QT3 52 books in 52 weeks '09 Challenge

JK Rowlings meets Jane Austen with a side order of Tolkienian ideological undertones, and then quite more.

I have a particular gripe: my recent reads in Regency settings are Pride & Prejudice and the Patrick O'Brian series, and in JS&MN I missed the extremes of convoluted dialogue and wittiness I've come to expect from the setting. Those parts that you reread a few times not because you didn't get them, but because you need to revel again in their sheer brilliance are missing here. No lady in JS&MN can hold her own against a Lizzy Bennet or Diana Villiers. No one rants and retorts like  Mr. Bennet or Maturin. The servants and folk peole pale in the shade of Killick.

Now, that said, there was a lot to like. The footnotes were a great touch: you are clearly reading one of those "books about magic" that are talked about all the time, and the final crescendo of crazyness is quite powerful compared to the placid, bureaucratic tone of the norrellite magic that dominates the story up until everyone goes all ahoo.

Since they are short I won't count each one as a full book.

I first read Sandkings, a nice Sci-Fi/Horror short story. If Alfred Hitchcock came back and made Spore machinima this would be the quintaessential episode. In fact I'm told that Sandkings was cited explicitly in the Spore design documents. A shame that THE VISION seems to have strayed a bit after that.

Then I remembered that while I'm waiting with everybody else for GRRM to stop doing whatever the hell he's doing and finish the next book, I hadn't read the Hedge Knight stories, set in Westeros but a few generations before the ASoIaF era. So I got both of those and liked them well enough. I felt some Prince Valiant vibe and won't complain since I like Prince Valiant a lot.

In all three I found something that others might consider a flaw but I somehow enjoyed: Many things about the twists and endings were very predictable, but sometimes I like it when my predictions are spot on.

To run the whole Science,Speculation,Sci-fi route on the GNR subject I picked up this, which has been defined as a "Sword&Singularity" novel. Rightfully so, as it starts with a dusty swordsman in a desert and ends with a war where whole universes are flung around by planet sized AIs. Fun.

I picked this one up from Cosma Shalizi's "Books to read while the algae grow in your fur" posts. Cosma's site is a great source for quite a lot of good reading, particularly the notebooks and weblog.

Ok, I came to this after reading Drexler's Machines of Creation and then finding out about transhumanists, singularitarians and the whole G-N-R revolution thingie.

On one hand it's pretty convincing as you are reading it. In fact more than convincing: an exhilarating accelerated ride into a future of techno-bliss after the -as someone has put it- Nerd Rapture.

On the other hand, I'm not quite sure that exponential science and technology evolution is such a clear given, no matter how many semi-cuantitative plots you can make about it. Many of the advances he hopes to see in the next few decades might be possible, but not so fast or easily attained. In the particular case of strong AI giving us self-sentient superintelligent machines I'm afraid that too many of his hopes hang from keeping up Moore's Law. But faster hardware won't give us magically better software, and I don't see exponentially better software in any way or shape.

Still one is left with the feeling that it would be quite cool if Kurzweil were after all right, but in a sort of reverse Pascal's Wager is safer to bet against him: I'm not paying if when it's all said and done I'm not immortal.