What am I reading

May be you're interested, may be you're not.

but here comes what's been keeping me awake at night - no, it's not my GF.



a book which is the follow up to 'The Lexus and the Olive tree' (which I haven't read yet). In essence, it talks about how the world market is being flattened by globalisation, and how this is going to impact our lives. Unfortunately, as many american books, after a good start he only stress the point over and over again...

So that after a while I lost interest and cast it aside. it's been lying on my kitchen floor for two weeks until my GF picked it up.

Now, it's been substituted by a very clever book by Peter F Hamilton, author of the acclaimed (by me, if nothing else) "Reality Disfunction" cycle. The new Book is called Pandora's Star (click here to read the prologue on the author's official web page)



As in the Reality Disfunction cycle, humans have spread along the galaxy but this time using WormHoles rather than Spaceships. The first chapter is very good indeed, and after that is a jump of three hundred years in the future, to when a neighboring (only one thousand light years away from Earth) star is secluded from the rest of the universe by mean of a gigantic shell of exotic matter - The Dyson Pair, since there are two of them, puzzle the human, which decide then to send their first faster-than-light spaceship to investigate - 'cause wormholes don't get that far without five or six intermediate steps, and each one needs very expensive infrastructure to be mantained.

The Universe is accurately detailed as in Hamilton's tradition, and reminds strongly of the Hyperion universe. However, it lacks credibility in the semi-fantasy social ordering, and the absolute monopoly over technologies such as Force fields and WormHoles transport - the Corporation who runs the latters can decide to cut everybody off the Commonwealth, and I can believe the governments would allow that. and if so, after three hundred years I'd expect the same technology to be available to everybody, so that worlds cut out would eventually form a kind of shadow commonwealth... mah... annyway, as Space Operas go, there's certainly a lot of meat and high-tech-babbling and gizmoes and stuff to keep me entertained. a tad below the previous saga, though. you can't beat the combination spaceships+zombies, can you?