I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother, which has been nominated for a Prometheus Award. In another tab I’m reading an autobiographical comic-strip by a boy of the same age as the novel’s narrator; switching between them is sometimes surreal.

Though he has lived in San Francisco, Doctorow makes occasional errors.

Even if you’ve never been to San Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it’s that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries.

Sausalito is indeed the nearest town north of the bridge, but it is only one of the cutesy towns in Marin County (which isn’t usually called part of “wine country”).

“He was going to take the BART over.”
“Don’t you know about the BART?”

Only a tourist says “the BART”.

“. . . But it used to be impossible to fly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytes of storage. . . .”

Hm, given the narrator’s youth I guess I can believe he has the impression that the first HDs were so small.

… one of her favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibidão — the forbidden guy from Rio.

That ‘ã’ looks out of place. Andre, shouldn’t it be –ido?

Mom’s a freelance relocation specialist who helps British people get settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her . . . .

Most of the members of the (British) Commonwealth have the same head of state, so they don’t send each other Ambassadors; they have High Commissioners instead. Doctorow, being Canadian, may have forgotten that the UK has an embassy to the US.

Ocean Beach is way out past Golden Gate park, a stark cliff lined with expensive, doomed houses . . . .

The clifftop houses are at China Beach, further north. The area of Ocean Beach (where I lived, 1988–92) is mostly flat.

“Mr Governor” sounds alien. I never thought of that before: why do “President” and (usually) “Mayor” get the prefix, but not “Governor” or “Senator”?

Qaeda is misspelled Quaeda two times out of five.

In Greg Egan’s latest novel, as is not uncommon in first contact novels, the chapters alternate between the viewpoints of a human explorer and a member of the newly discovered species. In defiance of convention, Rakesh never finds Roi’s world. (There is room for a sequel, but I don’t expect one.) Roi lives in a tiny artificial world orbiting a black hole, and Rakesh finds a similar world orbiting a neutron star.

So why is Roi in the book? Because she is a leader in the blossoming of science in her world – going from pretechnological ignorance to general relativity in one lifetime, thanks to the peculiar environment – while the world contacted by Rakesh is stagnant.

Glasshouse is Charlie Stross’s best fiction yet, so far as I know.

Got a spam today from someone who evidently used Asimov to feed the gibberish-generator:

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If you use “however” in two consecutive sentences, it’s a sign that your paragraph could benefit from rearranging.

If you use “however” in three consecutive sentences, your paragraph may be beyond help.

Roderick Long points out parallels between A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Hobbit.

(This post was previously part of another one, severed for what now seems to me greater convenience.)

Charlie Stross‘s recent novel Iron Sunrise has a surprising number of minor errors. The distance between Moscow Prime and Old Newfie is stated as 1393 light-days, one parsec (1191 d·c, close enough), one light-year (365 d·c). Someone mentioned in conversation is “he” then “she” then “Otto”. A garment is white when bought and black when worn.

Iron Sunrise is a sequel to, but plotwise independent of, Singularity Sky. It’s generally more coherent and less whizbang.

I’ve spotted two personal references in the first half. An empress is named Ayse, presumably after Ayse Sercan who, like Charlie, is or was a regular in alt.peeves. One of the quotations from which another Edinburgh writer takes the title of his blog is, er, quoted.