Two books I’ve started recently that I highly recommend: Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castranova, and Wake by Robert J. Sawyer. To summarize the rest of this post: buy these books.

        edit: oh dude the second book hardcover for $10 from Amazon.com, please don’t kick me out for being from Canada right before checkout *shakes fist at book industry*

        Castranova is the writer for Terra Nova (link only because he mentions Blizzard making two million dollars the day their shiny pony came out) and an economist. The fact that he’s an economist matters because Synthetic Worlds deals with the practical stuff involved with online games. Economics, immersion, psychological things that make us associate ourselves with our avatars, consequences of a world where the majority of the population spends most of its time in another world, legal things we’ve never had to deal with before… I’m only a couple of chapters in, and it’s very interesting and well worth reading. It’s got a really nice black cover, though, and I hate getting fingerprints all over it >.>

        Second book is a science fiction novel by, shock and dismay, a Canadian author! If you can’t think of a book you’ve read by a Canadian author, you would be no different from the vast majority of Canadians. Robert J. Sawyer is, according to wikipedia, relatively popular outside of Canada. He’s got an American tv show based on one of his books (Flashforward) and he also wrote a trilogy about the dinosaurs being abducted by aliens and taken to another planet, where they create a human-esque society. Unfortunately, the covers are so goddamn horrid that you could never read them in public.

        The book of his that I’m reading (and loving) right now is the first of a trilogy called Wake, and it’s about a blind teenager. She’s recently moved to Canada because her dad got a job working for some company or another that may be imaginary, but is funded by Research In Motion, who definitely do exist. She gets an e-mail from a Japanese researcher who says he could give her sight, and it doesn’t work, but somehow lets her see the internet. Or something. I’m only just getting to that part.

        Meanwhile, the internet is forming its own consciousness and making some connection with another being. China cuts off its internet from the rest of the world to cover up a mass execution, creepily enough to stave off a potential H5N1 pandemic (this was written pre-Swine Flu, I think o.0) and the internet itself recoils in pain. It isn’t aware so much of its existence before, but of the sense that things are no longer right, and slowly develops a sense of self and of others through its contact with the other being. The being may be a hacker from China who breaks through their security, and his connection seems to break when the internet stops concentrating and loses track of him, but the being may also be a monkey. Or it may be Caitlin herself, as she tries to figure out what she’s seeing that definitely isn’t her room. Who knows! Even if I did, I wouldn’t spoil it!

        Speaking of RIM, everything has a name in this book: her dad has a BlackBerry, she has an iPod, she uses JAWS, she has a LiveJournal, she edits a Wikipedia entry about her dad to remove a section about how her “disability” was a “burden” to him… I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m half-expecting her to give a speech about her Tampax™ tampons. It’s realistic - really, how could you refer to Wikipedia or LiveJournal without mentioning any names? “A free online encyclopedia” or “online journal” would just be clunky. Still.

        It’s the most “modern” book I’ve read, and it’s kinda strange. I was just reading a newspaper article about how to “become a better writer:” don’t let your character drink “a beer,” make it a Pabst! He doesn’t just look at the tv in the bar, he looks at the Samsung HD yadda yadda. This is the joke made real.

        Some of that stuff is what I really love about it, though. Attention to detail is nice. For example, those LJ entries are taken directly from the book. Another thing is that the main character is, regardless of everything else, a blind teenage girl. It’s not just a little thing that pops up here and there and everyone triumphs over adversity la-dee-da. It’s like, her dad is a super practical, devoid of sentiment, kind of guy, and he turns off the lights when he leaves her room because she doesn’t need them. Or she tries to guess at people’s body language based on their voice alone, or their height based on where their voice is coming from. It makes her pretty human.

        Anyway, here’s the website for the series, and the newest book just came out recently. I noticed the first book not long after it first came out, and it seemed really interesting, but not interesting enough to buy as a hardcover. Then the second came out, and the first came out as a paperback, so I snatched it. I’ll probably buy the hardcover of the second.

        (I’m so proud of my hyperlinks, I will try to use them less but the last couple of days I’ve been collecting stuff to post about at work then unloading it all here afterwards, so I have to fit them in somehow)