The Annihilation Score - Book Review

The Annihilation Score, by Charles Stross, is a book on the Laundry Files series. The laundry series is about a group of the UK government (The Laundry) that protects the country against Lovecraftian horrors.

In this volume, the narration is for the first time by Mo O'Brien - the wife of the usual main character. What she faces is the start of a breakdown in reality, where common people start getting occult powers, which naturally they view and frame as superpowers and start being supervillans and superheroes.

This is a very, very different path from the usual Laundry series, and tends to be more humorous, with use of slight slapstick comedy in places.

I didn't really like it as much as the rest of the series, and it seemed to drag a little around the middle. It does pick up around the end, which is quite satisfying (and avoids the "it all ends well" with everyone being saved that so many books follow).

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