A Cheating X

One has completed the latest in ones A to Z of Unread SciFi and Fantasy Authors being the "X" entry.

One's choice de jour, and a timely one at that, given there are televisual serials about it in the wild presently, was The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

As you can see, the rules had to be bent a touch to allow for this selection.

The Rules  

Titles should be in the sci-fi and fantasy realms, or speculative fiction if you prefer.

The Author's Surname should begin with the letter that One is upon, and they should be one who's wares one has not sampled before.

I found it interesting, with a little of the feel of a translated work, and also a touch of 'what the' weirdness.

Three and a half stars, and one will pursue the further pair of volumes in the saga.

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Sandro Season

Well the season of The Great Sandro is well and truly underway. In fact sportsball may be nigh halfway over already, such is the speed at which life flies by One these days. Why it hardly seems a day since One shook the dust off The Tales and yet, apparently, it has been more than a lunar cycle.

In any case, as well as purveying stereovisual sportsball presentations - and even one purely auditory occasion - One has been making the sacrificial journeys to worship at the temples of sportsball once again this year. Of course one was accompanied by The Great Sandro and his nigh constant chatter about the game, life happenings in general, and "Phill don't you think that should have been a free kick back in the first quarter".

The most recent pilgrimage was thanks to the timely supply of golden tickets by Lofty and involved one finally achieving long-deserved admittance to the Reserved section.
It turned out to be a bit of a letdown as One found found it to be just the standard section with a reserved chair cover at the end of every row.

The game itself was a tense bought of okay for 3 quarters and then a ridiculous celebration for the final quarter.

One was buzzing for the entirety of the journey home - although in hindsight the buzzing may have just been The Great Sandro chatting away.

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Dusting this thing off

Well one has been feeling the lack of ones nonsense outlet for almost a year now so I shall dust it off and commence once again irregularly regaling you with Cautionary Tales of Libraryland IT, gaming, reading, sportsball, and a life lived in these strange times with the many wonderful characters which one happens to interact with throughout said lived life.

A Thriller of a Twitch-worthy Read

One has just finished reading Upgrade by Blake Crouch, an XMAS gift from Grannie A, and I found it to be a reasonably enjoyable techno-thriller worth a 3 star rating.

What I did love about it was the way it made me think about all the upgrades it proposed and their consequences. Which left me with several perplexations and frustrational feelings.

First is several times throughout proceedings where it seems highly implausible that acting faster can give the advantages the protagonist enjoys. For example, and I may be incorrect here but, I don't think being fast would mean one could fire twelve shots from a pistol within 1 second, surely the mechanical parts of the pistol would put a limit on such shenanigans? 
One believes this is a case of the author erring on being too specific here in order to push the upgraded nature of the protagonist, i.e. compare and contrast:

• I squeezed off 12 shots within a second before they could react
• I squeezed off 12 shots before they could react

The big one that got to me throughout the story is that it so totally buys in to the belief that everything we have ever experienced is saved in our brains in perfect 3D HD detail with surround sound and smellovision but is locked away somehow.
Now One could easily have accepted that "perfect" memory was achieved by the eponymous Upgrade and from that point onwards, but found it constantly irritating that the beliefs on memory ran so counter to current research that has memory being akin to storing a series of dot points about events that we update and change every time we review the memory.

The second big one involves the ending so spoilers ahead.

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(highlight to read)

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The Epilogue has several issues to it. Firstly there is the fact that we were earlier told his rapid upgrade would burn him out and kill him and yet here he is 3 years later all fine and dandy and overseeing the "correct" upgrade to humanity.

Secondly is the un-ironic (as far as I can read into it) horrific ending whereby he is force upgrading humanity, not with intelligence that will still leave people doing evil, which was the "wrong" way, but with empathy for all of humanity not just your closest 150ish people. The horror being that this is most likely going to leave humanity in empathic paralysis as they consider the impact of everything on everyone.

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Apparently hone of his other books - Dark Matter - is a currently a TV series (but not the good Canadian sci-fi Dark Matter series). One wonders whether it will also cause one to twitch throughout proceedings.

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