Category: Books

I’ve recently been reading Ellen Kushner’s novels. They are novels of manners set in a fantasy world. This can be tricky, as one of the attributes of a novel of manners is that all the characters attempt to adhere to a set of social conventions which is never stated or even discussed. Doing this in…

Since I just mentioned it in a comment for my entry two days ago, I will mention the book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice, by Tom Slee. It’s an interesting book that applies game theory to simplified versions of real world problems. Although this is working at…

In the mid-90s Rob Walton wrote and self-published a very strange and funny comic book series called Ragmop. Sales apparently weren’t that great, and he cancelled it after (I think) ten issues. Recently he finished the storyline, and updated it for for 2006, and published the complete story in a book. It’s not possible to…

I was thinking about W. Richard Stevens the other day, when a colleague bought one of his books. I think the books he wrote are still unquestionably the best books on Unix programming and on TCP/IP. I first got in touch with him when I sent him a long list of errata for Advanced Unix…

I recently came across the science fiction writer Ken MacLeod. He has been writing for some time now, but for some reason I never read any of his work until a few months ago. He has a political slant which is, these days, unusual among science fiction writers: very left wing, taking communist ideas quite…