Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: book reviews

  • Current Reading: Surface Detail

    I’m always eager to read the latest Iain M. Banks novel, especially if it involves the Culture, because not only is Banks a great writer but his ideas and settings are really good, and I think the Culture novels have made a significant theoretical contribution to science fiction. So they’re always a pleasure to read…

  • Additional Notes on Tolkien and Racism

    Comments on my last post have become bogged down in a debate that makes it hard to think clearly about the things I’ve been discussing in this series of posts about Tolkien and racism. Specifically, I think we’ve drifted off the main thread of the arguments, and become distracted from the issue of racial essentialism…

  • Current reading: Kraken, China Mieville

    Kraken, by China Mieville, is another “city-within-a-city” novel, like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and Mieville’s previous (rather lacklustre) effort, UnLunDun. In this case the city-wthin-the-city is a supernatural world of grafters, shonksters and magicians, all oriented around a plethora of cults who worship “cast-off” deities and apocalyptic visions, all residing within London. There are some parts…

  • Cyberpunk, post-modernism and orientalism 2: Race in Cyberpunk

    So I’m still struggling through the introduction of the PhD thesis I promised to read: understandable since the introduction is still going at page 50. In between my last post and this one I’ve had to wade through some sleep-inducing academic wank, but now I’ve got to the outline in the introduction of the importance…

  • Current reading: Tokyo Real

    This book, Tokyo Real by “Ryu” is something of a milestone for me! It’s the first Japanese book I have read completely, from beginning to end, in Japanese. This isn’t as much of an achievement as some might think, because it’s a “keitai shosetsu” (Mobile phone novel), I think, or at least it might as…

  • Cyberpunk, postmodernism and Orientalism 1: outline

    In my previous post I mentioned stumbling across an analysis of cyberpunk and orientalism, which interests me for a lot of reasons, and I’ve subsequently decided that since I’m living in the shadow of the zaibatsu without a job, maybe it’s time I embarked on a shady criminal information-hacking project, so I’m going to try…

  • Current reading: Altered Carbon

    The next in my line of eBook downloads, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is perhaps best described as a cyberpunk Space Opera. It is set in a near future, perhaps 500 years from now, in which humans have developed a technology of human mind replication. This technology is not cheap, but it enables people to…

  • Current reading: The Court of The Air

    Before moving back to Japan I bought an eBook Reader (more on which later) in hopes of reducing the size of my bookcases (they aren’t so portable, really). I then stumbled on the horrendous problem of choosing books to read, since doing so no longer involves browsing a bookshop. This is challenging. So in the…

  • Current reading: The Elfish Gene

    Before I left England I was reading this book, The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe, which I was given by my flatmate, but for some time I couldn’t get very far into it because it was so nasty. The book is essentially the biography of a man who grew up as a role-playing nerd during…

  • Current Reading: The Dresden Files

    In two months I’ve managed to fly through the series of books called The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. I’m up to book 9 already, and it’s been a ball. This series of books is about a Wizard called Harry Dresden, in modern day Chicago, who advertises himself in the yellow pages and takes on…