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FMK #21: Cyberpunk
FMK is back! Yay! Review of Enchantress From the Stars coming shortly. (Also I continue to read City Watch books to write Sedoretu AU fic, and can I just say, it's really hard to write Vimes/Vetinari AU fic because rewriting the first couple books as if it's their courtship changes NOTHING in their scenes together. Like: "I wonder if there's canon on whether you can see the Patrician's Palace from Sybil's house so I don't have to check the maps," and then "Of course there is, here's the scene where VIMES STARES WISTFULLY ACROSS THE CITY AT THE LONELY LIGHT IN VETINARI'S BEDROOM WINDOW.")
Anyway! Last time's winner was The Beekeeper's Apprentice. This is the first occasion where you have voted me into finally reading a canon that I have already written fanfic about. :P Who knows, maybe this will inspire me to actually finish the next part of the story with Mary Russell in it. Loser was The Ghosts of Bly, so off it goes.
Also I have finally made up my mind that I will be reading The Dragon and the George out of the tie from a couple weeks back, because I had a dream that crossed it over with Heimskringla (which I also have not read yet, but apparently Earl Hákon got his brain transferred into a falcon as part of a palace plot, and then ended up being taken to a wizard who was all "I do dimensional portals, not political intrigue, go away!")
This week's theme: Cyberpunk! Because I kept whittling it down by using the books in other sets so I figured time to do it while I still had enough left. (Themes are going to get harder and harder as we approach the halfway point of my unreads.)
How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.
Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)
Anyway! Last time's winner was The Beekeeper's Apprentice. This is the first occasion where you have voted me into finally reading a canon that I have already written fanfic about. :P Who knows, maybe this will inspire me to actually finish the next part of the story with Mary Russell in it. Loser was The Ghosts of Bly, so off it goes.
Also I have finally made up my mind that I will be reading The Dragon and the George out of the tie from a couple weeks back, because I had a dream that crossed it over with Heimskringla (which I also have not read yet, but apparently Earl Hákon got his brain transferred into a falcon as part of a palace plot, and then ended up being taken to a wizard who was all "I do dimensional portals, not political intrigue, go away!")
This week's theme: Cyberpunk! Because I kept whittling it down by using the books in other sets so I figured time to do it while I still had enough left. (Themes are going to get harder and harder as we approach the halfway point of my unreads.)
How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.
Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)
Poll #18756 FMK #21: Cyberpunk
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 30
Godheads by Emily Devenport (1998)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdon by Cory Doctorow (2003)
Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane (2010)
The Mocking Program by Alan Dean Foster (2002)
Radio Freefall by Matthew Jarpe (2008)
Fool's Run by Patricia McKillip (1987)
The Long Run by Daniel Keyes Moran (1989)
The Android's Dream by John Scalzi (2007)
The Diamond Age by Neal Stevenson (1995)
Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick (1987)
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology edited by Bruce Sterling (1986)
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Diamond Age was flashy but unmemorable. Vacuum Flowers was dull. I know I read Fool's Run but recall nothing of it. I like Scalzi's blog but not his fiction. The one book of Cory Doctorow's I read was one of the worst books I've ever read, his insufferable YA that assumed teenagers are idiots who need every other word painfully-- and often incorrectly--defined for them. I raged about it here: I drank a glass of milk, a nutritious liquid squeezed from cows.
Diane Duane has never yet failed to be entertaining. I have not read her cyberpunk book because I'm afraid it will be her one fail. So you need to read it so I know!
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(RE your Little Brother Review: I will note that I, as a public librarian in 2017, twice today had to tell people to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer [or Chrome] because unlike them it would actually load their webpage, and then went back to my hip, with-it, teenage-in-2010 librarian colleagues and bitched about IE. But that may be a special case.)
I have attempted to read... two? I think two Diane Duane books that were neither YW, Star Trek, or Five Kingdoms, and did not fall in love either time. Which saddened me because I did fall utterly in love with those three. (I should probably try Stealing the Elf-King's Roses again, I might just not have been in the right state of mind. The other one I was so unimpressed I don't even remember which one it was. One of her other tie-ins.) So I've been a little afraid to branch out.
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I voted F on Vacuum Flowers because I don't know anything about it, but I've recently read another Michael Swanwick (Chasing the Phoenix) which was fun as hell but in a fluffy way. So if they're anything alike, you'll probably enjoy reading it once and then you can be done.
I am apparently the only person who really liked The Android's Dream - I'm not a huge fan of Scalzi's other work (I thought Redshirts was fucking dreadful) but this one hits the spot for me, for whatever reason. The right balance of funny and weird and action and aliens.
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I own about ten Scalzi books and have read none of them. I think I read a few shorts or novellas online and was just kind of meh so I haven't leapt onto reading the others. I am kind of amused though that he basically has managed to build a mainstream SF career writing fanfic.
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I think that it's probably possible to read this book without having read Emerald Eyes, but I read them in order, so I can't be sure.
But any book that features a character who becomes known as 'Trent the Uncatchable' is a winner in my book. The Long Run goes more in the romp direction than toward the gritty side of cyberpunk.
This is one of those series that I think everyone should read.
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The main characters in The Long Run are children in Emerald Eyes and adults in The Long Run. They're the only survivors of their extended family.
Moran had plans for a long series, but the books didn't sell well enough. I know he's put out at least one more as an ebook, but I haven't picked it up yet because I'm prone to forgetting about the ebooks I have, so I worry that I'd buy it and forget to read it.
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Have spent years wishing Cory Doctorow would just go away. Keeps on not happening.
The Diamond Age turns out to have been incredibly formative for the current state of SF as a field, and I can see its descendants every time I turn around, but I'm kind of meh on it as a thing in itself? If I had to teach an SF course I'd make the students read it, but I'd feel vaguely guilty about that. It is doing different things from Snow Crash, though, and in fact from anything else I've read of Stephenson (though I must admit I gave up sometime during the Giant Historical Bricks).
I have not read this Duane, but Stealing the Elf-King's Roses is completely unreadable, it's not just you.
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That's interesting about Diamond Age being a major influencer! I remember hearing a lot about it when it came out, but it doesn't seem to get brought up in discussion a lot anymore, compared to other influential books of the era.
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I also enjoyed Little Brother because of what it critiques, but found it not terribly memorable. I want to like Cory Doctorow because of his advocacy for leveling access to information, but my favorite of his works are a scattered few short stories.
Somehow, The Android's Dream is my favorite Scalzi, and I find it hilarious and rereadable, though I don't love the opening scene. I think it's because of how much I enjoy the character and backstory of Robin. Also, hover shoes.
I've never been able to get into Neal Stephenson.
...The conceptual trouble with FMK is I want to recommend you more authors to put on the list... (Is Paolo Bacigalupi cyberpunk-esque? What about RoAnna Sylver?) and more topics to accumulate books on, which kind of defeats the purpose.
:)
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Some of these are only marginally cyberpunk but when I have trouble filling out a theme I've just been going "did at least one person tag it that way on LT? Okay it counts."
I pretty much agree with you on Duane (although I would put some of her Star Trek novels up there too.) I don't remember much about Elf-King's Roses except that I didn't get very far, but I think it might have just frontloaded the worldbuilding a bit too much? Mostly I think it was that I had saved it for when I needed a book that I knew I would effortlessly love, since so far that had applied to all of hers, and ... it wasn't. If I pushed through I suspect I would at least like it okay, given the other things I have pushed through in this project.
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Diamond Age got an M. I loved this book. This era of Neal Stevenson is the part of his career I enjoyed best - he was doing hi best at balancing ideas and story. (As opposed to, say, Cryptonomicon, which I think would have been improved by stripping out the story entirely and publishing the infodumps as a nonfiction anthology.)
Mirrorshades got an F. Would have gotten an M, but I haven't read it since the last 80s and I don't know how well it has aged.
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(Mind you, that was also the point in my life where I read the explanation the playing card encryption system in the appendix and was like, "But I pointed out two years ago why this wasn't actually a robust system! To the guy who invented it, at that exclusive NSA-sponsored talk I went to! And this is the simplified version anyway! Augh. Just use them as a multi-use one-time pad it's a lot simpler and good enough for your purposes and that's what everybody else has been doing for centuries anyway.")
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It's nice and short, though!
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The long run is not a lot like anything else. It's pretty cool, but it's also book two of a series which will probably never be finished.
I voted M on The Diamond Age. It's definitely flawed, partly by Stephenson's besetting excessive infodumping, but its good points are really good. It's using SF to explore philosophical questions, but more interesting and less obvious ones than many, and it's also very fun to read. IMO much better than Anathem, much more accessible than Cryptonomicon, and shortish by Stephenson's standards.
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"Shortish by Stephenson's standards" sounds good to me - my experience with his stuff is that the shorter it is, the more I like it.
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Ommitopia Dawn is probably my least favorite DD, which makes it good for a first read but not something I'd ever be likely to reread. I feel the same way about Scalzi, though I haven't read the one listed.
I remember nothing about The Diamond Age, though I'm sure I read it.