Recent reading:

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11
Christopher Browne, The Little Book of Value Investing
M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

Working late, copying out paragraphs of Nova Swing in longhand, trying to slow the sentences down far enough to see how they're constructed. Eg.,

"A sun-diver like the Saucy Sal was more mathematics than substance. It didn't really know what to be, and without an active pilot interface would revert instantly to a slurry of nanotech and smart carbon components, a few collapsing magnetic fields. It was in the class of emergent artifacts, a neurosis with an engine. You don't so much fly your hyperdip as nurse it through a programme of dynamic self-reinvention. You have to tell it a story about itself."

or:

"The call was short, and it prompted Vic to open a drawer from which he took out two objects wrapped in rag. One was a gun. The other was harder to describe -- Vic sat by the window in the fading light, unwrapping it thoughtfully. It was about eighteen inches long, and as the rag came off it seemed to move. That was an illusion. Low-angle light, in particular, would glance across the object's surface so that for just a moment it [would] seem to flex in your hands. It was half bone, half metal, or perhaps both at the same time; or perhaps neither.

He had no idea what it was. When he found it, two weeks before, it had been an animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger than a dog, first moving away up a slope of rubble somewhere in the event site, then back towards him as if it had changed its mind and become curious about what Vic was. It had huge human eyes. How it turned from an animal into the type of object he finally picked up, manufactured out of this wafery artificial substance which in some lights looked like titanium and in others bone, he didn't know. He didn't want to know."
- posted by cjb @ 9:48 PM