Search

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Well, it's Spring Break here. It's also St. Patty's Day. And it's SXSW... I'm just about to get summoned downtown by the Professor and her friends from BCS. I hear it's a zoo down there.

It's been some time since my last update. Since then, I've only finished one book. Review forthcoming. But a lot of other interesting stuff has happened.

We are all preparing to move out of theWARWICK. After a good 8 years of operation, theWARWICK will be closing it's doors on April 15th. Perhaps on that day, I'll write a retrospective. :)

I have found a new house, and am involved in contract negotiations right now... With luck, the Professor and I will be moving into a snazzy new place in the next few months. I'm very excited!

Mike is off to get an apartment and seems excited. Robert & his "Circle A" friends are looking for a house to rent out. That will be a lot of fun... Except for whomever gets stuck footing the bill.

Right now I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House. But a few days ago I finished another book. Review follows:


Darwin's Children by Greg Bear

Darwin's Children is the sequel to the very interesting 2000 book, Darkwin's Radio. Unlike Darwin's Radio, Darwin's Children sucks.

The premise of the novels has to do with endrogenous retroviruses, which are sleeping in our DNA. They are activated, and cause mutations that lead to the next stage of evolution, in which a new species of children are born. This is all pretty interesting, to a point. But where Darwin's Radio takes us up to the point where the first child is born, Darwin's Children deals with the next 18 years, in which a repressive government takes over, and endless political manouvering ensues.

The book is very badly written, below even the minimal style bar that Greg Bear had set in works like Blood Music or Eon. The premesis is muddled. The supernatural plays a role, in a literal Deus Ex Machina scene where the presence of God is revealed in an MRI machine. The action is haphazard. The suspense is non-existant. The characters are unclear. (Even at the end of the book, I kept having to ask myself, "who is this person again.")

In fact, I'll not waste an further words on this book. It sucked. For 400 pages. End of story.

-tf