needs more demons?

I finally figured out that I like Charles Stross better when he’s being funny than when he’s being preachy. His short fiction collection Wireless offers both. My favorite entries were “Rogue Farm” and “Trunk and Disorderly.” The former is a sly future backwoods noir that almost lives up to its killer opening:

It was a bright, [...]

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In The Neptune File, Standage expertly balances personal drama and the intellectual excitement of a radical new idea. The new idea rests on the notion that the eccentricities of Uranus’s orbit can only be explained by the gravitational pull of another planet. What makes it so radical is that mathemeticians work out where the new [...]

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I saw it opined in several places that the third of Sheckley’s mysteries featuring Hob Draconian was so good it would make me want to go back and read the first two — and since I’m a “save the best for last” kinda person, I opted to read them in chronological order. I found The [...]

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I’ve never read anything quite like The Night Watch. It shares a background with Stewart’s earlier novel Resurrection Man, but it’s not a direct sequel; it takes place roughly a century later.
Stewart’s novel is set after the cataclysmic return of magic to the world — the Dream — ended civilization as we know it. [...]

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I loved Stewart’s Perfect Circle so much that I bought several more of his novels, and then didn’t read any of them for a while for fear they wouldn’t live up to the expectations Perfect Circle had set.
I’m glad I waited to read Resurrection Man, partly because it isn’t quite as good (it’s one of [...]

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I’m a big fan of artistic constraints as tools to help channel creativity, so much so that I often look at other people’s work and wonder what constraints they might have applied in its creation. In the case of Tinker, I can’t help but wonder if Spencer deliberately set out to write a fantasy employing [...]

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A Brother’s Price is a fantasy novel with a nifty feminist twist: it’s set in a world where male children are much rarer than female children. Spencer posits that this leads to a matriarchal society in which men are valuable chattel — or, in other words, occupy a similar role to women in the vaguely [...]

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I enjoyed reading Endless Blue, but it requires more than the usual amount of willing suspension-of-belief and tolerance for sloppy editing. The premise is fun: there’s a sort of “Sargasso Sea” of space where ships get marooned when warp jumps go awry, and aliens mingle more freely than in the “normal” universe. Four centuries or [...]

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(Subtitle: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers)
Basically, I loved The Turk so much I’m going to read everything by Standage I can get my hands on. This book explores the meteoric rise (and precipitous decline) of the telegraph from the historical perspective. pretty much, of Web 1.0 (the copyright [...]

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(Subtitle: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine)
The Turk recounts the amazing true story of a machine that purported to play chess, and which was seldom beaten except by the top players of its era. “The Turk” and its operators enjoyed a long and colorful career that intersected (and sometimes inspired) the [...]

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