Servusamanu.com

I recently just installed the Bad Behavior and WP-minify plugins. In the past, I’ve had a lot of spam-bots peruse the site and make obnoxious work of the place. Bad Behavior should help block a lot of that traffic from getting through. Wp-minify is used to condense some of the page coding to help improve load times. I’ve never really any speed issues with servusamanu, but every little bit helps, especially on slower connections.

In other news, I just finished reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. It’s definitely not quite the masterpiece of Crime and Punishment, the psychological musings of the protagonist are not nearly as visceral, but you there’s a similar appraisal of pride, morality, and justice within the piece. In total, I found the work entirely confusing. Sentence by sentence it seemed muddled and without any direction. By the end of section and the work as a whole it somehow came together. It’s a nightmare to try to dissect, because the individuals parts don’t seem to really contribute to the whole at all. If you take any individual paragraph out of the story and read it, you’d be hard-pressed to construct from that any sort of narrative at all. So much time is spent pulling out bit of the protagonist’s personality, but not directly and not even through interesting anecdotes. Rather, a paragraph of nothing gives up a phrase or a ‘tik’ in the wording that suggests part of the narrators mental state and history, but even that is nothing unless compared against similar giveaways later. The individual hints come across as nothing and only the aggregation makes any sense. It’s fascinating, and mind-boggling.

In a complete departure from Dostoevsky, the next book in the queue is Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame). I’m only a chapter or two in so I’ll save that for next week.

I’m also playing Napoleonic Total War. Excellent game, but my computer is choking on the battles. I need to toss some more RAM in, I think. Maybe soon, but not this week. I’ll be in New Orleans soon and it can wait till after that. I’m excited for the vacation. Images soon forthcoming…

After finishing Count Zero last week I jumped into Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson’s third and final novel in that Sprawl trilogy, a science fiction series set in a hypertechnological, paranoid,  corporate dominated, cyber-dystopia that began with Neuromancer.

Mona Lisa Overdrive ended the trilogy and brought to a close, or mostly a close, the story that began with Case and Mollys adventure in Neuromancer.  Molly makes a return and she’s part of this third novel.  I’m reviewing, of course, a novel that’s nearly two decades old.  I’ve quite a bit of catching up to do, but all in all the Sprawl trilogy is the in total probably the best series I’ve ever read.  While none of books match the sheer joy of Neuromancer or capture the near mystical sense of expectation I had reading it, they each shed light on simply a fascinating world that seems, despite all the futuristic technology, to be just around the corner.

Seeing as I wrote out my general criticisms just two days ago with Count Zero I’ll let this stand as is.  Read Neuromancer, at the very least!

Count Zero

I finished Count Zero as part of my read-a-thon.  It’s loosely the sequel to Neuromancer, which I read a few months ago and loved.  This ’sequel’ is set in the same world and a few years later, but has none of the same characters, although they are obliquely mentioned.  It’d be easy to argue that it’s not a true sequel at all, but it continued one important plot thread was left behind at the end of Neuromancer.  (No I’m not going to give that away.  Everyone should read Neuromancer, not pick it up through a review.)

Count Zero has the same rock solid prose, as fast paced as an old detective novel, but with post-modern (literally) color.  The world is the same paranoid, hyper-technological wasteland as the first.  The characters were not as good as Neuromancer.  They were interesting and had their quirks, but none of them changed all that much.  Even the character that was literally dragged into a new world didn’t experience all that much of an epiphany at his new surroundings and the female lead that was similarly introduced to world very much beyond her seemed to pick up it in her very first chapter.  Still, it was excellent and not just from the writing or the world (which I’m fond of.)  The story kept along the thread that I mentioned before and read in that context you can see a certain devious subtlety that hints at more to come.

If anything, the story just suffered from having a bigger world to work with.  Neuromancer only had the necessity of describing the protagonists’ immediate world.  A sequel, nearly by definition, has to expand the circle, but that means incorporating far more than the story itself requires.  In the cases where it over-reached, the plot came across as too weak.  Where it failed to expand, there was confusion.  It tried hard to fill the void, but sadly, it wasn’t as much of a thrill to follow as in Neuromancer, but well, that was a tough act to follow.

Currently I’m reading Mona Lisa Overdrive.  That’s the third story in the general arc.  I’m hoping it has the same prose, but with a defter touch.  Cheers!