User Profile

As a fan of StarCraft and... books, I was hoping that this adaptation of one of Gaming's most compelling narratives would be a slam dunk. Unfortunately it really isn't. Using a reporter as the audience insert character was a neat idea, but it turns out that what we end up with is a character who's got no real arc or motivations who just kinda drifts through the narrative.

It's an adaptation! So naturally we get descriptions of game elements. However the nature of the story is that the monsters are unknowns so we instead get silly descriptions like "crab things" etc. Human hardware gets obsessively named by the narrator, which also makes little sense because the character is supposed to be a big city reporter rather than a military buff.

Finally, the author misses the emotional arc of the story and guts in in a few key ways. One is that he sets up a conflict between Raynor and Duke before Mengsk's act of betrayal. Next, the betrayal itself is off-screen. The most important section of the story is over in a page or two, and then he inserts a fanficy section where Raynor goes off to try and save Kerrigan, but fails, because Reasons. Finally, our character never trusts Mengsk for a minute so Mengsk's betrayal isn't really impactful for the reader. Yeah it's cool that our hard nosed reporter saw right through the guy, but the reader now no longer cares about the characters who do. And that's a death sentence for a novel.

Terran 1 is an operatic story of heroes with fatal flaws that lead them to ruin, and that just didn't carry over. If I didn't love Terran 1 probably wouldn't care so much, but if you're not a StarCraft fan there is zero reason to read this book anyway, because it positively does not stand on its own.

The cover and summary don't mention this, but on page one you find out that this is a book in the SCP mythos. SCP is a collaboratively created fictional universe involving a "Foundation" with mind boggling resources that protects an unknowing world from supernatural horrors.

In fact, the first chapter is the relatively well known SCP 055, and the rest of the story is an extension of 055's ideas.

The problem with being part of a shared universe like SCP though is that it's not clear what background reading you need to do to understand what the rules are. The book is mostly self-explanatory but then around 3/4 of the way in a wild new element is introduced that takes the story from low fantasy firmly into high fantasy territory. It definitely sticks the landing though.

There is a big central mystery but we don't get much of our characters (or the reader) being in contention with it so much as them just bumping against it. Also we don't get very much information from inside the characters (in fact, it's not always clear who the POV character is from scene to scene.) I would have appreciated a bit more of that; I think that because the style is ultimately related to creepypasta the goal is to make the reader fill in the feelings with their own fear and doubt.

The message, setup, and especially the ending and lingering questions feel very current, but left me wanting a bit more spelled out-not the mysterious parts, but the mundane parts.

If you're a fan of Control or Primer you may enjoy the sf elements or the horror.

Short, focused story of an early online community, sometimes in it's own words. Seems to be trying to answer the question "what is a community?" or "can online communities be communities?"

From the perspective of a reader twenty years later in a world full of social networks, this is still fairly interesting because you can see very similar patterns play out; there are trolls, reviled moderators, consternation, drama, but also excellence-people helping each other out of jams, people treating each other with genuine kindness, and even mourning each other.

There are two contradictory premises at work. One is that The Well was truly special and something that you can't replicate by creating a threaded forum. The other is that The Well was promoted by media savvy Stuart Brand and Howard Rhinegold et al as this utopian place which can never be replicated. Clearly, the former is the case. I would have liked a bit more clarity around just how similar (or different from) The Well was to the BBS scene which existed at the same time. And of course it also resembles web forums which came later and now social media like Reddit. If there was something truly special here, I fail to be convinced.

DEC is the kind of company that left a lasting impact on the world. Hacker lore, especially the really old tomes that date way back, speak of DEC's PDP series of computers with reverence. They where the system that Unix was built on! VAX machines are a subject you'll hear about when reading old web stuff. David Cutler, the frequent subject of Showstopper, was a bigshot at DEC before he moved to microsoft. So how did a company so influental end up in a state of non-existence while leaving such a large shadow? What happened to DEC was always one of those questions I had. I went into this book hoping to find the answer. I also wanted something like Soul Of A New Machine or ShowStopper, but I always want that.

The first half of the book is heavy on dated managament-speak and light on human or technical narrative. It is focused on the culture if DEC and what factors created it, but it gives responsibilty almost entirely to Ken Olson as though it emerged entirely from the specific actions of the founder, and had nothing to do with time, place, or subject matter. as a result, instead of a rich tapestry we get dry repitition. Fanatical devotion to employees caused fanatical devotion to the company was said at least five different ways. Job security. Felt like a family. Maybe this all feels very rinsed out, though, because a lot of DEC's values are also the values of Startup Culture, SV, Hacker culture, etc. It is hard to pick up what DEC con tributed from this very limited and very inward-looking portrait.

The second half focuses more on the actual events. We get some textbook explanations of why a vertically integrated company was a mistake in the PC era, and such. There are some blinding errors mentioned, to be sure, but the best chapter is the last one. In it, Gordon Bell (not the primary author) is not convinced about the 'money gene' theory. Instead he lays blame at the feet of managament for missing opportunities, lacking strategic vision, and what would now be called 'not invented here syndrome.' Fabbing their own chips, ignoring Unix even though everyone was installing it on their machines, and losing the type of talent (Bell and Cutler) that was driving the successful stuff to political failures.