Two days ago, I received this in the mail:
For various reasons I was temporarily ever-so-slightly misty-eyed. Well-done boys, I’m SUPER proud of you!
Other books you might also like.
I’ve recently finished reading two other mind-expanding books:
The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin: Liu Cixin is a wildly popular Chinese science fiction author. I found this recently translated first edition of a trilogy to be an awesome first peek into modern Chinese science fiction. The translator, Ken Liu, managed to produce an English version of this story that still managed to bring across themes of Chinese history and culture. On top of that, you also get a computer consisting of 30 million soldiers arranged into inter-connected logic gates (think that’s far-fetched?), artificially intelligent quantum entangled photons (told you), and much more. I’ll be lining up as soon as the translations of part 2 and 3 appear.
I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer probably shortly after it was published in 1984. At that stage, I compensated for lack of internet by working my way through the local library, book by book. Through the succeeding years, as the internet came onto the scene, and cyberspace became more of a reality, I’ve re-read Neuromancer a number of times. Each time, it caused more goose-bumps than the previous.
In my eyes, Gibson already deserved his status as literary author many times over. With The Peripheral, he has shown, in an exceptionally suave and absolutely in-control way, that he is the final boss of modern writing. The number of mind-bending ideas that he develops, whilst fleshing out characters that feel more real than some real people, all the while masterfully having the reader ride along with the two protagonists and having us figure out the story along with them, is nothing short of amazing. (Yes people, I am positively gushing. It’s that good.)
Other news.
- The OSSSA core team has recently doubled in size. There are two of us now. Thanks to the extremely welcome addition, we are now actively busy gathering information on all open source software entities in South Africa, so that we can create the go-to resource for this. If you’re in SA, and you’re into OSS, please respond!
- Due to a whole team of intrepid Dutch adventurers with fairly concrete plans, please look for the Dutch Bicycle Repair and Pimping Shop at AfrikaBurn 2015, because you might just find us!
Have a great week people, wherever you are!