shouldn't this maybe go in the drunk thread?
btw I thought it was ass pirates. shows how much I know about internet terminology. 

YOU EEDIOT! 

I read Accelerando by Charles Stross this past summer and found it quite enjoyable. It starts out something like a near future cyberpunk Neal Stephenson novel, but then, well, accelerates into something else entirely. Lots of speculation about where AIs, nanotech, transhumanism, etc might take us as a species. The writing is technical at times, which can be fun if you understand what Stross is talking about. (for instance, speculative discussion of futuristic routers, firewalls, and network protocols)

There is a sequel as well, called Glass House, that I have not read and I've heard that it doesn't really directly follow from the first book's story or tie up its loose ends. 

I can't remember which else of his I've read, I read several in rapid succession and now they're all blurred in my memory :-)

Something I found strangely satisfying about the ministry stories is that the lead character's love life is important to the plot, but there's no contrived rom-com style stress between the two of them, 

 

finished reading ringworld a few days ago.

i love scifi that makes humans caught in the machinations of another more ridiculously advanced species. 

Welcome to having good taste in books.

Get Perdido Street Station obviously. Iron Council is skippable.

The City And The City is completely unrelated but is great. 

Thanks, I've been here for a quite a while now. 

Currently reading" Our Enemy, The State" by Albert Jay Nock. 

THIS

http://www.amazon.com/Between-Equal-Rights-International-Materialism/dp/1931859337/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1288744758&sr=8-12

The Anti anti-state book written by China Mieville! 

Those silly statists. 

Iain M. Banks' latest. It's not exactly bad, but it's certainly not very good either. I read it on a 13 hour flight and it was fine for that purpose -- but I said the same thing about the A Team movie :-)

This review gets it about right: http://totalscifionline.com/reviews/5588-surface-detail 

Stupid. Just awful. Avoid. 1/2 out of 10, would have gotten a 1/10 if Sharrow died at the end too. 

Do you like books, Zwiffle?

If I was reading anything less than 3/10, I wouldn't even GET to the end... 

 

Read half way through, and I made a call. I could quit reading like I tend to do or force myself to finish it. I forced myself to finish it just to see if it would pick up pace or change or something. I can safely say Iain M Banks is a poop author. 

Player Of Games, Feersum Endjinn, Consider Phlebas, The Algebraist, State Of The Art etc etc 

Against a Dark Background is probably one of his weakest books in my opinion... 

Found it incredibly shallow and irritating, with characters that really had no reason to be in the god damned book in the first place (you've been pregnant for 20 years because a man-slut CHEATED ON YOU??? Did you not see that coming you stupid bitch?), and unbearably annoying and unnecessary ship-format text. I also give it a 1/2 of 10. 

You fail at books! 

 

 

She is the Darkness by Glen Cook - still slowly working away at this 80s-90s fantasy series, The Black Company (which inspired bungie's 1997 game Myth: The Fallen Lords). It is awesome how obvious it is that Cook is writing _AMERICAN_ fantasy - based on Vietnam - confusion, cynicism, greed - rather than WW1 (Tolkien) or WW2 (most fantasy) with the good/evil/despair etc. Cook writes in a low register, it's all slang, people are sick, cynical, greedy, pock-marked, liars - most of the soliders are black - and there are lying priests EVERYWHERE. All of this anti-fantasy praised since that's what Cook, does, he could have done a lot better if he thought things out more carefully, but then that's the curse of genre fiction, quantity over quality.

The Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins - a crazily intense view of evolution, starting with modern humans and going back to the dawn of time. Slow reading for a layman but incredibly enlightening and interesting, and well-written and engaging. Some of the life-forms described in this book have never made it into popular consciousness (2-foot long sea scorpions, carnivorous kangaroos, jesus) and I wonder why.

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris - just started reading this, and it seems like his best book yet. I don't understand how anyone could disagree with this guy he has the clearest thinking and the most eloquent prose style I can think of. 

Just picked up Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, and so far it seems to be an amazing (and very wise) book on what it means to be an artist. Granted, level design isn't what most people think of when they think of art, but I think it qualifies, even though materials, modeling, etc. might be better examples. An excerpt:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the �quantity� group: fifty pounds of pots rated an �A�, forty pounds a �B�, and so on. Those being graded on �quality�, however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an �A�.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the �quantity� group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the �quality� group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.