A lot of critics seem to like Archform: Beauty, and I can’t really disagree with them.  It tells its story from five points of view, switching among them as it progresses.  Despite the title and the presence of five narrators, I didn’t really see much evidence of Bartók’s arch form in the structure of the book.  Beauty is, however, on the minds of the characters, though each has different ideas about what is beautiful.

Mostly, though, it’s a detective story.  Illegality has transpired, and the characters, variously, have committed it, are chasing it, or are affected by it.  The different threads of the story tie together marvelously as events work their way forward.

Modesitt also gets points for a very well-developed world.  Language usage has changed a bit in three hundred years, and the book is littered with new turns of phrase.  It’s not too hard to figure out meaning, though, and a short ways into the book I found the terms nonintrusive.

Spoilers

I’ll admit that I was disappointed a bit by Kemal’s death, mostly because he didn’t get what was coming to him.  Nevertheless, it was quite reasonable in the context of the book.  I was very happy with the tying together of Parsfal’s and Cornett’s threads at the end—the poet and the singer.

With respect to me discussion of endings in an earlier post, I’ll point to this one as an ending that left things loose or unresolved but still gave me a sense of closure.  (I had tears in my eyes at the last scene, even if Parsfal’s poetry wasn’t spectacular.)

• Beauty versus utility
• Everything I know about UI design, I learned from GAMES

Folder delivery:

   Total  Number Folder
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17882995    1913 /dev/null
12268067     810 spam
 2217635     641 lists/void
 2406290     526 lists/baltwash-burning
 2414109     446 lists/otakon-staff
 2676164     428 lists/bugtraq
  383989     391 cronjobs
 1317429     370 lists/mutt-users
 1469172     334 lists/burningass
 4234167     228 /home/phil/mail/inbox

High cronjob count was because of a couple of power outages that left some hosts running, but without nameservice.  Thus, the uptimes project client that runs every eight minutes left error messages complaining about not being able to resolve hostnames.

spam: 
Cnt: 2536
Max: 46.1
Avg: 14.0206230283912
Dev: 6.2294772771236

Zodiac is one of Neal Stephenson’s earlier books, and it shows.  A lot of the writing style that went into Snow Crash is there, but it’s rougher.  It’s hard to pick out specific examples, but the whole book didn’t feel to me that it flowed as well as it ought to have.  On the other hand, the story was a decent one, and had several nice moments of chemistry geekiness that reminded me of the mathematically-geeky side trips in Cryptonomicon.

Surprisingly (at least to me), I liked the ending.  I haven’t really been happy with the endings of Stephenson’s more recent books; I prefer something with a sense of closure.  All three of his books that I’ve read (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon) had endings that felt unfinished.  (Note that I don’t mind endings that deliberately leave things open-ended, but I do like to feel that the main story has been resolved.)  Regardless, Zodiac’s ending did have closure, and I was happy with that.

So, it’s a decent read, especially if you like Neal Stephenson’s writing, but not really something I’d recommend going out of your way for.

I’ve just discovered listsofbests.com.  It’s a website with lists of books, movies, and music that various people have deemed to be really good at some point or other.  Mostly, I’m interested in the list of Hugo Award winners.  It’s been a goal of mine for some time to read every work that has won a Hugo, and this site will allow me to keep better track of where I am with respect to that goal.  I’m not doing too poorly; I’ve read 29 of the currently 51 books on the list.  So, here’re my lists:

• Hugos
• Nebulas
• Phobos Entertainment’s “100 Science Fiction Books You Just Have to Read”