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Imagine if Steve Jobs were transported to a world where people thought he was an asshole and he engaged in sketchy business practices to get to the top. Imagine if you didn't give a shit. Imagine reading this book.

It is very well written, and is much better than Matter just in terms of its character and plotting... But the Ghizt don't make any damn sense at all. They are like a Heinlein military kludged together with Culture tech, and they have all the street sense of a 1950s sitcom character. The Sublime is needlessly obfuscated and repeated as ineffable,but there's no logical reason for it to be quite the mystic experience that it is described as... And the Minds themselves can't quite work out why they are engaged in this exercise, and they don't change anything. The plot of the book is without purpose.

The nihilism in the book is something that shows up repeatedly in Banks novel, but there is not enough payoff for me to say this book is worth recommending.

Creepy as hell, but it's just trying too hard to shock. I'd be more effectively engaged if the Crossed were just a little more human -- at least human enough to fake being the people they were from time to time.

Excellent. This book describes going from an idea to building a design to writing the implementation, which is the closest I've read to my actual development process. It also describes in withering detail why test driven design is not always the best approach to implementing a feature, and how careful design can account for requirement and be traced back.

The use of Enterprise Architect and ICONIX is a little dated, but the principles are solid.

THIS BOOK IS AWESOME (or at least that's what I said when I was 10).

I don't know what I expected, but this book doesn't hold up well.

And by "doesn't hold up well" I mean that it reads like a Twilight Zone episode, complete with punchline. It's a good idea, but Haber and Orr just don't resonate as real people. The plot forces the individuals to act as they do, and so it plays out in the concept of archetypes. The aliens are a nice touch, but I kept wondering what Philip K. Dick would have done with this.

Decent.

"The Truth doesn’t fuck around. It doesn’t care about your opinions. It doesn’t care if you don’t believe in it. It doesn’t give two shits what religion you are, what country you’re from, what color your skin is, how rich or poor you are. None of what concerns you concerns it in the least. It is not open to negotiation. You either go along with it, or it will sweep you aside."

"But most of us don’t believe in the reality we experience every moment of every day. That’s why we’re always trying to escape into religious beliefs, or into physical pleasures or into the kind of mindless zoned out state induced by video games and endless web surfing."

"We would say normal things to each other and to anyone we met and we’d behave in normal ways. This broke down in about half an hour."

Good, but short. I was also a bit concerned that the cartoons were very male centric.

Solid, and well put together.

There are a couple of annoying typos in the book though. It's not hard to see "Buttons 9don't", so I'm going to chalk this up to bad proofreading.

Can't read this book without cringing.

I wanted to wait two weeks until picking up this one. I made it two days.

One of the densest, most thoughtful superhero books out there. It plays with the lines between cartoony superhero and all too real impact in beautiful fashion, thinking about how people who kill (ninjas) think about people who don't (superheros), how death isn't harmless and how carefully people have to manage attraction and attention between friends and lovers, and how even cosmic villains occasionally want to kick back, watch a cute girl, and pretend that they're not driven by a cosmic imperative to destroy the world and everything in it.