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Showing posts from April, 2009

You should read this.

Evil Robot Monkey , by Mary Robinette Kowal. It'll take you about 5 minutes, don't worry.

Thirteen, Behemoth, Strange Country

Review backlog again. " Thirteen " (or "Black Man" outside the US), is another Richard Morgan techno-noir thriller, with all the kick-ups, shagfests and beatings you expect from his previous work. Takeshi Kovacs Carl Marsalis is a chiseled killing machine, a hit with the ladies, and a genetic experiment. Complicated plot involving lots of violence, shagging, more violence ensues. Keeps ensuing. Never seems to stop. Eventually does, pointlessly. If you've read "Altered Carbon", stop there. The rest of his books are pretty much the same. His prose style hasn't improved much, there are still viewpoint changes mid-paragraph which dump you out of the action and make you re-read to work out who's thinking what about whom and whose leg just got splintered by someone's obscure martial art technique. At 600 pages, this book could have done with a hell of a lot of trimming and a lot less plot. " Behemoth ", the last of Peter Watts' Rif

Too much information

As of this morning, Google Reader tells me I have 947 unread articles to view. Of these, a third are from the BBC news website telling me things about politicians I no longer recognise, celebrities I've never heard of, and sporting events in which I have no interest. Over a hundred each are from TechCrunch (companies I've never heard of going bust while trying to do things I don't understand), Wired (ditto), io9 (providing me with spoilers for programmes I'll never watch and the plots of films I'll never get around to watching), and SciFi Wire (ditto). My twitter feed tells me all about the mundane lives of Graham Linehan , Stephen Fry , Jonathan Ross , Lily Allen and other people I don't know, doing things I'm not really that interested in. Let's not get started on Facebook. Time for a cull. Blogs down to a minimum, twitter down to people I have communicated with in some form.

A haiku about Big Bounce

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can we still say that, it went straight to video, in DVD age? a raft of big stars, a fantastic location, no sign of a plot.