Done
Posted on September 05, 2002 @ 11:27 in Reading
In the meanwhile I've finished Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade: The First Arabesque and Cory Doctorow's short story 0wnz0red.
I'm rather impressed by Pashazade and I don't know if I can wait for the Second Arabesk to be published in paperback... It's a strong story with some hard-boiled detective elements, set in a novel locale, and the main characters are developed sensibly. What more do you want? If you like cyberpunk novels, or even if you don't because there's too much tech-talk in there, this is a novel for you. There is novel technology around, but it plays a secondary role to the main story that is set in El Iskandryia, a Northern African metropole, which provides a welcome break from the almost ubiquitous Japanese/MegaTokyo backdrop of many cyberpunk novels.
I'm not going to say much about the story, you'll have to read that for yourself (recommended!), but there was this one line about the book, that isn't on the back cover where I thought it was, that said something like El Iskandryia taking on the role of a character in the book as much as the the other characters. Very true... and resonates nicely with something that is on the back cover: "If Ashraf Bey is to survive in Iskandryia he must turn detective to uncover answers to questions about himself and the city that holds him in its embrace. Answers that may be factually accurate but are not necessarily true." And that in turn resonates nicely with a remark Reiser made in a totally different context: "A system may still be effective when its assumptions are known to be false."
Doctorow's story is an imaginative short story set in Silicon Valley and it's laced with tech-talk and Valley-speak. The story is aimed at a tech savvy audience, but if you fit in that category (as I'm afraid I do ;-) I think you'll like the ironic commentary on the high-tech lifestyle. (There are links to explanatory websites for the more obscure terms.) Besides that, Doctorow comments intelligently on developments like the "Honorable Computing Initiative", about which one of the characters muses:
"Yeah." Murray said. Ring Zero, the first registers in the processor, was where your computer checked to figure out how to start itself up. Compromise Ring Zero and you can make the computer do anything -- load an alternate operating system, turn the whole box into a brain-in-a-jar, executing in an unknown environment. Ring Minus One, well, that was like God-code, space on another, virtual processor that was unalterable, owned by some remote party, by LoCal and its entertainment giants. Software was released without any copy-prevention tech because everyone knew that copy-prevention tech didn't work. Nevertheless, Hollywood was always chewing the scenery and hollering, they just didn't believe that the hairfaces and ponytails didn't have some seekrit tech that would keep their movies safe from copying until the heat death of the universe or the expiry of copyright, whichever came last.
In short, I liked it, I recommend it, it's free, go read it :-)
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0wnz0red was definitely interesting for a little light reading. Glad you pointed it out ;)
Posted by ryan on September 10, 2002 @ 17:27
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