Manhattan in Reverse - Book Review


Manhattan in Reverse is a book of short stories by Peter F. Hamilton. I'm a big fan of his CommonWealth universe, as well as many of his other works (albeit he does have an habit of pulling Deux in Machina endings) and most of the stories are in the CommonWealth.

Watching Trees Grow - a murder mistery that takes hundreds of years to solve - was pretty good. It takes place in an universe where Rome never fell, and the Emperors turned from breeding gladiators to breeding for longevity (which I imagine is incredibly hard, given that whole generations will pass before you get any useful data about that coupling you made...).

I also can't help but imagine that without the whole Dark Ages thing, they would have much more than the few decades of technology advance suggested.

But overall, very good.

Footvote - a very nice story of what happens when you can generate wormholes and move the dissatisfied population in droves out of a country. The constitution items mixed with the story are particularly fun (as well as mostly a good idea).

If At First... is a clever time travel/parallel worlds story. Loved it.

The Forever Kitten - is just cute and short, but not memorable at all.

Blessed by an Angel - nice commonwealth story about how Higher culture tries to spread by force. Nice surprise ending.

The Demon Trap - very nice Paula Myo story. Couldn't help but find the ending not very satisfying...

Manhattan in Reverse - very nice Paula Myo story - although I can't help but feel that she was unnecessary to the story and was added to make it more likely for the fans to buy the book. Still, nice ending.

Overall, very much recommended for Hamilton fans. Other SF fans might enjoy it, but I'd rather recommend his various book series.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Solved - You have an incorrect version of driver "vmx86.sys" - VMWare Workstation 8

I have just installed VMWare Workstation 8 over my old VMWare Workstation 6.5 on Windows 7. On my first run I already got the error message: Could not get vmx86 driver version: The handle is invalid. You have an incorrect version of driver "vmx86.sys". Try reinstalling VMware Workstation. Failed to initialize monitor device. Obviously, I was concerned, but there is a simple way to solve it - just right-click the VMWare Workstation icon and use Run as Administrator. This is a bit annoying, but at least it is easy to solve. Update: I forgot to mention it, but as Dave said on the comments, you can right-click on the program shortcut, choose Properties, Compatibility tab and check Run as Administrator so that it will always run properly. Thanks, Dave!
Read more

[Fixed] Just Cause 3 Mouse offset

I've sort of "fixed" my mouse offset problems and cursor exits from Just Cause 3. For whatever reason, both seem to happen sometime, specially if I need to change focus from the game. Sometimes just going to another app and returning solves it, otherwise if I go to Options, Graphics, and turn full screen back on (or turn it off and on again), it seems to get fixed. However, still annoying.
Read more

Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

I've read Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master last week. It was pretty good, although if you have a few years of experience and good practices, you should be familiar with most of what it says, even if you don't follow it in practice :-) . Some of their bullet points are: - Don't duplicate - Write flexible code - Use Contracts, assertions and exceptions - Test - Automate where possible - Use a version control system. Obviously, many of these points have a lot to do with refactoring and XP. They also have another neat book on Automation, Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Apps . Obviously that is much less relevant to a Delphi programmer, but you can still learn quite a bit from it. After I started reading it, I automated large sections of my build and release process (in PHP - it's easy to use in the command-line, too, and some parts are re-usable on the site). It saves a lot of time and enables you to stop worrying if you ...
Read more