Geoff's Blog [Opinionated Geek]

�Ready Player One� by Ernest Cline

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:27:04 GMT

�Child Of The Eighties�
Score: 4/5

Ernest Cline

$24.00

If you�re as old as me (and not too much older) this book will bring back some fond memories. Lots of eighties pop-culture references, from PacMan to Ferris Bueller.

Really, I think the science fiction setting is just an excuse to reminisce about the eighties. There is a sci-fi plot, and it�s OK, but mostly you�ll just sit back, enjoy the eighties references you catch, and wonder how many you�ve missed.

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“The Lost Fleet: Victorious” by Jack Campbell

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:15:18 GMT

“A Fitting Final Chapter”
Score: 4/5

The Lost Fleet: Victorious (Lost Fleet 6)

Jack Campbell

£7.99

I sped through this book every bit as quickly as the others so it really did feel more like a final chapter than a final book. And it was fitting enough, even if it did still have that same niggling word-break issue previous books had.

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“The Lost Fleet: Relentless” by Jack Campbell

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:05:56 GMT

“Space, Action And Intrigue”
Score: 4/5

The Lost Fleet: Relentless (Book 5) (Lost Fleet 5)

Jack Campbell

£7.99

I’m still enjoying this book series, and it does finally feel like it’s Getting To The Point. Fun as they are, even their brevity couldn’t stop them seeming the same if there was no progress in the main story arc.

There’s a bit more intrigue in this one too, although it was a bit less than convincing. Still, many of the characters in these books are less than convincing, so I’m just going to let that go rather than look for any hidden meanings.

One weird point about this book. There was a word in it I’d never come across before: ‘identificance’. I’d never heard of it and didn’t really know what it could mean. The root was obviously related to ‘identity’ somehow, and the –ance ending means… something (I’d be able to tell you want if I paid more attention in O Level English, but the internet has come to the rescue and told me it’s one of the endings for a past participle).

It was only later when I read the word ‘identificant’ that I realised it was a Search&Replace error. I’m guessing someone did a global search for ‘sign’ and automatically replaced each occurrence with ‘ident’, without bothering to check if ‘sign’ was part of a different word. Mystery solved, even if it does point to poor proof-reading. (And on the subject of poor proof-reading, some words had extraneous spaces, like ‘in for mant’ but only when (most of) the sub-words were themselves words.

Weird.

Anyway, it didn’t detract from blazing through this book in a very short time.

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“The Lost Fleet: Valiant” by Jack Campbell

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:50:26 GMT

“More Action, More Space”
Score: 3/5

The Lost Fleet: Valiant (Volume 4) (Lost Fleet 4)

Jack Campbell

£7.99

I’m still enjoying these books, although maybe not as much as at first. They really are very readable – a few hours in a morning or afternoon and they’re done.

The story continues much as before. More of the same happens, but in interesting enough ways.

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“The Lost Fleet: Courageous” by Jack Campbell

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:44:12 GMT

“More Action-Filled Spaciness”
Score: 4/5

The Lost Fleet: Courageous Bk. 3 (Lost Fleet 3)

Jack Campbell

£7.99

Some of the books I’ve been reading lately have been hard work. They’re good, but sometimes it can be quite a slog getting to the end. I’ve been interspersing reading those books with reading these Lost Fleet books. These ones are simple fun. There’s action, there’s science, there’s fiction.

They’re not complex, really. One thing they try to do is capture the mechanics of a battle taking place in space at 0.1c – a tenth of light speed. While I’m not sure he’s got the mechanics right, it’s at least interesting that he tried when few others have. I can’t think of many others that have bothered as much with multi-ship formations facing relativistic effects and such short firing windows.

As I said, fun.

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“The Lost Fleet: Fearless” by Jack Campbell

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:36:57 GMT

“More Action-Packed Fun”
Score: 4/5

The Lost Fleet: Fearless (Book 2) (Lost Fleet 2)

Jack Campbell

£7.99

I’ve muttered here in the past about not liking series and how repetitive they are. This is the second in the Lost Fleet series, and it doesn’t really suffer from the same repetitiveness of other series.

I think that’s at least partly down to their brevity. Each book is short and readable, and there’s an episodic feel to each book in a larger story arc. Beyond the bits that are obvious from the cover (it’s science fiction, and it deals with a ‘lost fleet’ of starships) I’m not even going to try to explain what that context is.

It’s fun to read though, and that’s the main thing.

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“The Lost Fleet: Dauntless” by Jack Campbell

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:29:10 GMT

“Short Action-Packed Fun”
Score: 4/5

The Lost Fleet: Dauntless (Book 1) (Lost Fleet 1)

Jack Campbell

£7.99

This is one of a series of books I’ve been buying with my Christmas vouchers. I only know about them from Amazon’s Science Fiction top 50, I’d never heard of them before.

And I decided to get the first one even though I tend to find series of books repetitive, as I’ve mentioned here a few times.

I’m glad I did. The book is fairly simplistic in its characterisation, but it’s short, action-packed, and fun enough to be distracting. And that makes it worth the money, for me at least.

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“Game Of Thrones” by George R. R. Martin

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:51:00 GMT

“Subtle, Lots Of Characters”
Score: 4/5

A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1)

George R. R. Martin

£8.99

I’m not sure what I can add to what has already been said about this book.

The large cast of characters took a bit of getting used to. The way the action moves around from character to character when chapters change, but with never a character shift mid-chapter, is interesting and useful, but the sheer number of characters involved made it difficult for me.

There are a lot of characters in this book. Some of them go by different names though, and some of them have colours and crests that you should remember to make sense of some things. There are many subtleties here that don’t make it in to the expensive, lush dramatisation (some of it filmed right here in Norn Iron!)

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“For The Win” by Cory Doctorow

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:50:40 GMT

“Unions For Internet Age”
Score: 4/5

For the Win: Organize to Survive!

Cory Doctorow

£7.19

This book takes a very pro-union view, and describes how organisation at the low levels of companies can have an important effect and can act to right the wrongs perpetrated by those companies.

The problem I have with that is: each of the abuses that is carried out in the book is illegal. It shouldn’t be necessary for a union (or any form of collective action) to deal with a company that breaks the law. The corruption in this book that prevents legal recourse seems, to me, the crux of the problem. (And yes, I can see some of that happening in the Real World right now too.)

And maybe that’s the point of unions after all, a point I hadn’t really considered. They shouldn’t be necessary at all – they’re there for the times when you don’t have a legal recourse to an illegal action.

You don’t even have to buy this book to read it – you can download the full contents of the book free of charge.

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“Paranormality” by Richard Wiseman

geoff@opinionatedgeek.com — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:16:59 GMT

“More Like This Please”
Score: 4/5

Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there

Prof. Richard Wiseman

£6.57

I wish more people would read this book, or at least this kind of book. Subtitled ‘Why we see what isn’t there’, it goes about explaining how what can be seen as paranormal events can really just be the way our brains are tricked.

I’m not a believer in the paranormal though, so I’m open to reading this kind of book. Believers, I believe, probably won’t bother. That’s a shame. (And if you take this to mean I should read more books of ‘the other side of the argument’, feel free to point me to them.)

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