VM poster, fiction, etc.
Thanks to 
digitalwave for the birthday wishes!
Fannish Freecycle: Cast-signed Veronica Mars poster. Let me know if you want it!
Good article on perils of big data: "Street Bump offers us 'N = All' in the sense that every bump from every enabled phone can be recorded. That is not the same thing as recording every pothole. As Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford points out, found data contain systematic biases and it takes careful thought to spot and correct for those biases. Big data sets can seem comprehensive but the 'N = All' is often a seductive illusion."
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice: This far future sf has been deservedly praised. The remainder of Justice of Toren is now in a single human body instead of the multiple-entity ship and “ancillary” bodies she used to be/have. As she seeks revenge for the acts that brought her to this pass, she picks up various acquaintances, dealing with the prejudices of the Radch who made her but don’t think an ancillary is human. (The body’s original consciousness is destroyed and the ship’s put in; the process is not without hitches, but Justice of Toren is very confident that she is Justice of Toren and not someone else. This atrocity is defended in part on the ground that ancillary troops are much more well-behaved when carrying out Radch annexations-they don’t rape or murder without cause, the way human troops are known to do.) It’s a really interesting society, and I love that Justice of Toren is just angry throughout the book, in a way female characters aren’t generally allowed to be. (NB: to Justice of Toren, everyone gets the female pronoun; she’s aware of other cultures’ genders but thinks they’re weird and has to struggle not to misgender them. It’s not clear what physical attributes her body has. Reading about a world in which everyone was “she” was really interesting; maybe Justice of Toren wasn’t a “female” character, but she damn sure wasn’t a male.)
Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead: Set in a world where magic is a lot like contract law-so one studies the Rule Against Perpetuities and the seven orthodox uses of the spleen-this story follows a young woman kicked out of a magic school who’s offered a chance to work with an important firm on the resurrection of a god. I loved the worldbuilding, the occasional flippancy, and especially magic as contract that can be stretched to the breaking point if you have the right advocate on your side. While Brandon Sanderson’s magic systems are enjoyable, the videogame-like rules aren’t as fun for me (even when you figure out an exploit) as rules that have to be rubbed the right way to produce the results you want-that’s magic as law, or law as magic. There’s not actually a lot of discussion of the rules in this book; instead there are gargoyles and great magic-powered steampunkish engines, seafaring vampires and vampire addicts, and faceless minions of Justice who happens to be the resurrected corpse of the dead god’s lover-so I think the book will be enjoyable even for people without my specific legal interests.
John Layman & Rob Guillory, Chew Vol. 1: Taster’s Choice: Tony Chu is a detective who can taste an organic object’s history when he eats it. As you can imagine, this has some grisly applications. In a world where the FDA has dictatorial powers and chicken has been banned after the death of millions of people from, ostensibly, bird flu, Chu is forcibly recruited into an elite FDA unit, where he sees various crimes and conspiracies. Though it was an intriguing premise, the art was too spiky for me and the Russian secret agents in G-strings too pneumatic.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
digitalwave for the birthday wishes!
Fannish Freecycle: Cast-signed Veronica Mars poster. Let me know if you want it!
Good article on perils of big data: "Street Bump offers us 'N = All' in the sense that every bump from every enabled phone can be recorded. That is not the same thing as recording every pothole. As Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford points out, found data contain systematic biases and it takes careful thought to spot and correct for those biases. Big data sets can seem comprehensive but the 'N = All' is often a seductive illusion."
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice: This far future sf has been deservedly praised. The remainder of Justice of Toren is now in a single human body instead of the multiple-entity ship and “ancillary” bodies she used to be/have. As she seeks revenge for the acts that brought her to this pass, she picks up various acquaintances, dealing with the prejudices of the Radch who made her but don’t think an ancillary is human. (The body’s original consciousness is destroyed and the ship’s put in; the process is not without hitches, but Justice of Toren is very confident that she is Justice of Toren and not someone else. This atrocity is defended in part on the ground that ancillary troops are much more well-behaved when carrying out Radch annexations-they don’t rape or murder without cause, the way human troops are known to do.) It’s a really interesting society, and I love that Justice of Toren is just angry throughout the book, in a way female characters aren’t generally allowed to be. (NB: to Justice of Toren, everyone gets the female pronoun; she’s aware of other cultures’ genders but thinks they’re weird and has to struggle not to misgender them. It’s not clear what physical attributes her body has. Reading about a world in which everyone was “she” was really interesting; maybe Justice of Toren wasn’t a “female” character, but she damn sure wasn’t a male.)
Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead: Set in a world where magic is a lot like contract law-so one studies the Rule Against Perpetuities and the seven orthodox uses of the spleen-this story follows a young woman kicked out of a magic school who’s offered a chance to work with an important firm on the resurrection of a god. I loved the worldbuilding, the occasional flippancy, and especially magic as contract that can be stretched to the breaking point if you have the right advocate on your side. While Brandon Sanderson’s magic systems are enjoyable, the videogame-like rules aren’t as fun for me (even when you figure out an exploit) as rules that have to be rubbed the right way to produce the results you want-that’s magic as law, or law as magic. There’s not actually a lot of discussion of the rules in this book; instead there are gargoyles and great magic-powered steampunkish engines, seafaring vampires and vampire addicts, and faceless minions of Justice who happens to be the resurrected corpse of the dead god’s lover-so I think the book will be enjoyable even for people without my specific legal interests.
John Layman & Rob Guillory, Chew Vol. 1: Taster’s Choice: Tony Chu is a detective who can taste an organic object’s history when he eats it. As you can imagine, this has some grisly applications. In a world where the FDA has dictatorial powers and chicken has been banned after the death of millions of people from, ostensibly, bird flu, Chu is forcibly recruited into an elite FDA unit, where he sees various crimes and conspiracies. Though it was an intriguing premise, the art was too spiky for me and the Russian secret agents in G-strings too pneumatic.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.