[Anonymouse]

Originally Posted by Graham

It's a bit different, isn't it?!

A 'bit' different? A BIT? The character of Rico was utterly butchered by Verhoeven! For a start, the Rico in the novel would never have done something as stupid as allowing a member of his squad to remove his helmet during a live fire exercise! At the very least, he would have called 'cease fire' to his squad. Nor would he have received only ten licks - it'd have been more like a court-martial followed by dishonourable discharge. There is no room for such incompetence in the Mobile Infantry.

And as for pulling that claw out of Dizzy - oh, please! That was easily the worst thing he could've done - if you come across someone who's been impaled, stabbed, whatever, you do NOT pull the damn thing out! At least while it's in there it's plugging the wound. But no, this moron yanks it out, doing even more damage to poor Dizzy's lungs as he does so, condemning her to an agonising death. If he'd left the claw in, she'd have had a chance.

Plus the future world portrayed gave most viewers the (utterly false) impression that the Federation was a military dictatorship. This is because the question of why only veterans were eligible to vote was glossed over. Verhoeven completely missed the whole point of the novel, viz. the difference between a civilian and a citizen.

And no way - no way - would a cap trooper barely out of boot camp have been promoted to lieutenant that fast. In fact, none of the squad had even finished their training; no matter how short of men the M.I. might have been, they would not send anyone into combat who wasn't qualified. Picture it: you're a veteran, you've survived multiple combat drops, and suddenly you're expected to babysit raw recruits who haven't even finished boot. Yeah. The cap troopers described in the novel would, under those circumstances, refuse to drop - and their CO would back them to the hilt. What would you do?

Having said all that, Sgt. Zim was spot on.


Anyway. What am I reading? Well, I read a lot. Heinlein (duh!), Clarke, Asimov, Pratchett, Holt, Rankin, Dick, Adams...my bedroom is more like a library. Over 700 books, collected over 30+ years. One author I recently discovered, though, totally took my breath away: Richard Morgan. His books so far are Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Market Forces and Woken Furies.

Altered Carbon - something of a cross between Total Recall, Neuromancer, Starship Troopers and more, but it's all original. For a first novel it's incredible. It'd do justice to an established writer. The premise is this:

It's the 26th Century. Science has advanced to the point that at birth, everyone has a cortical stack implanted at the base of the skull, which records not just your memories, but emotions, thoughts, personality - everything. The upshot is that if you have the money for it, you can live out your life, pay for a new, cloned body and be downloaded into it - you might be a 100-year-old man in a teenager's body. Or you can swap bodies at will - a standard practice for the rich is to have two or more clones and swap between them every few months, to save wear and tear. You can have custom-made bodies, or sleeves, as they're termed. Want to change sex, to find out how the other half lives? Not a problem - just have yourself downloaded into a sleeve of the opposite gender.

Not only that, you can, if you're very rich, have updates to backup copies of yourself broadcast to a storage facility every few hours - so even if someone torches your head off in an attempt to permanently kill you (termed Real Death, as opposed to the faux, impermanent death you experience if your stack is intact), all you lose is a few hours of your life.

It adds a new twist to the idea of a murder mystery, which the novel essentially is - namely that the person retaining a detective to investigate a murder is in fact the victim. In other words, he's saying 'Someone killed me. Find out who and why.' The mystery is deepened by the fact that there's no point in killing a man who's backed up - you can't kill him just by torching his stack; you'd have to deal with the storage facility, too. To do that, you've got to find it, and the kind of money this man has buys a lot of protection. Having found it, you've got to get in, and of course the highly paid and therefore generally unbribable security staff might have something to say about that.

So why kill him?

No hints. Read it. You'll love it. I can't recommend it highly enough, though it does get rather gruesome in places. Hardly surprising in a world where it's possible to torture someone to death several times, either physically or in virtual or both, and therefore there really are worse things than death...

There was a terrific joke in the novel, too; one character, a cop, wears a T-shirt saying 'You Have The Right To Remain Silent - Why Don't You Try It For A While?' I loved that so much I had Streetshirts put it on a T-shirt for me!

Broken Angels and Woken Furies are sequels (sort of; they deal with the same protagonist, one Takeshi Kovacs, ex-member of the feared Envoy Corps, but they don't follow on exactly); Market Forces is set in our near future, and speculates about the way things are going with multinational corporations. It's reminiscent of Rollerball (the original version, if you please).

In an earlier post, someone mentioned Ronan the Barbarian. Brilliant stuff. A female warrior, Tyson, throws three spears - one takes out a zombie, the other two hit double top in a dartboard. What does the bartender shout? "One Undead and eighty!", of course.

Tales From The White Hart - superb. My favourite Tale is definitely The Reluctant Orchid.

Hothouse - entertaining, but if the novel is set 2000 million years in the future, then the Sun has entered its red giant phase at least 2000 million years too early. And while the Moon and Earth are indeed exerting a gradual braking effect on each other (to the extent that 400 million years ago, the day was only 20 hours long), there won't be time for their rotation to be reduced to zero because the Sun will go nova before then.