The occasional scrivener

More a novella than a full novel. Starts with a bunch of kids stuck in a VR education simulation but the near-future high-school drama soon morphs into something much darker.

Spook Country got some negative reviews, and even though I’d been looking forward to it a long time (Gibson is one of my “read-anything” authors) I decided to wait a bit before buying it. I snatched it up at the library and enjoyed it.

A few people have remarked that Gibson’s stories are pretty shallow and uninteresting, but the point his novels is not the plot, it’s his descriptions of places, people and things. The plot is a meta-MacGuffin that serves the purpose of getting the protagonists to new places where they can fondle shiny new things. These are descriped in the trademark Gibson style.

This book is more of the same. Read it if you like Gibson, skip it if you don’t.

I recently had a spot of bother with my work lappy. The screen went all blurry after a short while of use. I didn’t mind this as it didn’t happen when the laptop was docked.

However I felt it needed to be fixed, so I called the Dell Gold support line in Sweden. Very professional service from them, a tech arrived the day after with a replacement motherboard and LCD screen. So far, so happy.

This morning I arrive to find an email from Dell asking me to participate in a survey about my experience. I’ve ignored these in the past, only to be spammed by reminders, and I thought that in this case I should take it as a I was very happy with the service I got.

So like a fool I click the link to some god-awful outsourced company (prognostics.com). A series of barely literate, badly sequenced survey questions pop up. Each takes about a minute to load. They are repetitive. They have no discernable order. They seem to reiterate the same damn point over and over again.

So I waste about 10 minutes of my time with this crap and feel obscurely that I’m more unhappy with the level of service I’ve received than before. This is the last time I’m answering these, I’ll be creating a filter to bin them from now on.

A fun satire but pretty poor SF. I think the fragmented societies of Ken MacLeod (Star Fraction) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash) are more likely than this future ruled by giant corporations. The government is privatised as there are no taxes. The dirty secret is that without taxes, a huge chunk of “private” enterprise will go bust: military, parts agriculture. Big Capitalism is as addicted to the state as “welfare” recipients.

I was really looking forward to this book, but can’t help but being disappointed. MacLeod’s first foray into techno-thriller territory starts out well. It’s a chilling portrayal of a paranoid post-9/11 Britain. But after a while you recognise the backstory, it’s the same setup as in the Fall Revolution series, with bits from Engines of Light and even Newton’s Wake thrown in. In the end it gets really SF-y, and not in a good way.

In short, I’ve read better MacLeod novels.

I had an errand to the local concentration of stores (Sickla Köpkvarter) and looked into the library in Dieselverkstaden, a centre for performance and art. It’s a little oasis for the velour and DN På Stan-reading set, in the middle of a desert of crass commercialism.

Anyway, the library was very well stocked with quality SF. I quickly snagged MacLeod’s The Execution Channel, Gibson’s Spook Country, and Jennifer Government by Max Barry.

This is nice because I’ve come to the realisation that 99% of the books I read aren’t really worth owning. Most of Stockholm’s libraries have an SF shelf but this was the best I’ve seen for a while.