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
I thought I’d try a new category, listing things I for some reason are worth pointing out. But since I mostly end up mumbling a lot when something asks me about something general, like movies or bands (that is probably because I have very varied taste in such things) the categories will be a bit more vague. Anyway, the best opening line of a novel is:
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
It is the opening line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. There are few lines that have set the ambience of a scene so efficiently, and in so few words. I really can’t put my finger on why, maybe it is because days with skies befitting that description often come with a certain mood.
Tags: Books, Neuromancer, thoughts, William Gibson
June 15, 2006 at 1:13 am · Filed under The most [whatever] ever
I havn’t kept up with William Gibson’s blog for a while, but today a Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow let me know that Gibson has posted a few snippets of fiction to his blog the last couple of weeks. Vague – but very enticing – glimpses into something that hints to a very intriguing bigger picture.
Milgrim doubted that Brown was comforted by Gray’s Papaya, but he could become relatively talkative there. He’d have the non-alcoholic piña colada with his franks and lay out the origins of cultural Marxism in America. Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old school American academia. Brown always enjoyed this part; it had an appealing vintage sci-fi creepiness to it, staccato and exciting, with grainy monochrome Euro-commie star-spawn in tweed jackets and knit ties, breeding like Starbucks.
When I browsed through the archives I found a few more excerpts posted between January and March that seem to be related. Whatever it is about, Gibson’s next novel is at the top of my “anticipated literature” list.
Tags: blogs, Books, links, William Gibson
June 12, 2006 at 5:10 pm · Filed under Books, Entertainment & Culture
I thought I’d use some space in this blog to mention the books I read, new as well as old. I don’t have any real ambitions in literary criticism, but I still think it could be fun to share some thoughts, as well as keep a tally of what I’ve read and maybe enhance my reading experience by reflecting about the books.
Anyway, The Butlerian Jihad, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson is set about ten thousand years before the events of Frank Herbert’s Dune, in a time when thinking machines are ruling over the Old Empire, including Earth. This period is the source of the technophobic aspects of the society in the original Dune novels. But humanity still clings to life, many as slaves under the machines, but some on free worlds such as Salusa Secundus. Here we find Serena Butler, the idealistic daughter of the planet’s viceroy, and Xavier Harkonnen, officer in the Salusan Armada – two people dedicated to standing up against the machines.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Books, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson, Legends of Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, review, sci-fi
September 27, 2005 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Books, Entertainment & Culture
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