They can't all be winners...

Hi,

Let's do a couple of book reviews shall we?

First up: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben. As you might guess, it's a book that discusses the impact of our current way of life and what we might do to minimize it. Bill is a big believer in local/urban agriculture, public transportation and local/networked solar power grids. He's not necessarily anti-suburban, although he does feel that suburbs are currently very poorly designed.

I suppose it's the nature of what he's arguing -- that there will be a variety of local solutions to local problems, but this also means there's no "big picture" view of what a local economy might look like. It also glosses over a lot of the problems that you might have with small, highly independent communities. He doesn't discuss communication in any great detail which is a shame because being able to stay informed and in-touch will go a long ways towards helping these communities succeed.

So, overall, a so-so book, especially if you've been keeping up with this stuff.

Right, so next we have The Last Legion by Chris Bunch. This is the book that I'm pretty sure I'd read sometime in the past. It's pretty clear now that I started reading it and just quit somewhere early in the first half. Is it a bad book? No, but it's not a fantastic book either. It's just pretty standard military sci-fi grist. It's part of a short series of books all around the same theme of two guys who enlist in the Space Force and get dumped on a backwater planet. Then the Confederation goes dead and they're trapped on the frontier with tons of enemies all around them. In this particular story, the enemies are a bunch of religious fanatics.

So, like I say, only so-so. The soldiers get a hell of a lot of hot sex (any former soldiers want to verify that for me?). It's supposed to be sci-fi, but technology that you would expect to be present (or just a better version of what we have now) is strangely absent. So basically it's Vietnam, but with anti-grav vehicles rather than helicopters. They don't even make extensive use of drones or unmanned vehicles. C'mon, people, it's not that hard.


We'll see what the next batch brings.
Tom

They can't all be winners...

Hi,

Let's do a couple of book reviews shall we?

First up: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben. As you might guess, it's a book that discusses the impact of our current way of life and what we might do to minimize it. Bill is a big believer in local/urban agriculture, public transportation and local/networked solar power grids. He's not necessarily anti-suburban, although he does feel that suburbs are currently very poorly designed.

I suppose it's the nature of what he's arguing -- that there will be a variety of local solutions to local problems, but this also means there's no "big picture" view of what a local economy might look like. It also glosses over a lot of the problems that you might have with small, highly independent communities. He doesn't discuss communication in any great detail which is a shame because being able to stay informed and in-touch will go a long ways towards helping these communities succeed.

So, overall, a so-so book, especially if you've been keeping up with this stuff.

Right, so next we have The Last Legion by Chris Bunch. This is the book that I'm pretty sure I'd read sometime in the past. It's pretty clear now that I started reading it and just quit somewhere early in the first half. Is it a bad book? No, but it's not a fantastic book either. It's just pretty standard military sci-fi grist. It's part of a short series of books all around the same theme of two guys who enlist in the Space Force and get dumped on a backwater planet. Then the Confederation goes dead and they're trapped on the frontier with tons of enemies all around them. In this particular story, the enemies are a bunch of religious fanatics.

So, like I say, only so-so. The soldiers get a hell of a lot of hot sex (any former soldiers want to verify that for me?). It's supposed to be sci-fi, but technology that you would expect to be present (or just a better version of what we have now) is strangely absent. So basically it's Vietnam, but with anti-grav vehicles rather than helicopters. They don't even make extensive use of drones or unmanned vehicles. C'mon, people, it's not that hard.


We'll see what the next batch brings.
Tom