Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

It's a hot summer in London at the moment, grey humid skies in the mornings, that break by lunchtime and then clear for the rest of the day. While hawkida may have the thunderstorms we're hoping for here, there's no sign of them yet. And I have another day out at Bromley in a very very hot little room full of computers, consultants and clients.

About a week ago, on a glorious evening, I was walking back across the new Hungerford footbridge, and had the digicam in my pocket. The city was bright lights all aound me, and even though it was nearly two hours since sunset there was still a bright glow in the western sky.

So I decided to try an experiment - a five shot panorama that I would stitch back together on the PC using some of the bundled software. To be honest, I'm actually quite impressed with the results. As it's Canon's software it knows just what the camera can do, and puts together a very nice image.




(Click on the picture for a larger view which will open in a new window. It's still only 94KB though....)

One of my listed interests in my LJ profile is "post-cyberpunk". It's hard to explain what I mean by post-cyberpunk, but I tend to describe it as books like Bruce Sterling's Distraction or John Courtney-Grimwood's alternate history futures, books that pick up on the tropes of cyberpunk, and twist them to the author's own ends. There is no movement, no Vincent Omniaveritas with a Cheap Truth for the noughties, just writers with a new set of tools.

Peter J Evans' Mnemosyne's Kiss is a post-cyberpunk novel, very much in a similar vein to John Courtney-Grimwood's Napoleonic futures. It's a thriller, a chase through a mid-21st century world that's more than a list of technologies. Evans' tomorrow isn't a utopia, and it isn't a dystopia. It's a world that has had more than its fair share of problems, but appears to have pulled through.

Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory, and memory is the key to Evan's story. Cassandra Lannigan was dead, and has returned minus most of her past. Rayenne is blotting out her past with memory crushing drugs. Between them they need to find out just what has caused them to be reluctant allies, and to understand who is chasing them and why. It's a chase that will take them from Africa to Central America and to space.

Evans' first novel is hopefully not going to be his last. Mnemosyne's Kiss is an enjoyable thriller, and far beyond "writing blurbs for anime videos". It's a pity that Virgin killed their SF line just after this book was published, as orphan books rarely gain the success they deserve.