Not! For Summer Reading

[la_samtyr]

If you decide to read this book at the beach... well, I can just about guaranee you'll walk into the ocean and hope Jaws is there, waiting and hungry. In fact, you just might want to give my whole review a pass, 'cause it's kinda depressing.

Cut for spoilers

The name of the book is "Quantico" by Greg Bear. This is "hard" science fiction btw, meaning there will be no rescue by Scotty. No, in this one, you're pretty much dealing with a "plausible" RL scenario which is only slightly fictionalised. So, you are wondering, just what is the book about? Mostly about how we (i.e., the government tends to focus on outside terrorism and forget about what's going on *inside* the country. Anthraxx-guy didn't just come from nowhere and he (or they?) is/are still around. Scared yet? How about all the kids in high-school who are playing around in labs? All the "cool" stuff they can do because of the vast amount of... "stuff" they can find online thanks to PCs -- not to mention how the technology is changing every two or three months. I mean face it, look at how cell phones have changed. Every few months they are "new & improved" until they aren't too much different from a ThinkPad (or whatever.) So you just know somewhere, someone is going to say: "Let's do this to that and see what happens. Oh look, it's almost like one of those (insert special effect here) from (insert name of film here). I wonder what will happen if..." Ok, I think you get the idea.

Comments

That bad, eh?

[boltonia.livejournal.com]

Have you read anything else by Greg Bear? I know I've got Darwin's Radio floating around somewhere that I never got around to reading. Now I'm wondering if it's worth the work of finding it. :)

Re: That bad, eh?

[samtyr.livejournal.com]

Oh it's not bad. I've read other books he's written (don't remember reading 'Darwin's Radio' though.) He's a good writer--it's just that sometime the hard scifi gets a little too RL for me.