zzzzzzzzzz

[redbird]

All I did yesterday was do laundry and go out for Chinese food with my brother and cattitude, and I was yawning through it and joking about whether I would fall asleep before our food arrived.

Today, I only went as far as the water, and the major activity of the day was cooking myself a cheese omelet. Still sleepy.

Okay, I've also read Ken Macleod's Dark Light, and done some LJ support and stuff.

Dark Light is good, with enough throwaway jokes and references that I'm sure I missed a bunch, but it badly needed a proofreader. This is the mass market paperback, and there are places where words have obviously been omitted, and typos like "hunerd" for "hundred." Also not-so-throwaway jokes, like "Saint Teilhard of Piltdown", the patron of evolution, whose feast is celebrated with the display of avowedly faked relics. Macleod is having fun playing with overlapping tech levels and different ideas of gender. Croatan has a settled, hunting-and-gardening Stone Age culture, and an industrial culture a short distance away. Quite short, by the gliders that are part of the Stone Age people's tech. Somewhere in there, one of the industrialists explains polycentric Ptolemaic astronomy. (This is the middle of a trilogy; I'm going to wait a bit on volume 3, because three more Tiptree submissions arrived today, and I have a middle-sized backlog already.)

Comments

[avram]

Engine City, the third book, has my favorite joke of the series, which I'm certainly not going to spoil here.

[redbird]

One from volume 2 that isn't spoilable is that "Dawson's Night" and all the references to Dawson are the result of the charity auction at <plotka.con>, to which Ken donated the chance to have a heresy named after the winner. I think he was rather relieved that Square Bear was outbid.

[bibliotrope.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any of Ken's books yet. Is this a good one to start with?

[redbird]

No; it's the middle of a trilogy. Start with either one of the Fall Revolution Books--I'd go for The Cassini Division or The Star Fraction--or Cosmonaut Keep, the first book of the Engines of Light trilogy.

[avram]

I agree with starting with the Fall Revolution books, but disagree about which to start with. I'd go with The Stone Canal, then The Star Fraction, unless you're really well-read in British politics, in which case you could go in the opposite order. Then, after those two, The Cassini Division. I think everyone agrees that The Sky Road comes last.