Book #24: Scratch Monkey by Charles Stross
I enjoy autopope's books. They're nice hard SF with a significant amount of technology to which I can relate (me being a computer science bod). This one threw me a little at first, as for some reason I assumed that the main character was male for the first few pages and when I realised that she wasn't it changed the way I related to her. Which is very odd and has never happened before.
Like the Peter Watts' books though, at times it's not a comfortable read, which makes me begin to wonder if SF is going/has gone through a 'shock' phase recently that I'd missed. Nevertheless, I did enjoy it and will keep going back for more.
I'm also rather looking forward to picking up a copy of the Laundry RPG once I get back. Way back when I used to use the Call of Cthulhu ruleset to run a sort of "X-Files UK" game (mainly because of the sanity rules) which bore a certain amount of similarity to the Laundry set-up, although without the computational magic. I might easily be tempted to run a Laundry campaign at some point as a result.
Like the Peter Watts' books though, at times it's not a comfortable read, which makes me begin to wonder if SF is going/has gone through a 'shock' phase recently that I'd missed. Nevertheless, I did enjoy it and will keep going back for more.
I'm also rather looking forward to picking up a copy of the Laundry RPG once I get back. Way back when I used to use the Call of Cthulhu ruleset to run a sort of "X-Files UK" game (mainly because of the sanity rules) which bore a certain amount of similarity to the Laundry set-up, although without the computational magic. I might easily be tempted to run a Laundry campaign at some point as a result.