Woken Furies is the latest installment in Richard K. Morgan's "Takeshi Kovacs" series of novels.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, the pertinent points are that it's a first person space opera cyberpunk noir set in a universe where people's consciousness is digitized onto a cortical stack, permitting them to be "needlecast" faster than ( Read more... )

I'm a bit embarrassed.

When I went to start writing this, I realized that back when did my Runo Knows... on Broken Angels I had misidentified it as Fallen Angels.  I have no idea how that happened.

Unlike Broken Angels, Market Forces is not set in the Kovacs/sleeving universe of Richard K. Morgan.  Instead, it's set just over 40 years in the future, ( Read more... )

I think this might be the last David Drake book that I own that I haven't done a Runo Knows on.  I'll have to check.

Especially in comparison to the sequel, I think this book shows why you don't hire a gritty military sci-fi writer to write a book set in a fairly physics agnostic gaming universe (in this case, the SJ Games' "Car Wars" universe).  ( Read more... )

And now we teeter into the conclusion of the trilogy.  Unlike the other two books, this one can't stand on its own; you really need to have read both of the other ones to understand what's going on here.

It's the confluence of events, in a way.  Colin Laney, in Tokyo, is living in a cardboard shack and sees the nodal point forming up on the Bridge ( Read more... )

Finally got around to this one, but it's going to be short because it's been a while since I finished.

With Idoru, you wrap up some of the threads from Virtual Light while setting up for the finale of the trilogy, All Tomorrow's Parties.  Simultaneously, the book is both updated somewhat, technologically, to avoid a bit of the archaic fax-isms of ( Read more... )

I decided to go ahead and do them separately though I did finish Idoru last night - and then I finished The Complete Hammer's Slammers Vol. 2 today.  I'll get to those.

Virtual Light is the first in the trilogy of books by William Gibson that includes it, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties.  Basically, much like the Neuromancer trilogy, it follows a ( Read more... )

Okay, honestly - this is just a flat out great book.  I'm being up front and personal about it.  I love this book, I think it's great, every time I re-read it I still love it, and if you're reading this and you haven't read it, you're less of a person for having missed it so far, go out and buy the damn book and read it right away, and if you don't ( Read more... )

Now, where I bitched about The DIfference Engine for its stylings and baroque writing, here it's a good thing.

WHA?!

Let me explain.

Let's look back first, say, to the '80s...and cyberpunk.  It was good (in my not-so-humble opinion, of course), it was timely, and it's no longer quite as - well - relevant.  At least, not in that form.  And some might ( Read more... )

In the Shadows, edited by Jordan K. Weisman, is an anthology of short stories in the "Shadowrun" roleplaying game universe.  I found the book in my car, and given that there's a new (evidently crappy) game coming out of it for Xbox 360, decided to re-read it.

It was also inspired by my reminisces of cyberpunk.

If you're not familiar with Shadowrun, ( Read more... )

For some reason I expect people to say something like "he's reviewing burned bread?!"

But I'm not.  Instead, I'm reviewing a collection of Charles Stross' short stories - some of which are a bit old.

Dated, in fact.

Not so engaging.

Particularly when you're used to his writing style being so cutting edge.

But I get ahead of my stuff.  As per usual with ( Read more... )