spending a week in space
I have been on holiday all week. This week was a twofer of Children's Day and 清明節 Tomb Sweeping Day, so i took a couple days annual leave and made it a full week off. My plan was to do some traveling, although i was discouraged a bit when colleagues told me it'd be even harder to find a hotel over 清明 than it was over the 228 holiday. Well, i would
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I read the setting like it was somewhere between the movie Dark City, and like the Israel/Palestine or East/West German disputes where you can SEE watching people live another way, but you're supposed to ignore it.
It was a great concept and worked well for the story.
I'd never read Doctrow, but by the time I was 1/4th of the way through "Walkaway" it was clear that he was a VERY proficient author, who wasn't just playing 'hacker' for a cheap premise, but that his knowledge of computer science/logic/philosophy was real, and VERY well-thought out.
A read you might really like is "The Long Earth" by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. It has an AMAZING premise that is SO beautifully simplistic, but unlocks a really fantastic story.
One day a famous inventor disappears, but before he does he seeds a 1-page schematic of an ultra-simple machine called a "stepper" all over the internet. It's a machine anyone can build in 10 minutes after a trip to the grocery store and Radio Shack. It fits in the palm of the hand, and costs almost nothing to make.
People start building the machines out of curiosity, because they LOOK like they should be inert.
But what happens is... people start disappearing.
Turns out the 'stepper' is a personal device that can take **most** anyone to another TOTALLY new an uninhabited Earth.
And actually, it's more than that.
Much more.
So there is a sudden abundance of Earths
and no way to control the boundaries between them.
People go crazy over the possibilities unlocked.
So do corporations... so do governments.
Plus its Terry Pratchett so it is a fast, effortless read.
I'm so glad you enjoyed your rest! It's that not YOU deserved it.. I think everyone deserves it, INCLUDING you!
But it's also strange how strange the guilt/doom feeling haunts you when you're enjoying *not working*. How... there is this feeling like it can't last forever... that you will *need* to get back to "normal" or terrible terrible things can/will happen... or that it is lazy or shameful... despite how hard you work at not-a-job.
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