Now Reading…
I was shopping for a 21st present last week and bought myself some books along the way, a bit of a mixed bag: Raymond E Feist’s new release, Talon of the Silver Hawk, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Kafka’s Metamorphosis (and other stories), and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The latter was referred to me ages ago by Fuzzy, who told me that unfortunately the book was now out of print but sent me an OCRed copy of it instead. However, the OCR copy was so riddled with digitisation typos, that it was pretty much unreadable. But as I was browsing the sci-fi shelves of Dymock’s, I spied one last aging copy of the book and snapped it up.
I didn’t regret it. I read through Metamorphosis (a short, curious, novelette) first, and then chased it up with Snow Crash. I’m not really going to go into what Crash is all about, other than its really easy to get immersed in the techno-world Stephenson portrays – just reading his descriptions of the dynamics of the Metaverse (sort of like a massively multiplayer VR world simulator) is entertaining enough. The story eventually gets tangled up in linguistics and neurolinguistic programming, religion, history, theories of propagation and obviously technology that’s all spun together in an intriguing fashion. The book is 10 years old, but there’s virtually nothing in it that shows its age – meaning that in the novel’s world of the future, nothing in it would be considered “old” or “outdated” in our reality’s world of the present. (Though the SmartWheels Y.T. uses did remind me of Segway technology :) If you ever come across this book, it’s a good read.
1:37pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
