Permutation City Blog

I finished the first book about a year ago and it was difficult getting all the characters straight in my head again. Again the book is split between a sci-fi and fantasy "dream". This time the dream was too dominant, the opposite from last time. I still like both settings and recommend the series.

A man without memory on an endless bridge is only one of the stories. It was good to remind myself how this book went. Each section has it's appeal. It's not one his I'm going to hang on to though.

This book builds its own world and language. There are dictionary definitions at the start of chapters to help set the scene. Much of the story is set in a secluded society of mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers. The story is slow to show itself but I didn't mind. Sometimes you have to wade through some theory and the payoff doesn't quite match the setup. All in all I enjoyed it.

A TV star slips from one world to the next and becomes an unknown without a past in a police state. This didn't engage me. It just seems to be another one of Dick's books dealing with reality and drugs.

Humanity is separated into Shapers and Mechanists, those who improve themselves through genetics and cybernetics. War is averted when the alien Investors arrive and replaced with cut-throat economics. This book has interesting ideas about the fracturing of humanity as it grows in thousand of different space habitats.

How the Eagle, a 32-bit mini computer, was designed and built. Enticed by the adventure of creating their own machine engineers, may just out of college, worked endless hours to try to meet an impossible deadline.

Origin story for Card's Speaker for the Dead books. Battle School takes children and turns them into soldiers to fight the buggers. I enjoy this. If you analysis it the main character is unrealistically good or everyone else is strangely bad. I don't read if for analysis stake though.

A story set in the far future about a world where pilots can travel between the stars if they can find the mathematical theory to describe there journey. Somewhere in the galaxy stars are going nova unexpectedly, a legandary race has left a message for someone to decode, and the moon-brained Solid State Entity may be able to help. I like the beginning and end of this book for it's ideas. The middle takes place planet-side and feels slow by comparison.

Doctor Impossible is super-intelligent but suffers from Malign Hypercongnition Disorder, he wants to take over the world. This is a world with many superheros and supervillians. Powers come from skill, magic, accidents, technology, and other dimensions. I liked this, it was less about the battles and more about the stuff in between.

I came away with two impressions of the book, interest and confusion. It starts by diving right in by introducing various gods who aren't gods having returned from... Somewhere along the line it went to a flashback and started explaining things a bit more. It's a world with men, gods (men who arrived long ago with technology and powers), and the natives (who seem to bit spirits of sorts.) This almost ended up on my pile to go to the charity shop but I think it deserves at least one more read, maybe I can figure it by then.