Book 8 - Ready Player Revelation Space

Film watching tonight !

Book reading yesterday. Book 8 in my attempt at reading 52 books in the year was Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

I have to be honest, I nearly gave up on this book before getting halfway through ...

There is a huge amount of scene setting at the start of the book to get the various characters into the place where the action starts to happen. That takes up maybe 45% of the start of the book and it was a struggle to get through that. That (and Idle Champions) was probably why it took me so long to get through this one.

Would I recommend it having said that ? Actually yes, because when it does spark into life and get going, it's an excellent book. The threads set up in that first half of the book combine together at the end for .... dare I say it .... revelations.

What's it about ? It's set in the same dysfunctional scifi universe as Chasm City, after that system was wrecked by the Melding Plague. We start off by following a superior archaeologist in his quest to find out what happened to the long dead previous inhabitants of the planet he has ended up on. And that's not superior in terms of archaeology skill, it's superior in terms of his attitude to the rest of the world. It makes him a compelling but definitely not lovable character.

There is Khouri, the assassin with an unfortunate past, a definitely superbly murky present and a future ? (Read the book to find out about that future !)

We have the lighthugger (big interstellar space ship) Nostalgia for Infinity commanded by a moribund Captain who is a victim of the Melding Plague, plus the Triumvirate of Sajaki, Ilia and Hegazi along with a few more characters.

And more going on as well ....

A great book when it gets going, I was finding it hard to put down the iPad (Kindle app!) at a suitable time for going to bed. But it does take a long time to get its characters into the place where amazing things happen.

My next book isn't on the Kindle, it's a paperback (Michael Crichton, Sphere). I watched the film a few years ago and enjoyed it, I'm very curious to read what the original was like.

Tonight's film and birthday outing for Cyberkitten (happy birthday for the weekend CK !) was Ready Player One.

I didn't have high hopes for this one, I thought it was going to be a cash in on the nostalgia of 30+ years of gaming. In other words, not much story and a lot of raiding of other people's work.

It didn't feel like a raid, it felt more like a love letter to all of that pop culture that some of us have lived through for all that time, with actually quite a decent story wrapping it all up. It was a joyous trip through this future world as the characters were carried along by the narrative.

A lighthearted tale and one that I will definitely enjoy again at some point in the (possibly near?) future.

There weren't many people in the cinema though, perhaps people have been turned off this one by its marketing. Perhaps people are avoiding it due to feeling that it might have been a shameless, faceless, charmless cash in (I'm lookin' at you Pixels and Emoji Movie which I've never seen but am commenting on anyway!). It'll be a pity if people miss out on this one because it was genuinely good fun.

That's it for me for tonight, since wrenching my shoulder again last week I've been on and off with pain coming and going. But I'm feeling ok now. A decent feel good movie can have that effect !