Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel is arguably the book William Gibson’s Spook Country should have been. MacLeod’s work is a little uneven, and eventually has a complete mindfuck ending, but it’s well worth reading just for the speculative political fiction.

First and foremost, The Execution Channel is a near future spy thriller with some interesting speculative elements, bearing only the slightest bit of science fiction. Set in the UK, the key characters are Roisin Travis and her father James Travis. Roisin, a peace activist, happens to be near an RAF base in Scotland when it gets vaporized in a mysterious mushroom could. This sends things sideways in jolly old England while Roisin and James both go on the lam. Turns out that James is a bit of a mole, selling out the crown. Meanwhile, he trained Roisin in a bit of tradecraft, which she uses to try and make her way to their designated meeting place.

Potential thermonuclear detonation obviously escalates world tensions. MacLeod develops a bevy of ancillary characters to illustrate hidden surges of espionage, counter-espionage, propaganda, and disinformation. One of the more interesting persons is Mark Dark, one of those pajama wearing, basement blogging, conspiracy theorists, who just happens to actually have a line on what’s really going on. Dark stands in for the blogosphere which MacLeod brings to life as a real area of of action for clandestine information operation campaigns. In addition, there’s a passel of spook types filling a spectrum from brutal, ideology driven thugs to elegantly refined pragmatists.

Suffice to say careful attention pays well when reading The Execution Channel.

Where The Execution Channel improves on Spook Country is in the gritty meanness that’s probably a little more accurate to our times. The just plain nastiness of some of the operatives in action and post-disaster human behavior doesn’t get lost in effervescent slickness. Yet the feel of conspiracies within conspiracies is similar. MacLead also does a brilliant job of subtly twisting the milieu into a disconcerting alternative history. I did a couple of double takes when confronted with some of the political shifts deftly woven into the narrative. And while subtly presented, they are at the same time enormous yet insignificant. Hard to explain but definitely on of the more interesting aspects of the book.

MacLeod mainly trips up near the finish line. The concluding events seem rushed and rely on some seemingly manufactured coincidences. The absolute conclusion jarringly comes completely out of left field, although it is consistent with all of MacLeod’s prior foreshadowing. Finally, the eponymous “Execution Channel” is a slim chapter ending device that adds a sense of menace. However, it just up and disappears about 2/3 of the way through the book. Not sure what the intended commentary was but I certainly missed it.

The Execution Channel is far from perfect, but similar to MacLeod’s The Star Fraction, I found it worth reading if for nothing else its political provocations. As I said of that book, MacLead is most interesting not because of his ability to speculate about science, but his political thought hacking, said ability also applying to The Execution Channel. Recommended.

The diggin’ in the cratez iTunes strategy has reunited me with the Jungle Brothers. The JBeez, for short, were an offshoot of the late 80’s/early 90’s Native Tongues hip-hop collective. Not quite reaching the same level of renown as A Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul, looking back they had a pretty productive oeuvre.

Apropos, Elle Driver: “You know I’ve always liked that word… ‘oeuvre’ … so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.”

Some highlights:

• Jimbrowski, their debut, “the thing’s so big you need a U-haul to haul it”

• Because I Got It Like That, the 12” followup if I remember correctly

• JBeez Coming Through, “5000 boomin watts. Sound system state of the art”

• Black is Black, especially the Gee Street Ultrablack mix

• I’ll House You, A House music anthem to this day, “feel the vibe, feel the vibe, feel the bass, c’mon!”

What’s great about all of these tracks is that the beats, rhymes, and energy still hold up well today. For a 1.5 album group, their sophomore effort Done By The Forces of Nature was a little weak, the JBeez got a lot done.

Since I started listening to more music through iTunes on my Macbook and with my iPod Mini, I decided to reconnect with Audioscrobbler or technically last.fm. I had used the old Audioscrobbler for a short while back in 2005, but they have since been absorbed and redeployed as the last.fm web services API.

Audioscrobbler plugs in to your media player, scrobbles your tracks a.k.a records what you listen to, and then uploads that data to last.fm. From there, last.fm taps you in to a social network of other digital music listeners. This has turned out be surprisingly interesting, as there are connections to playlists from similar users, videos for many songs that I didn’t think had one, and even free music.

Even better, I’ve found that my jury-rigged home MP3 jukebox can be hooked in as well. I’ve put a bunch of MP3s on an old Linux box. I run MPD as a remotely controllable, media player. MPD feeds an Icecast server which I can securely connect to over SSH tunnels. Comes in handy when trying to listen from work.

Just to be a completist, since I do a lot of listening in the office, I wanted tracks played through the above concoction to be scrobbled as well. MPD doesn’t directly support scrobbling, but there are a handful of supporting applications that listen to MPD’s playlist and scrobble the results. At first I gave mpdscribble a shot, thinking a stable C application would be pretty reliable. For whatever reason, mpdscribble often timed out uploading scrobble data. I switched to the Python based lastfmsubmitd and now things work great.

Finally lastfmsubmitd is a nice elegant piece of code that relies on basic UNIX principles to get the job done. It cleanly forks daemon processes for the MPD listener and the last.fm submitter, and uses the filesystem to record its data. Plus it logs nicely and feels very Pythonic. Excellent job!!

I’ll post more later specifically about the last.fm experience.

Previously I harshed on the Amazon MP3 Store because I couldn’t get Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. That criticism still stands, but a crack has appeared in iTMS armor!

None of Big Daddy Kane’s classics like Raw, Ain’t No Half Steppin, and Smooth Operator are in the iTMS. In fact, it doesn’t look like any of the Cold Chillin’ catalog is in the store. Boooooo!

Thankfully, the Amazon MP3 store at least has Marley Marl’s House of Hits. Okay, so you can’t get Smooth Operator, but digital versions of The Symphony, Part 1 and The Bridge more than make up for it. The rest of the collection isn’t that bad either.

Ob Trivia. The Bridge was originally a B side. The supposedly lesser side of a 12” vinyl record for you youngsters out there. Which reminds me to dig up Public Enemy’s B Side Wins Again

I was deceived by the cover of M. M. Buckner’s War Surf into thinking the story was more of the Neuromancer ilk with the action happening in the cyber realm. Despite the bait and switch, and a truly detestable protagonist, I managed to slog my way through the novel. Surprisingly, I was quite satisfied with the ending.

War Surf documents the self-absorbed antics of a small band of post-apocalypse, hyper rich executives. These over-gene-engineered corporate Methuselahs, led by one Nasir Deepra, parachute into restricted areas of labor unrest, broadcast their joy rides for fame and fortune, and occasionally fry the unfortunate prote (protected employee) that gets in their way. A particularly juicy target is the legendary Heaven, an orbiting satellite under complete lockdown and which Deepra seems to know too much about.

Deepra, despite being hundreds of years old, falls head over heels for a young idealistic executive named Sheeba. To the point of seriously annoying this reader, Deepra fawns over Sheeba, gets violently jealous, and launches into rash acts as if he was a teenager. Goaded by Sheeba and one of his crewmates, Deepra leads a war surf of Heaven.

Things go disastrously for the run, and Deepra and Sheeba get captured and trapped with the denizens of Heaven, a fairly pathetic collection of youngsters barely subsisting against the corporation trying to wipe them off the satellite. Here too Deepra is particularly annoying in his running condescension towards the spacebound “protes”, despite their saving his and Sheeba’s life on multiple occasions. Even worse, Sheeba falls for one of the protes which causes Deepra no end of consternation and brings out his most base and treacherous instincts.

Literally being one of the most self-absorded, clueless, and pathetic characters I’ve ever read about I was amazed that Buckner was able to ultimately redeem Deepra. He finally realizes the protes he so looks down upon represent a humanity that existed before the apocalypse. An apocalypse he barely survived somewhat due to chance, with great personal loss, and with exposure to great horrors. Meanwhile, his life has become an empty existence of tempting and cheating death to no good purpose. His final act of sacrifice is all the more bittersweet due to the careful crafting of his odiousness.

War Surf is a bit uneven, and definitely not a great book. For example, getting to Heaven takes quite a while, even though it’s clear the satellite has to be the tale’s final destination. But if you can enjoy a tale of a true anti-hero it can make a quick and stimulating read.

Be advised that people who read and write a lot more science fiction than I do granted War Surf the Philip K. Dick award.

So I bought Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz Six at the end of December and had an interim report in early January. I think there’s been enough listening. Time to render a final judgment.

Mushroom Jazz Six is good, but not great. The mix sustains some of the finest elements of the Mushroom Jazz series. Downtempo beats with echoes of house music combined with hip-hop and R&B vocals. As I said before Six incorporates many more jazz elements.

What deflates Six is the last 4 or 5 tracks. While quite jazzy, they also take all the energy out of the ride. The mix doesn’t generate any toe tappin’ after Mark Farina’s Life and never rises to another peak. Since this is the last quarter of the album the listener leaves the mix with a blah feeling. Contrast this with Mushroom Jazzs Three,Four, and Five, which all had a late peak then a gentle closing glide.

However, there are some stretches of Mushroom Jazz Six that I really do like. First up:

• Jamal: Jamal 141

• Colossus: Dopebeatz

• Brawdcast: Calm Down (Instrumental)

• J-Boogie’s Dubtronic Science, Feat. Crown City Rockers: Alive (Instrumental)

This run is classic Mushroom Jazz. Fat beats. Mellow atmospherics layered on top. A loop snatched from Tha Alkoholiks Likwit pulls it all together. Guaranteed head nodding.

Then a bit later we have:

• Rubberoom: Bodysnatchin’ (On The Isle) (Instrumental)

• Flash (13): Wasn’t Really Worth My Time

• Mark Farina: Life

Here the energy really picks up. The diva vocals of Wasn’t Really Worth My Time are a signature of the Mushroom Jazz mixes. The bass of Life is really thumpin.

After that though, Mushroom Jazz Six is sort of forgettable. For Mushroom Jazz completists like me, Six is definitely a get. Not a must get, but a get. Don’t feel bad if you waited or bought it used. For those new to the series, there are better places to start.

But you might want to check out some, other, more positive, opinions.

Previously I wrote about a new strategy I have for purchasing music through the iTunes Music Store (DRM free natch). With only 35 hip-hop tracks stuffed into a looping, shuffled playlist, it seems to be working out quite well. Highlights include:

• Chemical Brothers (featuring Q-Tip), Galvanize. That Budweiser commercial campaign got me hooked.

• Tribe Called Quest, Award Tour. 1991?! Jeez I’m getting old.

• DMX, What’s My Name. Vile lyrics, but the combined fury of DMX and the beat is an incredible combination. Makes a lightweight like me want to get up and punch someone.

• Black Eyed Peas, Hey, Mama. Part of the TV campaign that took the iPod to a new level of consumer consciousness.

• Souls of Mischief, ‘93 Til Infinity. Classic Bay Area flow.

• Just-Ice, Going Way Back. A gem known only to real hip hop hedz.

• Public Enemy, Fight The Power. PE and Spike Lee. Nothing else need be said.

For the past week or so, this has been the playlist for my long, commuter bus ride. iTunes is impressively good at not repeating things too closely and some of the sequences are pretty interesting. It’s to the point now that I’m thinking about setting up a few more of these singles playlists. There’s a bunch of 70’s disco and soul, plus 80’s pop that I’d be interested in collecting.

I kinda liked Men At Work. Really

New York may bounce back quickly according to Richard Florida, but DC may never take a hit. George Mason University’s Stephen Fuller has a deeper analysis than BusinessWeek but comes to similar conclusions. Hat tip to Danilo Bogdanovic.

As a DC resident (that may have been the first time I’ve used that phrase in over 20 years), I’m not that sanguine. I don’t think it will get really bad here like it is in the state of Florida, but I retain a sense of downward economic pressure. My guess is that there’s still a non-trivial number of real estate properties underwater or bank owned. Even if interest rates go down, single family homes are typically over the line for jumbo loans. Fat chance qualifying for one of those these days. And that plethora of government and contractor jobs just don’t reach the same compensation levels as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, LA, et. al.

Hope I’m wrong though!!

Given that President Obama is addressing Congress and the nation regarding economic concerns, two recent magazine articles were highly relevant. In The Atlantic, Richard Florida examines how the economic catastrophe will reshape america. Florida, a vocal proponent of cities as engines of progress, weighs potential regional survivors and victims in the wake of the financial meltdown.

His overall argument is that certain city cores are better equipped to deal with the downturn as opposed to exurbs and rural areas. Excess talent, creativity, and tendency towards reinvention can prime the pump for clawing out of the trough. Counterintuitively, he argues that New York will turn out all right, despite the collapse of the financier lifestyle. First, the transferrence of financial might happens on a glacial pace. Second, the throngs of creative types from the artistic, literary, entertainment and fashion industries can step up to drive the city. Other urban areas like San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston have much higher concentrations of residents with high levels of education. Finally, a number of Sun Belt cities that have exploited globalization to expand into manufacturing, may outlast the downturn without much damage.

The big losers? Traditional mid-western Rust Belt cities that haven’t been able to retool ala Pittsburgh. Detroit is the poster child, with St. Louis, Buffalo, and Cleveland teed up for similar dire straits. And of course there’s sunny locales of Phoenix and anywhere in Florida, excepting Miami which will continue to serve as an access hub to Latin America.

Florida is where George Packer’s New Yorker article The Ponzi State goes to ground on the mess that is the Florida real estate market, and how so much of Florida’s economy depended on limitless growth. The article is too long for me to summarize, but Packer does a great job at detailing a cross-section of the social strata in Florida, how the crash poignantly affects them, and the very real interconnectedness of this disaster. Paraphrasing one of the resident’s musings (and Pogo), “We has met the enemy, and he is us.”

Obviously the truth of this mess is a complex and many splendored thing, but these two articles provided me context going forward.

Session saving in Firefox through the Tab Mix Plus extension. Saved my bacon on a number of occasions.

iStats menus. The menu bar items are cool, as well as the iStat pro Dashboard widgets. Reminds me that I need to make a donation.

DyDNS.com’s MailHop Outbound SMTP service. Pay $15/year, get 150 outbound messages a day. Beats the heck out of keeping your own SMTP relay up, running, not busted into and not blacklisted. Also supports working around stupid firewalls you see in many travel settings.

Dashboard in Mac OS X. Oddly enough, I decreased the clock size in the menubar and now I use Dashboard more frequently to check the time. This is making me appreciate Dashboard’s utility.

Search templates in LaunchBar, although I need to break the muscle memory of doing a Google search through the Firefox URL field.

One of the big goals I had for 2008 was to read more books. I started out with a focused target of approximately 30 pages a day for all of January. That stuck as a regular habit, which was amplified by starting to take public transportation into work. An hour and half each way on Metro and a commuter bus (yes, I know), provides plenty of personal time. There’s always a tension between diddling with the laptop and reading, but pursuing a good story turned into a pretty consistent habit.

Anyhoo, I finished 30 books in the calendar year, which is a pretty big achievement relative to most other Americans. Small bar I know. But I’ve got a high maintenance youngster, who defaults to highest priority in time allocation. Heck, it’s highly significant relative to myself. I don’t think I’ve read more than 10 books in a year for the past decade or so. To commemorate the milestone, I’m collecting some final thoughts.

Without further adieu, here’s the roster:

1. Spook Country, William Gibson

2. Spin State, Chris Moriarty

3. Woken Furies, Richard K. Morgan

4. Geek Mafia, Rick Dakan

5. Accelerando, Charles Stross

6. Dead Witch Walking, Kim Harrison

7. Geek Mafia, Mile Zero, Rick Dakan

8. Endymion, Dan Simmons

9. Spin Control, Chris Moriarty

10. Idoru, William Gibson

11. All Tomorrow’s Parties, William Gibson

12. Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman

13. Foundation, Isaac Asimov

14. Everything Bad is Good For You, Steven Johnson

15. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

16. Brave New War, John Robb

17. The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross

18. The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons

19. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a.k.a Bladerunner, Philip K. Dick

20. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

21. American Gods, Neil Gaiman

22. Halting State, Charles Stross

23. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi

24. Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov

25. The Ghost Brigades, John Scalzi

26. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

27. The Star Fraction, Ken Macleod

28. The Last Colony, John Scalzi

29. Market Forces, Richard K. Morgan

30. Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov

The obvious theme is science fiction, with a dash of urban fantasy and a touch of non-fiction. Within the science fiction bunch, I tended towards a lot of “new guard” types such as Scalzi, Stross, Simmons, Morgan, and Macleod. There was also a healthy dose of “classic” types such as Dick and Asimov.

My nonexistent audience obviously knows I’ve been working through a series of personal mini-reviews. The currently completed ones are linked to above. As I finish more I’ll be updating this post. With any luck I’ll be done by the end of January 2009. As you can see, I didn’t have any luck in this regard.

Best of the year? Tough call that I’m not going to make a singular choice on. Here are the contenders: Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, Anansi Boys, The Atrocity Archives, The Rise of Endymion. Watchmen is in a class by itself, but despite being 20+ years old, it’s still a modern classic. Side note. I’m so old as a teenager I collected, and still have, the original 12 issue Watchmen comic book series. With the Watchmen movie coming out in 2009, it might be time for an appraisal.

The only thing I can’t recommend is Dead Witch Walking. The romance and relationship driven wing of urban fantasy is just not my cup of tea.

In 2009, as I said, I plan to finish the 2008 reviews (Done!). I’m planning on keeping the reading and reviewing habit as well, with a goal of 35 books. (Way behind though at this point.) I now find myself in a position where new author choices aren’t ridiculously obvious. I’ll commit now to one new (to me) author, Iain M. Banks. There’s still some Stross to be had and since this was my first PKD dose, I’ll probably add some more. Of course, I could also adjust the mix. Once upon a time, I read a lot of fantasy, but the vibe from that community doesn’t seem to be in tune with my adult sensibilities. Other than that, I’ll play it by ear.

New Media Hack has been visited by the Google Bot and is now back in the index. Hooray!

There’s a fine line between slick elegance, and flimsy thinness. William Gibson finally crossed that line with Spook Country. I’m in the tank for Gibson, but I can’t really recommend this one. Spook Country is definitely worth reading for Gibson completists like me, but afterwards I didn’t feel like it was must read for the general SFF fan.

Per usual Gibson, there are three interlocking narrative threads. One involves Hollis Henry, which tangentially connects Spook Country with Pattern Recognition through the reappearance of Hubertus Bigend and his Blue Ant company. A second thread involves Tito, of Cuban, Chinese, and professional espionage heritage. The tale of shadowy operative Brown, (CIA, NSA, Rogue?) rounds out the storylines. Brown ruthelessly and somewhat illegally pursues a secretive plot threatening national security. Brown’s pursuit of Tito’s patriarch puts them on a head on collision. Meanwhile, Henry’s involvement with the GPS artist, Bobby Chombo, winds up entangling her in Tito and Brown’s conspiracies.

Spook Country is a story of the present future. There is no speculative fiction, all of the technology and science is here today. Living in the future that Gibson describes diminishes the techno-cultural ether that is his trademark. The reader is left with the characterization and the plotting. The former isn’t particularly deep and the latter is convoluted, partially obscured, and a bit unsatisfying at the end.

What Spook Country does well is capture the sense of an infinite set of plots and backstories that seems pervasive in today’s popular culture. There’s always another behind the scenes story or expose or investigation or true report out there. What it doesn’t do well is challenge the reader’s conceptualization of how technology, culture, and society intersect. That’s the hallmark of Gibson’s past work and he missed the mark by coming a little too close on our event horizon.

Once upon a time, I was a real magazine junkie, buying 10-15 a month, off the rack no less. Now I’m down to three subscriptions, The New Yorker, Wired, and Harper’s Magazine. The New Yorker is the only must read and I’m barely keeping up with that. If it wasn’t for a free year tied to an Amazon purchase, I would have let my Wired sub expire in December. Frankly, I’ve come to almost detest the magazine. Overdesigned to a fault with too many pieces that border on sycophancy or smack of manufactured controversy. Despite the cost, I’m seriously considering replacing Wired with The Economist

I’ll always have a soft spot for Harper’s despite having zero time to read the magazine. Fabulous writing across a wide range of subjects: politics, literature, art, science, fiction. The quarterly folios are something to behold. An article on a lost shipment of rubber ducks is one of the greatest magazine pieces I’ve ever read.

Now the iconic Harper’s Index is online. Bravo!

I’m sure it’s been done somewhere else, but I have this nagging suspicion that a Web/blogosphere version of the index would do quite well. The tricky part is in the research and not getting sued by Harper’s.

I’ve come to the conclusion that DJ mix House music, my favorite style, is better purchased on physical CDs rather than through online services like the iTunes Music Store. Here’s why:

1. Selection is pretty poor. I can count on one hand online service, mixed products that are new to me that I’ve really enjoyed.

2. Even if I find a mix I might like, it’s often delivered as one big MP3 or AAC wad. No track separation or playlist information, just one big song. Granted getting an hour+ of music for $0.99 radically increases the amount of music you get per dollar, but a mix is not just one song.

3. To top it off occasionally there are tracks of the mix that aren’t available through the service. That might be fine for a traditional album where the track was a stinker, but the absence sort of puts a big pothole in the middle of a mix.

Instead I’ll use the iTMS to reconnect to my mid 80’s to mid 90’s Hip-Hop roots and build a library of nostalgic singles and then progress into the modern era. In this case, I’m much more singles oriented making for a better match with the iTMS. Cherry picking the best one or two tracks off of any Hip-Hop album seems to be a good strategy. Even better is the fact that the iTMS seems to have captured a lot of the B-sides and special releases of the era.

For example, Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted is a Hip-Hop classic. On the iTMS, the “album” has 23 tracks, five more than the original vinyl and CD albums. More importantly the bonus tracks include Jackin’ For Beats, which only appeared on the relatively rare Kill at Will, ep. Jackin For Beats is a straight up 3 minute romp through some of the classic beats of the time, covered by one of Ice Cube’s better rhyme stylings.

I’m getting really hooked on LaunchBar. So much so that I want to push as many keyboard commands as possible through the versatile launcher.

Google Desktop was bollocksing up things though with its too similar keyboard trigger. Not to mention the goofiness of showing Web results ahead of desktop results. When I go to my desktop search engine I’m looking for desktop results.

At first I thought a simple LaunchBar search template would do the trick except for a couple of issues:

1. Google Desktop can be reached in a browser through a URL. Unfortunately the base of this URL has an embedded token whose creation isn’t documented anywhere.

2. Firefox is completely braindead when it comes to the Apple OpenScripting Architecture.

3. Getting LaunchBar to recognize your custom scripts and actions is a little tricky.

Mac OS X command line to the rescue.

The Google Desktop url can be pulled out of Apple’s system configuration variables using defaults. Firefox can be told to launch a URL using the open command. A Python script ties it all together by running the command to get the url, escaping the query args, creating the full url, and launching Firefox. Plop the script into ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions and I’m in hotkey heaven.

It’s not the fastest thing in the world, but it gets the right results in the right place. Not bad for a 1 hour hack, although it took a couple of hours of research. Here’s the script:

!/usr/bin/python

import urllib

import subprocess

DEFAULTS_CMD =

‘defaults read com.google.Desktop.WebServer search_url’

def main(qargs):

output = subprocess.Popen(DEFAULTS_CMD, shell=True,

stdout=subprocess.PIPE).stdout

gdesktop_url = output.readline().strip()

url_txt = gdesktop_url + “&q=” + \

urllib.quote_plus(” “.join(args))

subprocess.check_call([“open”, url_txt])

if name == ‘main‘:

from optparse import OptionParser

op = OptionParser()

options, args = op.parse_args()

main(args)

Now to write that Discogs.Com search template for LaunchBar.

Chris Moriarty’s novel Spin State is an inspired attempt to mix quantum mechanics and coal mining. In commenting on Spin Control, the sequel to Spin State, I said Spin State didn’t work for me. I’ll give Moriarty credit for the attempt though.

Spin State at it’s is core a murder mystery with hard science speculative fiction elements. The SF elements center on cloning and genetic modification, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence. Catherine Li, the protagonist, is a disgraced UNSec operative who is hornswaggled into a chance at redemption. If she solves the murder of a famous quantum physicist, she can get back into the military. The murder took place on her home world of Compson’s Planet, where a mysterious material, termed “condensate”, is extracted from mined coal. Condensate enables faster than light travel.

There exists an uneasy peace between UNSec and the Syndicates. Syndicates are posthuman species that heavily use gene engineering and cloning to promulgate. UNSec has outlawed Syndicate technology and the small minority of their members who interact with homo sapiens are considered second class citizens. A couple of Syndicate members play central roles in the mystery. Complicating matters is that Li is 3/4’s Syndicate stock, passing as an unmodified human. Plus she was key in a critical battle to end war between UNSec and the Synidicates, a battle involving war crimes. To put it mildly, Li is a very conflicted character.

Spin State, while receiving quite a bit of laudatory recognition, didn’t click for two reasons. First, the emphasis on coal mining just didn’t resonate. When I pick up an SF novel I’m not looking for a heavy dose of old, Earthbound technology. With the perspective of time, I can acknowledge the plight of the condensate miners as commentary on oppression and otherness. Second, I just didn’t have any intuition about the science of quantum computing. Ergo, one of the central speculative elements was opaque to me. Not the author’s fault, I’ll admit.

I finished Spin State about a year ago, so there’s some distance between now and the reading experience. Subsequent to finishing, I got a heavy dose of quantum computing background for a project at work. Also, after enjoying Spin Control, I better appreciate Moriarty’s writing style. It would be interesting to reread Spin State now and see if I enjoyed the story more. I suspect I would.

All that said, I’m sort of neutral on Spin State. It wouldn’t be the first thing I’d recommend to someone, but I wouldn’t actively discourage anyone from picking it up. For most SF fans, it’s probably worth the time spent, and it would definitely help in the reading of Spin Control, a book I can definitely recommend.

Woken Furies, Richard K. Morgan’s third tale of Takeshi Kovacs, gets much deeper into the character than Altered Carbon or Broken Angels. Kovacs maintains his sociopathic charms, but a nuanced complexity emerges. Woken Furies starts off heavy on complex plotting and speculative technology, to the point of confusion, but eventually rewards the reader as the stage settles and the plot plays out.

Kovacs is a highly skilled mercenary with meta-human capabilities due to his training as a United Nations Envoy. (What’s up with the UN as bogeyman in recent sci-fi?) He doesn’t have super powers, but his augmentations make him a cut above a normal thug for hire. For example, Envoy’s have perfect memory recall. In Altered Carbon he was essentially a private dick. Broken Angels turned him into an interstellar “Man With No Name”. Woken Furies sees him as a “ronin”, returning to his home planet of Harlan’s World. Grudges abound, but there’s an underlying honor to the mayhem that Kovacs generates.

Of course Kovacs is such a wanted man that someone’s gone to the trouble of resleeving an earlier version of himself and sicing the younger Kovacs on the elder.

On Harlan’s World, 90 percent covered in water, Kovacs is systematically taking vigilante vengeance against a radical religious group. On the lam from this church, he joins up with a mercenary crew tasked with decommissioning extremely dangerous, leftover sentient military hardware. As part of a skirmish gone awry, Sylvie, a member of the crew, winds up channeling Quellcrest Falconer. Channeling? This may actually be reincarnation. Falconer is a revered revolutionary, whose teachings have greatly influence Kovacs. A return of the leader of the Quellist movement would shake the foundations of society on Harlan’s World. As part of saving Sylvie, Kovacs bonds, as best he can with her crew. They work together to figure out if and how Falconer can re-emerge on Harlan’s World.

One of the neat conceits of Morgan’s Kovacs tales is the concept of sleeving, putting someone’s recorded consciousness into a new physical body, often technologically augmented. As long as your stack, a small spine embedded cylinder, is intact you can be easily reborn. Not exactly a revolutionary concept but Morgan’s stylings give the sleeve concept a gritty plausibility. For example, having one mind in two sleeves simultaneously is well nigh sacriligeous. Kovacs brutality is also magnified as his anti-faith rampage involves tallying the stack destruction of priests.

So throw the conflict of the present self with the past into Morgan’s pot. Add in political philosophy and intrigue, not to mention questioning the morality of religion by a distinctly amoral character. Layer in heavy doses of violent action and forward looking speculative tech. Mix it all up with Morgan’s literary stylings, he’s been compared to Raymond Chandler and has some of the techno-cultural elegance of William Gibson, and you’ve got yourself a pretty good book.

My only criticism is that the early chapters of Woken Furies were really confusing. I just couldn’t get a clear picture of the mercenary runs in my head. And there are a plethora of characters to keep straight. I had to do more than my fair share of backtracking and rereading.

However, I can recommend Woken Furies for your literary pleasure. As the first of the trilogy Altered Carbon has an advantage, and is clearly the best of the bunch. But Woken Furies is a satisfying conclusion, if Morgan is to be believed, to Kovacs journeys.

Trying to broaden the horizons beyond io9 and sites of my fave authors, I’ve added a few new sites to the subscription pool:

• SFSignal, fan driven and hopefully a little more focused than io9

• Locus News, news from one of the industry’s flagships

• Locus Roundtable, discussion from a broad selection of “various reviewers, authors, and academics”, plus some of the editorial staff

• Tor.com, publishers are made out of people!!

I’ve really gotten into e-mail subaddressing recently. It’s a pretty well known technique. In conjunction with GMail’s labels, filtering, and IMAP access it makes for a really powerful, private bookmarking tool accessible from just about anywhere.

I do a lot of information trapping. I have three different GReader accounts: two heavy with tech oriented or work related subscriptions and one I’m growing with more personal, less techy feeds. Not to mention the 77 subs I have in NetNewsWire. That’s four places where I might see interesting links, plus anything useful I come across in plain old browsing.

The one thing all of these applications have is the ability to e-mail a link with ease. GReader will actually e-mail a whole RSS item with an attendant note if you want. Browsers just use your standard e-mail application. I can easily e-mail to myself+notes@example.com from just about anywhere.

At the GMail end, I just filter on to:myself+notes and mark those incoming messages with the inventive label, notes. There’s also an option in GMail to remove filtered messages from the Inbox. Now my self notes don’t interfere with important incoming e-mail from real people.

Finally, the notes label appears as a folder in Thunderbird, which I can synch locally. This also makes for easy reading. To top it all off, I get great search either directly within GMail or with Google Desktop.

This strategy beats del.icio.us, or similar shared bookmarking sites, because it defaults to private not public. Plus posting to del.icio.us is somewhat inconveniently done through a Web interface, or bookmarklet, or something else not as ubiquitous as e-mail. Also, it’s easier to suck notes out of an e-mail store than del.icio.us.

I’m thinking about adopting this strategy for TODO management. Probably won’t go as hog wild exploiting GMail as Steve Rubel though.

Bonus: GMail also supports super-starring, for just that little bit of extra, instant metadata on notes.

Flickr turned 5 today. My first post about Flickr was relatively early in its history. However, I never really got deep into Flickr but did study tagging behavior a little bit. For 2009, one of my goals is to get back into the API, do some interesting empirical study, and create some generative art from publicly available photos.

Recently The New York Times has been making quite a push to open up some of its internal software development to the rest of the world.

• A large, labeled data corpus of articles is available

• They’ve recently exposed an article search API

• IBM’s technology behind Many Eyes is now being used for a white label social visualization silo within The Times’ site.

Obviously as one of the worlds legendary newspapers, The Times developers have unique repositories of content to work with. Counter that with a business that seems to be springing leaks in its revenue streams left and right. Careful observers will note that commercial usage is typically prohibited, so don’t plan on making a bundle off of their content. In any event, it’s admirable that such a significant media concern is making so much available for people to experiment with.

One thing they could be doing on the blog though, is promoting external projects that leverage Times open source code and web APIs. If they had an evangelist, probably can’t afford one, I wonder what they would do.

Now if we could only get The New Yorker to venture out in a similar way!

Recently I chanced upon a long lost gift card for Coconuts, a music chain eventually purchased by FYE. Stopped by the local FYE and it turns out that there was quite a bit of cash left. Given my musical tastes, I can never find anything in brick and mortar music stores these days. I just turned part of the gift card into $50 of iTunes Music Store credit.

Now that the iTMS has gone DRM free, I feel much more comfortable buying tracks from Apple. The real downer is having to use iTunes to search the store (it’s a damn website! stop trying to act like it’s not) and the fairly limited search even within iTunes.

As an example, I lean towards DJ mix, house music. In the late 80’s through most of the 90’s this genre was very label oriented. Artists were relatively unknown and even the known ones used lots of aliases. Labels represented particular flavors of house pretty reliably.

I was pleased to find that the iTMS had a number of tracks from the legendary Strictly Rhythm label. But there’s no way to discover the extent of the back catalog available because search by label doesn’t exist. I’m not going to sit there with a Strictly Rhythm discography and one-by-one figure out what tracks iTunes has. That’s what computers are for!

-1 on you iTunes Music Store!!

N.b. Amazon MP3s isn’t any better

Rick Dakan’s Geek Mafia is an entertaining, somewhat sexy, romp into an underground world of scams and confidence schemes. However, be advised that there’s really not a whole lot of geek in this mafia.

Parts of Geek Mafia are based on Dakan’s life experience. He was a comic book writer and participated in development of the game City of Heroes. During that process his corporate teammates fired him, providing the kernel of truth for the beginning of Geek Mafia.

Paul Reynolds is the protagonist of Geek Mafia. Subsequent to getting fired Reynolds encounters the mysterious and attractive Chloe. Chloe helps him exact revenge on his former company. Then she ushers him into her circle of friends and associates who live “off the grid”. These folks engineer and execute illegal scams that provide a steady, if risky income, and access well beyond their authorization. Computer cracking and various repurposed technologies support their work.

Reynolds is seduced by both Chloe and The Life. While not being particularly clueful about tech, part of the reason he got fired, his writer’s imagination serves well in devising new scams. This provides Paul the means to stay in Chloe’s crew’s good graces, not to mention get into Chloe’s bed. However, jealousy and betrayal within the crew rear their ugly heads. The climax involves Paul and Chloe rooting out and confronting a traitor within their midst.

Geek Mafia isn’t particularly deep, challenging, or well written, but it’s a light entertaining read. Poor copyediting and other errors allow the first time novelist flavor to come through. Dakan makes up for it with an implied enthusiasm and just enough Silicon Valley trappings to attract techno-elites like me. My biggest complaint actually is the lack of inventive and authentic geek elements. The scams typically relied more on brute force labor and theatrics than any technical wizardry. Contrast Geek Mafia with something like Stross’ Halting State, where UNIX, augmented reality, and MMORPG references fly thick, and are integral to the story.

So if you see Geek Mafia in the remainder bin, feel free to grab it on the cheap. Or if you’re cheap, just download a copy for free. Just remember you’re getting more crime caper than science fiction.

As advertised, I’ve been doing a little work getting the remnants of New Media Hack back to life on the web. The style sheet for the archives is busted, and I’m sure there’s plenty of linkrot. Much work to do to clean up some of the rougher edges, but maybe it’ll come back to life in the Google index. Interestingly, I managed to resurrect an old version of MovableType so that I could reconfigure and regenerate the site from my laptop. From a tar file and a MySQL database dump, things were pretty straightforward.

New Media Hack was my old blog. Most of the posts were authored when I was a professor at Northwestern University in the Computer Science Department. Looking back, there was a lot of good, forward looking material in New Media Hack. I’m glad it’s back on the web in some form.

Mass Programming Resistance will always be a distinctly different beast, much less hardcore CS for example. However, MPR will always owe a debt to NMH. I’ll be digging around NMH and linking from here to some of the better posts.

Irruption, n

1. The action of irrupting or breaking into; a violent entry or invasion; an intrusion.

2. An abrupt increase of numbers of a particular animal.

Learn something new every day.

If Charles Stross’ goal with Accelerando was to explode the reader’s head, he succeeded with this customer. I’m not sure that’s a good thing though.

First off, Accelerando is built out of nine short stories. This is not made obvious within the paperback edition (or I missed it in the cover notes, intro, etc.) so it doesn’t quite read like a complete novel. For the first couple of chapters, the temporal leaps between tales are disorienting. And since these are nine distinct stories, while there are common elements, there’s not really a unifying plot.

The [nine stories](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(book)) break down into three segments of three, chronicling characters from three generations of the Macx family: Manfred, his daughter Amber, and her son Sirhan. Events in Accelerando start from Manfred’s near future world, similar to ours where the onset of The Singularity is beginning. Amber lives in a post-Singularity, but still human oriented milieu. However, post-AI entities are starting to compete with humanity for domination of the solar system. Finally, Sirhan emerges in a world where planetary matter is being turned into “computronium” and humans are being banished from their home planets. Lesser beings and species are suffered existence as long as they stay out of the super-intelligence’s communication lines. This apparently is the natural order of the universe.

Stross’ attempts to stuff every sentence with a reference or nod to some aspect of singularity based Nerd Rapture. The flux of advanced concepts quickly becomes overwhelming. If the goal is to illustrate how a rapidly accelerating pace of technical advancement would feel to a lesser being, consider Accelerando a success. However, an accessible, completely coherent literary work this is not. The book is not without its charms, and is elegantly playful in spots, but it takes a lot of work on the reader’s behalf.

I’m sort of on the fence about Accelerando. On the one hand, I think it’s good enough that people I respect would get something out of reading the book. On the other hand, I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend Accelerando to them. If you’re a Stross completist, or into hard Singularity science fiction, then this is your book.

For more on Stross in general, check out this “Charles Stross book event”, hosted by Crooked Timber. A number of luminaries, e.g. Paul Krugman, comment on various of Stross’ work, although there are some notable omissions, like The Atrocity Archives.

John Scalzi reports that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is being reissued. This is great, I’ve been looking to read The Forever War for a while. For whatever reason, Amazon only had old copies at outrageous prices through 3rd party sellers. My local library didn’t even have a copy.

Now I can get my hands on a must read classic. We’ll see how well time has treated it.

The way Movable Type handles Markdown formatting on posts with body and extended parts. The Markdown from the body part doesn’t carry over to the extended part.

How MarsEdit doesn’t do well with re-editing of posts. I too often wind up with extra copies on the server.

How the [MarsEdit]((http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/) post preview window doesn’t display the destination of HTML links. Many of my posting errors involve incorrect links that could have easily been caught before posting.

Without too much effort I managed to make it through January (and a bit of December) without an alcoholic beverage. No, I didn’t have a drinking problem. Occasionally I challenge myself with habit building exercises. This started off as a half whim and then I just kept rolling with it. Sort of like Jerry Seinfeld’s streak lifehack.

While surprisingly easy and pointless, it was also oddly satisfying. With the holidays and my wife’s penchant for social activities, there were plenty of opportunities to end the little experiment. Somehow I managed to wriggle off the hook each time.

I’m probably going to bust the streak later this week, as I meet up with an old drinking buddy for the first time in over a decade. We’ll probably tip back a beer or two.

Just wanted to log the achievement.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user jk5854. Used according to a Creative Commons By-NC License.

Apparently Chris Moriarty, the author of the excellent Spin Control, started a blog. Looks like its gone dark, but I didn’t know that Spin Control had won the 2006 Philip K. Dick award.

At least I know I have some SF taste. And the list of past winners is probably a good seed for feature reading.

This review will be pretty straightforward. I could not stand Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking.

Dead Witch Walking is rightfully categorized as “urban fantasy.” Unfortunately that label applies to two wildly different strains of storytelling.

On the one hand, you have writers like Kim Harrison, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Patricia Briggs. You might call these authors descendants of Anne Rice, blending the supernatural, horror, and romance.

On the other hand, you’ve got Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow (at least for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town), and Emma Bull. The intersection of the urban and the fantastic is the central focus. The romance is secondary or non-existent.

I’m a fan of the latter camp. Trying to extend my canon, I foraged on Amazon, came up with Dead Witch Walking, and wound up in the former camp. I did not enjoy the experience.

Rachel Morgan, the heroine of the story, is a supernatural bounty hunter. She practices her trade in Cincinnati, Ohio. A fictional area known as “The Hollows”, just across the river from Cincinnati, houses various fantastic sorts such as vampires, pixies, and demons. At the start of Dead Witch Walking, Morgan works for a big, soul sucking, bureaucratic organization. In the process of quitting and starting her independent agency, she becomes a marked woman. Solving the mystery of who’s after her and why takes up the bulk of the book.

In regards to the writing, I had two major beefs with Dead Witch Walking. First, there are a number of points where sexual tension is built up, but not resolved. I don’t need a tell all porn show, but no satisfaction is just irritating. Even the resolution of the main mystery left me wanting. Second, the world of The Hollows just didn’t project a satisfying, internal consistency. Maybe I need to be better educated about the mythos that Harrison was leveraging, but there were many elements of the fantastical milieu that left me going, “Hunh? Why?”

In the end, I don’t want to disparage Harrison’s abilities as an author. Clearly, she resonates with many people she is making quite happy. As for me, Dead Witch Walking was easily my worst read of 2008. Just not my cup of tea.

Rick Dakan’s Geek Mafia: Mile Zero fell a little flat for me. While I wasn’t particularly high on the first Geek Mafia, it was passable. The sequel really lost what little geekiness there was in the original. The result was a tedious game of keeping track of a number of confidence schemes, played out by a cast of fairly thin grifter characters.

Paul, Chloe, and Bee, the remnants of a Crew formerly based out of Silicon Valley have moved to Key West, Florida. There they’re trying to reestablish themselves as a profitable con artist collective. Obviously, the different setting requires different tactics, and the reduced population makes the overall upside, and fun, a lot smaller. This aspect of their relocation seems to be chafing Paul and Chloe’s romantic relationship.

Enter Winston, Chloe’s mentor in The Life of Crews, who shows up unannounced in Key West. At Winston’s urging, a number of other leaders of large national/international crews are about to descend upon the adult playground. Plans to take The Life to the next level are brewing.

Things really get ignited after a murder takes place, throwing negotiations amongst the various leaders out of whack. Various double crosses and treacheries take place, as Paul and Chloe take up the task of solving the mystery. They also have to address the bigger picture of their fragile relationship and what role they might have if these big schemes actually hatch. Plus old ghosts from Silicon Valley rear their ugly head.

Too bad Geek Mafia: Mile Zero didn’t live up to the setup.

My first beef with Geek Mafia: Mile Zero is the lack of real exciting geekiness. Dakan doesn’t push into sci-fi by inventing new technology. Nor is there any creative extrapolation of present or near term capabilities. The tech used to pull of their scams seems pretty pedestrian to me. An average episode of Mission Impossible (TV or movie, take your pick) is more exciting in this aspect.

Secondly, after Paul and Chloe, the characters become fairly uninteresting and indistinguishable. You never really get much backstory on any of them , there’s way too many, and the plot doesn’t really allow anyone to stand out.

Finally, the plot? Well, let’s just say it’s a bit convoluted. To no good end.

I bought Geek Mafia: Mile Zero on the good graces of Geek Mafia. You won’t hurt yourself reading Geek Mafia: Mile Zero, but you’ve probably got better things you could be doing with your time.

Aaron Swartz knocked out exactly 100.

Matt Biddulph beat that book total by 4.

I did a measly old 30. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m way ahead of at least 43% of adult Americans. I’d be willing to up that quite a bit since a book per 2 weeks is a solid if not spectacular clip. I haven’t read the report closely, so the numbers might be skewed given the NEA’s emphasis on literary reading. Still averaging 2 books per week entails some serious dedication. And those guys weren’t doing a lot of light reading.There’s some seriously hard sledding in their selections. Not to mention the fact that they’re both pretty creative folks to boot.

However, all three of us did read Watchmen this year!! I know the movie’s building anticipation, but I’m glad people are revisiting Moore and Gibbons’ classic.

And finally, this was a test of using Markdown to author a post. I think I’m liking it.

io9 reports that development of a movie version of Hyperion is proceeding apace with a directorial assignment. Unfortunately, it seems they’re squishing Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion into one movie. Not a good sign.

Color me skeptical.

Of the four books in the Hyperion Cantos, Endymion may be the least of the litter. Since Dan Simmons is the author, that still makes for a darn good book.

Endymion picks up some time after the events of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. In those two books, humanity and AI had forged an alliance allowing humans, via Farcasting, to instantaneously travel and communicate across vast stretches of space. However, the alliance was a sham and the characters of Hyperion brought about the downfall of those technologies and the interplanetary capabilities they supported.

Fast forward two hundred and seventy four years. The known galaxy is in the grip of a resurrected Roman Catholic Church. Humans can literally receive a sacrament of resurrection. Although not without cost, the sacrament is repeatable, and thus real death is mostly unknown in this current age. Farcasting is still busted, but slower than light travel is in use. To put it mildly, Simmons’ Catholic Church is pure evil.

On the planet Hyperion, the old poet Martin Silenus (yes the one from the first book Hyperion) enlists the aid of a young, poor, local hunter, named Raul Endymion. Endymion is to protect the timetraveling child Aenea, daughter of another pair of characters from the Hyperion books. It is Silenus’ vision that Aenea bring about the downfall of the Church, allowing him to write the conclusion of his Cantos. The only aid Silenus provides Endymion is an android assistant and an intelligent spaceship.

The Church however is aware of Aenea’s forthcoming presence and sets out to eliminate her. Thus begins a long chase, the mighty forces of the Church desperately seeking a barely pubescent girl, her somewhat slow, backwater bodyguard, and a blue faux human.

The odds are not in favor of the good guys.

Through Aenea’s power to resuscitate Farcaster portals, Endymion and Aenea lead the hunt across a dizzying array of planets. Simmons has a gift for making each stop a unique tale unto itself. Yet each contributes into an increasingly ugly picture of the horror that the Church is perpetrating. Behind them follows the devout Father-Captain De Soya in a ship that kills its occupants to achieve faster than light transport. Such are the possibilities when resurrection is possible. Yet despite the vast resources of the Church, at every turn De Soya just misses snatching our heroes.

I’ve written earlier about Endymion’s sequel The Rise of Endymion and how excellent it was. Endymion only suffers through comparison to its sibling and its predecessors. The Rise of Endymion has the advantage of the grand climax. Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion have the benefit of being much more literary, and of course being first. Many of the negative reviews I’ve read are simple dissatisfaction that Endymion is not Hyperion.

But on its own merits Endymion is a really good book. Looking back from a distance, I appreciate the mysteries and conundrums that Simmons set up. The time put into Endymion’s characters makes the final payoff that much more bittersweet. For 2008, Simmons character building is probably the best in any of the books I read. Gaiman may give him a run for the money, but no one else even comes close. Be warned though, if you’re a devout Catholic or other Christian, you may be turned off by his extremely dark vision of organized religion. Other than that caveat I can highly recommend Endymion.

I wish I could claim a rousing finish to the books I read in 2008, but Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation will have to do. Not that Second Foundation is bad, but the third leg of the Foundation series ain’t exactly cutting edge, fast paced, or deeply moving.

I’ll just use the lame excuse that it was due back at the library right after New Years Day! Can’t afford those exorbitant late fees.

Second Foundation contains two stories. In the first, it is a relatively short time after the events of Foundation and Empire, featuring The Mule, a mutant featuring powers of emotional manipulation and adjustment. The Mule has consolidated his hold on the galaxy and is now obsessed with finding the mythical Second Foundation, the last obstacle to complete domination. He has been able to detect people who have been subtly manipulated in their emotions, signs of a potentially superior psychohistorical force. To suss out the hidden power, he pairs up an older, converted former Foundation rebel, a younger, unconverted overachiever, and points them in the direction of the Second Foundation. Suffice it to say that The Mule gets neutralized and Seldon’s plan is saved once again.

In the wake of these events, the first Foundation has risen again for the second half of the book. However, the Second Foundation has become an almost mystical concept across the galaxy, stalling Hari Seldon’s plan. Meanwhile, a small cadre of Foundationer’s views the Second Foundation as a threat to be rooted out. They hatch a plan to find the elusive organization, but the precocious daughter of Foundation and Empire’s heroine, apparently throws a monkey wrench into the works by stowing away as the plot sets sail.

Similar to the first story, the second half of Second Foundation is a bit of an easter egg hunt. Only at this point in the Foundation series, we’re into our third consecutive tale of “search for the enemy with surprise twist at the end”. Asimov does set up a bit of a conundrum in a “how do you know you’ve defeated the invisible enemy,” vein. Other than the clean tying up of loose ends though, I didn’t find anything really distinctive. In fact, I was somewhat peeved that the world was configured back to mysterious scientists and Seldon’s Plan being well-nigh omnipotent.

You can’t really argue with a classic, but it’ll probably be a while before I read Second Foundation again, if ever.

Despite some despicable characters and an uneven plot, Richard K. Morgan’s Market Forces is an entertaining read. In the book notes, Morgan freely admits that the book draws inspiration from Rollerball (I’m assuming the classic James Caan version) and Mad Max. Those elements are combined with a dark vision of executive privilege and immoral capitalism, but not with much actual extrapolated science. This is probably more rightly called speculative fiction than science fiction. Singularity fiends, hard sf geeks, and space opera lovers need not apply.

The main character, Chris Faulkner, is a fast rising executive in a world where promotion is metered through deadly road rage challenges. Competing executives run each other off the road to get ahead. Faulkner specializes in managing the resources for bloody geopolitical conflict to significant profit. The book starts just as he is joining the high flying London firm Shorn Associates. Think of Shorn as the extrapolation of Blackwater Worldwide. Faulkner has climbed from abject poverty, caused by a global cascading recession (sound familiar), to reach an elite class which is essentially above the law.

Needless to say mayhem ensues.

Market Forces chronicles the internal and external conflicts of Faulkner as he navigates the treacherous waters of becoming a player in Conflict Investment. His management and peers view him as a threat to be roadkilled. His best friend at Shorn is a brutal thug who’s having an affair with the sleazy media whore Faulkner lusts after. Faulkner’s wife thinks he’s becoming a monster. She plots for him to sell out the company even as their marriage falls apart. His ineffectual father-in-law thinks he’s a tool of capitalist excess and tyranny. His clients think he’s just another expensive suited gringo come to colonize their region.

Did I mention that Faulkner occasionally goes psychotic and ruthlessly murders people? As an example he actually brutally beats to death an elderly South American politico. Right in one of Shorn’s expensive meeting rooms!! With a baseball bat!! In front of senior management!! This doesn’t even take into account what happens to the poor lower class scum who get in his way. That’s just the breaks of privilege.

I’ve enjoyed Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels, especially Altered Carbon, but I’d been holding off on Market Forces. Reviews had deemed the book to be somewhat of a dropoff from Morgan’s earlier books, and I have to agree with that sentiment. At 464 trade paperback pages, I think might have been more effective with 100 to 120 less pages. The reduction would have forced Morgan to tighten up a few plot elements, drop a few thin characters, and not linger unnecessarily on some scenes.

Despite all of that, I was oddly compelled to complete Market Forces. This is a credit to Morgan’s plotting ability, born of his screenwriting background. Apparently Market Forces started off as a screenplay, was optioned for film rights, and progressed to a novel. Ultimately, I could find no redeeming features in any of the characters, yet I had to know, “What happens in the end?”.

My final verdict is that unless you really like Morgan, and are a completist, Market Forces is worth a library trip or bumming a copy from a friend. Don’t feel the need to rush out and read it though. It’s got enough interesting elements not to be a complete waste, but I could see folks getting a little peeved after putting down their hard earned money.

John Scalzi’s The Last Colony is a worthy conclusion to the trilogy that started with Old Man’s War and continued with The Ghost Brigades. Exceedingly jam packed with plot turns and twists, maybe to a fault, Scalzi brings John Perry’s tale to a fittingly circular end.

Perry has retired from active duty and is now a petty bureaucrat on some backwater planet. Instead of gunning down aliens, he’s now settling disputes over pregnant farm animals. Along with his wife Jane Sagan (retired Special Forces carrying Perry’s ex-wife’s DNA) Perry’s adopted Zoe Boutin, the daughter of the traitorous Charles Boutin from The Ghost Brigades.

The Colonial Union comes calling to this idyllic scene, asking John and Jane to start a new colony, one unusually populated by citizens from a number of existing colonies. The new colony is promoted as a means to pacify agitating colonies, but is also part of a plot to fend off the league of hostile races known as the Conclave. Anymore detail and I could rightfully be accused of spoiling the story.

While The Last Colony is chock full of action, there’s definitely an emphasis on politics and relationships. My only complaint is that I wanted way more of the Consu, the god like alien race from the climax of Old Man’s War. A quick and easy read, in top fashion The Last Colony leaves you wanting more.

Bonus: Since Scalzi is a longtime, prolific blogger, you can catch some of his thoughts right after completing The Last Colony.

Because I’m tired of hassling with full-fledged DBMS systems like MySQL and PostgreSQL for personal stuff, the database behind this blog is sqlite. Data is stored in a simple single file, subject to all the utilities of a typical UNIX environment.

Between a simple db and generating static files with MT, it should be relatively straightforward to use my laptop as a staging server for MPR.

Also makes backups damn easy. A cron job and ssh should do the trick.