Covering the transformation of Kodacell (formerly Kodak and Duracell) into a network of tiny teams, journalist Suzanne Church goes to Florida and the inventors behind it all, Lester and Perry, who have more ideas than they know what to do with. The New Work takes off, with a mini-startup in every abandoned strip mall in [...]
Archive of posts filed under the books category.
WIJFR: Daemon
Gaming genius Matthew Sobol, the 34-year-old head of CyberStorm Entertainment, has just died of brain cancer, but death doesn’t stop him from initiating an all-out Internet war against humanity. When the authorities investigate Sobol’s mansion in Thousand Oaks, Calif., they find themselves under attack from his empty house, aided by an unmanned Hummer that tears [...]
WIJFR: The Wizardry Consulted
After rescuing the world from the creatures of darkness and chaos by applying a few computer logistics, Programmer and Systems Analyst Extraordinaire Wiz Zumwalt finds himself in another fix when he is kidnapped by dragons. “The Wizardry Consulted” by Rick Cook is my latest iPhone/Stanza read. Resuming the story three years after “The Wizardry Cursed,” [...]
WIJFR: Cross Country
Alex Cross, a Washington, D.C., police detective, takes on a human monster known as the Tiger with ties to the African underworld. When the Tiger and his teenage thugs butcher writer Ellie Cox, her husband and children in their Georgetown home, Cross is devastated because Ellie had been his girlfriend in college. The Cox family [...]
WIJFR: Anathem
On the far-future Earth-like planet, Arbre, scientists, philosophers and mathematicians—a religious order unto themselves—have been cloistered behind concent (convent) walls. Their role is to nurture all knowledge while safeguarding it from the vagaries of the irrational saecular outside world. Among the monastic scholars is 19-year-old Raz, collected into the concent at age eight and now [...]
WIJFR: The Wizardry Cursed
Once upon a time, Major Mick Gilligan, USAF, didn’t believe in Magic. Nor, had he been told of it, would he have believed in the elf Lisella, or cared that she had cursed master programmer Wiz Zumwalt, later of Cupertino and now of an alternate world where magic works like a computer program. But that [...]
WIJFR: Blue Mars
Using the last 200 years of American history as his template for Martian history, Robinson projects his tale of Mars’s colonization from the 21st century, in which settlers successfully revolt against Earth, into the next century, when various interests on Mars work out their differences on issues ranging from government to the terraforming of the [...]
Fellow Ozians …
We went and saw “Wicked” this afternoon at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, using tickets we purchased about five months ago. It’s an incredible show and I highly recommend you see it if you have the chance! This was the third time for me (once on Broadway with the original cast, here in Tampa [...]
WIJFR: The Wizardry Compiled
Wiz Zumwalt, ex-Cupertino programmer and now mighty wizard in a sword-and-sorcery world, must contend with the need to act as a leader in the Council of the North, the need to teach his new magic programming system to others, and the need to rewrite his spell compiler system. He also learns of incredibly destructive ends [...]
WIJFR: Green Mars
The sequel to Red Mars details an early 22nd-century Mars controlled by Earth’s metanationals, gigantic corporations intent on exploiting Mars. Debate among the settlers–some native-born, some the surviving members of the First Hundred–is divided between the minimalist areoformists, who have come to love Mars in all its harshness, and the terraformists, who want to replicate [...]
