Remember when I went to Dragon*Con and then actually wrote about it afterward? That's what I'm planning to do for Calgary Expo 2014, because some stuff came up that I want to say more about than just "LOL it was great, can't wait till next year!" and this blog is pretty much the best place I can think of to discuss it. So I won't say a whole lot about Calgary Expo, although that was what took up a lot of my thoughts and time in April. I didn't manage to finish the costume that I'd been spending all my time working on, but I'll have it done and nicer for next year, so I'm ok with that.
Honestly, this month was more of the same as last month.
What I'm working on right now is just not stressing myself out about everything so much all the time, i.e. not beating myself up about things not getting done. No one will die if I spend too much time watching tv. (Well, I might, so prioritizing physical activity is kind of next on the to do list.) No one will die if I keep posting here twice a month, and only once substantially.
Happy spring, is what I'm trying to say. The house I live in where I work has no screens on the windows and I can't really figure out how to open them, so I'm actually not too upset about the lingering cool weather.
R32. The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
Year Published: 2010
Pages: 330
First Sentence: As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.
Review:
I'm not sure that I'll be able to summarize or even review The Quantum Thief in a coherent way.
I guess it starts out fairly simply. The warrior Mieli breaks the thief Jean le Flambeur out of jail so that he can help her to ... do ... something. Mieli's motives aren't quite clear, beyond the fact that she's serving a mysterious and powerful employer. Jean is suffering from memory loss, so the two of them travel to his old home, the Oubliette on Mars, to retrieve his memories.
From there it becomes extraordinarily hard to continue explaining what happens because the technology becomes an integral part of the story, and the technology is full of crazily complex concepts. Or, if not crazily complex, then certainly they are indistinguishable from magic.
Hannu Rajaniemi is, I think, a good writer with an engaging style, but he is by no means a hand holder. I'm not sure I've ever read such a mind-punch of a book. This is bewildering future tech at its absolute finest. It's disorienting, to say the least, but it was also a wild ride that I really enjoyed. I might've done without the use of present tense, which seems to maybe be trendy at the moment (not that I read a whole lot of current fiction).
I can't even begin to speculate as to the genre of this book. I used to call anything involving post-humans cyberpunk, but that's not right at all. There's also a detective in this novel, so I guess it can be considered a mystery, and he's probably one of my favourite characters in the whole thing, too.
The only thing that I found weird and a bit distracting about the book is that for some reason many of the characters have French names. I can't/couldn't figure out any reason for that.
I'll definitely be obtaining and reading the sequel to this book, The Fractal Prince. But if you end up deciding to check it out, try not to use it as light reading. This is a book that requires time and brain power.
I didn't write down anything in particular, but here's a few sample phrases:
Pages: 330
First Sentence: As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.
Review:
I'm not sure that I'll be able to summarize or even review The Quantum Thief in a coherent way.
I guess it starts out fairly simply. The warrior Mieli breaks the thief Jean le Flambeur out of jail so that he can help her to ... do ... something. Mieli's motives aren't quite clear, beyond the fact that she's serving a mysterious and powerful employer. Jean is suffering from memory loss, so the two of them travel to his old home, the Oubliette on Mars, to retrieve his memories.
From there it becomes extraordinarily hard to continue explaining what happens because the technology becomes an integral part of the story, and the technology is full of crazily complex concepts. Or, if not crazily complex, then certainly they are indistinguishable from magic.
Hannu Rajaniemi is, I think, a good writer with an engaging style, but he is by no means a hand holder. I'm not sure I've ever read such a mind-punch of a book. This is bewildering future tech at its absolute finest. It's disorienting, to say the least, but it was also a wild ride that I really enjoyed. I might've done without the use of present tense, which seems to maybe be trendy at the moment (not that I read a whole lot of current fiction).
I can't even begin to speculate as to the genre of this book. I used to call anything involving post-humans cyberpunk, but that's not right at all. There's also a detective in this novel, so I guess it can be considered a mystery, and he's probably one of my favourite characters in the whole thing, too.
The only thing that I found weird and a bit distracting about the book is that for some reason many of the characters have French names. I can't/couldn't figure out any reason for that.
I'll definitely be obtaining and reading the sequel to this book, The Fractal Prince. But if you end up deciding to check it out, try not to use it as light reading. This is a book that requires time and brain power.
- - - - -
I didn't write down anything in particular, but here's a few sample phrases:
But secrecy is one of the mission parameters. So she wears the temporary gevulot shell the black-carapaced customs official Quiet in the beanstalk station gave them (no imported nanotech, q-tech, sobortech; no data storage devices capable of storing a baseline mind; no—), keeps her metacortex and q-stone bones and the ghostguns and everything else in camouflage mode, and suffers.
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