Blindsight is Peter Watts' first stand-alone novel after his much-praised 'Rifters' trilogy. The book was shortlisted for the Hugo Award, but lost out in a rather strong field. It also is Peter's first foray into space – Rifters played in large parts under water (he is a trained marine biologist by previous trade), but Blindsight manages to project the same claustrophobic and slightly haunted feeling – the deep sea and space are not that different from that perspective (although the pressure differential is reversed, of course).
Blindsight is the log book (for want of a better term) of one Siri Keeton, travelling, literally, where no human has gone before. Keeton underwent, as a child, a radical hemispherectomy to get rid of his epilepsy (literally the removal of one side of his brain – yes, that's a realistic and existing medical intervention...). His friend Rob Paglino thinks that what came back from the clinic is not the same person, and, after some thought (because Siri now has to think about everything that concerns humans, and human interaction), Siri agrees. It is the story of what this did to Siri, Siri's parents, and to Chelsea, his girlfriend, one of very few people who still prefer human contact (and sex!) in the first person, and not just in virtuality (yes, the birth rate is dropping radically in Siri's world). “That distance – that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind – it's not entirely a bad thing. It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.”
Missile Gap is a short story by Charles Stross, which is available both in Hardback and online. The book plays during the coldest phase of the Cold War (Cuba crisis), but on an earth far removed, in time as well as space, from what we know. And the 10 million Dollar question is, as always – does humanity have a future? Answers on a post card – if you can find a post office, 100 million light years from home …
Film clip: An Atlas rocket on the launch pad rises slowly, flames jetting from its tail: it surges past the gantry and disappears into the sky.
Cut to: A camera mounted in the nose, pointing back along the flank of the rocket. The ground falls behind, blurring into blue distance. Slowly, the sky behind the rocket is turning black: but the land still occupies much of the fisheye view. The first stage engine ring tumbles away, leaving the core engine burning with a pale blue flame: now the outline of the California coastline is recognizable. North America shrinks visibly: eventually another, strange outline swims into view, like a cipher in an alien script. The booster burns out and falls behind, and the tumbling camera catches sunlight glinting off the upper-stage Centaur rocket as its engine ignites, thrusting it higher and faster.
Here's an old, and previously published (on the now-defunct Diversebooks site) review of Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson - this is the fist half of the final book in the original Dune cycle, written to the original outline Frank Herbert planned for the book.
There are a lot of new books available in the Dune universe, most of them written by Brian Herbert (Frank Herbert’s son) and Kevin J Anderson – both acclaimed authors in their own right, now working on expanding and filling in the gaps in Frank Herbert’s epic story. But this book is different. When Frank Herbert died, he had the outline, plot etc for the finale of his epic series ready – but it laid in a safe deposit box, forgotten, for over 10 years, before it was discovered again. So this is Frank’s original vision of how the story, which started, millions of years ago after the Butlerian Jihad, would come to closure. And boy did he have plans for his follow-up to ‘Chapterhouse Dune’ – there was enough material (so Brian and Kevin felt) for a two-volume finale...
The Hacker Crackdown is/was Bruce Sterling's first non-fiction book (he has written a 2nd one since, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years) – essentially this is the sound of a successful author putting his fiction/SF work to the side, and writing a piece of classical, well-researched journalism on the hacker/phreak/cracker 'digital underground' of 1989/90; a crackdown which affected figures in his circle of acquaintances (not even for legal reasons, but for overreach and general hamfistedness of the agencies involved) and which he felt could just as well have caught him up in its sweep.
He portraits, in a very readable form, the beginning of computer crime, pre-Internet (ie with dial-up Bulletin Board Systems as main hub of these groups and communities!); with the Legion of Doom, Acid Phreak, and Phiber Optik (just to name a few handles which rang a bell from my time on the BBS scene… it's not that long ago, honestly!) and of Operation Sundevil and similar efforts by the law enforcement agencies. And it ends with the Well and the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation – something which profoundly affected and shaped the discussion and development of privacy and legal arrangements on the nascent Internet, and continues to do so.
Unseen Academicals is the 32nd book inSir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I do belive that neither the author nor the series need introducing here, no? Here we go:
The Unseen Academicals is the Unseen University's football team. Yes, the setting here is Football. Or Foot-the-Ball, as the Wizards call it, referring to the old Gentleman's game, which has, in classic Ankh-Morpokh manner, deteriorated into something bordering on Anarchy, a back-alley brawl, with a mix of players and spectators (and plenty of violence), known as 'The Shove'. Ever heard of an ancient (and still played) British game called 'The Ba'? Look it up... In the Royal Art Museum an ancient vase has been found in the cellars, depicting an ancient game of Football, and the rules it was played by. You know the kind of vase – the players are all in the nude, our museums have plenty of those, too (not depicting football, that one has yet to be found). Ankh-Morpokh calls it 'The Tackle' – bad pun alert! The Wizards, meanwhile, have realized that, every so often (er, rarely), they need to participate in a game of Football, sorry, Foot-the-Ball, to retain a rather large legacy. And, just coincidentally, Vetinary, Tyrant of Ankh-Morpokh, asks Archcancellor Ridcully to modernize the game along the lines of the ancient rules. And so they get started, in their typical manner.
Here's an old, and previously published (on the now-defunct Diversebooks site) review of Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson - this is the fist half of the final book in the original Dune cycle, written to the original outline Frank Herbert planned for the book.
The Hacker Crackdown
Unseen Academicals
