Ravenweb Blog

Half-Life 2: Episode One advances the Half-Life story and launches the first in a new, three-part series that leads far beyond City 17. Episode One offers a new single player experience, and is designed to be four to six hours in length. Stepping into the hazard suit of Dr. Gordon Freeman, you face the immediate repercussions of your actions in City 17 and the Citadel. Alyx Vance and her robot, Dog, will accompany you in your efforts to aid in the human resistance's desperate battle against the totalitarian alien menace of the Combine.

DeLillo's Underworld is a long, dense novel that is not for everyone but rewards those who enjoy the author's dry humor and signature vignettes. The text begins on October 4, 1951, the date when Bobby Thompson hit the home run in the ninth inning, thereby winning the pennant for the Giants against the Dodgers. This was on the same date, by coincidence, when the Russians exploded their first nuclear bomb. These two themes, baseball and the Cold War, run throughout the book as dozens of characters and hundreds of incidents intersect and nearly connect but never quite fit together. Ultimately, for me, the book didn't work. There were quite simply too many characters and too many shifts in narrative time to process for one novel. I ended up lost in the pages - in the cacophony of historical events, human emotions, and snippets of dialogs.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a sparsely beautiful novel that tells the story of two Catholic priests in New Mexico. The novel's impact is in how it is as much a story about the priests spreading their faith as it is a living marker of the historical American Southwest, that vast territory of red hills, arroyos, and unforgiving desert.

Condemned: Criminal Origins is a survival horror first-person action game that casts you in the role of a detective tracking a serial killer who is killing other serial killers. The game boasts astounding, creepy presentation, and it plays like a gritty police procedural that is more like "Seven" than "CSI". The game departs from the traditional action shooter in that more often than not you do not use firearms but instead whatever instruments you can find to engage in close quarters melee combat. Weapons include pipes, axes, crowbars, two-by-fours, and the occasional pistol or shotgun. This results in a visceral, even unsettling, game experience where the combat feels as desperate as the condemned buildings through which the story leads you. The story is well-plotted but doesn't quite deliver the revelatory moment or satisfying climax to which it builds. There's also a fair bit of repetition in the game's uniform dark and dreary levels. Overall, though,...

The Big U is an early Stephenon novel and is definitely not his best, but the text does provide an energetic and inventive satire of 80s university life. What's most interesting about the book is coming across the many rough ideas in their incipient states that Stephenson would go on to flush out in some of his later, more polished works.

The End of Oil provides a compelling analysis of the current oil and coal dominated energy industry and a stark preview of the looming energy revolution. Roberts examines all aspects of energy, from the peaking of oil reserves, to the relationship of energy resources and geopolitics, to the effect of current energy consumption on global climate, and to the political and economic challenges in transitioning from oil and coal to alternate energy sources.

Use of Weapons is set around the edges of Banks' utopian star-civilization the Culture and focuses on Cheradenine Zakalwe, an elite agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances division and a tortured soul, haunted and scarred by his past. The novel explores the layers of Zakalwe by shifting between a traditional forward timeline narrative in which Zakalwe undertakes a political stabilization mission for the Culture, and a second timeline that moves steadily backward in time, following Zakalwe's career as an agent for Special Circumstances, back to his recruitment by Special Circumstances and early war experiences, and, finally, back to his formative years. The net effect is a stellar, literate SF novel. Definitely recommended.

Go Ask Alice is a classic diary by an anonymous teen about the pressures of adolescence, drugs, and sex. The text, presented entirely as a series of diary entries, chronicles the unnamed diarist's experimentation with drugs and sex, her eventual drug addiction, and the consequent exalting highs and excruciating lows she experiences. Go Ask Alice was first published in 1971, and though there is still some question as to whether this diary is real or fictional, the continued popularity of the text indicates that it has made a profound impact on millions of readers during the more than 25 years it has been in print.

Four suicidal depressives, meaning to do themselves in, meet on the roof of Topper's House — a traditional London suicide haunt — and instead form a pact in author Nick Hornby's comic fourth novel. What follows is a narrative of the next ninety days in which the four would-be suicidals become friends (sort of) and stay involved in one another's lives. At its heart, this novel is not about suicide but what happens when you don't kill yourself, and the well-executed and thoughtful tale Hornby tells never digs too deep and simultaneously doesn't denigrate the seriousness of its characters' dilemmas.

This volume gathers twenty-one Dick stories, including "Faith of Our Fathers", "Paycheck", "The Minority Report", and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale". This is a good, representative Dick collection that spans some of his early works to his later classics. All of the famous Dick tropes are in this collection: paranoia, shifting realities, pulp culture, dystopia, authoritarian states, and machines.

Tehanu is the fourth novel in the Earthsea Cycle and is more of a simple and understated story than the previous Earthsea novels. The story revolves mostly around Tenar, now a widow facing obscurity and loneliness, who rescues a badly burned girl from her abusive parents. Ged, now broken and without magic, seeks refuge with Tenar and attempts to learn how to live with the great loss he suffered at the end of the trilogy. Overall, while I appreciate Le Guin's attempts at infusing new threads of feminism into the Earthsea series, I found the novel a bit boring and bland.

The World is Flat has been over-hyped a bit, but I think overall the text is well-researched and provides a good overview of globalism and the implications of a global, flat world. Friedman does maintain a clear technological determinist bias throughout the text, but I think he's pretty upfront about that and does a good job at presenting contrasting viewpoints to his arguments.

Imperial Ambition includes a collection of Chomsky interviews with radio journalist David Barsamian. In these exchanges, Chomsky offers his views and analysis on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, US propaganda, and the US doctrine of preemptive strikes against so-called rogue states.

You can likely read My Friend Leonard as a true-life story, a wildly embellished memoir, or as a work of pure fiction, shamelessly masquerading as a memoir. Ostensibly a continuation of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard focuses on Frey's attempt to start over after rehab, and his relationship with Leonard, a classic Italian impresario who Frey befriended in rehab. The problem with the text is not in the writing or the story -- the text is engaging and evokes emotion, although it lacks the edge of A Million Little Pieces. No, the issue with the book, at least for me, was that I found it impossible to separate the narrative and story from the recent revelation that Frey embellished many details in his writing. One of the inside pages in My Friend Leonard states in very small type that "some details and sequences of events have been changed". That added to what we know Frey altered made me wonder while reading the text what really happened and ...

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992), was the author of the speculative fiction classic Foundation Series, and hundreds of other books, spanning nearly every subject, from fiction to science to history to humor. http://www.ravenweb.net/writing/isaac-asimov/

Ranting Nerd is a blog with rants about science, technology, politics, science fiction, and whatever else comes to mind.

The Schopenhauer Cure is a wide-ranging and exhilarating exploration of psychotherapy, philosophy, and humanity. The plot centers on Julius Hertzfeld, a successful therapist in San Francisco, who is shocked to learn that he suffers from terminal cancer. Moved to reassess his life's work, he contacts Philip Slate, a former patient who he was unable to cure of sex addition. Much to Julius's surprise, Philip has become a philosophical counselor and requests that Julius provide him with the supervisory hours he needs to obtain a license to practice. In return, Philip offers to tutor Julius in the work of Schopenhauer. Eventually they strike a bargain: Julius agrees to supervise Philip, provided that Philip first joins his therapy group. What follows is Philip's entrance into the weekly therapy group and a gripping exploration of loss, suffering, sexual desire, death, and the search for meaning. Throughout the novel, Yalom weaves Schopenhauer's life and work into the na...

The Tony Award winning comedic stage show Dame Edna was in Buffalo this past week, and I was fortunate enough to attend one of the shows. For the unfamiliar, Dame Edna is one of the alter egos of Australian actor Barry Humphries. Edna's humor is decidedly British in its acid-laced, sugar-coated content. Edna does a great job of interacting and playing to the audience, including calling out latecomers, bantering with the crowd, and bringing a couple onstage for some marriage counseling. In the end, it was all silly, hilarious fun.

Consider Phlebas is the first of Iain Banks' speculative fiction Culture novels. It is space opera on a grand scale, set in the middle of an immense war between two galactic empires, the Culture and the Idirans. The plot centers around Horza, a humanoid shapechanging agent of the Iridans, who undertakes a clandestine mission to a forbidden planet in search of an intelligent, fugitive machine whose actions could alter the course of the conflict. The book is very compelling, in large part because it is morally ambiguous. While Horza despises the machine intelligences and moral laziness of The Culture, his embrace of and alliance with the Iridans reveals them to be intolerant, racist, religious zealots.

Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, February 5, her birthday. Friedan asserted in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals. The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.