I have an older Mac Mini hooked up to my television. For the most part it just serves up the content from my weather station, but every so often I need to use a browser or other application that is most easily done on the computer.
I used to have an Apple bluetooth keyboard, but even though I had removed one of the AA batteries, the other decided to leak all over the inside of the device so I threw it out. Needing a new keyboard, I found the Logitech K380:
It’s inexpensive, light and what I like most about it is its ability to connect to up to three devices. Pairing is a cinch – just press and hold the number you wish to assign to the device and it will show up to be discovered. Your device will prompt you to type a series of numbers into the keyboard, and if you do it right you’ll be connected.
Easy peasy.
So now I have the Mini, a tablet and my phone all paired and when I need a keyboard it’s always ready. I’m not sure I’d want to use it as my main keyboard (I use a mechanical one from Code) but at half the price of the Apple one it does the job nicely.
Yesterday I managed to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens and even though I was ten days late to the party, I managed to get there spoiler free. If you haven’t seen it and you want to remain spoiler free, stop reading now. If you really liked it and went out and bought a Darth Vader humidifier and are sucking right now on a GoGurt lightsaber, you might want to stop reading now.
Although I’ve waited a long time to see this movie, it turns out that I saw it back in 1977 when it was just called Star Wars. This is pretty much the same movie. That said, it is still my third favorite in the franchise. Since this review is somewhat critical of the movie, I would expect to be blasted by the fanboys if anyone actually read this blog. So, set your blasters on stun (and yes, I plan to mash up all kinds of stuff in this review).
The action in the film takes place 30 or so years after Return of the Jedi. The emperor died but it doesn’t look like much has happened to the Empire. They still have Star Destroyers, stormtroopers and they seem to be pretty much in charge of things. They are called The First Order, mainly so that a lot of Nazi symbolism can be dragged into the Star Wars universe. The so called New Republic, which popped up after the Empire died, is apparently limited to one little planet and a couple of large space ships. The rebellion is now called The Resistance, so, with the exception of a few scenes containing dead Empire war gear, it is still pretty much business as usual.
In the opening scroll, we learn that Luke Skywalker is missing. Turns out that he tried to rebuild the Jedi order, but one of his students went bad and destroyed all of his work (and I assume, killed all the younglings). Rumour has it that he went off in search of the first Jedi temple, but no one seems to know where that is.
Princess Leia, now General Organa, sends one of her best pilots, Poe, to a planet called Jakku (a desert planet, e.g. Tatooine) to retrieve a clue to Luke’s whereabouts. The mission is interrupted by a squadron of The First Order and a Darth Vader wannabe called Kylo Ren. Ren has a dark helmet and cool light saber that looks like flames, since we all know the dark side baddies have to have their own signature weapon. He can also freeze a blaster bolt in mid-air, which seems to indicate he is pretty powerful. Anyway, the squad kills most of the people in the little village, but one of the stormtroopers, later called Finn, starts to have second thoughts and refuses to shoot people. They return to the Star Destroyer with Poe as a captive.
Anyway, the clue, which turns out to be part of a map, is hidden in a piece of merchandising called BB-8. The droid escapes and meets up with Rey, an orphan scavenger with flawless skin and perfect teeth living in a dead AT-AT. She senses that there is something special about the droid, and even when offered a lot for him, refuses to sell. Meanwhile, up in space, Ren tortures Poe to discover that the clue is in BB-8, but Poe escapes with the help of Finn. Together they crash on Jakku, but only Finn survives.
Soon Finn (also with flawless skin and teeth, but one can assume he was grown in a vat somewhere or at least had better rations) meets up with Rey and BB-8 at the same time The First Order starts attacking the planet based on Poe’s intel. They escape in a junked ship which, viola!, turns out to be the Millennium Falcon. This was, of course, the first time our heroes had ever escaped from a desert planet in that ship, right?
They get away only to be captured by another ship (again, sound familiar?) run by Han Solo and Chewbacca. Now, I wish they had explained this part a little better. See, space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. So the thought that they would just show up as soon as the Falcon leaves the atmosphere is just wrong. And they could have explained it away with something like a hidden transponder, but if they did I missed it (while I didn’t doze during the film, my attention did wander at times).
Anyway, soon there ensues some cool action sequences that exist to show that Solo is still a rogue, again they misuse the term “parsec” as a unit of time, and our heroes escape.
Meanwhile, the bad guys are quite put out at losing the droid, so they confer with the Lord Grand Poohbah Snape, played by Andy Serkis in his usual CGI glory. He tells them to use their nifty new Starkiller Base (which is a sun-powered Death Star on steroids) on the home planet of the New Republic’s Senate, and it is able to do so from quite a distance (’cause, see, it’s bigger).
Han leads Chewbacca, Rey and Finn to Ireland, I mean, Takodano, and a version of the original Mos Eisley Cantina (on steriods). By this time news of the missing droid has spread. There is a huge dude with a cute girl in the bar as a throwback to Jabba the Hutt who work for The First Order, and another dude with a mouth made up with one of those old timey microphones who works for the Resistance, so pretty soon everybody knows where the droid is to be found. We are introduced to the owner of the bar, Maz Kanata, who plays the role of Yoda, but her character was original enough that I’ll give them a pass on this one. Rey finds herself drawn to a vault in which she finds a light saber that once belonged to Anakin Skywalker and, later, Luke. When she touches it she has a vision, and we can assume that she has what it takes to be a Jedi.
Well, the bad guys show up and start blowing up the place, and Rey is captured. Before total victory, the Resistance shows up (yay! Poe is alive) and Finn takes up the light saber. While he doesn’t demonstrate Jedi powers, it remains to be seen if he will become a knight. Ren figures out that Rey has seen the map, so all he has to do it get it from her memories, so The First Order leaves.
Back on the Starkiller Base, Rey is strapped into an interrogation chair when Ren comes in to get the information from her. Here he takes off his helmet, which we learn is just for show, as underneath it is Hayden Christensen in a black wig, but with the same whine. She discovers that she has the ability to block her thoughts from him, and, frustrated, he gets called off to a meeting with General Hux and High Supreme Bad Guy Snape. Here is where Darth Vader would have mind-strangled the General like he did Admiral Motti, but Ren just whines about how strong Rey is. Snape, sensing another he can turn to the dark side, says to bring her to him right after they use the new fancy weapon to destroy the Rebel, I mean, Resistance, base.
Unfortunately for that plan, Rey discovers she has mad Jedi skillz and escapes. Since I’ve spoiled enough of this so far, let me wrap up the last bit of the movie with our heroes meet back up, a major character dies, and X-wing fighters fly into a trench and blow up the weapon before it can destroy the base.
Sound familiar?
Oh, Rey eventually finds Luke, who manages second billing despite 20 seconds of screen time and no dialog. Jedi master, psssh, his agent is the Jedi master.
Do I want my $15 back. No. Overall, I think it would be difficult to reboot this series and make everyone happy. If the goal was to make a movie to introduce a new generation into what Star Wars was to mine, I think they succeeded. Also, if the goal was to make a metric asston of money, they did that as well.
I give it a solid B, but I am eager to see where it goes from here. There is a lot of potential, although I hope they deviate a bit from the the original story line. If Luke and Rey end up training on a swamp planet, I might get a bit snarky.
My first trip to Ireland was in 2014 and I welcomed the opportunity to return this year. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate very well.
I did manage to snap a picture of the Irish countryside from the plane.
It is quite beautiful, but I did find it strange that there was almost no “forest”. One of the things you get when flying over the United States is that you can always see large stands of trees. Apparently the British cut those all down to make boats.
Still, it is very pretty and I can see why it is called “The Emerald Isle”.
I got into Dublin on a Sunday morning and made my way to the hotel. I’ve been traveling a lot and I have little spare time, so I didn’t have as much time to plan for this trip as I wanted. During the entire journey I had the feeling that I’d forgotten something. I realized what it was when I got to my room and discovered I had left all my electrical power adapters at home. As I was leaving Ireland for Germany I needed both UK and European adapters, but luckily Dublin is a tourist town and I was able to find them with little problem.
That evening I was eager to try something I had read in the book Boozehound. The author referred to ordering a “Guinness and Powers” and I wasn’t quite sure what that was. Turns out that Powers whiskey is the most popular whiskey sold in Ireland.
I can see why – it is quite tasty. It’s smooth, even in the “normal” version (there are lots of grades of Irish whiskey, even within the same brand).
The weather was cold, windy and raining, but the company was wonderful. On Wednesday evening my friend Patrick took me to a local pub that specialized in craft beer and was known for good food. He brought along his childhood friend Liam, who was a lot of fun, and an Englishman named Malcolm who was in town doing some construction work. Malcolm is from north of Newcastle, which means he probably has more in common with Scottish culture than British, and he was also fun to hang around.
During the wonderful meal I mentioned I was interested in learning about Irish whiskey, and Liam suggested a place in Temple Bar called Mary’s Hardware. The only problem was that we were considerably north of there. It was suggested that instead of taking a taxi that we should get on the ubiquitous public bikes and ride down there. A few minutes later I found myself barreling down O’Connell street, dodging buses, construction and irritable taxi drivers.
Mary’s Hardware turned out to be a blast. It’s a little hole in the wall, and speaking of walls, along one side of the bar is a wall full of hardware supplies. While mainly a bar, apparently you can actually buy hardware there.
There we had some whiskey, including the excellent Green Spot, and delightful conversation that I am both unable to and refuse to post here (grin). It had the makings of a long night but Patrick and I had meetings the next morning, so I announced I was going to walk back to the hotel and play Ingress. Since it was now around 1am, I was informed that a fat geek like me walking along looking at a gigantic phone would probably get mugged, so we all got into a cab. The stereo was playing Bob Marley’s “Don’t Worry” and we all started singing, including the driver. It was a perfect end to a wonderful evening.
One part of the conversation I can repeat involved me getting out of Dublin. I really like that city but I was told I needed to see the rest of Ireland. One location that kept coming up was the Cliffs of Moher, which is on the west coast near the town of Doolin. So I decided to head out there over the weekend.
Since I didn’t have a car I decided to take a bus. The main bus line in Ireland is Bus Éireann, but Google told me the best way would be to take a GoBus to Galway and then a Bus Éireann bus to Doolin. The GoBus is nice, with WiFi and a bathroom, and it goes direct from downtown Dublin to Galway. I then had to rush to make my connection for the rest of the trip, and although it was only a fraction of the distance, the journey is on back roads and takes almost half of the total trip time.
The western countryside is beautiful – what I could see of it. It was a miserable day weather-wise, with rain and wind and about 100m of visibility. That said I enjoyed the trip. There is a lot of stone in this area so everywhere you look are stone walls and stone buildings. There is the occasional “castle” although they tend to be in such disrepair that only a wall or two remain. I got left off in Doolin near my Bed and Breakfast, and I felt like I was in a movie from the 1960s when I was the only person to get off the bus. I watched it pull away through the drizzle, leaving me alone by the side of the road.
But it was a quick walk to the Bed and Breakfast, which was warm, comfortable and inviting. It is right across the road from Fisher Street, which is both picturesque and the home of Gus O’Connors Pub, renown for Irish music.
This is Fisher Street, with the ocean off to the left and what is left of the 500 year old Doonmacfelim Castle can be seen on the right (it’s that little back square toward the top of the frame).
While it was time for lunch, I was told I needed to visit McGann’s, which was another pub a short walk away. The owner asked me to sit at the bar since he was expecting a bus load of tourists.
Now, I’m an avid tourist who hates tourists. I know that sounds hypocritical, but when I travel I try to blend in and both meet and become part of the local culture. Not like the group that arrived in Doolin by bus, stormed into the pub and then proceeded to demand things. Now, I’m sure that this is good for business and the owner took care of them all (including the guy who asked for a Miller beer – hey, I guess in Ireland it is an import) but I really disliked the noise and jostling.
Food was good, though.
As I walked back to the B&B the weather got worse so I decided it was time for a nap. First, I had to change my plans to go to Paris later in that week, but after that I had a wonderful siesta falling asleep to the sound of the roaring wind.
For dinner I had to walk down to O’Connors. The place was full but not packed, and I found a spot in a corner. The food here was excellent, and I had the best sea bass I’ve ever eaten.
O’Connors in known for music, but I was still tired and decided to leave before they started. Apparently this was a good thing, because at breakfast the next morning I learned that they didn’t go on until late, around 22:30, and I doubt I would have liked sitting there alone for 90 minutes or so.
Speaking of breakfast, I was staying at a B&B so I went for the full Irish:
It was yummy.
Sunday morning found me starting my journey back to Dublin, this time to an airport hotel and a flight to Germany the next day. I was on the left side of the bus which meant for the first part of the journey I was often looking straight down at the sea, with only a small stone wall between me and it. Beautiful. I really look forward to visiting this part of Ireland again, just not during winter.
I’ve had a visit to the Munich Oktoberfest on my bucket list for some time, and when it was announced that the OpenNMS Users Conference was going to be held in September, I decided this would be the year I went. There are quite a few German beer festivals held in the fall, but Oktoberfest is the largest and most well known. Yes, despite the name, it occurs mainly in September as it is scheduled to end the first weekend in October.
I arrived on a Thursday morning, as most flights from the US are overnight, and checked in to my hotel. My room wasn’t ready so I dropped off my bags and decided to head for the “Wiesn” – the main Oktoberfest grounds named after its location (Theresienwiese).
This sucker is huge.
Even on a Thursday morning there were lots of people about, and by Saturday there would be over one hundred thousand packed shoulder to shoulder on the grounds.
The best analogy for people in the US would probably be a State Fair. There are rides, including a huge ferris wheel, roller coasters and at least one haunted house:
There are food stalls stalls everywhere, including the famous “half meter bratwurst”:
as well as stalls selling souvenirs and booths to play games. But the area is dominated by ten huge beer “tents” from a variety of area brewers, along with several smaller tents as well.
Some friends of mine host a tech podcast called “Bad Voltage” and they were coming to do a show at the Users Conference, but they all wanted to come to Munich as I did. While Jono, Stuart and Ilan were showing up on Friday, Jeremy did what I did and came a day early, so through the wonders of modern mobile technology we were able to meet up on the Wiesn (near a huge ride called “Konga”).
Of course the first order of business was to obtain a beer. A serving of beer at Oktoberfest is called a maẞ (“mass”) and is served in a liter-sized glass mug. We picked a beer tent and entered to find it filled with thousands of like-minded people.
Since there were only two of us, we managed to find a seat at one of the large communal tables and within minutes we had a huge pretzel as well as huge beer each.
This was the first time I’d seen Jeremy since the SCaLE conference, so we spent the time catching up and taking in the crowd before getting up and seeking out our next beer in another tent.
I liked this tent the best, as we had nice people at our table (at this time of day on a Thursday most of the people were older – this would change on the weekend), a nice waitress named Julia and good food. Jeremy had a traditional dish called Schweinshaxe, or roasted pork knuckle, whereas I had Weißwurst (“white sausage”). I apparently was eating mine wrong so the friendly couple next to me demonstrated the proper way (you are supposed to remove the outer casing with a knife). By the time we were done with our beers I was in a good mood and was very happy I had come. The hotel called to let me know my room was ready but I didn’t want to leave, so it was off to the third tent.
This is when things started to go south.
Okay, I am nearly fifty years old, so I’ve been drinking for, what, almost thirty eight years or so. I know how alcohol affects me. I rarely drink to excess and at this point I figured I had about two more maß before I needed to quit. I was wrong.
We found a place at a table in the third tent and ordered another beer. I don’t remember much more than that. I know I bought a pin with the word “Boss” on it in the shape of the heart-shaped gingerbread cookies (Lebkuchenherz) popular at Oktoberfest. I can vaguely remember buying a hat and arguing it was too small (the lady went away and came back again, but the hat was still a “medium”). The best theory I have is that Jeremy slipped me a roofie, but to hear him tell it at some point in time I just got up and announced it was time for me to go.
This part was a bit frightening. I got lost and ended up wandering around Munich. At one time I remember looking at my phone and it told me I was an hour away from the hotel. Google showed me wandering around quite a bit.
But somehow I managed to make it back, and the next thing I remember is waking up, face down on the bed and fully clothed, in my hotel room. All of my bags were there, including a huge Pelican case with our telepresence robot, as was my passport, wallet and about as much money as I expected to have.
So, all in all not bad.
Needless to say, I slept in on Friday. I did manage to get out of the hotel around noon and meet up with Jeremy at the large, open air Viktualienmarkt. Munich is a beautiful city, so it was fun to wander around while slowly returning to being human.
The rest of our friends, including Stuart, Jono and Ilan, showed up late afternoon. We all met at their hotel, but as my friend Fanny was coming in too I left them to meet up with her at her hostel. She had lived in Munich for several months and wanted to get some traditional Bavarian food, so while the rest of the guys headed off to the Wiesn we went searching for a quieter place to eat.
We found a little restaurant that fit the bill and wasn’t too crowded. They had a band, which was actually pretty good, and I thought it was funny that in addition to traditional German songs they played some old American Pop.
This included a rendition of “Achy Breaky Heart”, but the crowd really got into a cover of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. Combined with my continuing recovery from Thursday, I did feel a bit of cognitive dissonance.
But the food was good. I got Nürnburger sausages with sauerkraut while Fanny really wanted Obazta cheese. Both were good, but I thought it was funny than when I used the Google Translate mobile app to look at “Obazta” it translated that to “Obama”. I wasn’t fully recovered from the previous day so I drank Apfelschorle (apple juice and water) while Fanny had a beer. The waiter joked as he brought them to us that it was usually the other way around.
We then wandered over to the Wiesn to try to find the other guys, sampling a number of rides and attractions along the way. We never were able to find them – as I mentioned this place is huge and it was considerably more crowded than Thursday.
Fanny was very eager to find the Teufelsrad, or “Devil’s Wheel”, and after asking a number of people for directions we found it and were finally able to squeeze our way in. This is an old traditional attraction consisting of a large spinning wheel mounted in the floor. The “master of ceremonies” will call out certain requirements, such as “men in short lederhosen” and if you meet the requirements, you rush out and try to secure a good position near the center of the wheel. It then begins to spin, ultimately throwing off the riders until there is one left, who is the winner. You don’t win anything but pride, but man is it fun to watch.
The categories are funny, too. In addition to short lederhosen, long lederhosen and no lederhosen, there were a couple for only people over 50 and even one for men with a “penis less than 10cm long” – which both drew laughs from the crowd and a surprisingly large number of participants (with one man offering to prove himself before the crowd indicated that wouldn’t be necessary).
Woman participate as well, include those in the traditional Bavarian Dirndl dress. In fact, the best competitor of the evening was a young woman in just such a dress. See, even when you are the last rider of the wheel, they still have to get you off of it. They do this a number of ways. There is a large, pumpkin-shaped ball that they can drop down but mainly they use ropes. This woman avoided the ropes and ball like a ninja. She got a huge ovation when, after five or so minutes, they managed to slide her off.
I posted a little video so you can see the wheel in action, but it doesn’t do it justice.
By this time it is early morning on Saturday so we called it a night, promising to meet up in front of the Daemonium haunted house later in the morning. I walked Fanny back to her hostel and successfully took the S-bahn back to my hotel.
By late Saturday morning the Wiesn was packed. It was incredible just how many people were there, with more than half in traditional dress. It was nice having a German guide in Fanny to show me around, or I would have missed many things. She took me to the Old Wiesn, which is a part of the grounds set up like the Oktoberfests of a hundred years ago. The rides are mostly mechanical and it was more of an agricultural faire (we saw a lot of old tractors, etc). We stopped at a shooting arcade and Fanny managed nine out of ten shots, which netted her a small stuffed devil.
We then decided to try and find a place to sit and drink. We went into Käfer Wiesenschänke which was an amazing tent, but it was totally full and we were not able to get a seat. We did find a place at the Schottenhamel which seats nearly 10,000 people, but I think it was mainly because Fanny is pretty and the bouncer let me in with her out of pity (grin).
We were outdoors, which was fine, since it wasn’t raining and they had outdoor heaters near the tables. We started off with our first maß of the day, and I ordered a large pretzel.
I asked for some süßer Senf, or sweet mustard, to eat with the pretzel and both our waiter, Stuart, and Fanny looked at me like I was crazy. I was satisfied to see that Fanny ate nearly half of the mustard with her part of the pretzel. Note that in the picture she is wearing the hat I bought on Thursday.
We were seated at a large table with a bunch of other people. There were two women from Switzerland next to us as well as two men, one from Columbia and one from the US. The US guy sat next to me and it turns out he is from Greensboro, NC, which is less than an hour away from where I live. Small world.
I looked down the table to see what looked like a bunch of young people snorting cocaine. I was told that it was powdered caffeine, although it did cause us to tease the guy from Columbia a bit.
When I was planning on coming to Oktoberfest, I wondered that with all the excessive drinking, how did they handle people throwing up? Well, I didn’t have to wait long to discover that as a young man decided to empty his stomach right next to our table. It was promptly and efficiently covered up with sawdust, and I figured the floor would be getting thicker and thicker with it as the day went on.
We stayed there for several hours but then decided to head out and wander around. The rest of the guys were sleeping in, so we grabbed lunch from a food stall and just enjoyed people watching. There were people of all ages, and while most appeared to be sober there were a few who definitely were not, including people passed out in random places. By mid-afternoon we did finally meet up with the rest of the team.
I wanted to get everyone in bumper cars, so that was the first thing we did. It was a blast, although the green hat (which was sporting Fanny’s little devil in the hat band) disappeared at some point. The guys really wanted to buy lederhosen, so we eventually left the Wiesn and walked into town.
With Fanny’s help we found a place that specialized in traditional clothing that was of a decent quality but not too expensive. Lederhosen means “leather pants” and all of the men’s clothes were along the front of the store. For men there were no changing rooms, so you basically just “dropped trou” in the open. So, yes, I know the answer to the burning question of “briefs or boxers” for Bad Voltage, but I’ll leave that up to your imagination.
Rather you think that I was just a voyeur in this process, I spent most of my time in the back of the store as Fanny wanted to try on a Dirndl (the women could use the changing rooms). While she rocked it, it just wasn’t her style. She’s usually dressed in black, so after trying on a more traditional colored dress we got a black one, but it still wasn’t her.
The guys, however, left in full hosen gear, and we headed back to the hotel so they could change. At this time, two more of my friends, Jeff and Ken, had arrived and so as a group we headed out to find dinner, which was a bit of a challenge as by this time we were nine people and it was Oktoberfest. We ended up at an Italian place with bad service that could seat us, but the food, when it finally came, was very good. A nice time was had by all.
Fanny and I decided to call it fairly early, say a little after ten, but the rest of the group went back to the Wiesn. I hit the S-bahn, found my hotel, and managed a good night’s sleep.
Our last day in Munich started off with me meeting up with Fanny for breakfast at a café near the Marienplatz. We had a leisurely meal and then decided to wander around Munich. As I mentioned before it is a beautiful city, and I ended up going in a number of the churches:
It reminded me of a NOVA episode about how all these old cathedrals were built, and before I go back I’ll need to watch it again.
Fanny needed to get to the airport, so after saying goodbye I met up with most of the rest of the gang. Ken had driven, so Jeff and Ken were going to pick up my bags and drive them to our next stop, Fulda. This left me with just a small backpack. Our train wasn’t until late afternoon, so we wandered over to the Viktualienmarkt for light lunch.
Then it was time to grab a cab to the Hauptbahnhof for the train. The ride on an ICE train took less than three hours and was amazingly comfortable – I kind of wish we had a better train system in the US as I could get used to it.
Overall, I had a great time in Munich. While I am not sure if I’ll ever go back for Oktoberfest, I do hope to return to the city real soon.
I’m so pissed at Marriott right now, I can’t sleep. I’m so angry I’m seriously thinking of switching to Hilton.
This is from a guy who has spent more than 500 nights in Marriott hotels. I average between 50 and 70 nights a year, and my devotion to the brand and their rewards program has motivated most of my team to do the same. Between us we probably do 300 nights a year.
So what has me so angry? It’s this little card:
I am a man who firmly believes in the idea of karma. Now I have no idea of the formal religious connotations of that word, and I hope not to offend anyone of the Hindi faith with my ignorance, but I firmly believe that if you do good things, good things will happen to you.
One of the things that always makes my stays at Marriott hotels feel like home is the staff, especially the housekeeping staff who make my room inviting every day. To show my appreciation, I always leave a tip in the room, along with a little note. Sometimes the staff will leave a note back, and it makes me feel good inside.
But not now. Now Marriott has decided to take my act of kindness and turn it into an obligation. I no longer return to a room that I think of as a substitute for home – I return to see this guy:
Yup, I have a roommate. Even though I am currently paying several hundred dollars a night to stay in a Courtyard, that isn’t enough. I now am made to feel guilty unless I tip – a practice I used to enjoy.
Now, their defense will probably be “well, thank you for tipping, but a lot of customers don’t so this is our way of suggesting it.”
Bullshit. The phrase “The Envelope Please” has been trademarked. This isn’t some subtle suggestion, this is a marketing campaign. Some Marriott marketing exec probably got a bonus for coming up with this insulting and demeaning program. Hey, news flash, if you really want to run the world’s best hotel chain, pay your people a livable wage. Add a few bucks to the cost of the room and we probably won’t notice, but don’t put the equivalent of a bucket and bell in the place where I plan to sleep.
This is the third time I’ve seen this program, although the first in a Courtyard, so they are obviously planning on rolling it out across all brands. Bad idea. Put some kind of note next to my profile that states I never want to see a card like this in my room again, or better yet dump the program entirely. It really, really demeans the brand, and I am serious about switching.
It’s enough to make me want to refrain from tipping out of spite, but I’m certain that Isabela had little to do with the decision to panhandle in my hotel room, so I’ll be sure to leave a little something for her in the morning.
It’s the least I can do, since there will be a “little something” extra in the trash.
I forgot how I got introduced to Paolo Bacigalupi. I do remember that the first book I read by him was The Windup Girl. I loved it. In the universe he creates, the world is post Peak Oil and depends on bioengineering, among other things, to provide the functions that used to come from petroleum. For example, vehicles run on springs, special nanotechnology springs that can store a tremendous amount of energy. They are wound by huge animals called meglodonts that walk on treadmills to generate power.
Cool, huh?
I followed that book with the short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories that I enjoyed as well, especially since many of the stories occur in the Windup Girl universe.
His next two books, however, were aimed at young adults. Look, considering the amount of money made from stories aimed at the YA market set in a distopian future, preferably with a female protagonist caught in a love triangle, I can’t blame him. They were good but not as enjoyable as his other work.
When I heard he had a new adult novel out, called The Water Knife, I immediately ordered it on Amazon.
This book is definitely aimed at adults. It is set in our current universe, perhaps ten to twenty years in the future, and concerns the issue of water in the American southwest.
The story references a real book called Cadillac Desert. I haven’t read it (it’s on my wishlist) but it apparently warns that current water management policy in the western United States is doomed to fail. Considering the large population of people who live in that part of the country, the disappearance of water would have a huge impact.
The Water Knife is mainly set in a future Phoenix, Arizon, and follows three main characters: Angel, hired muscle to enforce water rights (or “water knife), Lucy, an idealistic Pulitzer-prize winning author, and Maria, a Texas refugee who fled to Phoenix when the water gave out in her home state.
Bacigalupi brings together these three people against a backdrop of violence and a murder mystery as they search for something that could greatly change the distribution of water in the region. The characters are fully developed, the writing is tight and I found it hard to put the book down. His writing reminded me of a younger, hipper William Gibson.
Reading the book was very straightforward, or I might have compared him to Neal Stephenson. Mainly because I didn’t much care for the book’s ending, and Stephenson is renown for not ending books well. He’s also known for requiring a bit of work to get into his stories, but this one was much easier to read. The more I’ve thought about the ending, the more I’m okay with it, but it is hard to say more without spoiling it.
Speaking of spoilers, I have more to say but as usual, the more sensitive of my three readers may want to stop now and just go get the book. If you like Gibson and Stephenson, you’ll like this. If you liked The Windup Girl you might be disappointed, as I was, that this story wasn’t set in that universe, but I still enjoyed the book.
Okay, so a little more detail about the story. The current system of water in the west has collapsed. Texas went dry, causing a mass exodus of people to the surrounding states. This caused a fracturing that saw these states to independently set up and police their borders, becoming more like small countries. They are still part of the USA, but Washington, DC, is a long way away.
As I mentioned above, Angel is a Mexican ex-con who works for a woman named Catherine Case, “The Queen of the Columbia”. Case makes her money building self-contained buildings in Las Vegas. All of the water and moisture is captured and recycled within the structures, and many of the wealthy citizens have bought into her buildings. She was able to build her empire by exercising tough control over water rights within Nevada.
Nevada is constantly competing with other states in the area, such as Arizona and California, for water. Case pulled Angel out of prison to become a “water knife” – a sometimes violent enforcer of her water rights. The book opens up with a military operation to destroy the pumping capacity of an Arizona border city that lost a lawsuit against Case. As part of his compensation, Angel lives in one of Case’s buildings, drives a Tesla, and is much more affluent than many around him.
We are also introduced to Lucy. She lives in Phoenix, which is struggling to stay alive after they lost access to water. While they are also building self-contained buildings for the affluent, the city is heavily populated with refugees from Texas. As with any situation with such suffering, the criminal element has taken root as well, and combined with a “Zoner” hatred of the influx of Texans, there is a lot of violence. She is documenting life in the city in the hope of finding some answers, and she makes her living publishing those stories. So while she is far from affluent, she can support herself and, unlike others, has the option to leave.
Finally, we meet Maria. She is a Texas refugee who came to Phoenix with her father, who was working to help build one of the self-contained buildings. He died in an accident and she was left without many options. Her story is that of the struggle the refugees face living day to day and wondering when and how they will get water.
As a reporter, Lucy often rushes to scenes of violence within the city. On one such trip she discovers the body of friend of hers, and he had been horribly tortured before his death. She knew that he had discovered something about water rights, rights that could drastically change the balance of power in the region, and it had gotten him killed.
Case has also heard that something is up in Phoenix, and she sends Angel to investigate. He and Lucy first meet when she is at the morgue to learn more about her friend’s death.
If anyone has any doubts about Bacigalupi’s return to adult fiction, the account he writes about what happened to that body will remove them, along with your ability to sleep at night. It describes, in cold and clinical detail, one of the most horrible acts of torture ever conceived. I thought about quoting it here, but I can’t bring myself to type it in.
Anyway, the paths of Angel and Lucy cross a number of times until they become partners of sorts. Lucy is trying to uncover the news story of a lifetime, and Angel is trying to execute his job for Case. Eventually, their paths cross with Maria.
I should stress, this is not a happy book. What happens to these three characters is not good. Water is life, and without it life is “nasty, brutish and short”. I won’t, and actually can’t, say if the ending is happy or not, but if you’re looking for “they lived happily ever” read Harry Potter.
If you are interested in a take on how the beginning of the end will start, check out this book. You’ll be glad you did.
The second book in the Slabscape series, Slabscape: Dammit takes place immediately after the events in Slabscape: Reset. Once again we join Louie Drago in his various incarnations on a spaceship called The Slab (that is the size of California) on its 20,000 year journey.
That seems like a long time, and it is. This second book is very much about time.
We follow the story through the eyes of our protagonists, the “reset” Dielle who is in Louie Drago’s rejuvenated body, as he strives to find purpose and understand his new home, and a holographic recording of Louie Drago himself, who has managed to place himself in a position of power within the Slab’s government system. This is a system which is not a democracy. As my home country struggles with its own democracy, I really liked the following quote from the book:
Democracy is a flawed and highly ineffectual form of government that relies on the majority of the enfranchised being capable of understanding all of the implications of highly complex and interdependent situations. An empowered electorate must not only be able to fully comprehend all of the information they are given and be capable of making accurate analysis, which few are, they must also be motivated and willing to be completely engaged in the process, which even fewer are, and they must also accept responsibility for their decisions, which virtually no one does. Democracy is open to manipulation by clandestine information controllers and by the mass media who have their own commercially dictated agendas. Voters are too easily influenced and are vulnerable to the fear-mongering and short-term whims of the self-interested and the self-destructive.”
Poetry.
As in the previous novel, the Slab is beset with a danger that it must overcome, and Louie plays a big role in this. We also follow Dielle’s journey of personal growth through a variety of very comic situations. I enjoyed this book a lot, and I think SSB has avoided the sophomore slump.
I have more to say that I’ll try to keep spoiler-free, but if stuff like that bothers you, just stop now and go read the book.
The Slab is traveling at close to the speed of light. That causes all kinds of funky things to happen. For example, compared to someone remaining on Earth, time would appear to move much more slowly on The Slab. Those whiz-bang smart kids I went to school with can even calculate the exact factor by which time would slow down. It’s called gamma, and there is even a nifty little calculator to determine what it is. For example, if you are traveling at 97% of the speed of light, gamma would be a little over 4. This means that for every year of subjective time you experience, a person in a reference frame stationary to yours (i.e. think back on Earth) would experience four years. At 99% of the speed of light, that jumps to 7. A speed of 99.9% makes it 22, and 99.99% comes out to 71.
So if the Slab was traveling at .9999c for 300 years, over two millennia will have passed on Earth.
Now, the physics of Slabscape are similar to our own, and thus the Slab is having issues trying to accelerate. From a stationary reference point, gamma also affects mass (well, not really, it affects momentum but let’s pretend it affects mass). If you are at 99.99% of the speed of light you would appear to have 71 times the mass. Since the energy needed to accelerate an object is proportional to its mass, it takes a lot more energy to accelerate a relativistic object a small amount than it would at lower speeds. Since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, the theory goes, it will take more and more energy for smaller and smaller gains until it takes an infinite amount of energy to try to reach light speed.
That is, if nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
Einstein, the guy who thought most of this up, stated that not even information can travel faster than the speed of light. But then he and two buddies named Podolsky and Rosen came up with a thought experiment, referred to as the EPR Paradox, that seems to cast doubt on that.
The idea is pretty simple. There are “entangled” particles that have to share certain known characteristics. For example, spin. If one particle has a spin of “up”, the other must have a spin of “down”. The kicker is that spin is pretty arbitrary. During the measurement I choose what is “up” is, but with entangled pairs, the moment I say one particle is “up” the other one automatically becomes “down”, even though the values of “up” and “down” didn’t exist before the measurement.
So, the EPR guys thought, what happens if I have an entangled pair and I send each particle off in opposite directions at close to the speed of light. I then wait awhile (milliseconds is enough at these speeds) and then measure one particle as “up”. The second one must instantaneously know to be “down”, but the only way that is possible is if the information travels faster than the speed of light.
Fascinating, huh?
Anyway, this theory plays a role in a plot point in Slabscape: Dammit as we finally find out how Louie got his start. Louie, currently a being of pure data, ends up getting himself duplicated again, and each of those “selves” have a fun run in with time.
In the meantime, our horny, naive hero, Dielle, is busy making friends and questioning his relationship with his manager/girlfriend Kiki. At one point she refuses to let him join her shopping because he is a heterosexual male, and, also being a heterosexual male who has been married for over 20 years, I loved this explanation of the female shopping experience:
Statistical analysis of time spent shopping by typical female Slabcitizen: 40% trying on things they already know they won’t like, 40% deciding not to try on things they know they would like but are too similar to something they already own and 20% complaining about the lack of suitable choice. Although 85% of shopping results in zero acquisition, 90% of shopping activity produces feelings of satisfaction in the shopper, 65% of acquisitions are never worn, 30% of acquisitions are worn once only, 4% are worn more than once but never when the same people are involved in the same social situation, and 1% are worn until they wear out, then lamented over despite the fact that identical replacements are available.
Anyway, he joins a band called “The Garlic Farts” (a wonderful name by Slab standards) and takes the stage name of Blood, and yes, Blood Dielle took me a lot longer to get than I care to admit.
One of his band mates, Fencer, is a character that I identify with pretty strongly. If I had unlimited time and fairly unlimited resources I’d be out making things, and that is what Fencer does (in addition to playing mad drum solos on a virtual reality drum kit). He is the one who figures out how to use quantum entanglement to send information back into the past.
We also get to learn about other cultures on The Slab. For the most part we’ve been spending time with the “famous for being famous” set, those people who make modern day TV shows with the words “Real” or “Shore” in their titles popular. But there is a huge set of “gamers” on The Slab who spend their entire lives isolated and immersed in a virtual reality. If all of your bodily functions could be maintained automatically, wouldn’t that be tempting? Some people isolate themselves to a similar extent on modern day Earth – in Japan there is even a term for it: Hikikomori.
There are also the Unkos, or “uncooperatives”. These are people who do not wish to be attached to the SlabWide Integrated System (Sis) and have thus withdrawn to areas of the Slab Sis is not allowed to monitor. This doesn’t mean they have gone primitive, as many use localized versions of the tech Sis manages, but those who do are called Naturalists. Naturalists tend to grow their own food and make their own tools and shelter, as well as doing other things in a more natural fashion that would spoil a funny part of the Slabscape mythos if I told you about it.
As I mentioned above, SSB is really finding his stride in this second novel, and it made me hunger for the third book, Slabscape: Reboot. Since the first one came out in 2011 and the second in 2015, we may have to wait until 2019 for it, but at least he writes faster than George R.R. Martin.
When I was last in the UK, I made a friend named Bill. We share a lot of things in common, especially a taste for a certain breed of science fiction. He recommended that I read the Slabscape series by S. Spencer Baker, so, moist robot that I am, I immediately ordered it on Amazon.
The first book in the series (whose number currently stands at two) is Slabscape: Reset. I quite enjoyed it, once I got over the author’s initial attempts to channel Douglas Adams.
For geeks of a certain age, Douglas Adams holds a special place in both our pantheon of authors and our hearts. There was no one like him. When I started the book I felt that SSB was trying a little too hard to write like Adams. Now, granted, he did a pretty darn good job of it but I still found myself recoiling slightly every time I hit a paragraph that was especially Adams-esque.
Luckily, that didn’t last. The author finds his own voice and spins out a yarn that only echoes the whimsy of Adams without co-opting it entire. Part of the similarities could be that they are both British and about the same generation, but beyond that I wasn’t able to find out much about him. There wasn’t even a Wikipedia entry, so I had to go off and make one (I’m a little embarrassed about my own).
The TL;DR is that if you like science fiction along the lines of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, you’ll probably like this.
As usual, I try to be spoiler free when doing reviews, but purists may want to skip the rest of this.
Okay, Slabscape: Reset. The book focuses on the point of view of two characters, who are, in a sense, one. Louie Drago was once one of the wealthiest people on the planet. In his old age he has himself frozen and he buys a one-way ticket on a huge interstellar spaceship with instructions to revive him when the technology has advanced enough to do so. The start of the book details this revival as Louie comes back as a “reset”. His body has been reset to that of a 27 year old male, and while he remembers things such language he doesn’t remember much of his previous life.
He finds himself on the “Slab”, a spaceship that is 1024 km long, 455 km wide and 114 km high, currently holding nearly 32 million humans. Most of those humans are neurally connected to an artificial intelligence called the SlabWide Integrated System, or Sis. As a reset he can choose his own name, and at the suggestion of his nurse, Kiki, he chooses Dielle (from Row D, Column L, where his frozen body was stored).
Turns out Kiki is not normally a nurse. She wanted to be the first to meet Dielle because most of the revenue generated on Slab is from entertainment, and at 325 years Dielle is the oldest reset ever and thus a source of great interest to the Slab population. She is a media specialist who becomes his partner and love interest, and a lot of the early plot and humor comes from Dielle’s attempts to understand and assimilate into this new culture.
Part of that is dealing with meeting himself. The original Louie Drago is still around in the form of a hologram, and soon after Dielle turns him on he manages to gain autonomy. He quickly adapts to his new situation and becomes quite a player within the Slab community. One of my favorite quotes from the book is a description of Louie’s past self:
… he was pornographically wealthy, had traveled to all the parts of the Earth he had any desire to visit, had experienced as many risky and thrilling experiences as he could reasonably endure and had variously drunk, eaten or inhaled as many legal, semi-legal or wildly illegal substances as his robust constitution could tolerate. He’d been there, seen it, done it and stubbornly refused to buy any T-shirts, postcards or anything that would ever require dusting …
If I was planning on having a tombstone, I’d love to be able to put that on it.
The Slab is on a 20,000 year mission to a specific part of the galaxy. Scholars on Earth, trying to determine the existence of a soul, had discovered that when people die some energy heads off toward one particular point in space. The people on the Slab refer to this place as Home, and even though the Slab is traveling at a significant portion of the speed of light it will still take a very long time to get there (this story is set approximately 300 years after departure). Technology has advanced so that the Slab’s engines are “gravity drives” that collect mass to provide building materials and propel the ship forward. There are zones of the ship that are always in daylight, some that are always in darkness, and various combinations of sunlight and weather throughout the vessel. Drago had made most of his fortune through the discovery by his business partner of “matter transmitters,” or “emties,” that can instantaneously move matter from once place to another. They play a key role in life on the Slab.
The mission, however, is not a key part of this book. It is much more about discovering the world that SSB has created. In a place where everything necessary for survival is provided for you, human endeavor turns to creating things: art, music, entertainment, etc. How this society deals with issues of intellectual property, privacy and human interaction is interesting and at times quite funny.
Against this backdrop, a threat to the slab is discovered. Louie ends up playing a key part in addressing it. While emties can move matter around, they do not work on living things. Louie, being a hologram, isn’t covered by this limitation. Being pure data, he also ends up getting copied a number of times, so we end up with more points of view that are all still Louie in some form or another.
As with any good tale, adversity is overcome and the characters experience personal growth. I really enjoyed his portrayal of the consumer culture on the Slab. Think about it, what would you do if all your spare time could be focused on making things? While there are characters who take advantage of that, most of what is consumed on the Slab is the same banal entertainment that populates our culture and this book is something of an indictment of it.
It was a very enjoyable book and made me eager for the next one.
This is a bit of a Public Service Announcement, but if you live in North Carolina (and perhaps other States) you have a free way to set up a “credit freeze”. This will prevent anyone from requesting your credit history which is key to opening a new account. This can help prevent identity theft.
According to the website of the North Carolina Department of Justice, this was made possible in 2005. Simply visit a web page which will direct you to the websites of the “Big Three” credit reporting agencies.
I decided to do this and, with the exception of Experian which apparently still lives in the stone age, it was easy.
The first site I went to was for Equifax. This was the easiest of all of them. I simply answered some questions and the freeze was enacted. They gave me a 10 digit number that I’ll need to remove the freeze, but there was no need to set up an account or anything.
Then I went to Experian. This was a big fail. After filling out the form I was presented with the following:
Seriously? I have to copy down all of my sensitive information, including a copy of a government-issued ID, and mail it to you? Doesn’t anyone there even think that those of us with identify theft issues might have a problem with this?
This happened for both me and my spouse, so my guess is that Experian really isn’t set up to do this online, and it makes me wonder about what other technology they don’t understand.
TransUnion was the final site, and they require an account, which was a little more work, but within a few minutes (after going through the process to reset my password), they had accepted a credit freeze.
So, I feel a little better. Not sure what I’m going to do about Experian, since the last thing I want to do is comply with their instructions, but at least two of the reports are blocked and I doubt someone would issue credit on just one.
While I know this works in North Carolina, it probably works for other states. If you aren’t planning on using credit soon (to buy a car or house, for example) you might want to consider doing this. It looks like it only takes 24 hours to release the hold (well, with the exception of Experian) so it shouldn’t cause any issues and might prevent some big ones.
Neal Stephenson and I have a simple relationship: He writes books; I buy his books.
Such was the case with his latest, Seveneves (pronounced Seven-Eves, the second word like the wife of Adam). When I learned about it I immediately bought it on Amazon.
TL;DR; Stephenson’s writing for me is like pizza: when it is good it is really good, and when it is bad, it is still pretty good. I am not calling Seveneves bad, and I enjoyed reading it (at times I couldn’t put it down) but he tries to cram in too much into an already long book. Considering how much I like his other work, I’d have to place this one toward the bottom of the list.
Note: What I’m about to describe will be considered spoilers by many, so if you are sensitive to such things and plan to read the book, you might want to skip it. I listened to Stuart Langridge’s review on Bad Voltage and while it was pretty much spoiler free, I almost wish I hadn’t until I’d finished the book. I’ll add some carriage returns here in case you want to leave.
Okay, Seveneves is divided in to three parts.
Part One
The book starts out with the moon being broken into seven pieces. Stephenson never explains why this happened, and even the characters in the novel just refer to the cause as “The Agent”. I am more than okay with this. My favorite type of hard science fiction is when something happens or something changes suddenly that might remain unexplained, but then what follows is a coherent chain of events that can be explained by the science we know. So, the moon blowing up is a given, and now what happens next?
One of the first major characters we are introduced to is a popular scientist named Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris, or “Doc Dubois”. As many people have pointed out, he is strongly based on Neil deGrasse Tyson. Due to orbital mechanics, the remaining seven large pieces of the moon stay pretty close together (The Agent, by whatever method used to fracture the moon, wasn’t energetic enough to send the pieces far away from each other). When, after awhile, two of the large pieces collide to make eight, Dubois realizes that this process will continue for some time, making smaller and smaller pieces, and eventually all of those pieces will be captured by the Earth’s gravity.
This will not be a good thing. The moon is massive enough that this “Hard Rain” of debris will fall for approximately 5000 years and destroy all life on the planet. There is about two years before this will start.
The world’s population reacts by creating a “Cloud Ark”. The International Space Station (ISS) in this universe has been tethered to a captured asteroid called Amalthea. The idea is to group lots and lots of survival pods, called “arklets”, behind Amalthea to provide a shield from the debris, and all of the world’s infrastructure is put into action making the arklets and solving issues such as food production.
Stephenson does a good job in describing a world where almost all of population realizes it will die. The process is surprisingly orderly, due in part to the idea that through a method called “the casting of lots” the members of the Cloud Ark will be chosen from the population as a whole, usually consisting of a young man and young woman from various regions of the planet.
I especially liked a scene where Dubois visits Bhutan to collect the two people chosen for the Ark from that area. Stephenson has a fetish for the idea of seeing what happens when members of a population, usually scientific or philosophic, decide to separate themselves from the rest of society. It was a key plot point to Anathem.
On this side of the river the ground rose almost vertically. The mountain barrier was cleft by a steep-sided valley that zigzagged up and away from them; the road leaped up into it and switchbacked up a stone cliff, fringed here and there with clusters of hardy evergreens that had found toeholds in crevices. Tendrils and torn veils of mist drifted across the face of the rock, providing occasional glimpses of a white tower, high above them, that had somehow been constructed on the precipice. It was one of those buildings, like some monasteries in Greece and Spain, whose whole point was to proclaim to those below, “This is how far we will go to achieve separation from the world.”
Lovely.
In any case, this part is focused on introducing us to the characters, setting the stage and describing, sometimes in great detail, the orbital mechanics of the whole thing. For a Stephenson novel is was surprisingly easy to get into the story (usually it takes me 100 pages or so to get into the groove). We learn about the people already on the ISS, the people who go up to make things ready for the “Akies” and how they plan to spend the 5000 years in space until the Earth is habitable again. Many of the characters are women, which becomes important later.
Dubois becomes one of the last people to leave Earth, which brings us to …
Part Two
Not far into the second part, the Hard Rain falls and fries the planet. The ~1500 humans still alive are spread out in the Cloud Ark, all with differing agendas, backgrounds and experience. Stuart refers to this as the Lord of the Flies part and he isn’t too far off.
In my mind, this is the weakest of the three parts but it was also the one I couldn’t put down. I thought it was weak because the characters were very stereotypical. There was the politico who uses social media and rhetoric instead of science and bad things happen. There is a tech billionaire who puts his life at risk to try and capture part of a comet to use for water. Interspersed throughout is lots and lots of science of “how things work”, which I both loved and found frustrating. From robotics to life in zero-g, Stephenson just throws so much at you, sometimes just enough to pique your interest before he moves on to something else.
But as I said, I couldn’t put it down.
At the end, what’s left of civilization is pretty safe. At the end, what’s left of civilization is eight women, one who is past menopause. Hence the name “Seven Eves”.
One of the remaining “Eves”, Moira, is a geneticist, and she offers each of the remaining women the option of tweaking her genome. These are the women who will seed the next generations of the human race (and thus I assume it is not a coincidence that the moon originally broke into seven pieces), which will, in fact, create seven new races of human beings.
I almost wish that the book ended here. Stephenson could have fleshed out more of the story (for example, the survivors split into two factions and we learn little of one of them) and then done the next part as a separate volume.
But he didn’t, so on to …
Part Three
It is now 5000 years later. The Earth has cooled and been terraformed. The human population is around three billion and they live in an orbital ring around the planet, divided in groups based on which “Eve” was their ancestor. Several of the “Eves” have segregated themselves away from the rest of the population (going back to Stephenson’s isolationist theme), thus dividing humanity into two groups, the Red and the Blue (this was based on color coding used by Moira when doing her genetic modifications).
I really enjoyed this part, but it was very different from the first two, hence my suggestion that this would have been better served as a stand-alone book. The science here includes more orbital mechanics (such as space elevators) plus a lot about genetics. There is also a strong sociological thread as Stephenson discusses how the seven races interact. He introduces characters that I really wish could had had more development and background, such as Ty the bartender, but since the book runs over 850 pages, by this part Stephenson seemed to be in a rush to get to the end.
And like many of his novels, the ending isn’t great. I thought it ended better than I was expecting from earlier reviews, but it was a little too pat and somewhat predictable.
Conclusion
If you like Stephenson, you’ll like this book. I doubt it will be your favorite, but you won’t feel like you wasted your time or your money. I both enjoyed it and found it frustrating. He throws so much at you science-wise you want to scream “too much” but then there are parts of the story you wish he would explore in more depth.
If you have never read Stephenson, don’t start with this book. Start with Snow Crash, although it is a bit dated. He’s worth the investment.
