[books 2012] Ken Macleod

57. Newton's Wake by Ken Macleod

It's Ken Macleod, so, you know, big space opera, post-Singularity, where societies have evolved around scavenging machines made by post-human AIs, and accidentally wake some, for want of a better description, Big Honking Space Guns (thank you Stargate).

It's a stand-alone novel with a similar scope to the Star Fraction series, so there's a lot packed in to it. There's a lot less difficult political stuff than he usually deals with though.

I wish I hadn't waited so long to write it up - there's a lot of things to think about in it, and I was actually thinking about them, but that was back at the beginning of the week and I can't remember.

Very good, though.

[books 2012] Future Bristol

58. Future Bristol, edited by Colin Harvey

It's BristolCon next weekend, so I thought I'd better read the books put out by previous BristolCons. This is the first, from 2009, and I was pleasantly surprised.

The stories are all set in and around Bristol, but there's a wide variety in the approaches taken, though some themes recur - Brunel, slavery, environmentalism in general and the lack of political will to do anything about the city's incessant gridlock and appalling public transport.

This collection is better than it has any right to be - even the stories that are Not My Thing can't be faulted for sloppy writing.

hirez has a story in here, and very fine it is too.

[film] Paranormal Activity

A really boring first half followed by a slightly better second half with a few made-you-jump moments.

What disturbed me about it was the general lack of respect the boyfriend shows for the girlfriend - endless mansplaining, saying he's "taking care of it" when she is adamant that this has happened to her before and she knows a thing or two; and refusing to get the camera out of her face when she is clearly extremely distressed and wants to be left alone.

Or, as Jason put it, "just adds to my theory that all day traders are dicks".