What do you do when you’ve successfully gotten a demo to Mobile World Congress and you want to reward yourself?

Go order a little light reading of course!

Amazon are really getting to like it when I log in at this stage I think

Although, the more recent book purchase was with The Book Depository and between lower prices and free shipping, they actually worked out cheaper than Amazon did (and thanks to Neal Asher for that tip). They weren’t cheaper for every book though – ironically the science fiction books I was looking at were more expensive – but for the programming books I was looking for, they came in about seven or eight euros under amazon.com and their shipping is about six weeks faster than amazon’s, for free. So we’ll see in a day or three when the books arrive if they’re as good as they look…

…as a Neal Asher fan.

Well, not the worst thing in the world (though it wasn’t Don Corleone’s pizza shop, that goombah wouldn’t know good pizza if you threw it at his sister), he writes good stuff. By the way, if you’ve not read his stuff yet, don’t start with Hilldiggers like I did since it’s the tail end of the chronology of most of his work, start with Prador Moon and work onwards:

• Prador Moon
• The Shadow of the Scorpion
• Gridlinked
• The Line of Polity
• Brass Man
• Polity Agent
• Line War
• The Skinner
• The Voyage of the Sable Keech
• Orbus
• Hilldiggers

For those who enjoy Neal Asher’s science fiction books and have any questions they’d like to ask him, he’s taking questions right now over on his blog…

Non-spoiler comment: Go see it, it’s good. Not brilliant if you’ve read any science fiction where the math works, but good nonetheless.

Spoilers after the break…

Okay, so first, perspective. Go watch a bad movie or a popcorn movie and afterwards you either think “that was fun” or “that sucked”. There’s no fine detail, no nitpicking, because a movie has to get above a certain threshold of intelligence before you go from “gah, this sucks” to “that wouldn’t work because…”. Moon makes it past that threshold. The problem is, it then doesn’t commit fully in the setup of the story, and it out-and-out chickens out completely from logic in the last few minutes to give a Disney ending.

The good news is that at least some of the obvious gaffes are easily overlookable as being constraints imposed by filming rather than mistakes per se. The gravity, for example, is never portrayed as being less than Earth’s all through the film, and while that’s not jarring inside the habitation modules of the moonbase, it’s very obvious when watching the scenes set on the surface, and there’s a lot of those scenes for visual effect (and yes, they’re very pretty, just not very real – it’s like looking at a painting of a unicorn).

The bad news is that the other mistakes range all over the place from fundamental – the economics of the setup don’t work – to visual – we’re treated to loving-yet-impossible shots of the earth hanging in the star-studded sky. Actually, in at least one shot, the Earth is so large that the moon would need to be approaching if not inside the Roche limit, which would make for a visually interesting ending if nothing else…

Some of the gaffes are against even basic common … Read the rest