Tue, 25 Apr 2006
That's a Wrap
So, the third of three, Prophet completes the story arc of the central characters.
This is the strongest of the three. The wicked end badly, the good end unhappily. You'll probably only find this interesting if
you read the first two or at least the second one. It hits a couple flat notes but finishes strong so points for that.
What I liked
- Carlos Mendoza, again
- Gravedancer
- the Prophet's Plan
What I didn't
- The Anointed One
- The Silicon Kid
- the infallibility of cranky old men
Essentially, there was a set of throwaway characters and a perfectly good opportunity to add some chaos into the mix which wasn't used, here.
So not a great trilogy in retrospect but better than many stories and definitely tackling an interesting problem.
Who might like this book
- players of any varient of Traveller
- people who read any of the Santiago stories or earlier books in this series
- GMs with precogs in their campaigns looking for some effective ways to foil them
posted at 22:38 PDT (-0700)
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Do You Like to Waste Time on the Internet?
Coming soon, a great game for people who can maintain the concentration to
play a computer game while on drugs, SpongeBob Diner Dash.
posted at 13:37 PDT (-0700)
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Sun, 23 Apr 2006
Stuck in the Middle With You
Book two of the trilogy, Oracle is the sequel to Soothsayer, prequel to Prophet. This is the part where some trilogies fall apart, after a strong
opening. If you paid attention to my last review, I didn't think it was a very exciting opening.
The good news is, this book is much stronger. You could read this without
reading the one before it, and not miss much. In fact, I'd recommend reading
this one and then going back to read the first one.
What I liked
- Carlos Mendoza is more interesting this time out
- The Whistler's characterization and story arc
- the Lorhn
- tells a stand-alone story but which threads into the precursor
- the ending
What I didn't
- The Injun, who was a collection of stereotypes, most offensive
- 32
- the ending
Yeah, I list "the ending" under both. I have mixed reactions to it. It
doesn't resolve anything, which bothers me, but it does twist nicely from
where I feared it was going. So on to the third volume.
Who might like this book
- people who spend a lot of time thinking about free will
- people who spend a lot of time thinking about predestination
- people who like the joke: "Of course women are smarter than men. A man on
a date with a woman will wonder all evening if they're going to have sex; the
woman already knows."
posted at 22:40 PDT (-0700)
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Thu, 20 Apr 2006
On This, the Iceman and I Agree
Hey, Mike Resnick writes books. I read one a long time ago called Santiago and it was awesome. So when I told my friend Drew that, he gave me a bunch of other Resnick books, including the one I just read,
Soothsayer. It's the first book of a trilogy, which is good to know, because it ends without a great deal of resolution for the titular character. It's a western of the future, with gunfights and
bounty hunters and trading towns and nicknames. It's got the deft touch for dialog that I remember from Santiago and visits a troubling [if improbable] question. It's about a little girl who can see into the
future and the lives that are changed and ended by her passage through their lives.
What I liked
- characters, from nicknames to dialog to motivation; the character back-stories slip in under cover of night
- the setting; I like Resnick's vision of the future, probably because I'm an American who was raised on westerns
- fast flowing story
- dilemma; this is an interesting problem from an authorial point of view, which I sometimes experience as a game-master of role-playing games
- Carlos Mendoza
What I didn't
- there's not a lot of meat to this book and it seems to have been written to set up books in this arc; I hope it pays off
- many of the characters aren't much more than a nickname, which is fine for a fast moving book but I had more questions raised than answered
- I prefer my trilogies to have each volume more self-contained and free-standing; just personal preference, if you're planning to read the whole trilogy, this won't be a buzz-kill
Who should read this
- Deadlands players, possibly
- people who liked The Demon Princes
- people who liked the start of Dune but thought it got "a little heavy/tedious/dry" in the middle
As a side-effect of walking along under BART tracks reading Soothsayer, I received unsolicited but welcome book recommendations for Welcome Chaos as well as the work of
Chester Himes, who I have seen listed as an inspiration for various writers I've enjoyed but not actually read anything by, knowingly. So watch for those down the line.
Next book up will be the sequel to Soothsayer, Oracle.
posted at 08:41 PDT (-0700)
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Mon, 17 Apr 2006
Check Out the Big Brain on Bert!
This review probable won't be useful, because it's for a book which is out of print and has been for a while. But one never knows, maybe there will be a revival or it'll be bundled into an omnibus edition. It's called
Ability Quotient by Mack Reynolds. You might remember him from a previous review I did. He's an author China Mieville recommends to writers interested in Socialist themes.
The book itself is not a foreign idea. A protagonist is provided means to enhance his intelligence. It's been done many times since this book and several times before. What's different here is that it's
starkly sketched in terms of whether the enhancements will be the dominion of a self-defined elite or whether it will be distributed to all. It's a short book, clocking in at 160 pages. I read it in less than
twenty-four hours.
What I liked
- forward momentum the story had; it never dragged or really even paused
- the protagonist was likable and had more depth revealed over time
- the core conflict, which presages the current fuss over the Singularity
What I didn't
- the characters never really rise above being puppets in the shape of socks hastily pulled over animating ideas, with quirky buttons sewed on for personality
- kind of a rushed ending which makes me think this book either needed to be a short story or a longer book to give the idea time to develop
- the generic betrayal
- the generic love-story
- the generic settings
So, well worth the dollar I paid for it. Probably not anything anyone else would want to read unless they were trying to do a comprehensive study of attitudes toward the idea of humanity creating the next generation
of humanity, for better or worse, in fiction.
posted at 20:45 PDT (-0700)
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Thu, 13 Apr 2006
A Lot of French Bastards
This book took me almost two weeks to read. It's The Moon and the Sun by
Vonda McIntyre. I've met her, briefly, at a party for Clarion West
students. Vy really liked it and recommended it to me.
I didn't really get into it until page 330 of 458. It won a bunch of awards and I still nearly didn't finish it.
It's about an alternate history where sea dwelling humanoids interact with [primarily] French nobility. It's
the story of a woman at court and her interactions with the rich, powerful, and bitchy.
What I liked about it
- it did a really good job of capturing the arrogance of the extremely powerful
- I liked the bits with the portrait of the king
What I didn't like about it
It's not a bad book. It's just not a book for me. People who might enjoy it include
- women, as all the ones I know who've read it loved it
- 7th Sea players of Montaigne characters
- fans of lushly described settings
- creatures of the sea who are wondering why no one thinks they are real
posted at 23:59 PDT (-0700)
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Sat, 01 Apr 2006
Even Thugs Get the Blues
I read Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and it was of the same type of story as many PKD novels I've read.
A protagonist suffers from persecution by hostile forces which may include the universe, itself.
So if you like PKD, you'll like this book. If you don't, it won't change your mind about his stuff. If you've never read any PKD, this is a fine first choice.
What I liked
- persuasive inner monologue by narrator character
- mysterious actions have causes which are revealed in the fullness of time
- the Whatever Happened To denouement
- the mighty brought low
- Felix Buckman's bluff
- Alys Buckman
What I didn't
- some parts of the story weren't as accessible to me as I might have liked because I didn't recognize most of the quotes
- I wanted to know more of the history and setting of this world, though I could extrapolate a lot of it, knowing when it had been written
- totally didn't get the scene at the gas station; it was like a music video for Radiohead or some-such
posted at 11:20 PST (-0800)
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Converting in Place to LVM
I just converted my workhorse system, which was my desktop machine in 1999 and has had a few minor upgrades since then and now is the core of my home network, from using a mix of reiserfs and ext3 file systems to
having only ext3 file systems, managed by LVM. I'm documenting the process because I'm about to do it again to another machine and this probably won't be the last time I do it, either.
Why?
- wanted dynamic control and resizing of file systems
- had three physical devices
- wanted to use only file systems with dump/restore capability
- wanted to be able to take clean, quiescent file system dumps
How?
identify a partition to start with
- not in active use by the running OS
- as big as another partition
- small enough used that it can be copied off to another file system
copy the data off of the target partition's file system
- unmount the target partition
- pvcreate on the target partition
- vgcreate using the target partition
- START OF LOOP: lvcreate using all available PE in the volume group; if you know the next partition you'll be working with, name the logical volume appropriately
- mkfs -t ext3 on the logical volume
- mount the new file system in a temporary location
identify a partition to pivot
- used space in the file system on the partition must be less than available in new file system
- smoother if nearly quiescent, so if it's /var or similar, stop as many daemons as you can
- best choices will be large, mostly unused file systems early on
cp -a or rsync from the target partition's file system to the temporary mounted file system of the logical volume
- diff or re-rsync to verify currency; log files may well have updated during the replication
- unmount the logical volume from the temporary location
- edit /etc/fstab to reference the logical volume at its future permanent mount point
- if it's a file system in use, reboot; otherwise, unmount the target partition, mount the logical volume in its place
- pvcreate on the target partition
- vgextend using the target partition
- return to START OF LOOP until you've converted everything
I left the swap partitions alone as I already had equal priority swap partitions on each of several drives and it's easy enough to change their size without needing to reboot if the system is lightly loaded.
So now I'll be using the lvm snapshot capability to take backups of the point in time state of my file systems. I can also respond to changing system needs in terms of space and
file system architecture.
posted at 08:20 PST (-0800)
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