(Edited by Harry Harrison.) This book started off better than Planet of the Robot Slaves, but I found the random Star Trek and Star Wars rip offs in the middle of the book intensely annoying. This isn’t so much a satire it is a disjointed list of ideas. I’m disappointed to be honest. [isbn: 0380756625]
Foundation’s Triumph
This book is pretty good. I’d say its the best of the three Second Foundation Trilogy books in fact. Unfortunately, you need to read the other two in order for this one to make any sense, which is a shame because the first one sucked, and the second one was ok. A lot of loose…
Belgarath the Sorcerer
This book is a follow on from The Belgariad and The Malloreon written from the perspective of one of the protagonists in those two series — Belgarath the Sorcerer. This book has quite a different style from the others. It is written in the first person as Belgarath’s personal memoir. The book is really long…
Books read in October 2008
Seeress of Kell Iron Master The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell Magician: Apprentice Magician: Master Foundation and Chaos The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus Silverthorn Bill the Galactic Hero: Plant of the Robot Slaves You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat
You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat
This is a Stainless Steel Rat book, although different from the norm because it is a choose your own adventure. Its also the last of the Stainless Steel Rat books in the series, and the only one I hadn’t yet read. I figured I’d document my path through the story, so here goes: 30 –…
Bill the Galactic Hero: The Planet of the Robot Slaves
The previous Bill the Galactic Hero book was awesomely bad. This on starts out well: Bill, that’s what they called him. They called him that because that was his name. I didn’t realize when I started reading this series that only the previous book and this one are actually written by Harrison. The rest of…
linux.conf.au domain name
It looks to me like the linux.conf.au domain name is working again. I wonder what effect that will have on registrations? It would be interesting to see a graph of registration behavior over time…
Silverthorn
The characters of the Magician Books battle a new enemy in this book. The book centers around Prince Arthura’s poisoned wife and the quest to find the cure. There seems to have been some criticism of this book for being a fantasy cliche (something which people seem to say about a lot of Feist’s books),…
Mikal’s unreliable guide to buying secondhand sci fi in Mountain View
My algorithm goes something like this: If I am just browsing (I tend to target complete series before I start reading them, so am often buying things I don’t expect to read for months) and looking for a great deal I go to Rasputin’s Books. Sometimes they have nothing, and other times I walk away…
The android and I
I don’t talk much on this site about what I do at work. There are a couple of reasons for that — what I do is somewhat too specialist to describe easily (I am a member of the Site Reliability Engineering Group, who are tasked with making google.com the most reliable site on the Internet),…