Category: Books

A fun, fast read– once I started, it sucked me in. It is an alternate world, alternate tech– lots of gears and strange technology, no overt magic, Victorian manners and interesting interactions between the various strata of society.

I liked the gritty, strange tech of the world. It made for a place that felt real as a city– as more than the touristy veneer that some fantastic cities feel like. Similarly, the technology was strange– partially understood by the characters, but no long asides explaining where it came from, which was great. The airships were cool, as were the algorithm’s devices… and source.

The book does a really good job of pushing real characters. Everyone involved has an angle, people draw back just when you need them, and the secrets are all social– they are people secrets as much as technology or control secrets. The details of Veridon’s politics and their influence on Jacob is constant– but it develops at a reasonable pace, and the twists make sense in the newly expanded context that’s revealed when the world turns upside down (again).

Plague Year has a star– the nanotech that destroyed civilization and has stranded everyone up on mountain peaks. The story starts more than a year later and is told from two points of view. Cam is a ski instructor who has compromised his morals to survive despite the lack of sustenance up above 10,000 feet, and Ruth is a scientist on the International Space Station. Both stories are well told, with compromised but still sympathetic characters. Sawyer’s subplot is interesting and knits the two experiences and lives together with interesting contrasts.

The ending is abrupt– the action stutters to an break point and we get a sentence to end this book set up for the next book, Plague War. I will probably read the sequel, but it isn’t a strong compulsion. I enjoyed it, but I suspect it isn’t one I’ll reread much.

The full title is Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin.

The book was a solid look at a tangle of people and relationships. It’s amazing how much strange luck played a part of Myspace’s history– for a throwaway desperate idea, it was amazingly successful. It’s also interesting how many of Myspace’s unique features– allowing widgets and custom html– came about as a result of bad programming or oversight, not planning.

Actually, that’s the take away of the whole book– sometimes luck shines down. Even the successful widget makers were fantastically lucky, turning huge profits because they released something wildly popular– often among several equally good competitors.

The book is tightly written, in a series of very short (often 3 page) chapters. That makes the read fly along– it’s very easy to say “one more section” and “one more” until the book is through.

This is two books on the inside– the first, The Peace War, was a reread, though it has been a while. I liked it still– it’s an interesting world, the Peace Authority makes sense [though I’m really curious about those first weeks dismantling the old world], and the path to the book’s present is fascinating. The devastated low population world is quirky and unique. The struggle and Paul’s legendary skills seem a bit much at times, but it all works out well.

The second book, Across Realtime, expands on the bobble concept and seizes on it as a method of passing into the future– just bobble ahead and see what the world’s like when you get there. But everything is gone when the novel starts– some time after 2209 the human race disappears, and everyone coming out of their bobbles finds a wasteland. The book develops into an interesting hop across time, a big murder mystery with advanced technology, and a war between leftover fanatics. While the “low techs” are mostly undifferentiated, the high techs are all interestingly developed.

I really enjoyed this novel, despite my feeling of overexposure to modern supernatural books. Ray is a very believable main character, edgy but still sympathetic. He’s just learning the rules of magic in this world– while his relationship with his boss, Annalise, is tense.

Over the course of the book, we learn a few more rules for magic and the society, but all the way to the end, the situation remains hazy. The book is a good stand alone novel, though it seems to be the first book in a series. (Given the ending, followup books with the same characters are very likely.)