Michael Warren LucasReseñas

Dale Whitehead is back at it again. The poor guy deserves a whole Chinese buffet after the crazy events at the tech/sci-fi convention.

Book two brought the familiar sympathies of a tech geek wishing for just a moment for the dream to be real while simultaneously fending off your own endless insecurities. There's plenty of drama in the pages but perhaps the greatest of all is Dale's internal one. Without that earnest interior these books could easily be cliche. Instead they are (sometimes painfully) relatable, entertaining, and thrilling mysteries.

There's a certain level of tech-geek required to get full enjoyment. If you know what IPv6 is, or how to rebase in git, and you like a good mystery then you're going to love this.

This is a book for a very specific audience, but for that audience it is pure gold.

I don't have a fear of heights, I really don't. I kept repeating that to myself over and over as I read Forever Falls. It's a quick, tight story with one hell of an ending but the true secret sauce is the terrifying vertigo we met along the way.

(I did not read the Kindle edition; I read another ebook edition, but Goodreads will not let me accurately identify it.)

This (novella?) story is, first off, deeply weird. Secondly, it will be wholly nonsensical to people who are not somewhat familiar with both software developer and sysadmin jargon. Third, it could be deeply offensive to some people. Fourth, the protagonist is a dirty hippie GPL-lover (at least at the beginning), which might be off-putting to some.

It is hilarious, imaginative, and a bit frightening. It's described as "erotic" and sometimes listed under "romance" (though it's not the least bit romantic), but really it's a masterful piece of particularly icky satirical erotic horror with a "happy" ending that is not, really, the least bit happy. The protagonist makes the tough choice at the end, choosing good over evil, which left me with a smile on my face.

It is, overall, indescribable. Oh, sure, I could offer a lot of colorful description for this piece of weird literature, but I'd probably have to expend at least 50% of the story's wordcount to approach a description that truly captures the essence of it (at which point I would have just rewritten it badly).

I don't know whether I can, in good conscience, recommend it. I do know, however, that it warrants five stars on Goodreads.

Enjoyable read. I had a little trouble following the action sequences but overall this was a fun and interesting book. The feeling of being on a station in an alien universe was palpable. The descriptions of other Earth-based cultures adapting themselves to their environment made me think about how humanity loves to bring little bits of home with them.

Looking forward to reading more of this series.

I'll admit that I'm not one for reading murder mysteries. The last mysteries I've read had characters like Encyclopedia Brown or Jack McGurk as the protagonist. So I'm not qualified to tell if this is a by-the-numbers homage to Agatha Christie (who gets mentioned several times in this book, so I'm inclined to believe if it is it's intentional). What I did find was a murder mystery set in a place that I am intimately familiar: a computer conference. Michael's attention to detail of the conference and the overwhelming confusion possibilities there made me forget at times that this was a mystery. I could sympathize and identify with Dale's plight as he struggles with the barrage of friendly banter and the overall confusion that permeates a conference. It seems an unlikely place to stage a murder mystery but it works and works well.

Unfortunately like most murder mysteries talking about the plot is akin to giving away the secrets within, but suffice to say I found the whole book enjoyable. I could tell that I was enjoying it when I got sucked into the "one more chapter" vortex about 80% of the way through.