Reading

N.Y. City III, Straight, 1981 - H.R. Giger

Tam recommended Idoru. I bought it a couple of months ago and I'm finally getting around to reading it and it's pretty great. 

There is a long section where Chia is meandering through an airport. It was so long I noticed, it was also very accurate. 

Now we're in Tokyo and when Laney looks out of his hotel room window he can see the newer nanotech buildings and they remind him of paintings of New York that were done by Giger. Giger is the guy who designed the stuff for Alien, the science fiction movie from 1979. I'm looking at these paintings and I'm thinking, yes, that is that could easily be the result of AI designing buildings. Modern high-rises are designed so that every floor is identical. Make each floor the same as possible as every other floor. Makes it really easy to draw up the plans and easy to build but if you got AI drawing the plans making alterations, it's no big deal cuz it can keep track of it all, right? So you can see that we're building this high-rise and some guy says 'I want six floors for a data center'. Okay, that's going to require some modifications. We'll run some cables on the outside and you can have your six floors. And then somebody else says 'I need three floors for Cold Storage for frozen food' and you say 'sure, we can do that', but that makes more complications and now you've got these two floors with vastly different requirements. We're going to have to reroute some plumbing and we're going to have to do this and do that but the AI is fine, we've got rules on how to deal with all that and the AI just does it and you don't have to waste a bunch of people's time fretting over details.

I finished reading Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. I started reading it and said 'this story sounds familiar' and then I went checked and it turns out I not only read it, I posted about it five years ago. I read it anyway, I didn't remember enough of the story to spoil it and it's a pretty good story. A little too intense for me maybe. Seems every couple of pages our hero is running into life threatening catastrophe and I would have to put the book down for a while. Guess I'm funny that way. 

Anyway, I finished the book and then there's some teasers tacked on to the back for following volumes  in the series. I'm reading them and I found a couple of passages that are pretty great:

Tool of War - Tool is a man-dog hybrid, a soldier.

Chapter 2 page 1 

        Tool's ears pricked, tracking distant gunfire, the comfortable conversational chatter of the Drowned Cities. 

        It was a polyglot language, but Tool understood all of its voices. The ratchet exclamations of AK-47s and M-16s. The blunt roar of 12- and 10- gauge shotguns. The authoritative crack of 30-06 hunting rifles, and a snapping of .22s. And of course, over it all, the incoming streak of 999s, the voice that ended all other combat sentences with booming punctuations.

        It was a familiar conversation that flowed back and forth - ask an answer insult and retort - but over the last few weeks the conversation had changed. Increasingly the Drowned City spoke Tool's language only. The bullet patois of his troops, the battle pack of the battle slang of his pack.

Chapter 2 page 8

        Drowned Cities warlords had always valued the malleable qualities of youth. Savage loyalty was an affection of children; they're eagerness for clarity of purpose was easily shaped. All the soldiers of the drowned cities had been recruited young, brainwashed early, given etiologies and absolute truths that demanded no nuance or perspective. Right and wrong. Traders and patriots. Good and Evil. Invaders and Natives. Honor and Loyalty. 

        Righteousness.