I never read much scifi — Caterina, reading over my shoulder advises me that you will all sneer at me for saying 'scifi' rather than 'SF' ... grow up, you pieheads! — growing up, but I've read maybe a dozen scifi books by now. Permutation City was recommended to me by so many smart people that I was excited to pick it up. Almost done now. The first half was really excellent (I'll reserve judgment on the second part till I am done). This stuff should have been required reading in my undergrad philosophy of mind courses.

But, even in good books there are bad lines. And one of the reasons I was never attracted to SF (see?) in my younger days was this way of putting things:

It was bad enough that her true body was a pattern of computation resonating in a tiny portion of a otherwise silent crystalline pyramid which stretched into the distance for the TVC equivalent of thousands of light years.

Indeed.


` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `