Tag: books

Ever since I started writing on django@zerokspot I wondered whether I should really write reviews about books. While I like a certain kind of writing probably as much as the next guy ... with SciFi literature and also more or less with any novel it by far doesn't matter as much to me as the world that is described in it.

After quite some time I finally dared to look outside of my usual Star Trek and Star Wars books again and discovered A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.

The plot takes place in a very distant future (thousands of years). Earth is no longer all that important and a big part of humankind consists now of traders that make their living by finding new customers on other worlds. But in all these years, humankind has never met an advanced non-human civilization.

If you've read this blog before you might have noticed, that when it comes to SciFi I'm a Star Trek fan. I love the universe, I love the tech. But after reading all these Star Trek books for the last couple of years I somehow wanted to try something different. Then I remembered that there were also some books in the Star Wars universe taking place after the movies.

Sometimes when you compare Django with other (perhaps) more popular frameworks like RoR you hear people saying, that there is too little literature esp. in the form of books out there for the Python web framework.

This seems now about to change. Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss have started opening up their upcoming book about Django to the community under djangobook.com.

From what it looks like, they will release 2 chapters every week and are requesting comments, suggestions etc. to improve the book for the planed "physical" release in 2007.

Another book of the Star Trek: Vanguard series finished "Summon the Thunder" is the second book after Harbinger and also continues only a few months after the end of the first book of the series and also integrates the Romulans into the story line.

"Star Trek: Vanguard" (VAN) is a new book series telling a story about a space station in the timeframe or Kirks first 5-year mission. Starbase 47 "Vanguard" is one of the latest space stations of the UFP build in a border region more or less between the Klingon and Tholian empire called the Thaurus Reach. And no: In my opinion this isn't really a DS9 clone. True, both are about a space station somewhere on the edge of known space etc. but while DS9 has Bajor to put most of its plot in relation to, Vanguard seems to live from the exploration of a whole sector but with more or less known enemies like the Klingons and the Tholians. But the plot will probably also introduce a new power ... In DS9 it was also very clear from the beginning, why the UFP wanted to get a foothold in this sector, while in VAN it's a secret that only the reader and some people of the command staff know about. VAN in my opinion smells more like a spy/thriller story to me than the more soap oriented DS9

First I wanted to write a quite lengthy article how I liked IGN's podcast about the end of E3 and esp. Kathleen Sanders question about what will now get covered by "smaller sites" (compared to IGN, 1up, GameSpot).

225 words later I noticed, that I was talking rubbish and deleted that draft So all you'll get today is just another post containing smaller things I had on my mind.

Well, 2nd (as I already mentioned the IGN podcast) I want to mention my new Vox blog which I will use probably nearly exclusively for Vox's Questions of the Day. I like it there so far, although it is, from a blog-tech standpoint a little bit minimalistic. There is RSS but there is no trackback/pingback/searchback/*back.

This book was the first Enterprise book for me and also the first by Dave Stern and .... well, I think I should simply stop to pretend as if I could write decent book reviews and simply say: I was really enjoying this book. I was actually enjoying that much that I ordered the 2nd part when I was only half way through this one.

All the "Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine" books consist of two stories around one planet each. The first story of this book takes place on Cardassia where Chief Miles O'Brien and his family are trying to make a new home and helping the Cardassian people. During this story the reader also meets some other familiar faces like Garak and the former Gul Macet. Nice story but in my opinion nothing really special. Especially the ending somehow simply was too quick.

Written in 1974 (basically at the end of the Vietnam war) and influenced by the authors experience during the same war, "The Forever War" describes a war, that lasts not for years, not for decades, but for milliena. The main character of the story is William Mandella, a young soldier who compulsory joined the newly formed UNEF to fight an alien race, the Taurans.