Oz’s House of the Evil Dead

So, I’m fluctuating between bouts of intense pain and semi-concious bliss due to having my troublesome tooth yanked out of my head yesterday. I decided that now was an apt time to write a review of Anathem, the ‘new’ book from Neal Stephenson. The reason it is apt is because the main plot of the book (at least in my opinion) is all about how reality is percieved and interacted with, and from my current state of drug-induced euphoria – that seems like a great idea.

Lots of professional reviewers have either written glowing reviews or intensely critical ones, mostly dealing with how unoriginal this book is. I agree, the ‘story’ in this book is highly unoriginal, I’m going to break it down nice and simple for you:

Simple guy and wise master living in isolation with a monk order. Wise master is removed from monk order as he saw something he shouldn’t, simple guy investigates with his monk friends into what old master saw and they are all removed too. They go in to the big bad world and have an adventure to stop bad thing from blowing up the planet.

Now, that’s obviously not the entire story as the book is 900+ pages long, but if a hollywood scriptwriter was going to pitch it as a movie to a studio, that’s pretty much what the summary would be. As I said, it’s a story that we’ve all seen before. (continue reading…)

Most people would be familiar with the Night’s Dawn trilogy when you mention the name of Author Peter F. Hamilton. The title of this post is the opening line from the 2nd book of the second trilogy of his Commonwealth Saga. What am I on about?

(continue reading…)