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Veracity

2010-11-23 00:00

Cover for Veracity

Review:

Imag­ine a book writ­ten com­plete­ly from the point of view of a mis­an­thrope. Now imag­ine said mis­an­thrope is prone to sopho­moric men­tal ram­blings. Add some en­dear­ing fea­tures such as be­liev­ing he is smarter than any­one else. Add a lot of oth­er var­ied mis­an­thropes as char­ac­ter­s. Now make them com­plete­ly uni­di­men­sion­al, so you can de­fine each of them in one line ("On­ni is nice and makes mu­sic"). Put those char­ac­ters in a brief, not very in­ter­est­ing jour­ney where not much hap­pens ex­cept that they are all de­struc­tive mo­ron­s.

Now, take those in­gre­di­ents and use them to write a book. That book is Ve­rac­i­ty by Mark La­vo­ra­to.

The Space Pioneers

2010-11-19 00:00

Cover for The Space Pioneers

Review:

It's pulp. It's very old. It's aimed at kid­s. It's part of the "Tom Cor­bet­t: Space Cade­t!" se­ries. So, it is kin­da fun, if you can look the oth­er way when­ev­er it gets re­al­ly sex­ist, or sil­ly, but I can't quite rec­om­mend it to any­one.

Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die (Machine of Death, #1)

2010-11-11 00:00

Cover for Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die (Machine of Death, #1)

Review:

I got this book as a free PDF af­ter read­ing about it at Won­der­mark. I had not read any short sto­ry col­lec­tions in a few years and had for­got­ten the best thing about them: if some piece is weak, it goes away quick­ly.

A lot of the sto­ries are good, some very good (Ran­dall Munroe's for in­stance) and some... some are not so good.

There is one that had me laugh­ing for min­utes and was just a sin­gle line. The last one is just *killer* short fic­tion.

I think the col­lec­tion would have im­proved if a big­ger "canon­i­cal" frame­work had been es­tab­lished by the ed­i­tors, since there are con­tra­dic­to­ry lines ev­ery­where, but hey, it's a high con­cept book, it's fun to read, and it's pret­ty cool.

Memorias de un ingeniero

2010-11-11 00:00

Cover for Memorias de un ingeniero
  • Au­thor: Al­fre­do de Ho­ces
  • Rat­ing: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
  • See in goodreads

Review:

I read this by rec­om­men­da­tion of my friend Nico César and... it's so much fun even the span­ish slang did­n't both­er me.

From now on, egg car­tons will nev­er be the same thing for me.

Space Platform (To the Stars, Book 1)

2010-10-30 00:00

Cover for Space Platform (To the Stars, Book 1)

Review:

This is ex­act­ly "The re­turn of the Jedi", ex­cept from the POV of the em­pire and all ewoks are killed. Not a pleas­ant read, re­al­ly. Acrit­i­cal and jin­go­is­tic.
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