.
It's his first novel, and a bit over-laden with technobabble (to
be fair, technically sound technobabble, but something of
an audience-limiting factor in as much as those who don't
understand it will be put off and at least a portion who do will
also be put off) but also hosting a rather interesting
idea: the maker of a popular MMORPG uses it to, essentially, hack
society. The idea intrigued me, and in particular the post-hack
world where the Daemon of the title was providing its adherents
with access to cloned databases which it had obtained one way or
another. Made me think a lot about digital footprints and the
like. Anyway, the book rattles on for a while and then comes to a
screaming cliffhanger, which annoyed me a bit. Didn't stop me from
purchasing the sequel, however: Freedom ™
,
wherein I'm suddenly no longer sure who I want to "win",
I'm still finding the technobabble overdone, and I'm still chewing
through the book like it's a race. Again, more food for thought
here about digital footprints and tracking people and what not,
and a graphic example of the dangers of using biometric markers
(retinas, fingerprints) as an authentication mechanism. Oh, and
the Razorbacks were silly.Anyway. Long story short, you should probably read these if you like a good techno-thriller; it's not Neal Stephenson, but it's in the same ballpark. You will need to read both; the second does kinda recap the first in the opening chapters (another annoyance) but you're missing both a lot of nuance and a good deal of fun.
Oh, and I figured out where I got the recommendation when Warren Ellis mentioned that he was reading Suarez' most recent work.
· Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit was a nice bit of fun, and I didn't roll my eyes too hard at the bit where they did the "hacking through the electrical outlet" bit.
· Perhaps surprisingly, I'd never seen Alien (in fact, I'm not sure I've seen Aliens, either, but I've definitely seen some part of the franchise in its entirety before). Anyway, this was pretty good, although I probably lost something in the cut-for-airplane, squished for small-screen viewing version. The only thing that jarred was the whole "THERE IS A HOMICIDAL ALIEN STALKING ME BUT I MUST FETCH THE CAT" routine, which was tiresomely stupid.
· I heard exactly two types of opinion on The Lego Movie: "it's AWESOME!" and "it's AWFUL!" I liked it. There were some great gags, Batman as a loser was pretty epic, and the whole dad/son bit at the end was nicely played.
· Anchorman was... meh. This was pretty much universally pitched to me as a must-watch, but maybe I'm that one guy who doesn't find Will Ferrell's manchild routine funny? In any case, I watched the whole thing and found a few bits of it amusing but nothing that had me actually laughing.
And an honourable mention: Ethiad was carrying two episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and I don't care if it's in its forties, and some of the humour might be a bit dated, the attention to detail put into this show is something to behold. The thing that particularly struck me was the needless (and therefore funny) continuity: one episode had an early sketch involving an ever-increasing number of brown-coat-clad gasmen, culminating in a panning shot showing a line of same stretching down the street, all identically dressed; throughout the rest of the episode, this line cropped up as a background element without anything to draw attention to it. Genius.
