I purchased a Kindle from Staples a couple of weeks ago, on Friday the fifteenth.
Why Staples? I prefer buying physical objects in person, though I will admit that that's somewhat odd given that the object in question was a Kindle. The two brick-and-mortar stores that currently carry Kindles are Target and Staples. Now, I like Target, and dislike Staples, but I'd called around to a number of Targets and they didn't have any in stock. The buying experience wasn't the best, but I ended up with a wifi graphite Kindle, so I was happy.
I loaded it up with mostly free books that evening, and the next morning purchased Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold. I plan to review Cryoburn soon, but for now, I'd like to talk about some different options for purchasing ebooks.
Baen Books is my favorite commercial site. The Baen Free Library has one or two books each from a large number of their authors. This is a great way to sample an author, and if you like it, the author's other books are just a quick click away.
They sell their books through Baen WebScriptions, which is a pleasure to use. You can pay with a credit card, or you can use your credit card to fill a micropay account. I like the micropay account, I always feel a bit guilty using a credit card for small purchases, since the transaction fees hit the merchant pretty hard.
The books are available in a wide variety of formats, and all of them are DRM-free. And you can set it up to email the book to your Kindle email, so it just pops over to your Kindle as easily as if you purchased it on Amazon.
The price is good as well, the prices seem to run between four and six dollars. To me, this is a reasonable price to pay for an ebook, and it's low enough that I don't mind paying it to replace books that I already have physical copies of.
Amazon is the obvious place to go, of course. And they have a huge selection, running the full gamut of free, cheap, reasonable, and overpriced. Their books are DRMed, as well.
The Gutenberg Project has a huge catalog (34,000+) of copyright-free books, and they now support the Kindle format directly. This is an amazing project, if you haven't heard of them before, visit the site even if you don't have an ereader.
Manybooks.net has most of the Gutenberg books, and well as books from other sources. Of most interest to me are the Lovecraft books.
Another place I've purchased ebooks is fictionwise. They have some titles that aren't available elsewhere. Look for the "MultiFormat" label, those books aren't DRMed and therefore can be read on the Kindle.
This is Charles Stross at his best. Tons of mind-blowing ideas, good characterization, and a bizarre and compelling plot.
It's hundreds of years in the future, in the Accelerando universe. You can rebuild your body however you want, and also change your memory. The main character, Robin, has had a major memory wipe. And he doesn't remember why.
As he's struggling with a number of post-memory-wipe psychological issues, he ends up getting enlisted in an experiment.
The experiment is an attempt to reconstruct a pre-singularity community based on a scarcity economy. Because of the Censorship Wars, not much data remains from those times. So the purported goal of the experiment is to get some first-hand data on people living in that era, targeted at roughly 1990-2010.
Of course, it's not that simple to do, given the lack of good historical resources. Also, the actual goals of the experiment may not be congruent with the stated goals. And so what we see is a community that is based on a particularly horrid prescriptive view of how that society should be, rather than an actual descriptive view of the way society was (is).
Part of the subtext is the effectiveness of social controls. By manipulating "bonus points", the controllers have the participants enforce all of the regulation. Creepy, and with a sense of plausibility that makes you start seeing an uncomfortable amount of modern-day parallels.
And, as I'm sure he intended, it gave me an intense visceral reaction of loathing for modern-day society. From insane, sexist religious doctrines, to the horrifyingly inadequate state of current medicine, to the inevitability of death after a mere few 7 or 8 decades of life -- gah! Get me out of here!
At its heart, it's a mystery, and it supplies quite a satisfying number of twists and detours as it progresses, all the while slowly revealing more and more of the fascinating future history of the previous century. Add in solid romance, and a wide variety of villains, and you end up with a very good, and quite mentally engaging, read. I highly recommend it.
Goblins! Nasty, brutish, short, vile, cruel, and treacherous. The common footsoldiers of fantasy villains. Alternately, an easy way for a low-level adventurer to level up in an RPG.
I love the little bastards.
Now, kobolds are my favorite race of short, malevolent humanoids. But kobolds are harder to find in print, so I, like a jilted lover, take solace in my second pick, goblins.
I think my love of goblins really took off when I was playing Magic. I'd build all kinds of goblin decks, and then when I got a card called "Goblin Warrens", I could sacrifice two goblins to get three goblin tokens. I'd represent the tokens with keys and I'd–
What? Oh, right, the book!
Goblin Hero is the second in a series, the first being Goblin Quest. They feature Jig, a goblin who's even more helpless than usual. He gets forced into going into the depths of the mountain to help an ogre. Once there, he discovers the true problem is an incursion of pixies. And nasty, mean pixies they are indeed.
His party consists of an extremely ancient goblin from the creche, a large and tough but amazingly stupid goblin, a goblin wannabe-mage, and a hobgoblin.
A fair amount of the plot revolves around the mage-wannabe, who also has decided to follow the Way of the Hero. And, in so doing, often works at cross-purposes with Jig.
Many things mark it a juvenile: the level of humor, the way the depiction of the violence never gets out of hand, the moral sensibilities that run through it.
I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I thought that some of the ideas in it were really cool. If you like goblins, it's definitely worth reading. If you're into D&D, you might find his take on the monster viewpoint interesting. I don't think I'd recommend it to someone who didn't fall into one of those two groups, though.
This is a sequel to "The Atrocity Archives". That universe, or at least Bob Howard's part of it, is a delightful mix of Lovecraft, Brazil, and The IT Crowd. The book I read also contained "Pimpf", a short story set in the same universe, and "The Golden Age of Spying", an essay that delves into some of the history of James Bond.
The Laundry is a secret British government agency that tries to keep Earth, and humanity, safe from the creeping horrors from neighboring dimension that are always scratching at our metaphorical, or metaphysical, door. You see, all it takes is one incautious mathmetician trying to prove the wrong hypothesis and the next thing you know there's Nyarlathotep running rampant sucking out people's brains.
Bob Howard, IT support and occasional field agent, is sent out to investigate the activities of Billington. Billington, a classic multi-billionaire Evil Villain, has set a Hero Archetype geas, which protects him from anyone who doesn't fit the Archetype, in this case James Bond. The geas is a destiny-entanglement spell, its core material component is a mock-up model of the ships involved, with dolls and a bunch of James Bond paraphernalia. It's meant to keep everything running along Billington's desired path; his plan is to short it out just before the ersatz Bond can fulfill his function.
Bob's management are well aware of this, and after binding Bob to a demon-bound Deep One, send him in (with little explanation) and try to manipulate events to work through the geas. His management chain, headed by the enigmatic Angleton, isn't precisely evil, but is ruthless. After all, defending humanity against ultra-powerful, inimical other-dimensional entities really is a no-holds-barred fight.
While I enjoyed it, and liked several of the twists, the story didn't quite work for me. It was a rather complex set-up, and I didn't always follow, or buy into, the motivations of the various actors. It's possible that stylistically, he was going for the feel of the Bond books; I can't really say, as I've never read the originals.
Overall, my take is that if you liked "The Atrocity Archives", you should probably give this one a try. If you haven't read "The Atrocity Archives", try that one first.
"Pimpf" is a short story set in the same universe. In it, Bob's new intern runs afoul of Bob's NeverWinter Nights demonologist honey-pot. Having spent years as an avid NWN player, I probably should have enjoyed the virtual-reality part of this much more, but overall, the story just came across as muddled.
If you're interested in Bond, this piece may be worth getting the book all in its own. It's only 13 pages long, but I found it both informative and amusing. It goes into the history of the Bond universe, and also Ian Fleming's background. He give a pretty good argument that Bond is a Mary-Sue, living out his dream of working in the field. Ian Fleming worked in intelligence during WWII, but in a desk job.
It also has a quite amusing long "interview" with Mr. Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE. Why, they were just venture capitalists specializing in disruptive new technologies, not criminals!
This is the fourth Keller book. Keller is like a lot of us -- he's isolated, usually single, drifting through life. He's also a professional hitman.
This books starts with him buying stamps (he's a collector), hanging out while he's waiting to carry out a hit. But then there's another, highly political hit, and he gets framed for it.
So he flees across country, trying to get back to his apartment in New York. As they've broadcast a picture of him, and track down what his rental car and license plates are, this is a bit difficult. It's made even more difficult because he spent most of his cash on stamps, and doesn't dare use his faked credit cards.
He makes it to New York, realizes there's nothing there for him, and strikes out across country again. He ends up taking a break in New Orleans, in one of my favorite passages from the book:
On the other hand, could he really drive all the way to New Orleans, then turn around and drive out again, only to sustain himself with prefabricated burgers and fries from yet another soul-deadening fast-food joint? That hadn't been so bad in Tie Plant, Mississippi, or White Pine, Tennessee, where one's choices were limited, but Keller had been in New Orleans a few times over the years, and he could still remember the beignets and chicory coffee at Cafe du Monde. And that was just the tip of the Tabasco bottle -- could he really leave this city without a bowl of gumbo, or a plate of red beans and rice, or an oyster po'boy sandwich, or jambalaya, or crawfish etouffee, or any of the spectacular dishes you could get virtually anywhere in New Orleans, and nowhere else in the world?
He has a chance encounter that causes him to go to ground, and he starts building a life again.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. He spends even more time isolated and alone than usual, and it has his normal deadpan reactions and going along with events as they occur.
I think it was basically a retirement novel, giving Keller a graceful and satisfying end to his career, albeit once that Block can always pull him out of if he feels the need.
If you like Keller, you'll probably like this book. If you haven't read any Keller yet, start with Hit Man instead, it's the first one and, I think, the most delightful. On the other hand, these books aren't spoiled by reading them out of order, if you happen to have a copy of any of the four there's no reason not to start with that one.
This is the first book of a tetralogy. Like all reviews, this one will contain some spoilers, but I'll try to keep from major ones.
Overall, I really liked this book. It has a fairly different feel from other Bujold books. It's a fantasy romance, set in a fairly rustic, low-magic world.
The pacing is rather interesting. The bulk of the action and adventure is in the first chunk, the bulk of the romance and them coming together is in the second chunk, and all of the rest of the book is them dealing with everyone else's reaction to their romance.
Fawn Bluefield is a Farmer "girl" (18), leaving home and painful circumstances, heading towards Glassforge, a town which has an industry (as opposed to being just a small farming village). She hopes to find work and independence there. She's short, pretty, nice, friendly, and really, really smart.
Dag Redwing is an older Lakewalker, a different cultural and ethnic group. He's war-torn and scarred, mentally and physically, and is missing a hand. He's also really, really skilled and capable.
He saves her, he tries to save her again, she saves him and the world. This is just the first part of the book.
The rest of the book involves their recovery, and the romance between them. I really enjoyed the romance between them, they fall for each other quickly and the bond between them remains strong. It's the rest of the world that supplies the antagonism to their romance. Farmers and Lakewalkers aren't supposed to date, or for that matter, engage in any form of intimate contact. Intermarriage is unthinkable.
This book goes through them dealing with her family, dealing with Dag's family is left to the next book.
The farmers are all of the common-folk (including the mayors of towns and such). A large chunk are actual farmers, but it also includes tailors, blacksmiths, glass-makers, etc.
Compared to Lakewalkers, they're shorter-lived, shorter, and don't have any magic.
The Lakewalkers spends most of its effort patrolling for malices, more about them below. They also have a trade going in items that they've magically enhanced to be better. And they'll sometimes come to the aid of the farmers in other ways, for example, they might aid in the case of bandit trouble.
They can see and manipulate "ground", something that runs through everything, living or dead. They use this to sense things or people around them (range varies based on Lakewalker, but 1 mile isn't unheard of), to heal each other, and to produce enhanced items. For example, blades that don't rust and stay sharp.
Compared to Farmers, they're longer-lived and taller.
Malices (or Blight Bogles) are a sort of boss monster that appears semi-randomly, and then grows more and more powerful, and creates its own army of mudmen as well as mind-controlling (or slaving) farmers. They suck the life (or "ground") out of everything around them, and go through "molts" where they achieve a new level of ability. They also can take the knowledge and abilities from people, and give those abilities to its mudmen.