Friday, February 10, 2012
Grind Part, Slayer Part, Garbage to the End: "Use of Weapons"
Hilarious story (sorta; to me, anyway): My boss recently gave me an Iain M. Banks book. He's an author I'd blown off for years because it turns out I had him confused with talentless hack Neal Asher, who wrote Gridlinked, source of another Chang band's nom de grind. Whoops. Turns out Banks is pretty good for a space opera kinda guy (I'm more of a bio/cyberpunk kinda dude [I can't recommend Paolo Bacigalupi's magnificent The Windup Girl enough, if that's also your thing.]). I haven't read Banks' Use of Weapons, but it's one of the influences that made The Inalienable Dreamless what it is. Here's how it goes:
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11 comments:
we have that gridlinked book. haha.
never finished it...
i so hate that book. great concept about info overload and dependency on instant access to info and then..... does absolutely nothing with it.
i prefer Banks' non sci-fi stuff to be honest, but i'm not much of a sci-fi guy though
I'm checking out Use of Weapons.
Are Mr. Childers's second-hand book recommendations as reliable as his first-hand music tips?
STAY TUNED
Those are some good charts.
bill, ask miskatonic. he somehow pierced my veil of secrecy and found me on goodreads. ;)
I'm a huge fan of the Culture series, but also not a huge fan of 'space opera' in general. There's some amazing prose in those books, and they have a remarkable variety of stories/settings in the series.
Bill, if you want a reminder of all the classics you've been meaning to read, check out his Goodreads. Dick, Heinlein, Clarke, Vonegut, and Thompson. Not to mention a whole bevy of folk tales.
I'd follow his recommendations if I could just keep my grubby hands off Lovecraft, King and Barker. Not to mention all the comics I read. Ellis, Ennis and Morrison (Glad to see he gave We3 5 stars. Fucking masterpiece!) keep writing them faster than I can read them.
If you're looking for some good horror, I highly recommend F. Paul Wilson's The Keep.
I can't believe you got through both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
TRUE FACT: I have been where they filmed the movie version of 'The Keep'.
Also Iain Bank's non-scifi is superior I reckons.
english major, miskatonic. required reading. probably haven't touched them since.
"Use Of Weapons" is an excellent book. I didnt know it was an influence for "The Inalieble" though...
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