"Death's Head" by David Gunn

 

 

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"Death's Head" by David Gunn

via Fantasy Book Critic by Robert on Jul 25, 2007

Official "Death's Head" Myspace
Order "Death's Head" HERE
Read An Excerpt HERE

Watch the "Death's Head" Video HERE

Part science fiction, part military procedure, a sprinkle of cyberpunk and a whole lot of ass-kicking, David Gunn's "Death's Head" is an irresistibly fun debut novel that reminded me of a cross between Neal Asher's Ian Cormac books, Richard K. Morgan's "Broken Angels" and Glen Cook's Black Company novels with a hefty dose of videogame inspiration thrown into the mix--think Halo, Gears of War, StarCraft, Doom and Half-Life.

Taking place in a far distant future where Earth is but a myth, 85% of the known galaxy is governed by the utopian-like United Free, and the other 15% is fought over between the Enlightened and the Octovians, "Death's Head" follows Sven Tveskoeg, an ex-légionnaire handpicked by the Emperor of the Octovians to become an elite Death's Head soldier serving under General Indigo Jaxx. First though, the 28-year-old has to pass a series of tests to prove his loyalty & abilities. Once that is done, Lt. Tveskoeg is thrown into the middle of the war between the Octovians and the Enlightened, which will stretch our 'hero's' limits to the breaking point. There's a few other things going on as well, some minor subplots, a drop of intrigue, but for the most part, "Death's Head" is basically 368 pages of non-stop shooting, killing, sex, cussing and blowing up things. Not exactly complicated reading, but then again, it's not meant to be.

As far as the characterization, "Death's Head" is narrated in a first-person point-of-view by our 'hero' Sven Tveskoeg. Like the plot, Sven is not very complex. He's full of cynicism, ruthless and a very proficient killer who likes his booze & women. Definitely not what you would call an ideal role model ;) On the other hand, Sven does seems to enjoy playing the "knight in shining armor" and is loyal to a fault, so perhaps there's more to him than meets the eye. Without a doubt Lt. Tveskoeg is much better developed than the book's other characters who are mainly one-dimensional stereotypes that are primarily there so Sven has someone to interact with. There were a couple of interesting personalities among the auxiliaries, but basically this area of the book is not one of the author's strong points.

What I did like about Sven though was his straightforward approach and the way the narrative reflected his personality. So, instead of excessive exposition, brainy vocabulary (the author makes some funny references regarding this), thoughtful meditation or the examination of motives, the story is simple and to the point. The flipside with all of this is that there's just not enough information given to the reader, which was probably the biggest problem I had with the book. Details on the war, on the different species/planets we meet up with, on some of the book's scientific applications, the characters' backgrounds, etc., are hard to come by. Heck, some relevant information wasn't even given until the latter half of the novel, which could easily have been provided at the beginning. Of course there's a simple explanation right? Well, based on the clues I managed to uncover--a three-book deal signed by the author, the cliffhanger ending to "Death's Head", the novel's subtitle: Book One of The Aux--it's easy to see that "Death's Head" is part of a series, and Mr. Gunn just wanted to save some revelations--Why did the Emperor specifically target Sven in the first place? What is that 1.8 percent of Sven's genetic makeup?--for later volumes, which is fine by me. Still, some more data would have been nice.

Of the science fiction elements, "Death's Head" utilizes a lot of familiar concepts--telepathy, artificial intelligences, talking guns with their own personalities, hive-mind collectives, cybernetic enhancements, planets with extreme biospheres, cloning, etc.,--and while the author doesn't really do anything new with these concepts, that doesn't make them any less entertaining. After all, the focus is not so much on coming up with original ideas and making them plausible, but more on placing Sven in difficult situations, arming him with exotic weaponry, and letting the fireworks fly!

Bottom line, David Gunn's "Death's Head" is a massively entertaining debut that kicks off The Aux series with a promising bang, and while the book may have its share of problems--storytelling, characterization, info-dumping--it's easy to overlook such issues when "Death's Head" is so damn fun to read...

FYI: "Death's Head" first came to my attention thanks to Neal Asher's review HERE and was released in May via Del Rey (USA) and Bantam Press (UK). Go pick up a copy today!

 

 

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Bobcasting (and Google Reader)

 

 

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Bobcasting (and Google Reader)

via Seth's Blog by Seth Godin on Jul 28, 2007

I've been a fan of RSS for a long time, and I've been just waiting for it to reach its potential. Most of the readers of this blog read it via RSS, (if you don't, click here--more confusing than it needs to be, isn't it?)

Here's what's I think has been holding back RSS: the name (initials!) and the lack of a standard way to read a feed and to add a feed. We need one button, not twenty or thirty. I think both problems have been solved by RSS inside of Google Reader. (Click the link for a lens on an any easy way to get started). As the acceptance of Google Reader approaches ubiquity, marketers and managers now have the chance to take this technology to a totally new place.

Dave Winer, the pioneer of RSS, had a brilliancy about seven years ago that led to podcasting. Podcasting is just an RSS feed of music, with an easy interface (iTunes). Podcasting took off because it had the good parts of RSS without the hassles. But that's music, not text.

I want to suggest something that takes no new technology but could have a big impact on the way you do business: Bobcasting.

I call it that because instead of reaching the masses, it's just about reaching Bob. Or Tiasha. Or any individual or small group.

The future of online communication is micro-pockets of people getting RSS feeds in their Google Reader or on their Google home page. Amazon updates? Bobcast em to me. Fogbugz summaries for the customer service manager? Bobcast her three times a day.

Yes, Twitter is just an example of Bobcasting, but with a different interface. You only twit the people who want to hear from you, and you do it without spam filters or other noise.

What happens to your team when you have an RSS feed that can put a message or update in front of them without noise? And because the Reader separates the inputs by source, I can queue up my messages from you and read them in sequence. Compare that to the noisy disaster we call an inbox.

Facebook feels seductive, until you realize that the messages from those hundreds of friends are all sort of BlendTecked together. Yes, the spam is missing, but so is control.

With Bobcasting, I can have a feed for my Fedex packages, a feed updating me on the status of my frequent flyer miles at American, a feed from the project manager on the construction of my treehouse... anything that is primarily a one way piece of communication, anything where status updates instead of dialog are the goal.

If we are really living in a one to one future, then Bob (and our interactions with him) represent the asset we need to obsess over. Using RSS and Google Reader (and yes, there will be other, better readers to come) to do Bobcasting feels like a smart asset to build.

 

 

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Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Writing

 

 

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Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Writing

via lifehack.org by Dustin Wax on Jul 27, 2007

Writing well is easily one of the most sought-after and useful skills in the business world. Ironically, it is one of the rarest and most undervalued skills among students, and few professors have the time, resources, or skills to teach writing skills effectively. What follows are a handful of tips and general principles to help you develop your writing skills, which will not only improve your grades (the most worthless indicator of academic progress) but will help develop your ability to think and explain the most difficult topics. Although directed at students, most of this advice applies equally well to any sort of writing; in the end, good writing is not limited to one context or another.

1. Pace yourself. Far too many students start their papers the night before they are due and write straight through until their deadline. Most have even deceived themselves into thinking they write best this way. They don't. Professors give out assignments at the beginning of the semester for a reason: so that you have ample time to plan, research, write, and revise a paper. Taking advantage of that time means that not only will you produce a better paper but you'll do so with less stress and without losing a night of sleep (or partying) the evening of the due date. Block out time at the beginning of the semester -- e.g. 2 weeks for research, 2 weeks for writing, 2 weeks to let your draft "sit", and a few days to revise and proofread. During your writing time, set aside time to write a little bit each day (500 words is incredibly doable, usually in less than an hour -- a short blog post is that long!) and "park downhill" when you're done -- that is, end your writing session at a place where you'll be able to easily pick up the thread the next day.
2. Plan, then write. For some reason, the idea of planning out a paper strikes fear deep into the hearts of most students -- it's as if they consider themselves modernist artists of the word, and any attempt to direct the course of their brilliance would sully the pure artistic expression that is their paper. This is, in a word, dumb. There is no successful writer who does not plan his work before he starts writing -- and if he says he does, he's lying. Granted, not every writer, or even most, bothers with a traditional formal outline with Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, lowercase letters, lowercase Roman numerals, and so on. An outline can be a mindmap, a list of points to cover, a statement of purpose, a mental image of your finished paper -- even, if you're good, the first paragraph you write. See the introduction to this post? That's an outline: it tells you what I'm going to talk about, how I'm going to talk about it, and what you can expect to find in the rest of the paper. It's not very complete; my real outline for this post was scribbled on my bedside notebook and consisted of a headline and a list of the ten points I wanted to cover.

   Whatever form it takes, an effective outline accomplishes a number of things. It provides a ruler to measure your progress against as you're writing. It acts as a reminder to make sure you cover your topic as fully as possible. It offers writing prompts when you get stuck. A good outline allows you to jump back and forth, attacking topics as your thinking or your research allows, rather than waiting to see what you write on page six before deciding what you should write about on page seven. Finally, having a plan at hand helps keep you focused on the goals you've set for the paper, leading to better writing than the "making it up as you go along" school of writing to which most students seem to subscribe.

3. Start in the middle. One of the biggest problems facing writers of all kinds is figuring out how to start. Rather than staring at a blank screen until it's burned into your retinas trying to think of something awe-inspiring and profound to open your paper with, skip the introduction and jump in at paragraph two. You can always come back and write another paragraph at the top when you're done -- but then again, you might find you don't need to. As it turns out, the first paragraph or so are usually the weakest, as we use them to warm up to our topic rather than to do any useful work.
4. Write crappy first drafts. Give up the fantasy of writing sterling prose in your first go-around. You aren't Jack Kerouac (and even he wrote some crummy prose) and you aren't writing the Great American Novel (and Kerouac beat you to it, anyway). Write secure in the knowledge that you can fix your mistakes later. Don't let the need to look up a fact or to think through a point get in the way of your writerly flow -- just put a string of x'es or note to yourself in curly brackets {like this} and move on. Ignore the rules of grammar and format -- just write. You can fix your mistakes when you proofread. What you write doesn't matter, what you rewrite is what matters.
5. Don't plagiarize. Plagiarism is much more than lifting papers off the Internet -- it's copying phrases from Wikipedia or another site without including a reference and enclosing the statement in quotes, it's summarizing someone else's argument or using their data without noting the source, it's including anything in your paper that is not your own original thought and not including a pointer to where it comes from. Avoid ever using another person's work in a way that even suggests it is your own.

   Be sparing in your use of other people's work, even properly cited. A paper that is essentially a string of quotes and paraphrases with a minimum of your on words is not going to be a good paper, even though each quote and paraphrase is followed by a perfectly formed reference.

6. Use directions wisely. Make sure your paper meets the requirements spelled out in the assignment. The number one question most students ask is "how long does it have to be?" The real answer, no matter what the instructions say, is that every paper needs to be exactly as long as it needs to be to make its point. However, almost every topic can be stretched to fill out a book, or condensed down to a one-page summary; by including a page-count, your professor is giving you a target not for the number of words but for the level of detail you should include.

   Contrary to popular opinion, writing shorter papers well is much harder than writing longer papers. If your professor asks you to write 8 - 10 pages, it's not because she doesn't think you can write more than ten pages on your topic; more likely, it's because she doesn't think you can write less than eight.

7. Avoid Wikipedia. I admit, I am a big fan of Wikipedia. It is generally well-researched, authoritative, and solidly written. But I cringe when students cite Wikipedia in their papers, especially when they use the worst possible introductory strategy: "According to Wikipedia, [subject of paper] is [quote from Wikipedia]." Wikipedia -- and any other general-purpose encyclopedia -- is really not a suitable source for college-level work. It's there as a place to look up facts quickly, to gain a cursory understanding of a topic, not to present detailed examinations of academic subjects. Wikipedia is where you should start your research, but the understanding that forms the core of a good academic paper (or nearly any other kind of paper) should be much deeper and richer than Wikipedia offers. But don't take my word for it: Jimmy Wales, one of Wikipedia's founders, has very openly discouraged students from using his creation as a source.
8. Focus on communicating your purpose.Revise your paper at least once, focusing on how well each line directs your readers towards the understanding you've set out to instill in them. Every sentence should direct your reader towards your conclusion. Ask yourself, "Does this sentence add to my argument or just take up space? Does it follow from the sentence before, and lead into the following sentence? Is the topic of each paragraph clear? Does each sentence in the paragraph contribute to a deeper understanding of the paragraph's topic?" Revising your paper is where the magic happens -- when you're done with your first draft, your understanding of your subject will be much greater than it was when you started writing; use that deeper knowledge to clarify and enrich your writing. Revision should take about the same time as writing -- say 15 - 30 minutes a page.
9. Proofread. Proofreading is a separate thing entirely from revision, and should be the last thing you do before declaring a paper "finished". This is where you'll want to pay attention to your grammar -- make sure every sentence has a subject and a verb, and that they agree with each other. Fix up all the spelling errors, especially the ones that spell-checking misses (like "there" and "their"). Certainly run your word processor's spell-checker, but that's the beginning, not the end, of proofreading. One good trick is to proofread your paper backwards -- look at the last word, then the second-to-last word, then the third-to-last word, and so on. This forces your brain to look at each word out of its original context, which means that your memory of what you wanted to write won't get in the way of seeing what you actually did write.
10. Conclude something. Don't confuse a "conclusion" with a "summary". The last paragraph or two should be the culmination of your argument, not a rehash of it. Explain the findings of your research, propose an explanation for the data presented, point out avenues for future research, or point out the significance of the facts you've laid out in your paper. The conclusion should be a strong resolution to the paper, not a weak recapitulation tacked on to pad out the page count.

The best way to improve your writing is to write, as much as you can. The tips above will help give you direction and point out areas where you are likely to find weaknesses that undermine your written work. What tricks have you come up with to make the process of writing more productive and less painful?

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Designing AI Algorithms For Turn-Based Strategy Games

 

 

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Designing AI Algorithms For Turn-Based Strategy Games

via Gamasutra Feature Articles on Jul 27, 2007

Successful turn-based strategy games depend strongly on robust artificial intelligence, and in this exclusive in-depth feature, veteran software developer Ed Welch illustrates, through a hypothetical 4X space strategy game, a practical application of turn-based AI.

 

 

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Towards a New Process for Learning What is Important

Something to think about...

Towards a New Process for Learning What is Important

via How to Save the World on Jul 16, 2007

What is the purpose of education? Those of liberal bent tend to assert it is to allow us to become what we were intended to become -- fully capable individuals and members of community. Conservatives are more inclined to believe it is to acquire the essential survival skills of modern society, efficiently. And there are practical souls who think its purpose is to learn how to make a living. How would we 'score' the current formal education system of affluent nations on its ability to achieve these purposes? I would grade it rather poorly: Enabling us to realize our full capability -- D Enabling us to acquire modern survival skills, including how to make a living -- F Institutional education has no time, ability or flexibility to help us realize our full capability. Besides, its methods -- teaching in the abstract in classrooms disconnected from the 'real' world, to bums on chairs -- are not effective because this is not how we learn. As Gustavo Esteva says, we learn better when no one is teaching us, by doing and observing, not by being told. The survival skills we need in a modern society are not addressed by the teaching of obedience, numeracy, literacy, and 'management skills'. As the chart above indicates, to survive we need to learn how to learn, we need to understand how the world works, we need to learn to think, critically, creatively and imaginatively and adapt, how to work together, and how to self-manage -- to take care of ourselves and each other. Formal school systems teach us none of these things. Because they are so artificial, inflexible, and predicated on 1-to-n knowledge transfer, and because they depend utterly on the passivity of students, they cannot possibly hope to teach us these things. My book on working naturally, in Natural Enterprises, has the daunting task of giving readers -- in the context of guiding and facilitating them through a process for learning how to make a natural, responsible, sustainable living -- enough survival tools to do this effectively and successfully. And much of the book aims to give readers the courage to learn how to use these tools. But no book or classroom can teach people how to use these tools. You learn how to understand your strengths and passions, how to find partners for an enterprise, how to do research on what people need, how to innovate continuously, how to imagine possibilities, how to collaborate, by doing, by practicing, by discovering what works and by making mistakes. Our formal education system has no time for practicing and allows no room for making mistakes. In this system, practicing is remedial work for those not competent enough at rote learning and not blessed enough with native skills to get it right the first time. And in this system, making mistakes is fatal, carrying the unbearable stigma of failure. It doesn't matter that Inc Magazine discovered that the only attribute that correlated strongly with exceptional entrepreneurial success was previous business failure. These 'exceptional' entrepreneurs had either the good fortune to fail quickly and inexpensively, or the inherited wealth to be able to bounce back from 'failure'. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the proponents of our education system that if students aren't succeeding, it is the teachers who should be given a failing grade. The greatest critics of the formal education system -- people like Ivan Illich, John Holt, and John Taylor Gatto -- would have us believe that the designers and proponents of this compulsory system deliberately conspired to make students helpless and dependent (incompetent to make a living for themselves, and hence frightened and compliant to the point they will put up with the drudgery of wage slavery). Whether or not this is true, the reality is that now, thanks to automation and other technology, we no longer need that fear and obedience to keep the industrial economy humming along. In fact, that complacency and incompetence has now become a liability. The rich and powerful need increasing masses of dumbed-down 'consumers' (brilliantly defined by Jerry Michalski as "gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash") to buy their junk and keep their ROI growth up to shareholders' expectations. But since those consumers are (mostly) no longer needed in the industrial economy and since (even in times of low interest rates) creditors will only subsidize mindless consumption so far beyond the consumers' earnings, the corporatists have had to turn -- for new production and new consumption -- to globalization. This lets them externalize (leave taxpaying citizens to pay for) the social and environmental costs that enable them to buy cheaper from struggling nations and to sell to new consumers in those same nations. The works in affluent nations, deliberately cowed and dumbed down by the education system, have become increasingly useless, worthless, expendable. What's to be done with them? With us? The answer, I believe, is entrepreneurship -- relearning how to make a living for ourselves. My book, and entrepreneurial programs and networks (like BALLE) can get us started. Those who have the innate critical and creative thinking skills, sufficient self-confidence, the time to find appropriate business partners, and to make mistakes, and to understand themselves well (their Gifts, their Passions, their Purpose) will be equipped to succeed at this, on their own terms. They will become models of working naturally and Natural Enterprise that others can follow. But will this be enough to transform our dysfunctional and unsustainable economy? I'm not sure it will, unless we also work to replace our education 'system' with something that works in post-industrial society. What might this replacement look like? How do we learn, naturally, or as Illich says, convivially? Illich would tell us that this replacement would not contain experts, or institutions, or processes that commodify learning. Gatto would tell us it would not have teachers, or classrooms, or curricula. Esteva, sounding a bit like Bucky Fuller, would tell us it is hopeless to try to fix, re-form the existing system -- we need to create an entirely new learning process, and let the old system crumble. I suspect this new learning process would have these attributes: It would be a self-managed process, both at the individual and at the community level. We would trust people to do what they want, to learn. Esteva found that in Mexican 'radically de-schooled' communities, young people quickly grew bored of mindless activity and began to pursue the natural inclination to learn. When I was in my last year of high school, we were exempted from classes if we attained certain test grades, and by the end of that year we had learned to learn from each other and from the real world, away from classrooms and teachers, so well that our 'de-schooled' group won almost all the scholarships. It would be based on apprenticeship (which literally means 'grasping', 'understanding'), learning by observation of those acknowledged by the learner as having exceptional capability, and on practice (literally, 'becoming better'). It would be playful, joyful, fun. Skills like literacy and numeracy would be learned in the context of apprenticeship and practice, not as separate 'subjects'. The entrepreneurs and artisans from whom we learn would not be paid, but would know that they would eventually be rewarded for what they showed others, what Esteva calls receiving a 'cooperación'. The role of those who care about learning would be creating tools that make learning easier and more powerful. The activities of selected mentors would be primarily listening, facilitation and, when requested, coaching. A key objective of the process would be achieving autonomy, freedom from dependence, self-sufficiency. Another objective would be cultural regeneration -- relearning local (connected to place) skills that have been forgotten. The process would be improvisational and evolutionary, not planned or designed. It would be based on growing hopefulness, not raising expectations or achieving goals. It would entail renouncing those technologies and other obstacles that impede true friendship, which is essential for collaboration and learning to make a living together. But this describes a process that is local and community-based. What about cities and other places that have no real community? Such places lack what Esteva calls the 'conditions for apprenticeship' and the cohesion that allows collective learning (rather than 1-to-n teaching). Perhaps the reason that the most successful experiments in rediscovering this kind of learning process have been in small, relatively 'uncivilized' places in struggling nations is that these are places where true community still exists. For those of us in anonymous cities, and in 'modern' places where we think community has something to do with shared goals or interests, it may be frightening to discover that deep community is a precondition for true learning, and that, without such learning, an entrepreneurial, natural economy may be unachievable. Lots to think about. Category:

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