Core

An incredibly fun read to pick up during a bit of downtime. Some questions are more fun than others (I love the physics-y ones the most), but they're all so short that they never outstay their welcome.

Very enjoyable, simply due to the amount of concepts it's willing to throw at you. The tendency not to explain them, but to let you extrapolate from them what you will is exactly what I want from this kind of ideas-driven sci-fi. While hard sci-fi tends to explain in minute detail how everything works, PKD is perfectly happy to throw out psionics, inertials, coin-operated doors, half-life, etc. without explaining at all the whats and hows and whys. I'm still not really sure what the inciting incident is about, but I have my ideas, and that's how I'd like to keep it!

On the downside, the characters are all incredibly lifeless, and I didn't care about a single one. For one, Joe seemed generally inconsistent to me - he ended up caring a lot more about Glen than I was first led to believe, considering he seemed quite severely underpaid. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think PKD doesn't really care about writing strong characters, and for the genre he's working in, that's fine by me.

(Finally, I'd like to add that the silliest concept in this book - everything requiring small amounts of coins to function - is basically the utopia imagined by web3 crypto enthusiasts. I don't know if PKD expected this concept to ever be more than a fun joke, but it ended up being the most prescient part of the book!)

my loan ran out :(

Covid read #2 - probably the most fast paced book I'll read this year!

note: i expected to hate this