So tonight the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra together with the Concordis
Chamber Choir performed music from many contemporary video game
favourites. Plenty of stuff from Blizzard with various selections from
Warcraft and Starcraft, along with Uncharted 3, the Bioshock games,
Skyrim and plenty more. Above and behind the orchestra were large
screens showing off gameplay and cinematics from the games being
played.
Oh, seeing the Protoss on the big screen!
Oh, seeing Diablo on the big screen!
Speaking of which, we heard Diablo 3 music! We saw Diablo 3 footage!
It was all pretty glorious. Of course, a number of people were pulling
out phones at that point for a snap or two.
The general lighting effects during the pieces were quite well done.
There were all manner of colours and arrangements dancing along the
ceiling, along the walls and out of the side spotlights.
The night was hosted by Wil Wheaton, Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub. From
the description of the event it sounded like Wil would "make an
appearance" (I took this to mean pop in and say hi halfway through then
promptly leave) but Wil actually was there the entire night.
I wasn't expecting the guys to pop in between each different game, but
they did a great job with highlighting not just the particular game and
what it brought to the experience, but also a brief background on who
composed the music and any interesting anecdotes from its creation.
Soul Caliber capped off the end of the night. Oh my, you forget how exaggerated those female characters are until they're on the big
screen in all their beyond-comic-book-art glory. Footage from Soul
Caliber, and most of the games in general, tended to be from more recent
releases since it doesn't take too many years before the sort of thing
you're displaying starts to look rather prehistoric.
One of the best moments of the night was actually the Soul Calibur
conclusion, where two of the top aussie players dueled it out, with the
in-match music being played live by the orchestra. V1p3r played off
against Woody and man, Woody was on fire. Must have cleared the first
two fights near perfect. Lost the next, but won after that. The crowd
was very enthusiastic between rounds. It has me thinking about seeing
the upcoming gaming exhibition.
Disappointments?
No Tristram theme. I've actually listened to this a number of times
whilst working - and of course I've hit it up on youtube right now - so I
was kinda thinking this would get played. Everyone loves the Tristram
theme. Hell, they even talked about the Tristram theme when
discussing the secrecy regarding the recording of the Diablo 3 music.
Oh my god, I'm having serious flashbacks to standing around for ages with red and blue potions thinking how screwed I was and how I was
running out of portal scrolls and I couldn't afford anything at those
ripoff shops.
Oh, and no Guile theme. But I suppose, realistically, deep down inside, I knew this was never going to get played.
All in all, a fantastic night. Topped with ice-cream and apple crumble
and black russians. But no Wil Wheaton photo (damn you, battery) and no
Wil Wheaton signed poster (damn you, hindsight).
Friday, April 13, 2012
Friday, April 6, 2012
Antonym fun
There are many words in english that you can negate by adding a prefix
such as un-, il-, non-, etc. However, several of these words are much
more common in their negation than their root form. It's always fun
inserting a few of these uncommon root forms into speech:
- Complain about maculate code.
- Refer to the person who screws things up as peccable.
- Rail against nocent government policies.
- Compliment people by telling them that they look kempt.
There was a short story that I recall reading quite some years ago that was based around the use of such root words. Alas I cannot recall the title or the author or I'd link it from here.
The page below relates a few other interesting words in the same vein:
- The opposite of indefatigable is just fatigable (both in- and de- are dropped).
- The antonym of incline is disincline, not decline ("I was inclined to follow his suggestion", "I was disinclined to follow his suggestion")
Oh, the English language: travesty or endless supply of riches?
http://www.rinkworks.com/words/negatives.shtml
- Complain about maculate code.
- Refer to the person who screws things up as peccable.
- Rail against nocent government policies.
- Compliment people by telling them that they look kempt.
There was a short story that I recall reading quite some years ago that was based around the use of such root words. Alas I cannot recall the title or the author or I'd link it from here.
The page below relates a few other interesting words in the same vein:
- The opposite of indefatigable is just fatigable (both in- and de- are dropped).
- The antonym of incline is disincline, not decline ("I was inclined to follow his suggestion", "I was disinclined to follow his suggestion")
Oh, the English language: travesty or endless supply of riches?
http://www.rinkworks.com/words/negatives.shtml
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Top 3 books read in 2011
Yes, it's rather late for this sort of thing: it's the last day of March
and therefore the final day of the first quarter of 2012. Somehow
drawing attention to the fact that it's still the first quarter of the
new year makes it seem like this isn't really as late as it is.
I didn't pay that much attention last year to the books I read, so it's all going to be a bit vague, but here, briefly, are the three best books I read last year:
In order of reading.
The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi (2010)
This one stands out a little for me, selection wise, in that it was a very recent publication. Though I have a bit of a bent these days for modern SF, that normally means reading something from the last couple of decades.
There was a fair bit of hype on this debut and it doesn't fail to deliver. Hannu writes a very dense, very hard post singularity sci-fi novel that throws some brilliant concepts around some pretty cool characters. Post-humans abound, working with even more powerful entities, in and around the solar system perhaps a few centuries hence. Contains detectives, thieves, gaming culture and a whole lot of musings on the implications of future tech.
Looking forward to the sequel coming out later this year, but will need a reread of the Quantum Thief beforehand, methinks.
Trivia: contains a recommendation on the cover by Charles Stross, who wrote the very next book I read and is next up on this list.
Accelerando, by Charles Stross (2005)
Selected by me for a bookclub, since I'd been meaning to get around to Stross at some point and this one received some notoriety. The book is a collection of 9 continuing tales, though it didn't suffer for that. Taken together, they form a novel focusing on a man at the cutting edge of technology, and his descendents, as they head into and then through the technological Singularity, beginning in roughly the present day. Slashdot makes good background reading for this (and even gets a mention), especially for the first third that deals with the ramp up to the Singularity.
Probably has the highest density of ideas to pages of any book I can recall reading. Stross throws down concepts and references without even bothering to stop and see if the reader is still with him because he's already bringing something else up.
Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds (2005)
I'd picked up a slew of books by Reynolds at a garage sale recently and had rather expected that the first Reynolds books that I'd read would be the Revelation Space series. The first book in that series was in fact sitting in my short-short list of books awaiting to be read, whereas this book had languished in a more general pool of books: the second tier, as it were. Still, for whatever reason this book was picked up in the dying weeks of the year and wham! it delivers emphatically with a strong plot and characters, along with a high degree of page-turning readability. It has an adventure feel to it, and is quite reminiscent of Clarke's Rama series. A crew of comet-miners are in the vicinity of an unknown alien object that's discovered and they are dispatched to investigate. Cue humans interacting with cool alien tech.
General Notes
All three books are the only novels I've read by those authors, which also helps me tick off on another list a couple of the authors that I wanted to read something - anything - by.
All of the books are sci-fi, and in fact all are hard sci-fi.
All of the books are quite recent, being published within the previous 6 years.
Only one book (The Quantum Thief) is set in a specific time - the other two span non-trivial ranges.
All of the authors are European, and two of the three are from the UK.
Comments on the above novels are welcome, as well as your own favourite reads from last year, whatever the genres.
I didn't pay that much attention last year to the books I read, so it's all going to be a bit vague, but here, briefly, are the three best books I read last year:
In order of reading.
The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi (2010)
This one stands out a little for me, selection wise, in that it was a very recent publication. Though I have a bit of a bent these days for modern SF, that normally means reading something from the last couple of decades.
There was a fair bit of hype on this debut and it doesn't fail to deliver. Hannu writes a very dense, very hard post singularity sci-fi novel that throws some brilliant concepts around some pretty cool characters. Post-humans abound, working with even more powerful entities, in and around the solar system perhaps a few centuries hence. Contains detectives, thieves, gaming culture and a whole lot of musings on the implications of future tech.
Looking forward to the sequel coming out later this year, but will need a reread of the Quantum Thief beforehand, methinks.
Trivia: contains a recommendation on the cover by Charles Stross, who wrote the very next book I read and is next up on this list.
Accelerando, by Charles Stross (2005)
Selected by me for a bookclub, since I'd been meaning to get around to Stross at some point and this one received some notoriety. The book is a collection of 9 continuing tales, though it didn't suffer for that. Taken together, they form a novel focusing on a man at the cutting edge of technology, and his descendents, as they head into and then through the technological Singularity, beginning in roughly the present day. Slashdot makes good background reading for this (and even gets a mention), especially for the first third that deals with the ramp up to the Singularity.
Probably has the highest density of ideas to pages of any book I can recall reading. Stross throws down concepts and references without even bothering to stop and see if the reader is still with him because he's already bringing something else up.
Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds (2005)
I'd picked up a slew of books by Reynolds at a garage sale recently and had rather expected that the first Reynolds books that I'd read would be the Revelation Space series. The first book in that series was in fact sitting in my short-short list of books awaiting to be read, whereas this book had languished in a more general pool of books: the second tier, as it were. Still, for whatever reason this book was picked up in the dying weeks of the year and wham! it delivers emphatically with a strong plot and characters, along with a high degree of page-turning readability. It has an adventure feel to it, and is quite reminiscent of Clarke's Rama series. A crew of comet-miners are in the vicinity of an unknown alien object that's discovered and they are dispatched to investigate. Cue humans interacting with cool alien tech.
General Notes
All three books are the only novels I've read by those authors, which also helps me tick off on another list a couple of the authors that I wanted to read something - anything - by.
All of the books are sci-fi, and in fact all are hard sci-fi.
All of the books are quite recent, being published within the previous 6 years.
Only one book (The Quantum Thief) is set in a specific time - the other two span non-trivial ranges.
All of the authors are European, and two of the three are from the UK.
Comments on the above novels are welcome, as well as your own favourite reads from last year, whatever the genres.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Visual C++ 11 Beta 1 Initial Thoughts
I've started giving Visual C++ 11 a bit of a workout, and there's much to like about it.
Stability might be improved over 10 - I'll withhold judgement on that one for the time being, however.
We've got range based for loops. That's a nice improvement since the DP last year. Now you can do things such as :
Pity there's such a mess with the Task List comments not working. I can't get a single one to show.
And I won't even elaborate on the fact that it says it will only report on the ones in open files. Sheesh: I've got a solution. Feel free to inspect it.
The support for a light and dark theme is nice. A little interesting that it's just a two horse event, but still. Alas, I've kinda shot myself in the foot here by overriding some of the backgrounds in order to force a dark background - I'll have to undo some of that in order to get this fully working (should I want a light theme, and I might some day if I coded when the sun was up).
I really like the fully fleshed out syntax highlighting. Though I think I loved it more in the Developer Preview. I'm sure I used to be able to set things as italics - the example of parameters being in italics is mentioned across the web, however the Beta most definitely doesn't have an italics setting, just bold. I have a function definition in front of me that's never known the loving hand of italicisation.
Oh, the monochrome look. That's right. For those who haven't heard, the Visual Studio now uses about three shades of grey as its entire colour palette. Outside of your code, that really isn't an exaggeration. There's a dark grey, a light grey and a - wait for it - intermediate grey. Icons have been drained of colour and general boxing and lines have been removed from dialogs to give them a slabs-of-grey-paint look.
It was a little WTF at first. You start thinking that this is a feature they'll introduce for VS 11 in order to have colour introduced as a feature in VS 12. But I have to say that after the initial surprise, you get used to it pretty quick. It's distinctive. Better, worse? Not much in it for me at this point.
Microsoft have folded a lot of the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools into the VS 11 release. The theory goes they get some out-of-band feedback on enhancements and iterate them, then add them into the next release - and here we are. Alas, one of my favourites was the document view scrollbar. And since I don't have the Power Tool available for VS 11, that means I'm without the enhanced scrollbar altogether.
I don't have a picture handy of the VS 2010 Power Tool one, so here's an image taken of the scrollbar from the Sublime Text editor home page. Very much the same sort of thing: I love being able to see the general structure, as well as search matches, bookmarks, breakpoints, etc. Sublime's not a bad text editor btw, though I tend to prefer notepad++.
Overall, Visual Studio seems pretty punchy and responsive, though the find all references is as slow as ever.
Note that the Beta that you download is Ultimate. Which in some ways is a pity because that means it comes with a boatload of stuff that I am never going to see in day to day usage (since I'd be using something like Professional). Still, it does give you an opportunity to see what you're missing, including the perf tools and architecture stuff.
There are quite a few changes, both in the IDE and in the language support, so it will take quite some time to really go through and explore what's there. This has just been a quick write up to gather some thoughts, prompted by the discovery of some unexpected C++11 support in the form of range based for loops.
Stability might be improved over 10 - I'll withhold judgement on that one for the time being, however.
We've got range based for loops. That's a nice improvement since the DP last year. Now you can do things such as :
#includeIn the above code we can simply declare bob as a deduced type of the container joe. Handy when you're iterating over your containers and don't want to repeatedly deal with dereferencing (sorry, indirecting through, according to N3362) an iterator.
auto main()
-> int
{
// TODO - discover why this doesn't show up on Task List.
std::vectorjoe;
for (auto bob : joe)
{
}
}
Pity there's such a mess with the Task List comments not working. I can't get a single one to show.
And I won't even elaborate on the fact that it says it will only report on the ones in open files. Sheesh: I've got a solution. Feel free to inspect it.
The support for a light and dark theme is nice. A little interesting that it's just a two horse event, but still. Alas, I've kinda shot myself in the foot here by overriding some of the backgrounds in order to force a dark background - I'll have to undo some of that in order to get this fully working (should I want a light theme, and I might some day if I coded when the sun was up).
I really like the fully fleshed out syntax highlighting. Though I think I loved it more in the Developer Preview. I'm sure I used to be able to set things as italics - the example of parameters being in italics is mentioned across the web, however the Beta most definitely doesn't have an italics setting, just bold. I have a function definition in front of me that's never known the loving hand of italicisation.
Oh, the monochrome look. That's right. For those who haven't heard, the Visual Studio now uses about three shades of grey as its entire colour palette. Outside of your code, that really isn't an exaggeration. There's a dark grey, a light grey and a - wait for it - intermediate grey. Icons have been drained of colour and general boxing and lines have been removed from dialogs to give them a slabs-of-grey-paint look.
It was a little WTF at first. You start thinking that this is a feature they'll introduce for VS 11 in order to have colour introduced as a feature in VS 12. But I have to say that after the initial surprise, you get used to it pretty quick. It's distinctive. Better, worse? Not much in it for me at this point.
Microsoft have folded a lot of the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools into the VS 11 release. The theory goes they get some out-of-band feedback on enhancements and iterate them, then add them into the next release - and here we are. Alas, one of my favourites was the document view scrollbar. And since I don't have the Power Tool available for VS 11, that means I'm without the enhanced scrollbar altogether.
I don't have a picture handy of the VS 2010 Power Tool one, so here's an image taken of the scrollbar from the Sublime Text editor home page. Very much the same sort of thing: I love being able to see the general structure, as well as search matches, bookmarks, breakpoints, etc. Sublime's not a bad text editor btw, though I tend to prefer notepad++.
Overall, Visual Studio seems pretty punchy and responsive, though the find all references is as slow as ever.
Note that the Beta that you download is Ultimate. Which in some ways is a pity because that means it comes with a boatload of stuff that I am never going to see in day to day usage (since I'd be using something like Professional). Still, it does give you an opportunity to see what you're missing, including the perf tools and architecture stuff.
There are quite a few changes, both in the IDE and in the language support, so it will take quite some time to really go through and explore what's there. This has just been a quick write up to gather some thoughts, prompted by the discovery of some unexpected C++11 support in the form of range based for loops.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
On Latin and English and Mappings
It's illuminating how much of another language you can pick up if you've got a reasonable grasp of a related one.
And in the case of languages, there are a whole heap of related ones.
Now, I'm not talking about reading books, or even grasping full sentences. But pithy quotes? Not a total write-off.
The spark for this post was a Latin quote by a mate,
"Omnia mutantur, nihil interit"
But the origin of this post can be found some time ago.
When looking into the artificial language Ido, I came across a handy table describing words and the closest match in several languages.
One example was the noun, "kavalo", which in english means "horse". So far, so confusing. But the closest match shows that we can (imperfectly) map it to the concept of "cavalry", and this is indeed how I remember the word (along with the fact that nouns in Ido end in -o).
Fast forward to this evening and we have this latin phrase "Omnia mutantur, nihil interit". Now, I'm not of an age where I learnt latin in school. I'm also not of the bent that I decided to learn a dead language of my own accord. I must admit I'm fond of the occasional latin phrase or word (readers will recall my hunt for ex-situ's antonym) but, all things told, I really don't know any latin worth mentioning.
The phrase was posted without an english translation, perhaps because it was assumed to be well known enough to not require it. Alas, that was not the case for me. And yet, looking over the phrase, mappings immediately became evident.
Omnia: omni- (prefix for all, everything omniscient, omnivore)
mutantur: mutate (to change)
nihil: nil (nothing)
interit: ... ( ...? )
So close, stymied at the last.
Now, I'm vaguely familiar with the english translation, but even with the first three words I was unable to complete the phrase and had to resort to google. "Everything changes, nothing is lost" for those of you still wondering.
So the question becomes, where is the link between the latin "interit" and the english "to lose, perish, decay"
The closest I can get is intermit, and that's not very close at all.
Anyone?
And in the case of languages, there are a whole heap of related ones.
Now, I'm not talking about reading books, or even grasping full sentences. But pithy quotes? Not a total write-off.
The spark for this post was a Latin quote by a mate,
"Omnia mutantur, nihil interit"
But the origin of this post can be found some time ago.
When looking into the artificial language Ido, I came across a handy table describing words and the closest match in several languages.
One example was the noun, "kavalo", which in english means "horse". So far, so confusing. But the closest match shows that we can (imperfectly) map it to the concept of "cavalry", and this is indeed how I remember the word (along with the fact that nouns in Ido end in -o).
Fast forward to this evening and we have this latin phrase "Omnia mutantur, nihil interit". Now, I'm not of an age where I learnt latin in school. I'm also not of the bent that I decided to learn a dead language of my own accord. I must admit I'm fond of the occasional latin phrase or word (readers will recall my hunt for ex-situ's antonym) but, all things told, I really don't know any latin worth mentioning.
The phrase was posted without an english translation, perhaps because it was assumed to be well known enough to not require it. Alas, that was not the case for me. And yet, looking over the phrase, mappings immediately became evident.
Omnia: omni- (prefix for all, everything omniscient, omnivore)
mutantur: mutate (to change)
nihil: nil (nothing)
interit: ... ( ...? )
So close, stymied at the last.
Now, I'm vaguely familiar with the english translation, but even with the first three words I was unable to complete the phrase and had to resort to google. "Everything changes, nothing is lost" for those of you still wondering.
So the question becomes, where is the link between the latin "interit" and the english "to lose, perish, decay"
The closest I can get is intermit, and that's not very close at all.
Anyone?
Thursday, January 19, 2012
SOPA Oddity
SOPA Oddity
MPAA to User One
MPAA to User One
Take your videos and put your labels on
(Ten) MPAA (Nine) to User One (Eight)
Commencing upload, servers on
Check attribution and may God's love be with you.
This is User One under control, I'm looking at my screen
And I'm surfing in a most peculiar way
And the sites look very different today
Here am I sitting at a terminal, disconnected from the world
Lady Liberty is blue and there's nothing I can do
This is MPAA to User One, you really must obey
And the papers want to know whose files you share
Now it's time to post your comments if you dare
Though I'm past one hundred thousand views, I'm feeling very scared
And I think my blog just knows which links to post
Tell my ISP I love it much, it knows
Subscriber mail to User One, your server's dead, there's something wrong
Can you hear me, User One?
Can you hear me, User One?
Can you hear me, User One?
Can you...
Here am I sitting at a terminal, disconnected from the world
Lady Liberty is blue but there's something I can do...
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Unfinished Series
I'm not the sort of person who's entirely comfortable starting a series that hasn't been completed. Many others seem to have no such issues, as demonstrated by the myriad people picking up books starting a new series within moments of them hitting shelves. Myself, I usually only start an unfinished (non-open) series if the books are a gift or a loan.
I'm pretty sure it comes down to the fact that if I really enjoy it, I'm looking to see where it goes and to get some closure. I don't have any problem with picking up books from an open ended series (Gor, Discworld) and reading them out of order. I may have a slight preference for reading earlier works in the series before later ones, but not a strong compulsion.
At the moment I've got two unfinished series on the go, both unintentional. Wait, that could be three if you count Rawn's The Ruins of Ambrai. But given it's been 15 years since the second book I think we can safely discount that one.
The first unfinished series I have going is the Penrose series by Tony Ballantyne. I picked up the first book when it hit a mass market paperback on pre-order discount on the basis of a neat blurb and put it in the short list not realising it was part of a trilogy. After reading several consecutive less than stellar books I needed something punchy, exciting and - above all - highly readable, so I grabbed Twisted Metal off the pile. The book delivered the much needed invigoration to my reading, but towards the end I started to realise that the story wasn't really wrapping up. Admittedly Ballantyne could have been taking a leaf out of Peter F Hamilton's book and leaving the start of the wrap-up for the final half a percent, but no, he's left it hanging for book two.
Penrose book two is already out (2010) and I've got a copy sitting in the short-short list, but I'm not seeing even a pre-order or title on the third book and the author described it late last year as "yet uncompleted". Here's hoping it doesn't become a Captal's Tower.
The second series I started accidentally was Hannu R's The Quantum Thief. The book was getting some great press after its release and billed as Hard SF. The novel itself is fantastic and flooded with killer concepts but again, upon reaching the end I found myself stung by the lack of closure. Not too much, I have to admit, as a lot did wrap up, but it certainly had me scouring the net for more information on the trilogy. Not as lucky here as I was with Ballantyne, as the second book is only due for release third quarter this year.
The question now is what to do about these series?
Well, specifically what to do about book two of Penrose. I've got it lying around, and it's been maybe a year since I read the first book. I thought maybe I'd read it about halfway between the first and the third book, but that's a little difficult to place, temporally speaking, when the third book hasn't been released. Currently thinking about reading it soonish so the first one hasn't faded, with the expectation that the third comes out sometime next year so the second won't have faded by then.
The Fractal Prince, sequel to The Quantum Thief, I'll probably end up buying on release (paperback Octavo and HB will be published about the same time) and do a reread of the first book beforehand given the fact that you only start getting an idea of what the hell is going on when you're most of the way through.
And the above doesn't even touch on the issues of authors bringing out revised editions of their books (waves to Stephen King) or the fact that I'm actually considering reading A Song of Ice and Fire despite the series conclusion being perhaps a decade away...
I'm pretty sure it comes down to the fact that if I really enjoy it, I'm looking to see where it goes and to get some closure. I don't have any problem with picking up books from an open ended series (Gor, Discworld) and reading them out of order. I may have a slight preference for reading earlier works in the series before later ones, but not a strong compulsion.
At the moment I've got two unfinished series on the go, both unintentional. Wait, that could be three if you count Rawn's The Ruins of Ambrai. But given it's been 15 years since the second book I think we can safely discount that one.
The first unfinished series I have going is the Penrose series by Tony Ballantyne. I picked up the first book when it hit a mass market paperback on pre-order discount on the basis of a neat blurb and put it in the short list not realising it was part of a trilogy. After reading several consecutive less than stellar books I needed something punchy, exciting and - above all - highly readable, so I grabbed Twisted Metal off the pile. The book delivered the much needed invigoration to my reading, but towards the end I started to realise that the story wasn't really wrapping up. Admittedly Ballantyne could have been taking a leaf out of Peter F Hamilton's book and leaving the start of the wrap-up for the final half a percent, but no, he's left it hanging for book two.
Penrose book two is already out (2010) and I've got a copy sitting in the short-short list, but I'm not seeing even a pre-order or title on the third book and the author described it late last year as "yet uncompleted". Here's hoping it doesn't become a Captal's Tower.
The second series I started accidentally was Hannu R's The Quantum Thief. The book was getting some great press after its release and billed as Hard SF. The novel itself is fantastic and flooded with killer concepts but again, upon reaching the end I found myself stung by the lack of closure. Not too much, I have to admit, as a lot did wrap up, but it certainly had me scouring the net for more information on the trilogy. Not as lucky here as I was with Ballantyne, as the second book is only due for release third quarter this year.
The question now is what to do about these series?
Well, specifically what to do about book two of Penrose. I've got it lying around, and it's been maybe a year since I read the first book. I thought maybe I'd read it about halfway between the first and the third book, but that's a little difficult to place, temporally speaking, when the third book hasn't been released. Currently thinking about reading it soonish so the first one hasn't faded, with the expectation that the third comes out sometime next year so the second won't have faded by then.
The Fractal Prince, sequel to The Quantum Thief, I'll probably end up buying on release (paperback Octavo and HB will be published about the same time) and do a reread of the first book beforehand given the fact that you only start getting an idea of what the hell is going on when you're most of the way through.
And the above doesn't even touch on the issues of authors bringing out revised editions of their books (waves to Stephen King) or the fact that I'm actually considering reading A Song of Ice and Fire despite the series conclusion being perhaps a decade away...
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