Permutation City Blog

Start of The Keys to the Kingdom series. The House is the centre of all things. It's Architect left ten thousand years ago and her will was never executed. When Arthur is chosen as the heir he is dragged into a series of dangerous situations. Each of the current trusties is controls, and is named, for a day of the week. Monday controls the Lower House and is very lazy. There isn't anything very deep here but the books are exremely readable.

A set of short stories set in Reynold's Revalation Space universe. Mankind has separated into different cultures. One has rejected integration with machine, one has embraced it and gain a collective intelligence, the other tries to balance between the two. There are stories of human and machine intelligences and the changes that they undergo. Reynold writes some interesting new science fiction, I'll have to have a look at some of the novels set in this universe.

With the politic situation of Earth declining rapidly a project colonise Mars seems to be the only hope. Man cannot live there but man can be change. Man can become a Martian. This is partly a story of how a man might be changed and what he would experience. There's also a bunch of politics going on behind the scenes.

A man and a girl are being treated at the same hospital. They meet and the man tells a fantastic story of an evil govenor and the men who want revenge against him. The scenery and colours within this story are incredibly vivid. It reminded me of some sections of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It's worth a look.

America tries to skip out of its responsibilty to pay of the nation debt. The Network decides to fix the next election to ensure full payment. When the presidential candidate has a chip in his head a puppet government has a different meaning. While I liked this book it doesn't have as much technical character as Stephenson's other books.

A story of two parts. One follows a traditional themes for Egan dealing with software sentience, it's transfer into real bodies, and the exploration of the galaxy. The other is from alien viewpoint as they explore the way their world works and what will happen to it. Although I enjoyed this it didn't seem to add much new to Egan's work.

We sail right out of history into the sky. Ships ply a trade between the planets and ports are filled with strange aliens. In the midst of this a girl who doesn't know her past is growing up. This mixture of old and new sounds interesting, sailing-punk perhaps, but the story itself didn't really come off for me.

A near future story of an ex-military psychic brought in to deal with company espionage. Hamilton has gone on to bigger things with more recent series but this is a respectable start.

Over the years people have come up with a variety of ways to tie a tie. Many turn out to be mathematically identical. Finally these guys decided to find out all the ways a tie could be tied.

Python seems to be the scripting language to learn at the moment. This little book covers all the bases very quickly and is handy for looking things up. The language itself still seems foreign but that sort of thing is only overcome with practice. I should really have a look again at Ruby. I liked the way it handled things.