A Walk in the Woods, The Sword-Edged Blonde, Halting State
Books, thus:
A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson):Twice I flushed grouse, always a terrifying experience: an instantaneous explosion from the undergrowth at your feet, like balled socks fired from a gun, followed by drifting feathers and a lingering residue of fussy, bitchy noise.
This book is a good mixture of hiking stories, jokes, gripes about the national park service, and actual information about the Appalachian Trail. Along the way we get a couple other random bits which add up to some interesting meditations on the American relationship with nature. He points out that in America you have these big areas with No Development Allowed and then everywhere else is clear-cut; whereas in Europe you get fewer areas of pure wilderness, but the buildings that are there don't lead to turning the natural area into a parking lot. This seems like it ties into the stories about walking, where people act like it's nuts to walk around in a city* because cities are for driving, everyone knows that. The book as a whole ends up feeling a little scattered but this is ok -- he doesn't hike the whole trail, either, just enough to get a feel for it.
*There's a story where someone tells Bryson about a store he wants to go to, but the speaker warns him it's a whole mile away, maybe even two .. but then the joke is on Bryson, because the city is so sidewalk-less and otherwise unfriendly to walkers that it really does turn into a major production to get there.
The Sword-Edged Blonde (Alex Bledsoe): I have considered this title carefully and I don't think it actually means anything*. However, it's perfectly good at giving the right impression, viz, that this is fantasy detective noir in the same general category as Garrett P.I.. I assume this is the start of a series, and overall it's a pretty solid start. Occasionally the writing gets a little heavy-handed -- it's hard to take the phrase "sword jockey" seriously, and while it works in Harry Potter, I rolled my eyes when the guy refers to his weapon as an "Edgemaster Series 3 dark-metal sword". The other place where the genres bonk heads is the names -- I am ok with a guy being called Sir Michael, and I am ok with a guy saying "hey, call me Mike" but I don't think they should be the same guy or even in the same story. And this goes double for King Phil.
On the other hand, the plot is all good. It flirts with being purely a trip down memory lane, but it ends up being sufficiently tied to the present-day plot that the whole thing works pretty well. (The very last scene is lame but I am willing to excuse it as a sequel set-up.)
So yeah, I am in favor.
Incidentally, I can't help noticing this is another one from Night Shade, and I admit I am a little perplexed by the economics here. Surely if this wasn't a profitable gig they wouldn't be able to keep it up this long, and if it was profitable there'd be other people doing it. Or, ok, they're the only ones able to identify good stories, but that doesn't seem likely either. (Based on the editing in this book I do have the theory that they are saving money by not distinguishing between 'discreet' and 'discrete', but that doesn't seem like it would add up to that much.)
*Yeah, I know there's a story called The Guilt-Edged Blonde, but 1) I hadn't heard of it before and 2) when you swap out 'guilt' for 'sword' you lose the original reference that gives it any sense.
Halting State (Charles Stross): The only other thing I've read from Stross is that Lovecraft nuclear war thing, but the impression I get from the various blog posts and stuff is that he is basically Guy Most Likely To Have The Next Guest Appearance In xkcd. To put it another way, the target audience for this book is the people who would laugh when someone describes guys communicating secretly via a fantasy MMORPG as "tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D"*. Luckily this is me all over.
*Hell, maybe he should be writing jokes for xkcd
The setup is basically a cross between Snow Crash and A Point of Honor, and the book splits its time between describing the fantasy MMORPG setup and describing the world outside which, since it's a decade or two in the future, is fairly computer-enabled its own self. Stross has a bunch of excellent ideas in this department -- like, AI isn't good enough to drive cars on the city streets yet, so what you have in taxis instead of drivers are webcams and remote control from some guy in a call center in India. Stross hits a good balance extrapolating the technology and culture most of the time, so it's pretty jarring the few times he seems to forget when the book's set. Like, one character makes a Desperate Housewives joke, and another refs the Man from UNCLE. In fifteen years, are these really still going to be around? Whether the Iraq war is still going to be remembered as a massive fuckup is another issue; it felt pretty jarring as a reference but I guess the character in question is roughly my age, and presumably I'll still think of Iraq as a big deal in two decades, so ok, I'll grant it.
The characters are similarly kind of a mix. The situation isn't helped by the book being written in second-person, but rotating between three protagonists every chapter. It seems intuitively obvious that if you're going to switch protagonists frequently, third person is by far the best choice, because the reader can see the current person's name all the time. With first and second person all you get are pronouns and if the characters don't talk distinctly it's easy to confuse them.
Stross has (I think) tried to compensate for this by giving the characters broad identifying tics but none of them really work for me. One of the characters is a Scottish policewoman, and you know she's Scottish because sometimes she talks funny. Only the accent sort of drifts in and out, and it's a little disconcerting when it does so mid-sentence, like "It's like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand". Stross has the slang right (or at least knows it better than I do, which isn't hard) but dialects are also about word ordering and choice of phrases, and I don't think he does a good job in that department.
The second character is your standard bear-sized-but-gentle-programmer guy, with the change-up that he has serious psychological traumas rattling around in his head. One of his secrets is no big deal but he is majorly messed up by it, which, frankly, makes him seem kind of dumb. His other secret is an actual big thing and he is surprisingly casual about it, which makes him seem kind of massively delusional. Though in fairness the other secret doesn't come out til near the end of the book, so maybe there wasn't time to explore all the ramifications.
The third character is a forensic accountant who's also a LARPer and hence fills the girl-with-broadsword category. Are there any books like this where the woman is the computer hacker, and the man is the LARPer? In Snow Crash the guy gets both gigs, of course, but when they're split it seems like it's always the guy doing the hacking. Is it that combat requires interacting with another person, and hence is a woman's department?
But, yeah, the characters in this kind of book don't really matter, since what we're concerned about is the setting and the innovation there. The plot doesn't matter either, so it was a pleasant surprise to find a pretty satisfying storyline here. It starts out looking like it's going to be something straightforward, a bunch of other things pop up to raise the tension and the complexity level until it all comes together in a reasonably satisfying wrap-up at the end.
Up next: finally getting my hands on a couple Inspector Montalbano books. Also, Scott Pilgrim #4, hooray.
A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson):Twice I flushed grouse, always a terrifying experience: an instantaneous explosion from the undergrowth at your feet, like balled socks fired from a gun, followed by drifting feathers and a lingering residue of fussy, bitchy noise.
This book is a good mixture of hiking stories, jokes, gripes about the national park service, and actual information about the Appalachian Trail. Along the way we get a couple other random bits which add up to some interesting meditations on the American relationship with nature. He points out that in America you have these big areas with No Development Allowed and then everywhere else is clear-cut; whereas in Europe you get fewer areas of pure wilderness, but the buildings that are there don't lead to turning the natural area into a parking lot. This seems like it ties into the stories about walking, where people act like it's nuts to walk around in a city* because cities are for driving, everyone knows that. The book as a whole ends up feeling a little scattered but this is ok -- he doesn't hike the whole trail, either, just enough to get a feel for it.
*There's a story where someone tells Bryson about a store he wants to go to, but the speaker warns him it's a whole mile away, maybe even two .. but then the joke is on Bryson, because the city is so sidewalk-less and otherwise unfriendly to walkers that it really does turn into a major production to get there.
The Sword-Edged Blonde (Alex Bledsoe): I have considered this title carefully and I don't think it actually means anything*. However, it's perfectly good at giving the right impression, viz, that this is fantasy detective noir in the same general category as Garrett P.I.. I assume this is the start of a series, and overall it's a pretty solid start. Occasionally the writing gets a little heavy-handed -- it's hard to take the phrase "sword jockey" seriously, and while it works in Harry Potter, I rolled my eyes when the guy refers to his weapon as an "Edgemaster Series 3 dark-metal sword". The other place where the genres bonk heads is the names -- I am ok with a guy being called Sir Michael, and I am ok with a guy saying "hey, call me Mike" but I don't think they should be the same guy or even in the same story. And this goes double for King Phil.
On the other hand, the plot is all good. It flirts with being purely a trip down memory lane, but it ends up being sufficiently tied to the present-day plot that the whole thing works pretty well. (The very last scene is lame but I am willing to excuse it as a sequel set-up.)
So yeah, I am in favor.
Incidentally, I can't help noticing this is another one from Night Shade, and I admit I am a little perplexed by the economics here. Surely if this wasn't a profitable gig they wouldn't be able to keep it up this long, and if it was profitable there'd be other people doing it. Or, ok, they're the only ones able to identify good stories, but that doesn't seem likely either. (Based on the editing in this book I do have the theory that they are saving money by not distinguishing between 'discreet' and 'discrete', but that doesn't seem like it would add up to that much.)
*Yeah, I know there's a story called The Guilt-Edged Blonde, but 1) I hadn't heard of it before and 2) when you swap out 'guilt' for 'sword' you lose the original reference that gives it any sense.
Halting State (Charles Stross): The only other thing I've read from Stross is that Lovecraft nuclear war thing, but the impression I get from the various blog posts and stuff is that he is basically Guy Most Likely To Have The Next Guest Appearance In xkcd. To put it another way, the target audience for this book is the people who would laugh when someone describes guys communicating secretly via a fantasy MMORPG as "tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D"*. Luckily this is me all over.
*Hell, maybe he should be writing jokes for xkcd
The setup is basically a cross between Snow Crash and A Point of Honor, and the book splits its time between describing the fantasy MMORPG setup and describing the world outside which, since it's a decade or two in the future, is fairly computer-enabled its own self. Stross has a bunch of excellent ideas in this department -- like, AI isn't good enough to drive cars on the city streets yet, so what you have in taxis instead of drivers are webcams and remote control from some guy in a call center in India. Stross hits a good balance extrapolating the technology and culture most of the time, so it's pretty jarring the few times he seems to forget when the book's set. Like, one character makes a Desperate Housewives joke, and another refs the Man from UNCLE. In fifteen years, are these really still going to be around? Whether the Iraq war is still going to be remembered as a massive fuckup is another issue; it felt pretty jarring as a reference but I guess the character in question is roughly my age, and presumably I'll still think of Iraq as a big deal in two decades, so ok, I'll grant it.
The characters are similarly kind of a mix. The situation isn't helped by the book being written in second-person, but rotating between three protagonists every chapter. It seems intuitively obvious that if you're going to switch protagonists frequently, third person is by far the best choice, because the reader can see the current person's name all the time. With first and second person all you get are pronouns and if the characters don't talk distinctly it's easy to confuse them.
Stross has (I think) tried to compensate for this by giving the characters broad identifying tics but none of them really work for me. One of the characters is a Scottish policewoman, and you know she's Scottish because sometimes she talks funny. Only the accent sort of drifts in and out, and it's a little disconcerting when it does so mid-sentence, like "It's like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand". Stross has the slang right (or at least knows it better than I do, which isn't hard) but dialects are also about word ordering and choice of phrases, and I don't think he does a good job in that department.
The second character is your standard bear-sized-but-gentle-programmer guy, with the change-up that he has serious psychological traumas rattling around in his head. One of his secrets is no big deal but he is majorly messed up by it, which, frankly, makes him seem kind of dumb. His other secret is an actual big thing and he is surprisingly casual about it, which makes him seem kind of massively delusional. Though in fairness the other secret doesn't come out til near the end of the book, so maybe there wasn't time to explore all the ramifications.
The third character is a forensic accountant who's also a LARPer and hence fills the girl-with-broadsword category. Are there any books like this where the woman is the computer hacker, and the man is the LARPer? In Snow Crash the guy gets both gigs, of course, but when they're split it seems like it's always the guy doing the hacking. Is it that combat requires interacting with another person, and hence is a woman's department?
But, yeah, the characters in this kind of book don't really matter, since what we're concerned about is the setting and the innovation there. The plot doesn't matter either, so it was a pleasant surprise to find a pretty satisfying storyline here. It starts out looking like it's going to be something straightforward, a bunch of other things pop up to raise the tension and the complexity level until it all comes together in a reasonably satisfying wrap-up at the end.
Up next: finally getting my hands on a couple Inspector Montalbano books. Also, Scott Pilgrim #4, hooray.