Slashdot Mirror
Daemon
stoolpigeon writes "Have you ever been reading a book or watching a film and as the plot moves to involve some use of technology you begin to brace yourself, and the cringe as you are ripped out of the story by what is an obviously ignorant treatment of matters you know well? Do you find the idea of creating a "gui interface using visual basic" to see about tracking an ip address as more fit for a sitcom rather than crime drama? And if so, have you ever wondered what it would be like if one of us, a geek, wrote a techno-thriller? What if someone who grokked our culture and understood our tech wrote something? Would it be great, or would it just get bogged down in the techno babble?" Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.
Daemon
author
Daniel Suarez
pages
448
publisher
Dutton Adult
rating
10/10
reviewer
JR Peck
ISBN
978-0525951117
summary
A techno-thriller with a healthy dose of techno but absolutely zero let down on the thrill
It is not necessary to wonder any longer. Database consultant, geek and now author Daniel Suarez has stepped up to the plate with his effort Daemon and he does not disappoint. This is a techno-thriller with a healthy dose of techno but absolutely zero let down on the thrill. The story gains momentum rapidly and then never lets up. I had a terrible time trying to put it down, eventually just giving up and plowing through in an all nighter. It was worth it.
The story of Daemon's beginnings has already been documented by Wired. Suarez had Daemon finished in 2004 but literary agents found it to be too long and complex. Rather than give up, Suarez pushed ahead on his own and took the self publishing route. The book slowly built up a following and began to be trumpeted by the likes of Feedburner's Rick Klau and Google's Matt Cutts. And sales of the book grew and now it is available via traditional publishing channels with a hard back release in January of 2009.
The book introduces us to Matthew Sobol, genius software engineer and creator of one of the world's most popular MMOs. Sobol is dead when the book begins, having succumbed to brain cancer. But it quickly becomes apparent that while Sobol has moved on out of this life, his code has lived on and his death has triggered events that rapidly take a life of their own. Sobol's code is working so some unknown end and murder is part of the program.
Suarez may push the envelope at times but his deft handling of current tech and the possibilities is at times frightening. There isn't really much here that isn't very possible right now. At no point will a child sit down at a terminal where the operating system is run by flying through a bunch of 3-d buildings surrounded by network traffic that looks like it is flying about. But there are young people, capable and knowledgeable of current tools and vulnerabilities. People who may not fit into society but who are willing to engage in activities that they believe will build a society of their own.
Of course this is fiction and there are some leaps. But the story is so skillfully woven that the reader is never jarred out of it by some glaring error or lapse in understanding. It's easy to slip into what is an incredibly energetic ride all the while thinking, "This could happen." In fact the only real issue I had with the plot was as I thought about the book after I had finished it. Things work out so well for Sobol's software, and that is the biggest stretch for me. I've worked for and with some extremely bright people, but none have ever engineered systems that could achieve such complex goals unattended. That aside, this is an amazing story.
This book really brought back to me the sense of joy I felt in the 80's when I first began to work with personal computers. It was that sense of infinite possibilities brought on by this new technology. I've grown a bit jaded to it all over the years since then. Daemon brought a lot of that rushing back.
And while all the tech aspects of this story are solid, they do not make the story itself. The whole crazy adventure is pushed along by solid characters. These are well written, very real human beings. They are fully fleshed out people with strengths and weaknesses spread out between protagonist and antagonist alike. There are no super heroes and really no super villains, though at times it comes close on both accounts. These characters are locked in an extraordinary series of events that are at times pulling them along and at others they are the ones pushing things forward. Dialogue is believable and well written. All of that is what ultimately makes this such a satisfying and fun read. The tech trappings are just the bonus payoff for the true geek that has been waiting for a story like this.
People who are on the outside, the non-techie types may find this book confusing and hard to understand. That relative that calls you and asks what happened to their toolbar in word that seems to have disappeared may not really get this book. But anyone who spends an appreciable time in our world on-line and plugged in may just find this to be the most entertaining book that they have read in a very long time.
You can purchase Daemon from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The story of Daemon's beginnings has already been documented by Wired. Suarez had Daemon finished in 2004 but literary agents found it to be too long and complex. Rather than give up, Suarez pushed ahead on his own and took the self publishing route. The book slowly built up a following and began to be trumpeted by the likes of Feedburner's Rick Klau and Google's Matt Cutts. And sales of the book grew and now it is available via traditional publishing channels with a hard back release in January of 2009.
The book introduces us to Matthew Sobol, genius software engineer and creator of one of the world's most popular MMOs. Sobol is dead when the book begins, having succumbed to brain cancer. But it quickly becomes apparent that while Sobol has moved on out of this life, his code has lived on and his death has triggered events that rapidly take a life of their own. Sobol's code is working so some unknown end and murder is part of the program.
Suarez may push the envelope at times but his deft handling of current tech and the possibilities is at times frightening. There isn't really much here that isn't very possible right now. At no point will a child sit down at a terminal where the operating system is run by flying through a bunch of 3-d buildings surrounded by network traffic that looks like it is flying about. But there are young people, capable and knowledgeable of current tools and vulnerabilities. People who may not fit into society but who are willing to engage in activities that they believe will build a society of their own.
Of course this is fiction and there are some leaps. But the story is so skillfully woven that the reader is never jarred out of it by some glaring error or lapse in understanding. It's easy to slip into what is an incredibly energetic ride all the while thinking, "This could happen." In fact the only real issue I had with the plot was as I thought about the book after I had finished it. Things work out so well for Sobol's software, and that is the biggest stretch for me. I've worked for and with some extremely bright people, but none have ever engineered systems that could achieve such complex goals unattended. That aside, this is an amazing story.
This book really brought back to me the sense of joy I felt in the 80's when I first began to work with personal computers. It was that sense of infinite possibilities brought on by this new technology. I've grown a bit jaded to it all over the years since then. Daemon brought a lot of that rushing back.
And while all the tech aspects of this story are solid, they do not make the story itself. The whole crazy adventure is pushed along by solid characters. These are well written, very real human beings. They are fully fleshed out people with strengths and weaknesses spread out between protagonist and antagonist alike. There are no super heroes and really no super villains, though at times it comes close on both accounts. These characters are locked in an extraordinary series of events that are at times pulling them along and at others they are the ones pushing things forward. Dialogue is believable and well written. All of that is what ultimately makes this such a satisfying and fun read. The tech trappings are just the bonus payoff for the true geek that has been waiting for a story like this.
People who are on the outside, the non-techie types may find this book confusing and hard to understand. That relative that calls you and asks what happened to their toolbar in word that seems to have disappeared may not really get this book. But anyone who spends an appreciable time in our world on-line and plugged in may just find this to be the most entertaining book that they have read in a very long time.
You can purchase Daemon from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
No, not even once. Not even after having read this review.
I'm not dead yet.
Andromeda Strain oh... two more words, "insomnia cure"
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Do you find the idea of creating a "gui interface using visual basic" to see about tracking an ip address as more fit for a sitcom rather than crime drama?
In case you were wondering, that happened in CSI NY recently. Truly cringe-worthy.
People watch movies for entertainment, or for thrills - not for technological enlightenment. Tech in movies has a role meant to captivate the layperson - to keep them hooked; it is of no consequence whether it is acurate - it SOUNDS cool, and thus grips the viewer. In real life, it is similar to a high school wanna-be-nerd spewing out long and convoluted words to impress some peon... It seems to work. /.: please tell me that you are capable of sitting down and enjoying a film without nitpicking - if it bothers you, then IGNORE it.
For the enlightened on
What a nice slashvertisement. Where do I apply to get my fiction mentioned here too?
Most of time the ignorance is easy to look past and you can just enjoy the movie. I never really had a problem with it in most cases.
Two Notable Exceptions:
Wild Wild West - Will Smith, Kevin Kline
Battle Field Earth - Travolta
Those two movies took so much license with technology it reminded me of SpongeBob Squarepants and Bikini Bottom.
Friend of mine got a copy of this book roughly a year ago back when he wrote/published it under his pseudonym (Leinad Zeraus) and let me borrow it on the condition I'd send a review back to them. I did so very enthusiastically, thanking him for a great novel!
:)
About a month ago I finally got a response back directly from the author thanking me for supporting his early work. He asked for my address so he could send me a thank you. Last friday I received a package that contained signed copies of both the original and now mass market hard cover!
I thought it had already been done - Cryptonomicon is about as technically rich as any fiction could ever be without being marketable as a sleep aid. Not perfect, but it surely counts in the 'what if someone who grokked the culture and understood the tech wrote something' category.
Have you not seen the crap that was The Net? This movie is about a computer hacker/code tester whose life gets hijacked by other hackers. It was dumb and probably one of the worst thrillers I've ever seen. The closest movie that was interesting while at the same time technological-ish would have to be Primer. Check this out if you want more details. It's not exactly as much technological as it is paradoxical, but it seems to get at the techno-thriller genre (somewhat).
> have you ever wondered what it would be like if one of us, a geek, wrote a techno-thriller?
If you had read any of the stuff that's been written, you wouldn't have to "wonder" rhetorically. I for one thought Stephenson did a decent job in his treatment of the operating system FINUX in Cryptonomicon, and I'm sure there are other examples.
There is already some other fiction written by authors with in-depth knowledge of computers.
* In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson computers and computer hackers are portrayed pretty accurately.
* Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross is obviously written by someone who knows computers and most of all sysadms very well. Although I really hope that he doesn't know what he is talking about when it comes to using computers to summon demons from the fractal dimensions... :)
Encyclopedia Brown would have sorted this all out in a lot fewer pages.
(Am I the only one who has this namespace collision?)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
You ever wonder what it would be like to ask rhetorical questions that no one answered? I'm just sayin'.
Generally I find it funny, even enjoyable when a movie flat out gets it wrong. The only occasions where I've felt like throwing my drink at the screen are when the movie almost gets it right and then at the last second screws the whole thing up. Thankfully this almost never happened.
Just downloaded it, now I have to work so I can't read it
NO. I do not watch television because it does more damage than any other drug.
Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout
From TFBR: "
People who are on the outside, the non-techie types may find this book confusing and hard to understand. That relative that calls you and asks what happened to their toolbar in word that seems to have disappeared may not really get this book."
Don't worry, they're busy reading "The Da Vinci Code."
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I've never understood why it's done that way in movies, are they trying to dumb down things so the masses understand? Cause they still don't, it goes right over their head anyway.
I can understand some: the character is hacking into another computer, so masses can all understand the screen has to have in bright red flashing letters 'Hacking into another computer ... complete!' but couldn't even non-techies read between the lines and derive he hacked into another computer from the scene. Other movie genres don't have to spell everything out.
*DrugCheese rants*
What if someone who grokked our culture and understood our tech wrote something?
We'd be so bored we'd finally forgive Swordfish for the blowjob hacking scene? Part of the reason why we consume escapist entertainment is because real life is boring. Do we want to imagine the pretty heroine all made up in perfect makeup and lounging about her luxury flat in lace teddies or do we want the reality where she's wearing her comfy fluffy bathrobe that hides everything, bunny slippers, has a towel around her wet hair and has her face covered with some cosmetic mask cream?
Ok, having said that, I still cringe at bad tech scenes. "The Cylons can hack any computer that's networked, even if there's not a wireless access point anywhere on the battlestar! Just the act of running a cable from one primitive computer to another will give them a way in!" Or "Hey, this is Unix! I know this!" Or when someone is using the internet and they're instructed to bang away at random on the keyboard when they'd really be mousing around in an undramatic fashion while reading what's on the screen.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
In Eleventh Hour, the main character needed a T3 connection to perform online search on a patent. And the girl offered him to go to her dorm where she had Wi-Fi, "in case you need more privacy"... ouch.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
I think you missed the point about that flick (yes, the tech talk is mostly babelspeak nonsense, and at times I wanted to throw up when script writers take liberties with technical details) but I think it was more about the general over reliant and blind trust placed on computers than anything else.
I think that the cuckoo's egg would fall into the category of a techno-thriller written by someone who understands the tech... and it was a pretty awesome book.
Besides, if you want Charles Stross, you know where to find him.
Really? I've always been waaay to distracted by the ridiculousness of an impossibly hot ninja chick doing it to notice the technology errors.
(in thick "chicago guy" accent)
oh you must mean one a dem dere Graphical User Interface interfaces - i heard a dem
calling all destroyers
Am I the only one here who has read the Stealing the network series? Very real tech and good stories to go with that.
Global warming is a cube.
For example, this book has a chapter where version control plays a key part (and there's an online version or dead tree version).
Our webs are down, sir. We can't log in!
Which webs?
All of them.
They've penetrated our code walls. They're stealing the Internet!
We'll need to hack all IPs simultaneously.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16/
And if so, have you ever wondered what it would be like if one of us, a geek, wrote a techno-thriller?
Endless whinning from some spotty herbert who dare not leave the basement at his mum's house?
I for one can hardly wait.
zoom, enhance, zoom, enhance, zoom, enhance
Yes, now we can read the name on that credit card of the guy 50 yards in the background of the picture taken with a cellphone camera.
I am not a *blank*, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
The lack of writers everywhere, not just Hollywood (although the problem is acute there) - leads to a morass of bad fiction. Contemporary or even sci-fci. Who out there in Slashdot-dom could not tell when the spirit of Roddenberry and what TOS was trying to achieve left with his death, and the Paramount hacks took over?
It happened in TNG, and you could start to tell when the stories became character driven, and it became a soap opera in space. Will Deanna Troi hook up with Riker? Who the fuck cares?
Later, especially in Voyager (I admit, I stopped watching after DS9, and only saw a few episodes) really just became Buck Rogers in space. Action Adventure stories with daring escapes. Tech became an afterthought, and the goals that Roddenberry had of illustrating larger human condition themes? All lost to the ticking time bomb stories and who was learning a personal life lesson.
If Bond films are interested in going back to the basics, since they have ditched Q - then it would behoove them to start putting serious tech into those films. No more satellites controlled from a GUI laptop interface. And all over, Internet culture is pushing aside mainstream tv culture. The effects that tv had upon the Baby Boomers was profound, and studied by sociologists to death. Gen X (less so) and Gen Y and Busters will seriously be affected by the interactive nature of the net and how it works. No longer will we be happy being portrayed by Seth Green. We will want realistic portrayals of the reality of the world we live in. So far, outside of the South Park episode that mocked World of Warcraft (hilarious, yes) I haven't seen WoW or Guild Wars or any MMO mentioned in a popular feature film, or even YouTube used as a plot device, Twitter or even a realistic depiction of GPS technology. That will all change. The Bourne films started it, with grabbing a SIM card from a airport vendor and using it to dodge the CIA - we will see more savvy use of tech tips and tricks in the years to come used cogently by the screenwriters.
I also groaned when hearing the comment "Hey, this is Unix! I know this!" in jurassic park. However, it turns out that Hollywood gets the last laugh on this one as this is actually a real file manager for IRIX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
Although it would certainly have been more impressive if she managed to hack the computer by booting it single user and using the command line...
My preference would be that the tech-initiated writer would know well enough to simplify descriptions to "computer stuff" when the techie issues are brought up in the book. Like have some techie character explain to the less-techie characters "Well, I won't bore you with the computer stuff, but basically the fax machine is the one who 'dunnit' with the candlestick in the conservatory".
Heinleinism/Randism is so 90's. Today, a REAL geek uses the word "understand" instead of "grok" because he or she is able to understand more than just the most superficial of philosophical concepts.
(I can't believe I'm the first person to post that.)
I'm an IT guy - and I like to read. I really enjoyed this book, more than I've enjoyed anything like it in quite a while. So I wanted to share that enthusiasm.
It's not cut and pasted from anywhere - I wrote it myself. I don't have a 'hard-on' for the author. I've never met him but he did do a good job with this book. I probably am sympathetic to the path he took to gaining a broad audience with self publishing.
So I'm not really sure just what you want to say - but hopefully this helps you to better understand where I am coming from since you seem unsure.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
"I know this, this is UNIX!"
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to compose an opening paragraph entirely of rhetorical sentences?
Ah, so what we say to musicians (namely: publish your stuff on your own, RIAA is teh evil) is not automatically valid for book authors because book publishers are even less eviler than He-Man?
I particularly enjoyed The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
Written by a sysadmin
HACK THE PLANET!
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
Suddenly, he stopped. Was it... no! Impossible! Someone was at the door. Every nerve in his body was aware but his body was as still and silent as a week-old corpse. He waited, but he could sense that the person was still there. They must know I'm down here, thought Stanley. There came a knock. But he did nothing. He waited, it seemed like an eternity. He had expected them to come after him... but not this soon. Now, there was the sound of a hand on the door. The door slowly opened. He said nothing. Stealth was his only option.
"Stanley! Stanley S. Stumpkowitz!" came the voice, demanding.
"Yes?" he replied, hesitantly.
"That TV program you like. Babulon Five? The Science Fiction Channel is having a marathon. I thought you would like to know."
"OK. Thanks!" said Stanley, "I'll set the DVR."
"I made you some soup."
"That's OK. I'm not hungry," he replied
"You're a growing boy. You need to eat!"
"I'm 37, mom. I don't need you telling me what to eat."
"Fine. Be that way. Just ignore me. Break your mother's heart." The door closed. The machine-gun rattle of plastic-on-plastic resumed as his fingers and the keys set into an easy rhythm.
So far, outside of the South Park episode that mocked World of Warcraft (hilarious, yes) I haven't seen WoW or Guild Wars or any MMO mentioned in a popular feature film, or even YouTube used as a plot device, Twitter or even a realistic depiction of GPS technology. That will all change. The Bourne films started it, with grabbing a SIM card from a airport vendor and using it to dodge the CIA - we will see more savvy use of tech tips and tricks in the years to come used cogently by the screenwriters.
There was a Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode that dealt with MMOs IIRC.
That said, I am confident that there are vastly more people who care whether Troi and Riker hook up than believe that WoW deserves a more rigorous treatment within popular entertainment. There is tech savvy, and there is marketing savvy. That is why the Bourne series is still 99% Matt Damon punching, kicking, stabbing and shooting people.
I doubt that a significant portion of the audience noticed or cared about SIM cards, nor do I think it would have significantly impacted revenue if the Bourne character had evaded the CIA by re-mapping the keypad to scramble all his communications or some-such nonsense.
I'm not a big music fan, so I can't speak for the quality-to-sucking ratio of self published to studio music. But I suspect that the vast majority of self-published music out there is complete shit too. If you can't even get a small record company (or small publisher, or SOMEONE with at least a little clout) to support your work, odds are there is a good reason for it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Cory Doctorow isn't a hard science fiction writer.
Charlie Stross and Ken MacLeod are fairly computer literate and often reference Linux and whatnot in their near-future fiction. It's not exactly unusual.
I would write a book where hackers are part of a punk group with purple hair, weird piercings, crazy loud music and baggy pants falling halfway down with their boxers hanging out. Where they use AOL to hack into secret government computers by manipulating 3D images and going through a walkthru that looks like a level from Quake III. Then they would do a covert operation in the middle of the night, sneaking through a sewer into a building with laser alarm systems by doing crazy acrobatics, to access a console, which they use a password cracker (a device that looks like a joystick with a numeric readout) to crack the code within one second, and then by dragging an icon labeled "Raven Account, $1B" into a folder with their group's name on it, they jack a billion dollars from some evil warlord or something. Because we all know that hacking into secret computers involves solving 3D puzzles and going through a Quake level to shoot the cyber guards, web crawlers, and gate keepers.
My Review of Comment #26611353 (Re:Nope. Never.) by user 813711(flyingsquid)
This comment had me sitting on the edge of my seat. At no point from scrolling from the top of the comment to the bottom was I let down by the gripping realism and hard hitting factual basis of the comment. The protagonist, Stanley Stumpkowitz, is a loosely autobiographical amalgam of the typical /. reader. Finally, someone who gets it! The comment really has everything - real uses of technology like ASCII and DVRs, and a scope wide enough to include the daily dramas we all deal with - our Mom's trying to give us soup.
My only issue with the comment as written is that Stanley would not only already have known about the "Babulon (sic) Five" marathon via newsgroups and IRC, but would also have a complete collection on his shelf and ripped into high quality open standards copies on his media server.
Other than that minor quibble, I really liked this post and can't wait for the sequel. Hopefully, we'll find out what kind of soup Stanley's Mom made, and whether he finally is hungry enough to eat it. (My wish: chicken noodle!)
Considering that much of his work takes place in the near-future and focuses on the implications of technologies and technological issues which are extant even today (such as P2P, copyright issues, etc.), you must have a pretty stringent definition of "hard" science fiction to exclude him. He's one of the hardest science writers I'm familiar with. Even guys like Charles Stross are softer than that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I haven't had any high expectations of the portrayal of technology ever since Jurassic Park's: "This is Unix. I KNOW Unix!" However there some notable exceptions like in Matrix: Reloaded, Trinity is shown using nmap to find an open ssh port and then using sshnuke to exploit the SSHv1 CRC32 bug.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
A techie might cringe when the laws of physics get abused. A relationship psychologist probably cringes when reading chicklit and they all fall in love and hive happily ever after. A ballistics expert probably cringes when the good guy manages to fire two head shots at 50 yards. A real forensic scientist spews when CSI can solve a crime between two ad breaks.
All works of fiction are just fiction for entertainment purposes. Get over it.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
before there was a movie there was a book by Robert Ludlum who was known for technical accuracy and attention to details. Maybe it wouldn't have affected effected revenue of the first movie but it would probably have pissed off Ludlum fans to see a technically sloppy adaptation of his book.
midichlorians *runs away*
Tron?
Some of my favorite "gui interface using visual basic" moments:
The Bourne Ultimatum. When I was watching this film in the theater, I actually laughed at this:
Scanning for viruses... on Linux?
The CIA use Norton.
Those look a lot like Linux desktop icons... and yet Norton Internet Security 2006 is running. LOL. (Apparently, Norton were promoting the movie, so that was probably some odd product placement thing. But really, the CIA using Norton...
I also noticed this on an episode of CBS's drama NCIS: SETI@home on NCIS.
Most TV shows want their computers to look "cool", rather than realistic, when a computer is used for something important, like tracing the location of a murderer through his cell phone. Plus, most people wouldn't realize they're doing something like tracing a cell phone on a CLI based OS...
I have noticed on CBS's TV show Numb3rs, that they often use lines of source code, and even Mathematica code, to do stuff.
Just watched it last night.
Wow...just wow.
Besides the technology being the most OMG BS type and me actually laughing during most action sequences, the worst part was how predicable it was. I figured out everything in advance, and for a movie that is supposed to be an action/thriller, that probably not a good thing.
I thought Ghost in the Shell is technologically feasible given a century or two, and I'm not joking either. The main technological breakthrough needed there is the mass adaptation of BMI (that's brain-machine interface). We have fairly primitive working device on that already.
Now why on earth would people adapt these you ask? Well, the one single reason is if they can delay death or other aging phenomenon. Obviously, the BMI would have to be integrated with the future Internet, but given a century or two it should be doable.
Although as a network specialist, the current state of computer networking is REALLY far from anywhere close to it. I call it around 2150 to be death wrong.
He DID already know. The torrents have been waiting for a few days now.
He usually eschews his mother's soups, preferring delivery pizza or the rare foray out for sushi or more likely 'chinese' buffet. He eats soup when he is sick, which is too often lately.
It will be 12+ hours before he is hungry enough to eat anything. The Red Bull stash will pull him through. You only need carbs and caffeine to hack, and carbs are optional for short bursts of a few days.
No further character development, such as the ankle-deep detrius of Starbucks, ramen bowls, gum wrappers, and ruined rolling papers. No mention of the pile of fresh laundry at the foot of the stairs, or the drawer off the tracks on his bureau, the one from his grade school days. Or the one picture on the wall. But SHE will never be spoken of again. Remembered, but never, ever spoken of again. Neither will the motorcycle, or his so-called best friend, or the scholarship to UICU.
Or it could go in another direction - he could bounce up on Monday morning and flail his way through the subway system to a real job, grinding data into digestible chunks for his boss to use in extracting more money from an unsuspecting public.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I was just about to type the same thing. Michael Chrichton doesn't bother much with real technology, especially if it gets in the way of building a plot disney would like.
But I would definitely add Rudy Rucker and Stephen Baxter, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow to the list of people who really, really "get it."
Some of the best "hard" science fiction writers of today are geeks
Indeed. My favourites: Alastair Reynolds and, of course, Stephen Baxter.
Yes, because every author or musician should have to give up his copyright to some company, otherwise, you know, it must suck.
Maybe the new author doesn't want to have to give up his copyright just to be published? Maybe because old methods are dying and on-demand publishing will be important in the not-to-distant future?
Okay. Cory Doctorow isn't a good science fiction writer.
"What if someone who grokked our culture and understood our tech wrote something? Would it be great, or would it just get bogged down in the techno babble?"
Unfortunately, the latter in Strauss's case.
Well.. no. The fast-becoming-obsolete music industry depends on taking a very small number of likable tunes and thrusting them on the public in the attempt to get vast volume of sales. Some of this is occasionally good music but much of the time it is vanilla (the average of the masses will like it) and performed by underwear models.
Meanwhile there is a veritable renaissance going on right now in the music world. Yes, there is plenty of crap out there BUT there is also a mountain of fantastic music that will never see the light of record company forced fame. To put it bluntly: Recording Studios are expensive. Gear is expensive. Creating the music is an expensive endeavor possibly made cheaper with the emergence of the home studio but the chances of hearing a home-studio recording on a mainstream radio station are virtually nil. Marketing is what the big companies are good for (and always will be) but their ability to only push a few hits a year and oft-limited taste in music means more good music gets lost than promoted.
The difference between music and books is that anyone can burn a pile of CDs and even make them look pretty. For relatively small $$ you can even get an indy distributor to do it right and ship to your favorite store. That is still considered self-published. It is a LOT more expensive to have real books made and distributed. You need a publisher just to get the work printed unless you want to distribute digitally but frankly I would still rather cozy up with a good book than fall asleep on my laptop. Either way you lack the marketing engine to get the word to the masses.
Your statement is what the record companies and the RIAA want everyone to believe to keep them in business. Their days in the current model are numbered. They have the uses but are no indication of the quality of their product only how many people they can sell it to.
Yep. Also worth mentioning is Charlie Stross's Halting State, which is about crime in an MMORPG. No, really. Charlie is, I believe, the only successful novelist with a 4-digit slashdot uid.
I work in software development for the Navy. We use Symantec. Or is your point that the Norton brand name is for "personal" use and the Symantec brand is applied to the "corporate" products?
Been meaning to track down a copy of Daemon. But another book that is fairly technically accurate is Little Brother by Cory Docotow. It was a scary read in how plausable the events could happen and play out.
That's one of the funnier short-anecdote-type jokes I've seen lately. Of course, as one squid to another, I would have expected no less. ;) (consider yourself friended!)
[Back to the concept at hand...] Any good fiction writer researches any part of the background material he doesn't understand well. Period. I read Michael Crichton's _Next_ recently (about genetic research and its ethical implications), and although the pacing seemed uneven (a few times, I had no trouble putting the book down *g*), I was impressed with the level of research he put into it. [semi-spoiler warning: I'm not spoiling the plot here, but I'm spoiling the 'end' of the book. If you're a big Crichton fan and have not yet read _Next_, you may want to skip the rest of my post.]
There's an appendix containing a bibliography of his source material and another appendix where he speaks to the reader (i.e., a non-fiction essay) about some of the privacy concerns (et al) he has about genetic research. Most of the news clippings inserted to help the story along are actually real, as he explains in the end. This actually adds an extra dimension to the novel, as you reflect back on the technicalities upon which the plotline is based while you looking at the appendices.
For most stories, the suspension of disbelief is critical, and having the author come out from behind the curtain at the end and tell you how everything worked can take away from the enjoyment, but for stories whose plotlines revolve largely around technicality and detail (probably the kind of stories a lot of slashdot readers prefer, anyway---I can't tell you how many times I've re-read Asimov's Robot stories and pondered the elements of logic that play out), it does add something really neat.
When you pay attention to detail and are familiar with the subject at hand, the suspension of disbelief necessary for enjoying fiction can only come about when the writer has done good research or is already an expert.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
It would have been painless too. Look how many props the fricking Matrix series got for one tiny shot of Trinity(?) using nmap.
I understand that you have to give both the kids a role, since only one of them had a role in the book, but when you cheapen it...You might as well not have made the effort in the first place.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Depending on it's accuracy, I'll bet it's a lot like the James Bond series -- the book form, that is. Fleming knew quite a bit about what actual Secret Service life is like -- it's about as exciting as tracking down a network intruder, except the intensity of a "chase gone bad" is probably a bit more all-or-nothing.
âoeThe wall between art and engineering exists only in our minds.â -- Theo Jansen
A recent episode of SVU had them determine that a Jane Doe had been to Ukraine 6 months ago because of the levels and proportions of some isotope in her hair. You see, the water in Ukraine has a particular isotope signature, so by analyzing the hair the cops could determine that she'd been there. That led to a Ukrainian pimp, who, for a deportation in lieu of US prison, gave them the identity of the girl. Isotopes. Huh...
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
Real Life(tm) makes for really crappy entertainment. That why the industry has to embellish it. Consider that you "steer" planes with foot peddles. But watching that pilot drive down the freeway with his arms crossed would look ridiculous to the mass populous.
And I don't know about you, but during the last blackout in my house, I didn't get bathed in soft, indirect blue lighting. But real pitch black in movies only works with glow in the dark condoms.
So while I know that when I do a WHOIS lookup, it doesn't make cubes spin on my computer screen and then print the results in 72pt Comic Sans Wide Wingdings. Unless the industry starts doing a lot of close-ups, I'm okay with the big graphic font thing.
I'm just glad they've figured out how to get rid of the "refresh rate" rolling when trying to film an old CRT monitor.
Maybe a while back that was the case with self publishing. But today some authors have realized that self-publishing can be done well in today's world where a global niche market can create a decent profit, the internet can connect like-minded readers, and self-publishing tools are better than ever.
Also, I'd like to point out that disqualifying books or stories based solely on self-publishing will leave out a good deal of classics that weren't published via traditional channels because at the time there were no traditional publishing houses or they had better means than such houses. For example - Edgar Allen Poe self published some of his works due to the big publishing houses wanting no part. Would you say his works suck ass and have no dignity?
I'm starting to see cracks in the "hard science"...
Engineering is the art of compromise.
> it would probably have pissed off Ludlum fans to see a technically sloppy adaptation of his book.
As opposed to a technically accurate, total ignoring of the plot and characters of his book, like the Matt Damon movie was? The only thing that they kept were some names, that she was French-Canadian, and that he had amnesia.
BTW, I only suppose that it was technically accurate. I expect that an ex-SEAL friend of mine would find the combat as awful as we do using Visual Basic to make a GUI of something better handled via command line and piping long-existing tools.
If you want to see the book, watch the Richard Chamberlain TV movie version. Except that isn't politically correct, because the US government isn't being gratuitously evil for trying to hunt down Carlos The Jackal, or even by the means chosen.
And yes, I was pissed off enough to skip any other Bourne work that Damon ever does, even The Bourne Shell.
It seems like there should be a place for authors to go to look up things for their plot devices...
I know Clarke once went to a physics department to ask about reasonable sounding propulsion units for his Songs of Distant Earth story.
Personally, I'd really really like to see a physicist on the set of most movies. I'm not saying they can't have creative freedom, but the physicist could point out things that might look as cool without being r-tarded...
Anyway, it's not like those are the only two fields that get mistreated in films and books. Hell even rock climbing gets screwed up in films.
If only there were some huge network of computers that could be used to connect authors with experts ...
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Never go full retard (again).
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Technical sloppiness is really the last problem I think Ludlum fans would have with the Bourne movies.
The plot of the films is essentially entirely different than that of the books, with the exception of some character names and the fact that the main character suffers from amnesia for a time. By the time you get to worrying about technical details, you've already accepted that it's just another Hollywood action vehicle, so who cares?
Schlock Mercenary
Personally I think it makes a world of difference which medium you're portraying your lack of knowledge in. If its a book, do your research, know your stuff, or don't write it. I'm sorry, most people don't read today, and those that do read about things they understand, so if you're writing a technical-fiction novel about a field your ignorant in, you're a moron.
Cinema is a bit different, many TV shows/movies appeal to a wide demographic, and a lot of the time technology is used to add a level of "intelligence" to a character but not necessarily to hold the plot together. As long as it doesn't occur too many times (1-2 in a TV episode, 3-4 in a film) I can swallow it and move on. However, if the mistake occurs in a "realistic-fiction" atmosphere and is supposed to hold the entire story together I find it insulting. These lazy writers have fallen into the habit of thinking tech=magic. "Anything can happen with tech!"
With that said, you know these studios employ geeks, why not up one of their sallary's a bit, make them sign a non-disclosure and criticise the scripts. 95% of the time these failures are conceptually correct, but the writers just googled "network" and then slapped a bunch of words together. On the other hand I wish crime dramas would stop doing this "We got video footage from the 'convenience store' lets blow up the image and get the license plate of the car as it drives by"
I'm sorry, my father always taught me the first law of Information Science is GiGo (Garbage in, garbage out) and those security cameras arent THAT high res.
And I always point these out to my wife... she is tired of hearing it.
--I apologize for typos, this keyboard thinks its psychic... (EG sometimes hitting M is interpreted as ^M)
"I haven't eaten since early tomorrow morning."
Or the more common reason.. book publishers, just like movie and music, are highly risk adverse. They want more of the same, books that read exactly like the books they have already published. So if you have something geared twards a small group or there is something else unusual about your book your chances of getting published are pretty low, esp since as pointed out there will be 99 other writers who do write books that mimic older ones. Quite a few of the best authors got turned down by publishers over and over because they were not following some trend or assumption, until some small (or self) publisher was willing to take a risk on them.
I think the funniest thing about that posting from NCIS is that is a computer on Gibb's desk. The least likely place for it to be. Would love to see that explained in a backstory :)
Although it's a bit random, I seem to notice in the relatively new show Leverage that when you get a glimpse the bad guys (and random secretaries thereof) tend to be running Windows XP, whereas the tech-savvy good-guy (and a few of the tech-savvy antagonists) seem to be running KDE. That's KDE3.5, to be clear, so it's a bit of a statement itself ;)
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Aw, drat. (scuttles off to corner and mopes) ;)
In September 2008, I blogged a similarly glowing review, http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2008/09/book-review-daemon-by-leinad-zeraus.html A few months later, the publisher contacted me and supplied me with 3 copies of the new hardback, which I gave away through a series of cryptographic challenges over the last 3 weeks. It's an excellent book, and a must-read for anyone interested in the techno-thriller genre. Cheers, :-Dustin
Michael Chrichton is neither a good writer nor he is familiar with technology. He is just your average pop fiction writer, and let's leave it at that. Please. Next you will tell me Don Brown is a kick ass historian.
Maybe it wouldn't have affected effected revenue of the first movie but it would probably have pissed off Ludlum fans to see a technically sloppy adaptation of his book.
It may have pissed off Ludlum fans who a) didn't read anything about the movie before watching it (fan?) and b) believed that the intention of movie adaptations is to make them as faithful as possible to the original material.
Sadly, Halting State was wrtten in the second person (no doubt itself a comment on game design), making it more of a literary novelty than a good novel. Stross really needs to learn that he's not as clever as he thinks he is: he's clear capable of great work, if he'd stop trying to impress me with how smart he is and just tell the story.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sounds like my life. Wait, it is me. :P [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
And never forget Vernor Vinge, my favorite Hard SF writer (or at least, his hard SF works are among my favorite SF).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm a successful novelist, you insensitive clod ... ... oh wait.
Chris
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Hey now, self-publishing has a lot of benefits. If your book doesn't stand a chance of getting on Opra, then don't count on many major publishers picking it up. If your book is too complex and not accessible to the general public, don't expect anyone to pick it up. If your book appeals to a target market of people who, though small, would still really enjoy your book, why not self-publish? You can self-promote, save costs of what a major publisher would take from your profits, and do everything else the way you want to - and then, if it gets recognized by enough people, some major publisher may say "Hey, I want you and your book on Opra."
I've already read the best techno thriller available to man! Behold the Dragon Book! This is an epic novel of a mans fight with the system as he struggles for supremacy. The series starts with the Green Dragon book, with the second in the series being the Red Dragon Book, and there is the newest installment was released in 2006.
An absolutely fantastic journey which will have you battling your innermost daemons with a build to the climax at the finale. The authors choice of language helps to lend a sense of mysticism to the story, and the magic that is depicted is both fantastic, yet brings about new understanding of yourself the reader. A truly great work that puts the author up there above Tolkien. 5 stars.
We rest our case!
Actually, I seem to recall that SGI created it afterwards, as a demo app to show off the IRIX systems since everybody at the time knew the movie scene. The README from fsn includes the authors email address, if there's any reason to be canonical about.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
On the other hand, I pray that there is never a truly accurate IT novel. I think a riveting tale of viruslook troubleshooting, blackberry support, and "restore from tapes" isn't what the doctor ordered... although, I suppose a very graphic account of a complete recabling job of a datacenter would put the novel on Oprah's list. It would also put the sleep aid vendors out of business.
Since when is second-person narrative (in and of itself) necessary to make a book "more of a literary novelty than a good novel"?
So, I guess writers like Italo Clavino ("If On A Winter's Night A Traveller"), Jay McInnery ("Bright Lights, Big City"), and Günter Grass ("Cat and Mouse") just wrote "novelties" then?
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Is a GUI done in Visual Basic that far-fetched? I mean, people do do that. I wouldn't cringe at that. I do cringe whenever a news channel attempts to describe something that has to do with technology or gaming. I cringed when I read the summary too.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
I mean they don't make a secret of the fact that Charlie (the lead actor) has superhuman skills and sometimes his attempts to explain the math the the lay people aren't the best but the math is all solid and most of the applications are plausible. I mean the game theory/psychology ones are pushing it a little but the math is at least as plausible as anything on a crime drama is.
I mean shows spice up every element to make it more appealing. The cases always involve interesting coincedences or cunning criminals. Everyone knows that real investigators don't end up kidnapped so often or that real serial killers aren't perfect masterminds. We accept that the main charachters never trip at the last minute and die rather than saving the day because we want a good narrative that's fun to watch not a documentary about solving crimes.
As long as the math and science are treated just like the other elements in the show I'm happy. Sure, make the hero more awesome than most people and let his hail mary passes turn out to work as long as you don't make false claims or misrepresent how the math/science works. Numbers lives up to this and that's all I want.
Besides, I want more cute mathematicians depicted on TV...we could use more girls in the field.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I am confident that there are vastly more people who care whether Troi and Riker hook up than believe that WoW deserves a more rigorous treatment within popular entertainment.
Have you seen what they did in Make Love, not Warcraft?
Srzly, what kinda no0b ru if u only kill boarz?? And Stans dad playn, dat waz so laaaaame... And ZOMGF!! A sword ona USB stick, hu the fuck is retard'd enouhg to buy that??? LAME!!
(Ew. I feel so dirty now)
This comment had me sitting on the edge of my seat. At no point from scrolling from the top of the comment to the bottom was I let down by the gripping realism and hard hitting factual basis of the comment. The protagonist, badboy_tw2002, is a loosely autobiographical amalgam of the typical
our Mom's trying to give us soup.
A lot of Tom Clancy's (sp?) early books were like this. He was once investigated by the FBI for writing about "secret" technologies (like the SOSUS (sp?) net) which had been publicly documented in Jane's.
"fsn (File System Navigator) pronounced as "fusion" is a 3D file browser made by SGI for IRIX systems. It gained some fame after it appeared in the movie Jurassic Park. In a scene in the film, a main character, Lex, comes upon a computer displaying the interface, declaring "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" After the release of the film, many incorrectly perceived the situation as an example of media misrepresentation of computers, citing the computer game-like display as being an unrealistic Hollywood mock-up."
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
It was written like the plot of a video game, not surprisingly, since that's what Mr. Suarez does for a living. Very mechanical, not much in the way of human characters. I found it difficult to care much about any of them. A good beginning, but I felt cheated as the questions were answered. For example, why would this guy murder all these people who helped him? It seems like it would have more sense to choose an accomplice from those he knew while he was alive.
A truly unrealistic feature of Daemon is that nothing ever seems to go wrong. Devices run for years in the outdoor weather without a glitch. Right. I mean, sure, the main character's a "genius," but to write that amount of code without any bugs whatsoever? More realism on that count would have made for a better story.
Suarez could lay off some of the gore. Callous and unrealistic. Superficial pseudo-action, just the sort that would to appeal to, well, a hard core gamer who doesn't get out much.
For lighter reading from an author who has a clear grasp of technical reality, I would recommend James P Hogan. Many of his early works are a little short on actual character depth, but his more recent works are quite excellent in all respects. For those hard core Sci-Fi fans, I would strongly recommend the Giants series, and anyone, who likes a good overall read, should try "The Two Faces of Tomorrow".
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I am also a 4 digit uid slashdot user and I liked halting state.
His other novels are FANTASTIC as well but I'm a big fan of singularity related novels.
Food: It's whats for dinner
Numb3rs has used YouTube, facebook, FPS, MMO's, and even an ARG that used geocaching in various episodes. So there are some people who work on some shows that really do care about these sorts of things providing a degree of technical accuracy as a mechanism for developing a story.
A series of novels by John Ringo and Travis Taylor is what happens when you get a geek who (co)writes a novel.
It's filled with rednecks with big guns and tough marines who spend their time between blowing up alien monsters discussing the finer points of quantum mechanics.
It's sort of like reading a WWII novel while attending a college physics class and the two people behind you are talking about last nights Babylong 5 episode.
(Not that I ever had that happen to me...)
Book publishers do sometimes let an editor veto some books for other than commercial reasons. The RIAA stopped doing that long ago, any look at pop charts will tell you that. It has nothing to do with book publishers being evil, it has to do with books being harder to sell.
Have any of you read Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon? Authors who "get" us are not new to the literary scene.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Halting State was a terrific little crime novel with Really Cool stuff in it. But all the Cool Kids are reading The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. A hacker is recruited by British Military-Occult Intelligence after his new fractal rendering program almost summons Nyarlathotep.
Here's A Colder War which recasts the Cold War era with weaponized Eldritch Horrors and such. It's sort of a prototype for the Atrocity Archive series.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
What is so unbelievable about "navigating through a file system represented by 3-d Buildings?" The above mentioned part of Jurassic Park was actually real; it was a real program created by an engineer at SGI just for fun, and then used in the movie. It was open sourced and is available at:
http://fsv.sourceforge.net/download.html
To anyone reading this with a bit of programming knowledge; I'd love to see this program updated into a Debian package or at least updated so that it will compile under Ubuntu Hardy.
Although FSV didn't turn out to be the best user interface in the world after all, it actually is handy for some things, and there was some good thought put into it. You could launch applications by clicking on them, and you could base the height of the buildings on more than just file size, but other attributes as well. Sure there are other ways to find out the same information from the command line, but it can make a quick handy way to visualize some things about your machine.
FSV may not have completely worked out, but far sillier things have been seriously proposed when it comes to future technology concepts.
So, anyone feel like poking around at it an tweaking it to work again? I think it would be great to have a version which would work for modern OS-es.
I've enjoyed all the books so far - the Atrocity Archives in particular and I haven't read the Jennifer Morgue yet but I'm looking forward to it.
Peter Watts is also pretty good for a nano- look at future crime.
Cypherpunk is what "they" are pigeonholing the genre IIRC.
It gets Cory Doctorow and the boingboing crew going as well, which must be worth some whuffie
Anyone remember the Cuckoo's Egg? I quite enjoyed that. It's a bit dated today but it was a hoot when I first picked it up.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
I disagree with the gripping realism. One has to ask, "Would a mother of 37 year old man be so off kilter as to argue that the son was a growing boy?" If so, "Would she be capable of making soup?" As she must clearly be suffering from severe mental illness.
I thought this might have been an article on Daemon Tools...
Two years later, (Professor) Vernor Vinge published a short novel called "True Names" (the message in the title is about the first realization of the meaning of "ID Theft"). "True Names" envisaged Gibson's cyberspace, basically, five years earlier. Vinge wrote about getting the idea from a "talk" encounter with another minicomputer modem user in the early 70's.
And then there's Marc Steigler, an experienced IT developer who co-wrote, with Joseph Delany, "Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" in 1984, with realistic depictions of a development process and future computer networks. Steigler has also done numerous short stories in which programming work appears...correctly.
And in 1989, programmer Rick Cook wrote "Wizard's Bane" that sent programmer "Wiz" Zumwalt on a multi-book series of adventures in a D&D alternate world. Wiz's powers come from his programming, and C development environments and especially, Wiz's slow trial-and-error creation of a FORTH development environment out of, well, magic in the air, get many pages of exposition...because they're crucial to the plot. (It's complete with references to cartoons in Brodie's classic "Starting FORTH" that only a small subset of programmers would even get.)
Longtime programmer Ellen Ullman is mostly known as an essayist about the process of programming and inner lives of programmers, (cf. "Close to the Machine") but she did one novel, "The Bug".
And Stephenson has been much-addressed already, so that's my top-of-the-head list complete of published SF writers that have gotten programming, systems development, or operation / hacking correct because they're actually in the business.
Not to take anything away from this new guy, but every decade brings us a few. It's just a shame it's a few. Any of them could get it right with some research.
Who wants to see a move about the bourne again shell?
I do think Stephenson "gets it" but Cryptonomicon is less technically impressive after you notice how much of it was a fictionalization of David Kahn's excellent non-fiction work, The Codebreakers. Read them one after the other and you'll see what I mean.
Stephenson's one of my favorite authors; I've felt a compulsion to read passages from his books aloud to friends and family on many occasions. He has some bad habits, like the way his last chapters tend to splice all the loose ends together (no matter how insignificant) in the last chapter in a usually unsatisfying meltdown. FWIW, Anathem's ending is better than that -- and if you're interested in words and their origins, you shouldn't listen to the detractors, the vocabulary is part of the fun.
There was also the Stealing the Network series of short stories. I've only read the two short stories by Fydor, the author of Nmap who released them free at http://insecure.org/stc/sti.html and http://insecure.org/stc/. Quite enjoyed the first one. Not exactly well written from a literature point of view, but still interesting to read.
And who's just proved that they don't understand the meaning of the word 'grok'?
"grinding data into digestible chunks for his boss to use in extracting more money from an unsuspecting public"
this is good, you should write
...and it's awesome!
He gets the tech mostly right, but he also adds some extravagant sci-fi-esque stuff to make it more interesting. What I primarily liked about this book is that it doesn't read like something written by a computer scientist turned author, but rather like something written by a professional. The author has true skill, and I appreciate that. Too many books have an interesting story concept, only to turn out to be garbage because the author isn't very good.
Move sig!
Actually, if they were using IRIX, having a couple of staff members eaten by dinosaurs is probably a relatively good outcome.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Not to forget Glasshouse, his best novel up to date.
I only wrote one (not very successful, sadly), but I've tech edited a pile!
Still working on that novel though... and that video game... and...
- chrish
"Nope. Never." is an amazingly appropriate title for a post that recommends you read James P Hogan. Hogan's work sucks ass and his personality is worse.
If you're going to be a *real* writer, it's not enough to believe in yourself. You have to be good enough to get others to believe in you too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...and regarding that "relative that calls you and asks what happened to their toolbar in word that seems to have disappeared may not really get this book," um...wait...I and many of my technically educated colleges and friends (engineers, scientists, systems analysts, etc.) are frequently baffled by capricious and suboptimal behavior in MS Office products, especially as they morph from sensible to nonsensical and back again across versions. To be fair, that applies to any product, not just MS. Not all HCI schemes are necessarily intuitive, even (maybe especially) to people who live in the system development lifecycle. I've spent, and likely will continue to spend, a fair amount of my time cycling through both tech documentation and MS "Help" menus. :P
"have you ever wondered what it would be like if one of us, a geek, wrote a techno-thriller?"
I may have, decades ago, before I discovered Greg Egan, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Gregory Benford, Robert Forward, Fred Hoyle, Robert Heinlein, Christopher Anvil... (continue until you get tired).
Or doesn't science fiction qualify as "techno-thriller"?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Where are my mod points when I need them? This ain't a troll and it ain't flamebait. There are very valid reasons for self-publishing which don't involve suck (or suck related to the artwork, at least). One, as said, is that publishers would much rather fund the latest and greatest sequel that they can guarantee will be a mediocre success than they would back some guy in a garage who just happens to have a brand new sound. Another is that... well, it's _possible_ now in a way that it wasn't even 5 years ago. Digital content distribution is turning the Internet into the world's biggest, most open market.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
One has to ask, "do you have a mother?" If so, "have you spoken to her in years?"
:P
There are some universal constants, and one of those is that mothers enjoy feeding their children, however grown up those are.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
epic thread
If I could pick just one book to be turned into a movie it would be Cryptonomicon (specially since TLoTR's already done and The Hobbit is on its way).
It has the geek and math content that would make me happy, the sex appeal that would make me and my wife happy, and the historical related plot that would make me, my wife and my in-laws happy. A triple-win!
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
Any time a non-specialist is writing in or about a highly specialized field there are going to be *cringe* moments. If the story is actually good you either don't notice, don't care, or get a chuckle.
I'm an archaeologist (yes, not everyone reading slashdot is an IT person). The "forensic anthropology" drivel of that show "Bones" drives me to distraction. The Indiana Jones movies were ridiculous but highly entertaining. Tomb Raider - utter drivel, but still entertaining. Apocalypto - excruciatingly painful drivel. Stargate - amusing drivel, but entertaining. Et cetera.
A good writer researches enough so that those gotchas don't drag you out of the story, but unless they happen to be an expert on the subject it's guaranteed that someone somewhere is going to be grinding their teeth about it.
What, you mean like this one?
There are no hard-and-fast rules for writing a novel, but there are rules you problably shouldn't break unless you're a great writer and can actully pull it off. Charlie Stross is entertaining, but he writes prose of average quality, certainly not strong enough to avoid this being just a distracting gimmick.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Scrivener
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/
even if you have to get a polycarbonate macbook to run it on.
( & a Nice Big Screen to plug inta tha thang, fer deskwerk )
Stein on Writing ( Sol Stein )
http://www.amazon.com/Stein-Writing-Successful-Techniques-Strategies/dp/0312254210/
Writing Fiction Step by Step ( Josip Novakovich )
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Fiction-Step-Josip-Novakovich/dp/1884910351/
[ not affiliated ]
The MEANS for writing thoroughly well...
Cheers,
Not everything self-published is crap... the big issue comes when things are self-edited.
Thinking that you've made it big enough to stop needing an editor is a sign that you need to stop writing.
.hack//Sign?
Guy makes MMO, uploads his memory to the game, and dies. Leaving a bunch of code that takes on a life of it's own and puts children in a coma.
Well, I bought the hardback in the SF section last weekend and also could not put it down. It is a thriller, with a bit of out-there tech that doesn't jar the bs detector too much. It'll make a great movie script but it is certainly not going to win any writing awards.
For tech and truly original ideas as well as actual good writing, go for Stephenson: Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Snow Crash.
For beach reading though, I await Suarez's 2010 sequel,
Hmm. Wouldn't that be, "He's a successful novelist"? ;)
Bark less. Wag more.
I accidentally quite a few books in my per month, is this bad y/n?
SF is *full* of scientist authors or authors who grok tech: Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Isaac Asimov, Aurthur C Clark, Peter F Hamilton, Neal Stephenson, Alistair Reynolds, Jules Verne.
And how can we say grok with even mentioning Heinlein?!
I thought you people were nerds.
Elizabeth feels like a stranger....