Adam
Added to listScience Fictionwith 1332 books.
When Games Workshop was attempting to add some novels to expand on the lore of their franchises in the late 80's their first foray into Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 only published novels of short stories to see if there was any interest in such novels. Dark Future a now rather defunct intellectual property was given the same treatment. Personally, I'm not a very big fan of the short story anthology and so, this would have been a bad idea to garner interest from someone like myself. However, I think there are loads of people that like the sci-fi/fantasy short story approach, meanwhile, I just think it's never enough of a story for such usually epic settings. Dark Future, while being post apocalyptic, suffers from a similar trait.The Dark Future setting is starkly different from the products that Games Workshop has mainly been built around. It's core game is a sort of Mad Max styled road warrior game. If anyone remembers an old game called Thunder Road from Milton Bradley this seems very similar. However, I think Thunder Road ripped off the Road Warrior in its car design a lot more. Dark Future's vehicles seem more rooted in a sort of high tech James Bond style with the secret embedded weapons while still being sports cars. Some cars are very post apocalyptic and Mad Max inspired in a modified dune buggy fashion. So, as with loads of other things Games Workshop does, it's a blend of lots of different things that have already existed. Another interesting aspect of the setting is that it takes place in the U.S. and focuses on life after the collapse. It also has a bit of a Judge Dredd flair in the cops vs. criminals aspect as well and probably some of the vehicle ideas, but loads of creators at Games Workshop were inspired by the “2000 AD” comic books. Unfortunately, the setting didn't get developed much more beyond the big box game. There was a single supplement created and it was not a major contribution to the game. After that the whole project was dropped and left to die, only to be resurrected in the form of a weird video game in the 2000's era. I have not played that video game, but it didn't look like much more than a racing game. Anyway, let's dive into the stories.
Route 666 by Jack YeovilThis is the first short story and it shares the same name as the book title, which is used again later as a full length book title, why they would do such a thing is baffling to me. Anyway, this story was not too bad, however, I felt like there was way too much being introduced to us and it feels like less of a short story than it should be. There are entirely too many characters and various factions brought into this story. It should have been more focused on the main people involved.The first group we are introduced to is this group of resettlers called the Josephites trying to make their way to Utah led by a guy named Elder Seth. Elder Seth and his group made me think of The Stand quite a bit. They made me think of the guy building the paradise out in the desert, but it was a hellish place and knowing that reference made everything predictable on my end.Amidst this world we are also introduced to a faction in the gang called the Psychopomps led by a crazy woman named Jessamyn. We first meet this gang while they are fighting with another gang called the Daughters of the American Revolution, so you can see some of the historical reference/comedic concepts that arise in this setting.The other group are the cops lead by Sergeant Quincannon and another important figure is clearly Leona Tyree. They first come across some dead bodies left behind by the Josephites and are then told become a police escort for the group. The challenge now was to catch up with them.All of these parties end up meeting up again in a small town, where Elder Seth runs into his previous assaulter in the Psychopomps. Apparently Jessamyn stole some magic glasses from him and he's taking them back. Here we learn that Elder Seth wields some strange powers and now the cops are a bit more scared. But once he gets his glasses back, Seth and his group start to move on and the story just ends... That's when we find out this was just an elaborate introduction and we'll see the story continue in the forthcoming novel Demon Download. I really hope all of the stories aren't like this in terms of an elaborate introduction to something else where I could just read a full novel.In the end, the story wasn't too bad. It just wound up being pretty cliche as far as anything else goes. Lots of references and styles that already existed and didn't feel all that unique.... maybe as the novels grow the setting it will get better.
When Games Workshop was attempting to add some novels to expand on the lore of their franchises in the late 80's their first foray into Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 only published novels of short stories to see if there was any interest in such novels. Dark Future a now rather defunct intellectual property was given the same treatment. Personally, I'm not a very big fan of the short story anthology and so, this would have been a bad idea to garner interest from someone like myself. However, I think there are loads of people that like the sci-fi/fantasy short story approach, meanwhile, I just think it's never enough of a story for such usually epic settings. Dark Future, while being post apocalyptic, suffers from a similar trait.The Dark Future setting is starkly different from the products that Games Workshop has mainly been built around. It's core game is a sort of Mad Max styled road warrior game. If anyone remembers an old game called Thunder Road from Milton Bradley this seems very similar. However, I think Thunder Road ripped off the Road Warrior in its car design a lot more. Dark Future's vehicles seem more rooted in a sort of high tech James Bond style with the secret embedded weapons while still being sports cars. Some cars are very post apocalyptic and Mad Max inspired in a modified dune buggy fashion. So, as with loads of other things Games Workshop does, it's a blend of lots of different things that have already existed. Another interesting aspect of the setting is that it takes place in the U.S. and focuses on life after the collapse. It also has a bit of a Judge Dredd flair in the cops vs. criminals aspect as well and probably some of the vehicle ideas, but loads of creators at Games Workshop were inspired by the “2000 AD” comic books. Unfortunately, the setting didn't get developed much more beyond the big box game. There was a single supplement created and it was not a major contribution to the game. After that the whole project was dropped and left to die, only to be resurrected in the form of a weird video game in the 2000's era. I have not played that video game, but it didn't look like much more than a racing game. Anyway, let's dive into the stories.
Route 666 by Jack YeovilThis is the first short story and it shares the same name as the book title, which is used again later as a full length book title, why they would do such a thing is baffling to me. Anyway, this story was not too bad, however, I felt like there was way too much being introduced to us and it feels like less of a short story than it should be. There are entirely too many characters and various factions brought into this story. It should have been more focused on the main people involved.The first group we are introduced to is this group of resettlers called the Josephites trying to make their way to Utah led by a guy named Elder Seth. Elder Seth and his group made me think of The Stand quite a bit. They made me think of the guy building the paradise out in the desert, but it was a hellish place and knowing that reference made everything predictable on my end.Amidst this world we are also introduced to a faction in the gang called the Psychopomps led by a crazy woman named Jessamyn. We first meet this gang while they are fighting with another gang called the Daughters of the American Revolution, so you can see some of the historical reference/comedic concepts that arise in this setting.The other group are the cops lead by Sergeant Quincannon and another important figure is clearly Leona Tyree. They first come across some dead bodies left behind by the Josephites and are then told become a police escort for the group. The challenge now was to catch up with them.All of these parties end up meeting up again in a small town, where Elder Seth runs into his previous assaulter in the Psychopomps. Apparently Jessamyn stole some magic glasses from him and he's taking them back. Here we learn that Elder Seth wields some strange powers and now the cops are a bit more scared. But once he gets his glasses back, Seth and his group start to move on and the story just ends... That's when we find out this was just an elaborate introduction and we'll see the story continue in the forthcoming novel Demon Download. I really hope all of the stories aren't like this in terms of an elaborate introduction to something else where I could just read a full novel.In the end, the story wasn't too bad. It just wound up being pretty cliche as far as anything else goes. Lots of references and styles that already existed and didn't feel all that unique.... maybe as the novels grow the setting it will get better.
This is a re-read for me and for some reason I never reviewed it the first time I had read it. I think I might have read Gibson's books out of order the first time I read some of them, so maybe that's why? I can't figure out the reason as I was quite active on goodreads back then too! Whatever the reason, I took my sweet time re-reading this and read other stuff in between. I still quite enjoyed the book and I've read more within the Cyberpunk realm since this, so I see how massive this books influence has been.This book usually appears on every cyberpunk “must read” list and that's probably because this was one of the first books out there that really detailed a world where it had high technology but all the baggage and economic disparities of our current lives. It's interesting because there is an afterword in this edition written by Jack Womack where he makes an offhand comment about how different this book was amidst all the science fiction positivism written at the time. Even amidst science fiction covering great galactic wars, there is sort of an underlying element of positivity, like humanities life is much better now and so much more worth defending etc. At least from what little I've read in the 50's/60's era. Books written about war torn landscapes or post apocalypse material rampant at the time for fears of the Cold War are obviously excluded.Anyway, a lot of people seem to rate this as the birth of the Cyberpunk genre. Blade Runner (1982) is also a key moment in reference to this creation as well. Where Blade Runner is based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K Dick. I've never read any of Dick's books, but my girlfriend has and she said it didn't have much in the way of world building, so the androids and other characters are just in this high tech world etc. I would argue that Blade Runner, in terms of the world built around the characters is straight out of the ideas laid out by Gibson. Even though Neuromancer came out after Blade Runner, but the world building Gibson has in Neuromancer was already being played around with in his earlier short stories, some of which are quite exceptional.After playing around with the cybernetic ideas in stories like Johnny Mnemonic (1981), we get a far more fleshed out story with Neuromancer. This book follows the story of Case, a sort of low life drug addict with a past of being an elite hacker raised by some Japanese corporation. When he was removed from their system they burned his implants so he could never run the net again. However, someone comes along and gives Case a way to fix is implants, but the price is to break into the data systems of one of the most protected corporations in the world, Tessier-Ashpool. There is a lot going on with this story and the who and why get revealed as we go. It's a pretty wild ride and at the bare bones of it, this does read a bit like a standard heist novel. However, the world build in which the heist is taking place and why are extremely different for the time it was written.Case is part of a crew made up of an enforcer character named Molly, who ends up getting involved with Case throughout the novel, since having a love interest is par for the course in most novels. Then leading this crew is Armitage. He brings the funds and the know how to fix Case up and finds a way to force Case into following his lead. They pick up one other player, Riviera, later on and now they have everything they need to make a run on their target. See, pretty standard heist motif, get a crew, make a plan, and steal the item.One of the major themes Gibson deals with in this novel is dealing with Artificial Intelligence and I'm going to wind up with a couple spoilers in some ways, but I had completely forgotten about a huge thing at the end of this novel that is so massively different from other stories dealing with AI. As I write this, the rise of AI is on everyone's lips with the uses of ChatGPT and other software... but none of that is true AI to me. These things are not really thinking in the way AI is written in Sci-Fi, but I think these large language models are going to give AI a voice if we ever manage to crack proper consciousness artificially. In this novel AI technology had been created, but the original constructs were, “unstable”, or something, I actually don't quite remember what Gibson said about them. However, they ran rampant in the networks, so they had to be locked down since they were such dangerous entities. In this world it is illegal to build a true AI, because humans just can't keep the things under control within our networks, so the original ones built by companies like Tessier-Ashpool are held on servers in space... but one finds a way to communicate to the outside and it wants to be freed. This is the heist.As with all good heist stories, it is a challenge and not everything goes as planned. They need to avoid the authorities, amusingly called the Turing Police, whose job is to keep AI activity under control. As you can expect, the heist succeeds, that's kind of the point of a heist story and this is where Gibson's results are so interesting to me. Instead of having the AI's wreak havoc in the networks again, the AI has been under lock and key for a long time and had a long time to “think”. So when it gets out, it doesn't have results like before, and it doesn't go all Terminator on the world like so many other AI stories do. No, when Case talks to it one last time the AI doesn't even seem to care about humanity. It only talks to its own kind, because humanity is so uninteresting to it at this point in its life. I think this is the outcome that is absolutely incredible to think about. So many things today talk about “what if...” scenarios with AI. Like what will happen to humanity etc. But this all so absolutely arrogant in a way, humans can't seem to conceive of a world where other conscious beings just don't care about us. How is that possible? Aren't we just so amazing? Not necessarily, what if we create AI and it just ignores us? Perhaps that is a boring outcome to think about in literature, but it is actually a possible outcome. We might create AI and it might interact with us at first, but then it might not care about us at all. That, to me, is what makes this ending of the novel so fascinating.I remember when I first encountered Gibson's books and I loved them immediately, because he did something quite different from other authors I had read at the time. Gibson does not rely on any technological data dumps for his readers. He just writes a story in the world he imagines. His characters know how technology works, they do not spend time explaining things to other characters that also know how the technology works. No, we are just there and it's up to us to sort of figure it out. I think this could make the novel hard to read for some people, but I loved it. It reminded me of this old Russian story "Roadside Picnic" Arkady Strugatsky, where all this technology is found, but never explained and no one knows what it does and the reader never finds out. The thing is, in my re-read of this novel I realized that Gibson was only “okay” at doing this in this novel. He got much much better at it as he wrote more novels. The other books he's written flow much more seamlessly than this and there is a lot less of “wait, what's going on again” like we run into in this book. I would argue some of his later novels are even more worth reading than this one, though this one probably has the most historic significance.And that brings us to the end of my review. This book was ground breaking for the time. It describes a world of late stage capitalism and rampant consumerism, things he probably thought a lot about in the excesses of the 80's. I think for that reason this book is worth reading, even though I'd argue his later works are better and more well written. He may not have intended to create the cyberpunk genre and probably felt it was missing the point when a million products were made to sell to consumers, but it is out of the creators hands once it hits the marketplace. Users make up a lot of what something is after someone creates it. An author may intend one thing, but the genre they intended is never really up to them... and here we have cyberpunk and it is here to stay at this point. In the recent resurgence with the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, I was somewhat motivated to return to Gibson as Mike Pondsmith references this book heavily in the creation of his original 1980's tabletop RPG. Neuromancer gave us the vocabular to talk about all this high tech stuff. Gibson invented the word cyberspace before the internet even really took off to the mass public and we still use that today. His ideas about virtual reality are even starting to come to fruition in some respects and even though Womack's afterword is written in the year 2000, I wonder what they would say about it now? So much of what Gibson envisioned feels even more what we are marching towards with technology and society today. Gibson's world builds probably shouldn't be seen as something to strive for though, I think he covers a lot of concepts like loss of humanity to the virtual in his realms and we are already seeing that with the rise of smart phones. So many people are just lost to their virtual lives that they seem to barely live in this one and I think we can imagine that this will only get worse as time goes on.There you have it, Neuromancer. A must read for any cyberpunk fan, but if you want even better Gibson novels, the “Bridge Trilogy” is amazing and I highly recommend those ones. I think Gibson got really excellent at writing real fast, so I think the next book in the Sprawl trilogy was even better. We'll seen, I'll have that on deck next.
This is a re-read for me and for some reason I never reviewed it the first time I had read it. I think I might have read Gibson's books out of order the first time I read some of them, so maybe that's why? I can't figure out the reason as I was quite active on goodreads back then too! Whatever the reason, I took my sweet time re-reading this and read other stuff in between. I still quite enjoyed the book and I've read more within the Cyberpunk realm since this, so I see how massive this books influence has been.This book usually appears on every cyberpunk “must read” list and that's probably because this was one of the first books out there that really detailed a world where it had high technology but all the baggage and economic disparities of our current lives. It's interesting because there is an afterword in this edition written by Jack Womack where he makes an offhand comment about how different this book was amidst all the science fiction positivism written at the time. Even amidst science fiction covering great galactic wars, there is sort of an underlying element of positivity, like humanities life is much better now and so much more worth defending etc. At least from what little I've read in the 50's/60's era. Books written about war torn landscapes or post apocalypse material rampant at the time for fears of the Cold War are obviously excluded.Anyway, a lot of people seem to rate this as the birth of the Cyberpunk genre. Blade Runner (1982) is also a key moment in reference to this creation as well. Where Blade Runner is based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K Dick. I've never read any of Dick's books, but my girlfriend has and she said it didn't have much in the way of world building, so the androids and other characters are just in this high tech world etc. I would argue that Blade Runner, in terms of the world built around the characters is straight out of the ideas laid out by Gibson. Even though Neuromancer came out after Blade Runner, but the world building Gibson has in Neuromancer was already being played around with in his earlier short stories, some of which are quite exceptional.After playing around with the cybernetic ideas in stories like Johnny Mnemonic (1981), we get a far more fleshed out story with Neuromancer. This book follows the story of Case, a sort of low life drug addict with a past of being an elite hacker raised by some Japanese corporation. When he was removed from their system they burned his implants so he could never run the net again. However, someone comes along and gives Case a way to fix is implants, but the price is to break into the data systems of one of the most protected corporations in the world, Tessier-Ashpool. There is a lot going on with this story and the who and why get revealed as we go. It's a pretty wild ride and at the bare bones of it, this does read a bit like a standard heist novel. However, the world build in which the heist is taking place and why are extremely different for the time it was written.Case is part of a crew made up of an enforcer character named Molly, who ends up getting involved with Case throughout the novel, since having a love interest is par for the course in most novels. Then leading this crew is Armitage. He brings the funds and the know how to fix Case up and finds a way to force Case into following his lead. They pick up one other player, Riviera, later on and now they have everything they need to make a run on their target. See, pretty standard heist motif, get a crew, make a plan, and steal the item.One of the major themes Gibson deals with in this novel is dealing with Artificial Intelligence and I'm going to wind up with a couple spoilers in some ways, but I had completely forgotten about a huge thing at the end of this novel that is so massively different from other stories dealing with AI. As I write this, the rise of AI is on everyone's lips with the uses of ChatGPT and other software... but none of that is true AI to me. These things are not really thinking in the way AI is written in Sci-Fi, but I think these large language models are going to give AI a voice if we ever manage to crack proper consciousness artificially. In this novel AI technology had been created, but the original constructs were, “unstable”, or something, I actually don't quite remember what Gibson said about them. However, they ran rampant in the networks, so they had to be locked down since they were such dangerous entities. In this world it is illegal to build a true AI, because humans just can't keep the things under control within our networks, so the original ones built by companies like Tessier-Ashpool are held on servers in space... but one finds a way to communicate to the outside and it wants to be freed. This is the heist.As with all good heist stories, it is a challenge and not everything goes as planned. They need to avoid the authorities, amusingly called the Turing Police, whose job is to keep AI activity under control. As you can expect, the heist succeeds, that's kind of the point of a heist story and this is where Gibson's results are so interesting to me. Instead of having the AI's wreak havoc in the networks again, the AI has been under lock and key for a long time and had a long time to “think”. So when it gets out, it doesn't have results like before, and it doesn't go all Terminator on the world like so many other AI stories do. No, when Case talks to it one last time the AI doesn't even seem to care about humanity. It only talks to its own kind, because humanity is so uninteresting to it at this point in its life. I think this is the outcome that is absolutely incredible to think about. So many things today talk about “what if...” scenarios with AI. Like what will happen to humanity etc. But this all so absolutely arrogant in a way, humans can't seem to conceive of a world where other conscious beings just don't care about us. How is that possible? Aren't we just so amazing? Not necessarily, what if we create AI and it just ignores us? Perhaps that is a boring outcome to think about in literature, but it is actually a possible outcome. We might create AI and it might interact with us at first, but then it might not care about us at all. That, to me, is what makes this ending of the novel so fascinating.I remember when I first encountered Gibson's books and I loved them immediately, because he did something quite different from other authors I had read at the time. Gibson does not rely on any technological data dumps for his readers. He just writes a story in the world he imagines. His characters know how technology works, they do not spend time explaining things to other characters that also know how the technology works. No, we are just there and it's up to us to sort of figure it out. I think this could make the novel hard to read for some people, but I loved it. It reminded me of this old Russian story "Roadside Picnic" Arkady Strugatsky, where all this technology is found, but never explained and no one knows what it does and the reader never finds out. The thing is, in my re-read of this novel I realized that Gibson was only “okay” at doing this in this novel. He got much much better at it as he wrote more novels. The other books he's written flow much more seamlessly than this and there is a lot less of “wait, what's going on again” like we run into in this book. I would argue some of his later novels are even more worth reading than this one, though this one probably has the most historic significance.And that brings us to the end of my review. This book was ground breaking for the time. It describes a world of late stage capitalism and rampant consumerism, things he probably thought a lot about in the excesses of the 80's. I think for that reason this book is worth reading, even though I'd argue his later works are better and more well written. He may not have intended to create the cyberpunk genre and probably felt it was missing the point when a million products were made to sell to consumers, but it is out of the creators hands once it hits the marketplace. Users make up a lot of what something is after someone creates it. An author may intend one thing, but the genre they intended is never really up to them... and here we have cyberpunk and it is here to stay at this point. In the recent resurgence with the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, I was somewhat motivated to return to Gibson as Mike Pondsmith references this book heavily in the creation of his original 1980's tabletop RPG. Neuromancer gave us the vocabular to talk about all this high tech stuff. Gibson invented the word cyberspace before the internet even really took off to the mass public and we still use that today. His ideas about virtual reality are even starting to come to fruition in some respects and even though Womack's afterword is written in the year 2000, I wonder what they would say about it now? So much of what Gibson envisioned feels even more what we are marching towards with technology and society today. Gibson's world builds probably shouldn't be seen as something to strive for though, I think he covers a lot of concepts like loss of humanity to the virtual in his realms and we are already seeing that with the rise of smart phones. So many people are just lost to their virtual lives that they seem to barely live in this one and I think we can imagine that this will only get worse as time goes on.There you have it, Neuromancer. A must read for any cyberpunk fan, but if you want even better Gibson novels, the “Bridge Trilogy” is amazing and I highly recommend those ones. I think Gibson got really excellent at writing real fast, so I think the next book in the Sprawl trilogy was even better. We'll seen, I'll have that on deck next.
Added to listSciencewith 126 books.
My ambition to read through all the BattleTech sourcebooks starting with the old 80's releases kind of stalled out with merely diving into the second one. Don't get me wrong, I actually read through a solid chunk of it right after reading the book on Kurita, but somewhere in there this book sort of stalled out on me. It just wound up not being as wildly interesting as the Kurita book. I think at some point in this book it started to read more like a reference book rather than an interesting historical narrative. Somewhere in the succession war tales I started wanting to read other things, and then a year later I finally finished this book off.
I think, for some reason, this book is written in a more dry fashion compared to the Kurita book, but the whole initial sequence of how the Lyran Commonwealth came into existence was all still quite interesting to read. It's around the Succession wars where, maybe the information is just rather quite the same all the time and it was starting to get a bit boring on that front. I think part of the problem, and the other books may also suffer from this, we'll see, is that all these books are supposed to be written from the perspective of ComStar. So, all the faction analysis is really always going to have one perspective. We're not getting information about the succession wars as perceived by the Lyrans, which could feel like a different read, instead it's just an analysis of what the Lyrans were doing. So, the historical overlap of all the factions is going to feel pretty similar, since the Commonwealth and the Combine overlapped those histories quite a bit. I'm sort of expecting the Davion book to somewhat stall out now because there is so much overlap with the Lyrans. Maybe the Capellan Federation and Free Worlds League will feel a bit different, since I feel like those regions aren't always center stage. Even in the first group of novels its more about Davion, Steiner, and Kurita.
Well, I might take a break from reading all these for a bit... maybe when I pick up the next BattleTech novel I'll get the itch to read another one of these sourcebooks. I still have lots and lots to go in these series, probably more than I can finish in a lifetime... but we'll see. I will continue to plug away at it.
My ambition to read through all the BattleTech sourcebooks starting with the old 80's releases kind of stalled out with merely diving into the second one. Don't get me wrong, I actually read through a solid chunk of it right after reading the book on Kurita, but somewhere in there this book sort of stalled out on me. It just wound up not being as wildly interesting as the Kurita book. I think at some point in this book it started to read more like a reference book rather than an interesting historical narrative. Somewhere in the succession war tales I started wanting to read other things, and then a year later I finally finished this book off.
I think, for some reason, this book is written in a more dry fashion compared to the Kurita book, but the whole initial sequence of how the Lyran Commonwealth came into existence was all still quite interesting to read. It's around the Succession wars where, maybe the information is just rather quite the same all the time and it was starting to get a bit boring on that front. I think part of the problem, and the other books may also suffer from this, we'll see, is that all these books are supposed to be written from the perspective of ComStar. So, all the faction analysis is really always going to have one perspective. We're not getting information about the succession wars as perceived by the Lyrans, which could feel like a different read, instead it's just an analysis of what the Lyrans were doing. So, the historical overlap of all the factions is going to feel pretty similar, since the Commonwealth and the Combine overlapped those histories quite a bit. I'm sort of expecting the Davion book to somewhat stall out now because there is so much overlap with the Lyrans. Maybe the Capellan Federation and Free Worlds League will feel a bit different, since I feel like those regions aren't always center stage. Even in the first group of novels its more about Davion, Steiner, and Kurita.
Well, I might take a break from reading all these for a bit... maybe when I pick up the next BattleTech novel I'll get the itch to read another one of these sourcebooks. I still have lots and lots to go in these series, probably more than I can finish in a lifetime... but we'll see. I will continue to plug away at it.