Fallout (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Deason)

I quite enjoyed this (a lot more than I enjoyed Resurrection Inc.).  This is really a pretty straight-forward action/adventure style story (the same sort of story as, e.g., 24).  I read a few stories along these general lines (e.g. the Dan Brown books) over the second half of 2008, and they were a nice break (I read more in this genre a long time back), although nothing was mind-blowingly great.

I gathered that Fallout continues the story of characters from an earlier story (Virtual Destruction), but not having read that didn’t effect my enjoyment of this at all – as far as I can tell, the story is completely standalone.

The plot was a little predictable – it wasn’t hard to guess who the villains would turn out to be, but the mystery wasn’t really the appeal of the book, and the characters were likable enough.

Overall, well worth a read.

Resurrection Inc. (Kevin J. Anderson)

For some time, I was posting my mini-reviews on Pownce, which seemed to suit the short format .  I’ve mostly switched to using Twitter instead of Pownce now, but 140 characters is a bit too short.  I don’t really want to create a new account somewhere else, so I guess they can go here for now.  Maybe I’ll start using one of the ‘library’ sites at some point, and switch to there, or maybe I’ll get my Delicious Library -> web system a bit more automated again and integrate it there somehow.

So, since it’s been a while, there’s a bit of a backlog.  Firstly, Resurrection Inc., by Kevin K. Anderson.

I mostly bought this because I recognised the name from ISBW.  It was reasonably enjoyable, but nothing spectacular.  A lot of sci-fi deals with immortality, and this didn’t seem to introduce anything particularly new or compelling.

I liked the first half more than the second – it didn’t end up going where it seemed like it would.  I think partly that I don’t have a huge liking for stories about such dreary futures, where humanity are essentially idiots.

Overall, though, I liked it enough to read more Anderson in the future.