Slashdot Mirror
Bay of Souls
The William Gibson comparison is only a little farfetched -- Gibson acknowledges Stone's "paranoid fiction" as the stylistic inspiration for Neuromancer, so if you liked that writing style, you owe it to yourself to try reading Stone. But his books aren't science fiction, and they aren't just adventure stories by any stretch of the imagination.
Stone's been living on the edge of the counterculture since before Ken Kesey's famous 1964 Magic Bus trip. (In fact, his next book will be a memoir of his adventures with Kesey & Co.) His 1974 tour-de-force Dog Soldiers was about southern California drug smugglers in the Vietnam era. His 1981 A Flag for Sunrise was a painfully realistic study of central American political corruption. And 1998's Damascus Gate explored dozens of flavors of religious fanaticism in present-day Israel. [more background]
But Stone's style is the bedrock these are all anchored by. On the one hand, he uses his style to give a gritty, macho, hardboiled detective-story authenticity, but at the same time he's aiming much higher, into the realm of the literary classics (two of his novels qualified for Harold Bloom's exclusive Western Canon of all-time greats). He likes to weave in lots of casual allusions to interesting-but-obscure historical tidbits (I've started compiling online annotations for Damascus Gate and now for Bay of Souls as well).
You can read a sample online [more] to get a sense of Stone's writing, although that first chapter just shows "the calm before the storm," as the hick professor goes on a short hunting trip, and encounters a tragicomic loser who becomes a recurring motif in the book:
...He was struggling with the odd wheelbarrow across which he had slung his prize deer. It was a thing full of seams and joins and springs. Though it appeared altogether large enough to contain the kill, it could not, and its inutility was the source of his sobs and curses and rage and despair. And as the unfortunate man shoved and hauled, pushed and pulled his burden, covering the ground by inches, the extent of his rage became apparent. To Michael, observing from the tree, it was terrifying ...
This short book (250 pages) isn't for everybody, but I strongly recommend it to Gibson fans who feel curious to explore beyond sci-fi.
You can purchase Bay of Souls from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
+5 Dumass
Ya know what? Yeah, trolls bug me sometimes, but sometimes their just downright funny. They're part of the community and you have to take the good with the bad.
The S/N ratio isn't just about trolls. it's also about quality posting. The quality of posts has tended to go down. One problem is the MacSlash groupthink. Post a story about Apple and you'll get 20 posts from Mac fanboys about how totally cool OS X (it just works, yada yada), how they love their tibooks, etc., another 10 posts arguing with the fanboys that Macs are too expensive, better price/performance ratio elsewhere, etc., another 5 posts about rumours of an x86-based OS X port and how Apple's gonna move to AMD or Intel, another 3 posts saying that Apple is dying, another 1-2 posts about how wonderful AcaBen is, or that he still lives with his parents ?!??!?, about 300 (deleted) trolls, and some miscellaneous Gentoo Fanboys touting that Gentoo runs on PPC (?!?!?!)
I mean, quite frankly it's ridiculous.
You lazy cunt! Get off your ass and get a job; stop leeching off others.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Raising their spirits by poopooing bond as childish and suggesting the idea of an overeducated hick, as if education and hicks ever crossed paths. Slap nascar racing in there along with blind following of Bush and wrapping onself in the American flag and he can't miss!