Archive for June, 2006
Altered Carbon is quite a ride, steaming through a landscape full of well-applied clichés and with enough innovation to make the trip interesting. One cyber-fiction cliché that is missing, though, is that of the young outsider who suddenly finds himself too deep in something – instead we have Takeshi Kovacs, a man who has, so to speak, spent most of his life diving head-first into shit creek. The environment he moves in is one littered with drugs, violence and prostitution – a world where money speaks and those who don’t have any are bent over for those who do. Classic cyberpunk corruption, in short.
Kovacs has been, by way of what we could call “an offer he can’t refuse”, contracted to investigate the death Laurens Bancroft – one of those who have money. The police have written off the case as suicide, but Bancroft himself insists, contrary to the evidence, that he was murdered. Ah, yes – in the the future crafted by Morgan real death only happens if the “cortical stack” in which the mind is digitized is damaged, and men like Bancroft evade even that risk by remote storage. Still, there is a gap since Bancroft’s last back-up, and Kovacs sets out to find seek truth in a web of corruption and vendetta.
In all honesty, Altered Carbon is pretty much raw pulp, but it is well written pulp that, as Peter F. Hamilton blurbs, “hits the floor running and then starts to accelerate”. The first person narrative – you can’t write a detective tale any other way, can you? – is the kind that manages to be graphically vivid while keeping the pace up as an intriguing yarn with plenty of twists is unraveled.
I loved Altered Carbon, and I doubt anyone who is appealed by the concept of cyberpunk and gritty noir blended will be disappointed. I am certainly going to grab the sequels as soon as possible.
Related links:
Altered Carbon at Amazon.com
and Amazon.co.uk
Official Homepage
Richard Morgan at Wikipedia
Tags: Altered Carbon, Books, review, Richard Morgan, sci-fi
June 28, 2006 at 12:47 pm · Filed under Books, Entertainment & Culture
Seems Penn & Teller: Bullshit! managed to make it’s way to Swedish television now. Better sooner than later, I guess. Brilliant show.
Tags: tv
June 27, 2006 at 8:33 am · Filed under Asides
A while ago I started to listen to Strapping Young Lad, and that actually rekindled my interest in extreme metal somewhat. I usually don’t care that much, but now I’m a bit excited about the upcoming album.
Tags: metal, Music, Strapping Young Lad
June 25, 2006 at 1:51 am · Filed under Asides
Replaced “.net” on the logo with “&blog”. What an incredible burst of creativity…
Tags: desing, random
June 25, 2006 at 1:40 am · Filed under Asides
This guy performed at a place I went tonight. Could be interesting for anyone into ambient electronica. And I feel like giving heads ups on local talents. The Nest
Tags: links, Music
June 22, 2006 at 3:50 am · Filed under Asides
As mentioned in my post about Maul I also picked up Tricia Sullivan’s 1995 debut novel Lethe at the same time.
Set in 2166, some 80 years after the devastating events known as the Gene Wars, Lethe presents the reader with a quite damaged world. Due to the the harsh climate remaining pure humans are forced to live in protected reservations under the control of the League of New Alchemists – an organization controlled by a small group of disembodied, networked brains known as the Heads.
Jenae Kim is doing research for the League together with the dolphins, with whom she can communicate telepathically after changing to an aquatic form known as Altermode. This research leads Jenae to stumble on a piece of significant information – knowledge which forces Jenae to flee outside the reach the heads.
Meanwhile, Daire Morales passes through an unexplored gateway at the mystercial celestial object dubbed Underkohling. What he finds is an Edenic world, populated by a small colony of human children and adolescents.
While it doesn’t make me want to throw superlatives around me, I must say Lethe is a solid, quite skillfully executed work. The characters are well defined and come through vividly. The story is intriguing and well laid out – using the term fast-paced would be an exaggeration, but it flows on well, with enough surprises to keep the interest up – and the future it is set in is well thought out. To put a label on it, I’d call it a dystopy (though with a glimmer of hope) half-way to hard sci-fi. In short, not much to complain about.
Availability suggests that it is out of print by now, but here are direct links to Amazon.com
and Amazon.co.uk
for those who want to track down a copy in the Amazon Marketplace.
Tags: Books, Lethe, review, sci-fi, Tricia Sullivan
June 20, 2006 at 6:47 am · Filed under Books, Entertainment & Culture
I’ve always, for some reason, been fond of watches. Here’s a Swiss watchmaker that allows you to customize your timepiece online. Very neat. 121 Time
Tags: gadgets, links, random
June 20, 2006 at 3:46 am · Filed under Asides
Finally got around to reading Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. Been hearing about it ever since it was published, and yes, so far it’s brilliant. More about it when I’m done.
Tags: Books, random
June 20, 2006 at 2:54 am · Filed under Asides
While the Soviet Union is a thing of the past and the Cold War has been replaced with the War on Terror, I still found James Morrow’s darkly satirical post-apocalypse meditation This is the Way the World Ends to be very insightful.
Under the threat of an all-out nuclear war the latest fashion among the American public is to buy SCOPAS suits – high-tech protective gear supposedly equipped with everything needed to survive the nuclear aftermath. Our protagonist, George Paxton, is a tombstone engraver in a small Massachusetts town. Being a loving family man he is deeply mournful to the fact that he can’t afford such a suit to protect his daughter, until he is given an offer for a free SCOPAS suit on the condition that he signs a special contract – with an agreement Paxton doesn’t put much consideration to with the love for his daughter in mind.
Then the nuclear war, with retaliations and counter-retaliations happens, and Paxton finds himself on a submarine along with the five other survivors of the human race. They find out that they are on the way to a trial – prosecuted by the “unadmitted”, the future generations that never got to be born because of the war. While the other defendants all had active roles in the nuclear proliferation, Paxton is tried as a representative of the bystanders that passively let the arms race happen.
Morrow’s storytelling is quite full of fantastic elements, besides the overall concept of the unadmitted there is also a few passages taking place in 16th century France, featuring no other than Nostradamus himself. In the trial itself the author makes excellent use of the Cold War rhetoric, and speculates on ideas of deterrence contra disarmament. There is also a what probably is described as a certain kind of bizarre over-exaggeration in the way certain scenes are depicted, like a fairy-tale gone horribly bad, but I think it fits quite well with the big picture.
Even though two decades has passed since This is the Way the World Ends was published, I thought it was an excellent piece of speculative fiction. Well worth reading for anyone in need of some food for thought.
While I am on the subject of the author: another novel by James Morrow that I feel is worth mentioning, even though I feel it was too long since I read it to write anything detailed about it, is Towing Jehovah, in which a disgraced sea captain is contracted by the Vatican to tow the corpse of God to the Arctic for preservation. An intriguing speculation, and a great example of a satire where the author manages to get equally into the mindset of both the religious and the atheists.
Related links:
James Morrow on Wikipedia
Author’s homepage
This is the Way the World Ends at Amazon.com
and Amazon.co.uk
Towing Jehovah at Amazon.com
and Amazon.co.uk
Tags: Books, James Morrow, review, speculative fiction, This is the Way the World Ends, Towing Jehova
June 20, 2006 at 12:59 am · Filed under Books, Entertainment & Culture
In a mall, just like any other, Sun and her two friends get on the wrong foot with the wrong gang. What follows is a fight for survival on a battleground littered with trademarks.
In another place and time Meniscus, a cloned test subject locked up in a sealed chamber, is waging his own battle against the viruses he has been infected with.
Of course the two storylines are connected and together will affect the future of humanity. I quite liked that connection, but going into further detail would probably give away too much.
Having picked up Maul (along with Lethe by the same author, but more about that one later) when browsing the library’s sci-fi section while waiting for a bus one rainy day, I didn’t know what to expect – but I have to say I’m not very disappointed with this discovery. While the author herself describes the science in the book as “pure fudge”, the concepts she writes about are quite clever. Sun’s world is full of glorified consumerism – not without an underlying reason – and Meniscus’s future is an interesting take on a world where men have become an endangered gender and propagation is big business.
To conlude, I’d say that my opinion of Maul is “a bit better than not half bad” – a not too heavy but still stimulating read. “Good for lazy summer afternoons” may be the appropriate description.
(and the links for those who want to check it out at Amazon.com
or Amazon.co.uk)
Tags: Books, Maul, review, sci-fi, Tricia Sullivan
June 18, 2006 at 1:33 am · Filed under Books, Entertainment & Culture
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