cjstokyo

This is a fun little book. It reminds me of Stanislaw Lem stories, but set in a place much closer to the modern world of the first decade of the 21st century.

Unfortunately, while the idea behind most of the stories is strong enough, the book really needs a good edit. Sometimes a story's conceit is a bit trite, the writing often doesn't quite live up to the idea, sentences tend to be weak, and grammatical, punctuational and general infelicities abound.

Still, if you're not too irritated by this… (more)

This is a fun little book. It reminds me of Stanislaw Lem stories, but set in a place much closer to the modern world of the first decade of the 21st century.

Unfortunately, while the idea behind most of the stories is strong enough, the book really needs a good edit. Sometimes a story's conceit is a bit trite, the writing often doesn't quite live up to the idea, sentences tend to be weak, and grammatical, punctuational and general infelicities abound.

Still, if you're not too irritated by this sort of thing, it's worth reading the first three or four pages just to see if it otherwise appeals to you.

Unfortunately, the edition as of 2010-03-01 is marred by the fact that during conversion somewhere, non-ASCII characters were turned into question marks, which are embedded in to many of the names. (These are ASCII question marks in the XML files themselves; it's not a reader issue.)

Aside from one or two slightly fantastic conceits, this is a hard science fiction novel in the tradition of Vernor Vinge or David Brin. It's also an alien-contact novel, and what an alien it is. I read a lot of SF and I've never seen something this strange and yet this plausible. As with most good hard-SF novels, it grabs you within the first few chapters and keeps you glued to it right through to the end. If for some reason you can't read the electronic version, just go out and buy the paperback;… (more)

Aside from one or two slightly fantastic conceits, this is a hard science fiction novel in the tradition of Vernor Vinge or David Brin. It's also an alien-contact novel, and what an alien it is. I read a lot of SF and I've never seen something this strange and yet this plausible. As with most good hard-SF novels, it grabs you within the first few chapters and keeps you glued to it right through to the end. If for some reason you can't read the electronic version, just go out and buy the paperback; it's easily worth eight or nine dollars. Highly recommended.

The EPUB version didn't work on my Sony Reader (a PRS-505) either. I used the 'epub2lrf' program from Calibre to convert the file to BBeB format, and that conversion worked to make it readable.