Reviews and Comments

An early book set in the universe of the Vorkosigan series. It's interesting to see it from a slightly different perspective, though the main character's outlook is quite similar to Miles's. Nothing amazing, though there are some references in Diplomatic Immunity that I would have picked up on if I'd read this first.

It's fun to read futuristic books written a long time ago and see how the conception of the future has changed. A lot of Huxley's world seems quaint, but some of the consumerist bread-and-circuses material is still chillingly accurate.

Another quick, fun read. Set in the same little town as Practical Demonkeeping, but now it's a B-Movie threat, rather than a demon.

I had trouble finding any books to buy in Belize that weren't recent bestsellers or guidebooks. Managed to find a copy of this in a bookstore recommended by a cab driver.

Addictive little tidbits of story. It's hard to stop reading them, once you start. Holmes's deductions aren't amazing, but his attention to detail is. He finds enough clues to make the answer obvious, where I'd be hard-pressed to find any at all.

Clearly one of Sterling's earlier works. Covers a lot of the same conceptual ground as Holy Fire: what will societies do to maintain control in the future, what kinds of changes will result because of vastly expanded lifespans. Definitely less fully realized. I didn't think that the short stories added much.

In the not-too-distant future, improvements in life-sustaining technology and a fear of infection resulting from an age of devastating plagues has created a suffocating gerontocracy where every act is monitored and morality is founded on how much you cost to keep alive. Sterling's strength is that he thinks deeply about the societal changes that technology causes; it's Science Fiction in the best sense. Occasionally, the plot seems to meander because Sterling is eager to show off one implication or another, but it's pretty fast-moving, so the digressions don't drag.

Very gossipy. Gives a feeling for what these guys might have been like as people. It's fascinating material. It had never occurred to me how much the Founding Fathers were making it up as they went along.

Spectacularly good. A fresh fantasy with a well thought out cosmology and a very interesting set of worlds. Barker creates a setting that's at once enticing and foreboding and populates it with a variety of heroes and powers, humans and monstrosities, each with their own very believable drives and failings.

There are worlds beyond Earth—four of them, in fact—separated from Earth by a magical void full of ravenous monsters. Three of them are under the control of a cruel Autarch, who rules from his huge city of Yzordderrex. God seems to have walled himself away in the last of them. Two centuries ago, the greatest magicians of all of these worlds tried to join Earth to them, and caused a catastrophe when they failed. Now an opportunity to try again has come, but what's worse: failure, or success?

There's a lot of interesting material in this book, but it's a brief survey of the territory, rather than an in-depth exploration. I felt like it got hand-wavey towards the end. A surprisingly large amount of the argument in grounded in evolution, and it clearly owes a debt to The Selfish Gene.

Like The Fionavar Tapestry, this feels like an early work. The world is interestingly designed, but it feels strangely empty. I got the feeling that nothing would happen in the world if it weren't for the main characters. Rather than a complex society they're moving around in, the world is a simple system for them to manipulate at will.

And, also like Fionavar, it felt like there were a lot of throwaway details stuck in for no compelling reason. For example, one of the characters dreams of being in Fionavar, though there's no real connection between the books.

It's unfortunate that the first of Kay's books I read was The Lions of Al-Rassan, because that book is so good that his other works are vaguely disappointing in comparison.

Rota was my favorite professor. This is a collection of fairly random writings of his. There are short biographies of mathematicians that Rota knew, some writings on Phenomenology that are well beyond my understanding, and musings on what Mathematics is and how its practitioners actually work.

The biographies seem to be somewhere between gossipy and irreverent and flat-out mean. Rota seems to be trying to show that a great mathematician needn't be a good person. Perhaps unintentionally, he seems to be underscoring the point by being unpleasant himself.

The Phenomenology is well outside my ken. I tried to make sense of it, but I'm failing on basic vocabulary. I wish I'd read the afterword first. It warns that almost nobody understands the distinctions Rota is making in these passages.

The musings on Mathematics were very interesting. Rota hits the nail on the head a number of times.

Weird. I thought it was one kind of book and it turned out to be another. I'm not sure I got it.