I would disagree with anyone who claimed this book is not science fiction. However I would understand their claim. This book starts with the crash of a spaceship from Mars, the sole survivor is a mutant human, another Thirteen is recruited to hunt him down, this hunter was on Mars, and returned to Earth enhanced with military implants.

But this is another of Morgan’s detective story with cops and guns and government agents and conspiracies, and murder scenes and drug dealers.

I’m glad I read it and would recommend it to anyone interested in scifi, but I was disappointed that the science fiction elements played such a minor role. This story would be essentially identical if it had been written without any of them. The Kovacs trilogy was a lot more dependent on the scifi devices.

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But I have to say the ending of this book was a tremendous disappointment. It’s not a spoiler to say that The Rabbit is one of the most intriguing and important characters of any book I’ve recently read. Vinge showed his genius in creating Rabbit as one of the heroes, or was it an anti-hero? It’s hard to classify.

So why after all this effort and success would Vinge leave the character unresolved at the end of the book? We learn nothing about Rabbit. He is simply not there. We don’t know if he is dead or alive, a winner or a loser. Vinge may intend on writing a sequel, but he still should give some hints. In the end we are left to guess as to the core of Rabbit’s essence. Saying more would perhaps give away a spoiler.

Vinge’s vision of a technological life is encouraging. HIs vision of secret personal messaging is excellent and shows that the next evolutionary step after IM is still just a conversation. And his ideas of what would happen to old people whose diseases were suddently cured is inspiring.

But I can’t get past the question “What happened to the Rabbit ??”

Interesting note,  SF Reviews did not even mention the Rabbit.

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I have been listening to Richard Morgan’s trilogy Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies. I noticed that Morgan really likes the word “shrugged”. Kovacs and others use this word 30+ times per book. It’s annoying, probably an indicator that he rushed the books past an overworked editor. It also might be an indication that words can be overused in audiobooks even though the work is great on paper.

I assumed that I had a few overused words and I wondered how to find them. Word doesn’t offer a word count histogram, so I wrote one in perl. If you are lucky enough to use a Mac you are only about 3 minutes away from running your own word count on any document you like. If you are on a PC you probably will have to download ActiveState Perl and get it running. This might take awhile. I’ll look into building an exe file if there is sufficient interest.

On a Mac you have to do 4 things:

1) open the Terminal and go to your target directory

2) save this perl code in your target directory as an executable text file named wordcount.pl

3) save your document as a text file in the same directory, let’s say you name it doc.txt. This program will not read Word files or other formats, just text.

4) type ./wordcount.pl doc.txt

The lightning fast result is a histogram analysis of your word usage. A 53,000 word document on a MacBook Pro runs in about 2 seconds. If you want to save the output for future review type ./wordcount.pl doc.txt > results.txt then open results.ext in your word processor.

Each line of output starts with the number of times the word is used, followed by the word, like this:
1176 of
1255 and
1268 a
1441 to
2502 the

At the end is a summary: Total of 53955 words, 10352 distinct words used. My word count agreed exactly with Microsoft Word!! I would have bet money they would not be exactly the same. But at least it gives me confidence in my code.

Your most heavily used words will be of course: the, to, a, and….etc. You will have to dig through the list to find the first word which is not common.

My first word to study is Phillip, the name of my protagonist which I have used 122 times. This might be an indication I’m overusing his name, although it will take a careful reading of the book to decided when to drop the name.

Suppose you only want to see the dreaded adverb. It’s trivial to look for words containing in “ly”. You can modify my script by deleting the first # sign around line 21 => unless ($word =~ /ly/) {next;} # remove the first # sign if you want to look for adverbs

I learned that my novel contains 261 distinct words ending in ly, and I use them 800 times. I used “only” 98 times, “nearly” 53 times, and “really” 30 times. Awful, just awful. Instead of slowly reading each paragraph I can now target specific words in much faster editing sessions.

Editors look for overusage of adverbs and specific words. Statistical analysis of your work is a tool you can use to get past these roadblocks. I look forward to your feedback.

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Two stories caught my attention: Reader’s Guide by Lisa Goldstein had an interesting twist at the end, at least I thought so. Seems that a young apprentice might be rising up in the organization. This was an interesting format for a story, but probably not one which should be imitated.

The other was Fullbrim’s Finding by Matthew Hughes. In this story Mr. Hughes offers an explanation as to why this world seems so imperfect. The vocabulary was almost a roadblock, too many clever new words. But he stayed on this side of decipherable. The character of the detective was slightly derivative of Dirk Gently, but his personality and techniques were not central to the storyline.

Enfant Terrible by Scott Dalrymple is a short story about a gifted child whose gift is not exactly desirable. But child abduction is a controversial subject regardless of the motives.

I’ve never understood the fascination with alternative histories. 1949 in Nazi dominated Russia is fairly boring (to me) in Albert Cowdrey‘s Poison Victory.

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