David > Recent Status Updates

What is it with Abercrombie's fascination with spit?

In Part 3 our heroes pair off into the obvious matches. Except maybe Jakob, who remains MIA? Really enjoyable banter, here. These characters are typecast, but I just love them. Still feeling Baldur's Gate 3 vibes, and I'm there for it.

Abercrombie sure can write an epic fight scene! Part 2 ends with our heroes in quite a pickle.

Battle #2. At sea! While sinking! And on fire! Vigga hates sea food!

"Nothing but the Truth" (inside the illusionist's house) is a fabulous weave of past and present. It's a bit jarring to hop heads within a chapter, but I see what Abercrombie is doing here, and it's quite effective. And now we know (and love) our anti-heroes even more.

Annnd it's a side quest! Eating this up. The dialog is snappy, irreverent, and just plain fun. And then we get lines like this: "Sunny squatted beside the bodies. Looked like they'd died in each other's arms, which was sort of heartwarming, till she realized they were both holding knives, which was the opposite. Heartcooling?"

Each short chapter takes the perspective of one of the questers, so we get to know them all fairly well. Their quick banter is what keeps me engaged. I love this motley crew!

Cozy meet cute audiobooks are ok for road trips, I guess. At least it's fun when we both chuckle at the same time. But this narrator is grating on my ears. And who pronounces gazebo with a short 'e'?

The chapter "Least Worst Choices" contains some of the best intraparty dialog I've ever read. Holy frak y'all. What if your NPCs carried on entire conversations among themselves?

Whew! And Vigga saves the day. How I love these characters! In my headcanon, they exist fully formed as a Baldur's Gate III party.

The first battle! Balthazar the Magician is frakking hilarious.

These characters! I'm already hooked. Brother Diaz is cut from the same hapless cloth as _Canticle_'s Brother Francis.

Lol, love Abercrombie's over the top descriptions: "His clipped hair was iron-grey with two great scars through it, and his clipped beard was iron-grey with at least three scars through it, and his grey brows were more scar than brow. He looked like a man who had spent half a century falling down a mountain. Perhaps one made of axes."

Welcome to the Middle Ages (?), where everything is filthy, religious, corrupt, and rife with dark humor!

Look, it's Raph! (A little *too* Raph.)

Well then.

"I am the Alchemist." This hit with a lot less force than I suspect Neal intended.

Another roadtrip with the wife, another "Stories from Among the Stars" podcast from Macmillan Audio.

Annnd now we get an info dump on CryptNet...

Ok, the thief wheel was pretty cool.

My wife loves to make fun of Mara's head monologues, lol.

I see now why Stephenson has Hackworth check out for a decade at the hands of the Drummers' 'sites: he needs him around for the coming of age of the Primer gals.

Another cassic Stephenson: "Fiona..., so self-conscious about her still linear figure, still devoid of the second derivatives that add spice to life."

The Drummers' disturbing ceremony calls to mind a similar (though less incendiary) scene in Oryx and Crake, complete with technicolor "glow sticks", lol.

So far so good, this is classic, heady Stephenson, and I'm loving it: steeped with visceral metaphor and mathy similes, a future extrapolated (sometimes farcically) to 11, and moderately paced before the spine crease, with different character groups set up to converge at some point and all tied to the titular primer, which is not so much a Macguffin as a mirror darkly.

OMG Hackworth's imagined ingredients for the bottle of McWhorter's Original Condiment.