John Karabaic > Recent Status Updates

Engagingly and elegantly written, with occasional laugh out loud moments. Extra points for an actual emacs reference (in literary fiction!) and the very true assertion that Cinderella is an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping.

What you learn from the first part of this book is not only the degree to which Nazi's censored foreign reporters, but that both William Shirer and Tess Stiberitz, his wife & a photojournalist, are legit badasses.

Lovely and strange.

If you think 2016 is the first time a foreign intelligence service tried to influence American policy, think again.

Casdorph says, male military officers were told to accept female officers as "social equals", but omits that a male officer did not have to obey the order of a female officer of superior rank. He says the Little Steel labor contract "gave the country a welcome breather from unsettling labor disputes", ignoring continual coal strikes and inequitable contracts.

Kinda Pollyanna.

TIL that Frank Borman did not move his bowels for 8 days in orbit on Gemini 7. He used sheer will power to avoid voiding into a bag.

This is so good. Raw, honest, meticulous.

A bit confusing so far. If Harrison writes again about how hard it is to depict 10 dimensions in 4, I'm going to throw the book against a tesseract. Some great images and a compelling mystery. I'm still engaged and reading.

More exposition than I like, but it's moving along.

I'm starting to think this may be the best book I'll read this year.

Very promising start!

Enjoying this immensely. It has samples of work about Lincoln throughout, mixed in with a suspenseful Buddhist-influenced ghost story, like a hip-hop thriller.

Needs a bit of editing, but accurate & brutal so far.

Ken, I love ya, but you know EMP's from nukes only happen in an atmosphere with an ionosphere, right? Obviously not.

Not sure I buy the "soup-free", in the sense of hormoneless, description of disembodied human consciousness, but it is fun. I think any "soup" would have to be simulated, too.

I have loved all of Macleod's work. I love this so far. He has a good chance of being designated Edinburgh SF Author Most Likely to Fill The "Culture" Hole Left By Iain Bank's Death by me.

‪"He understood for the the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands."‬

Delightful.

Getting an excellent perspective on the decision to use the bomb on Japan.

Firebombing of Hamburg. I need a drink.

TIL Western Union used to sell low-priced Kiddygrams, telegrams with canned text like "Brush your teeth!"

One of the greatest love stories ever written.

Richard Rhodes makes a masterful simile about the relationship between chemists & physicists in the quest for nuclear fire, when the chemists find evidence for fissioning uranium.

"It was as though a maker of hand axes had discovered fire by striking flints while the sorcerers pondered how to harness lightning. He might hardly believe his luck and urgently seek their authentication even though he knew what burned his hand was real."

Just past Hitler's rise to power. Given current events, nauseated. Rhodes knows how to keep you reading by dramatically giving the right details at the right time on all the context of the story. Did you know Fritz Haber gave the same excuse for using poison gas as we did for using the a-bomb? "Saving lives by shortening the war."

Such a great book on so many levels

I am loving this. Like a literary Stephenson.

It's like watching a slow motion accident; I cannot look away.



This has gotten so ridiculous--and borderline racist--that I can't stop reading.


Oh , and there's a drug plot point that seems to indicate neither Mr Ctein nor Mr Sandford know much about LSD.


It's so bad it's good!

Would the USA name a ship the Richard M Nixon? Would a US President tell the captain of said ship, "I want the credit" for their mission?

There's a whole lot of bad dialog, odd science, odder tech, SF cliche and plot-driven character shortcuts.

At this point I want to finish it just to see whether the cliche-driven drinking game I've invented just for this book gives me alcohol poisoning.