The Literary Lucy

  I really enjoyed this book.  Nalo Hopkinson is a phenomenal writer.  I had previously read her  Brown Girl in the Ring , a dystopian urban fantasy, last fall and also very much enjoyed that. Tan-Tan is a little girl growing up on a colony world called Toussaint.  Technology is bountiful and productive, with most tasks handled by AI-controlled robots.  This leaves the people of Toussaint free to engage in other activities.  Tan-Tan's father, Antonio, and mother, Ione, like to fight and then sleep with other people, which results in Antonio challenging one of Ione's lovers to a ceremonial duel.  It's intended to be a bloodless affair but Antonio  cheats by coating his blade with a poison.  He knows that he will be sentenced to exile for the crime but resolves to go on his own terms, and take Tan-Tan with him.  They travel via dimensional rift to New Halfway Tree, the prison planet, where there is no technology.  Free of the e...

  Let's jump right in, shall we? Snow Crash is a modern classic.  It parodies cyberpunk tropes but then brilliantly transcends them to create its own story before completely morphing into the best kind of 90's action movie through the climax. Hiro Protagonist is a world-class hacker and world's greatest swordsman but he exists on the fringes of society, refusing to be commodified by a corporate-controlled world, until his old flame Juanita approaches him about a dangerous new drug called Snow Crash that has the ability to affect a user through a computer and in real life.  Initially skeptical, Hiro digs into the origins of the drug and uncovers cults, neurolinguistic programming viruses, Sumerian myths, and one seriously deranged mutant Aleutian. This was written in 1992, which means that a lot of the technology is seriously outdated at this point. It's interesting to see how much Stephenson got right, but the info dumps explaining what an avatar is or how virtual...

Hello!  I'm Lucy and I love books.  Specifically, fiction books.  Even more specifically, urban fantasy, mystery, high fantasy, and some sci-fi books.  There are tons of books out there and sometimes it can be kind of overwhelming to find new authors.  Maybe you want to know about a book before you read it and invest a bunch of time.  This is where I come in.  See, I love talking about books almost as much as I love reading them. Who am I?  Well, currently I'm an English major at the University of Maryland and I've worked as an editor and technical writer for several years for various government contracts.  Before that, I was your average Army MI egghead. So why should you listen to me?  Well, this is the Internet so you really don't have to, but I hope to provide some helpful or even just entertaining opinions on various books as I read them. I have run a movie blog doing something similar since 2009 over at cinemalucyano.blogspot...