STG's

Slanted Jack - my Mark L. Van Name - is an old purchase. It sat on my cell phone for a couple of years until I got around to reading it. I'm glad I found it, however - while not great, it was quite fun. The story passes on a galactic (human) civilization that has found jump gates - the very common magical device that allows FTL travel. These are a little more convenient than usual - they only exist on systems with planets that support human life. The main character - Jon Moore -  is an ex-bodyguard with an interesting past - he's the survivor of a planet where mutation caused humans to get "powers". He also got infected by experimental nanotech, and can heal fast, doesn't age, and can unleash deadly nanotech clouds and talk to machines (the whole thing reminds me a bit of Jake 2.0 ) The machines all have embedded AIs, down to panes of glass. That does cause the addition of a number of silly dialogue between them, as they seem to chat all the time. The bulk...

Mission of Honor, by David Webber is the latest book in the Honor Harrington series. I'm a fan of the series and have read all the books, including the ones with short stories from other authors - some of which were surprisingly good. Mission of Honor follows the disastrous altercation with the SLN which ended with an overwhelming victory for Manticore. Meanwhile, the Mesan Alignment has a little surprise for Manticore... Eventually Cachat and Zilwicki, the super secret agents emerge after their Green Pines adventure from a previous book (ok, I am too lazy to look them up, even though I blogged about them). And thus comes a long revelation about the Mesan goals, that were never properly explained before. The relationship with Haven changes by the end of the book, in a mildly surprising way, that nevertheless shows where the next story arc of the series is going. It's looking pretty good. As always, recommended. The book does feel to have large segments cutting into the ...

My latest book was WWW: Watch - by Robert J. Sawyer. On most places, he is mentioned as the author of Flashforward. I've read many short (and longer) stories from him on Analog over the years, so that is the last thing that comes to mind. The book is a sequel to WWW: Wake, which was pretty good, too. The main events are  a blind girl that gets to see with a special interface that fixes the signals of her retina, a side-story about a painting, chimp-bonobo hybrid, and the main setup for the series - an emergent intelligence from aberrant TTL on packets (yes, I find it a bit hard to swallow either). I'm a bit of a sucker for AI stories. The first two that come to mind are Ring, from Emerald Eyes: A Tale of the Continuing Time  (one of my favorite books)- a lisp AI that evolves itself and breaks out into the net, and the Jane , AI from Ender's Game series, which also evolved from an AI program. I don't find the "emergent" stuff as cool, but given how little...

I've just finished reading Fortuna - by Michael R. Stevens. I came across the book from an Amazon e-mail. I checked out the sample on Kindle for PC and immediately bought it. The book is mostly about Fortuna - a fictional (maybe for now?) online game that takes place in Renaissance Florence, and were ruthless players will do anything to get ahead. The description of the game makes it sound quite impressive, although at times the author's mechanics seem weird (for example, it presumes that video is rendered on-line - certainly possible, but very unusual to say the least). The first part seemed a little slow to me. I liked the book most after the flashback of the father, although the final "surprises" were kind of of obvious. Overall, a good book, but not great. It's worth checking the sample and reviews to see if it's something for you, however.

As usual, a game was on sale on Steam so I went and checked out the demo. This time it was Power Of Defense, which is a common theme on flash games - you choose certain units, which will be sent to attack the enemy. You can usually choose the units for specific effects against the enemy types. That is basically it. Except that I've seen a dozen flash games that were better than this...

I've just started playing Resident Evil 5. When I start, I get bothered by Games for Windows that I need an account to save my games. Ok, I decide to make an online account and get it over with. It then proceeds to send me to a IE page (Chrome is my default browser, but it's not like they care). They open a windows without the regular address bar, so I can't tell WHERE I was sent. And then they ask for my Windows Live login. I can only imagine that they love phishing. I mean, how long is it going to take till some hacker makes a game that pretends to be Games for Windows Live and steal my Windows Live ID  - and have access to e-mail (not mine, I surely don't use Hotmail) and a ton of other attached services?