A Couple of Books

Just finished a couple of books. The first was Ceres Storm by David Herter. Its main character is a young boy who over the course of the book discovers his heritage. It was a fun read, and quite short with only 250 pages in small format hardcover. The book reminded me a lot of Poul Anderson's The City and the Stars, which I must have read about 100 years ago. If you enjoyed that book, then you're probably going to like Ceres Storm. (This is supposed to be the first in a series, but you can stop with this one, if you want.)

The second book was a piece by Cory Doctorow. This guy is a maverick, what with publishing his manuscripts online and arguing for a new take on copyright. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom itself is a vision of a utopian future where those kids with all those cool ideas that started with Wikipedia have apparently taken over the world. Money, death, and taxes are all a thing of the past. That doesn't mean that there's no unhappiness left: people are still human, in spite of made to order bodies and a kind of hypergoogle interface built into their heads. Like Standard Eastern Tribe I enjoyed this book a lot. (Another author whose style and ideas remind me a lot of Doctorow is Charles Stross.)