After seeing the rush of new reviews for Infoquake, I decided to do a round of vanity Googling and found several more that I had been unaware of. Yes, I know how unusual it is for me to blog three times in one day. But don’t worry, after today I promise I’ll go back to sporadically throwing out blog pieces about random topics at no fixed interval.
The book cover for Indian Larry: Chopper Shaman here has no relation to any of these book reviews. I just stumbled upon it while Googling and found it amusing. Tell me Indian Larry isn’t the coolest guy on the planet. Go ahead, tell me. No, I don’t believe you. You’re lying.
Now, the new reviews:
Graeme Flory of Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review recently reviewed The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two, and called my story “Mathralon” one of his two favorites in the collection. “George Mann’s second collection of science fiction makes for some enthralling reading of other worlds and the people who inhabit them,” says Graeme. “…My favourite stories were Dan Abnett’s ‘Point of Contact’ and David Louis Edelman’s ‘Mathralon’, two tales that leave the reader in no doubt as to how cold and lonely our universe can be.”
Not really a review, but the Antiaging Wellness Blog uses Infoquake as a starting point for a brief essay about biological programming. “In reading through the programs used in Infoquake, it is hard not to ask oneself, are these not the very mechanisms that the body is designed to control itself, through our hormonal and neurological pathways.”
Don D’Ammassa apparently long ago posted a capsule outtake review of Infoquake, which I completely failed to notice at the time. Says Don: “Lots of interesting speculation and a plausible and interesting plot. I found the prose a bit awkward from time to time but not so much that it significantly interfered with my enjoyment of the story.”
Some Amazon reviewer apparently has been using his copy of Infoquake as a makeshift Frisbee. Says Ray A.R. “Abe” in his 1-star review: “This is one of two supposedly highly rated books I read lately that were completely awful. I read the whole thing but wished I’d stopped after the third time I threw the book across the room. Take out the technojunk and this is nothing but a subpar novel, weak on character, weak on plot. Suffice to say I’ll never read another thing written by this awful author.” FYI, the other highly rated book that “Abe” disliked was Pat Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind.
Continuing my bad streak of reviews on the Barnes & Noble page for Infoquake, Karmen Roth echoes Abe’s sentiments about the book: “Very unoriginal, poorly written and chock full of junk technotalk that serves no purpose. By the end, there wasn’t a single character I cared about and the story didn’t seem to go anywhere.” To which I say: Oh yeah? Well, wait until you read MultiReal. It’s even more unoriginal, more poorly written, and every single word is junk technotalk that not only serves no purpose, but actively finds out your purpose and sabotages it.