My Random Rants

In a nutshell A time travelling serial killer Harper Curtis is found by plucky Kirby who refused to die when killed. This is tightly written with great writing and an amazing eye for detail. The fascinating bit was how the time travel played out. It is amazing how much personality Lauren Beukes imbues in the prose and the characters. The victims are fleshed out with just the right amount of character development so that they further the plot rather than impede it. All in all a great read and a mystery I greatly enjoyed reading and unraveling. You can buy the Shining Girls here .

People talk a lot about how Sanskrit would make the perfect programming language. They claim its rigorousness and flexibility make it the ideal choice but everyone fails to grasp the implications. Mostly they speak as if they wish to make Sanskrit a programming language. If Sanskrit were a programming language back in the day its greatest feature would be the fact that everyone spoke it which meant that everyone was a programmer by default. There is no need to learn to code. However what this would imply would be the fact that the best talkers would be the best programmers and the best programmers would be wielders of power. This is of course why training Brahmins in the Vedas makes sense since childhood because every word they intone is potentially a program waiting to be executed. Let me give you an example of the power. There is this Shloka in Sanskrit which gives you the value of pi when looked at with a few substitutions. These substitutions of course can be expressed as Sanskr...

There is a type of novel I like to call the Swashbuckler. A swashbuckler keeps you on the edge of your seat and has twists coming thick and fast which seem obvious in hindsight but totally unexpected when you first encounter them. The Lies of Locke Lamora is a Swashbuckler. It keeps you entertained and it draws you in to a world of thieves and confidence games in the city of Camorr. Locke Lamora is the Garrista of the Gentleman Bastards who specialize in thievery, duping the rich and playing confidence games. They plan an ambitious heist playing upon the greed of a certain Don. As expected complications arise as the Gentlemen Bastards get caught in a war for the Underbelly of Camorr. What sets The Lies of Locke Lamora is the execution of the plot, the deftness of the writing and the glorious city   of Camorr which is as rich a setting as I have encountered in fiction. Camorr reminded me of New Crobuzon of Bas Lag as I read about it with all its strange guilds, ma...

The Coldest War is the second part of the Milkweed trilogy and it is fantastic. The Coldest War takes place twenty years after the events of Bitter Seeds the first book in the cycle and this is not a book that can be gotten into without reading the first one. Whatever tragedy has been setup in the first one comes to fruition. Raybould Marsh, a hero of the war leaves the service only to get nothing in return but more misery. William the warlock begins his own personal vendetta and the military proceeds to carry out more dastardly deeds for the protection of the Great Britain. Even more than the first book, this part belongs to Gretel who is probably one of the most intimidating villains to grace the page manipulating everyone to her needs and ends and It all comes to head in a wondrous climax which makes perfect sense in hindsight but is difficult to predict whilst reading. There is odes of well orchestrated action all of which is beautifully setup but the overall atmosp...

Films are passive, you sit, watch and action happens. Novels are great but what the writer sees is not the image formed in your head.(This is a major benefit as well though) Comics combine both, the thrill of turning the pages and seeing what the writer sees at the same time. You get to fill the gaps between sequential art.

There was a great quote by China Mieville when Kraken came out. It went something like “Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.” and Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis is one of those which is based on the completely absurd notion about what would happen if Germany had X Men and Britain had Warlocks during the World War. It is an absurd notion brought to life because  Ian Tregillis treats it very seriously and fleshes out the novel with a great deal of though. I know I made the reference to X Men earlier but this is a war novel more than anything else and its a cracking good read.  I found it hard to believe that this is Tregillis's first novel. I particularly enjoyed the Ravens in the interludes and the way they were weaved through the story. I was hooked from start to finish. The characters are well written and their arcs are structured so that everyone seems to be doing the righ...