Ship Breaker: so far, so awesome

Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Little, Brown and Company, 2010

cafenowhere, intertribal, cucumberseed, I think all of you guys, for overlapping and different reasons, would love this book. I haven't finished it yet, so there's still room for it to go pear-shaped, but so far, it's *great*. The hero, Nailer, is a kid who works on "light crew," crawling through the ducts of old, decrepit oil tankers that lie abandoned on climate-changed Gulf Coast of the future. The details of this dystopic future are all so believable--the kid wears an old dust mask that says "discard after 40 hours," the best currency to have is Chinese red paper cash, and people pray to any number of deities, old and new and intermingled, but among them, the Rust Saint and the Scavenge God. There are realistic loyalties and betrayals, good parents and awful ones--all believable. The conflicts are personal, intense; no one's too good, and no one is impossibly bad. It's grim, but there's hope and humor, too--without the story falling into any danger of becoming "a feel-good tale"

There are some awesome books out there.

P.S. Description of what it's like to fall into oil---TERRIFYING.

"The Peacock," By Ted Infinity and Nabil Hijazi

And another recommendation! This is brilliant: spam as an intelligent life form ("I AM EVOLVED FROM A SOPHISTICATED MASS MAILING ALGORITHM. WE DO NOT LIKE THE TERM SPAMMER"), lonely and seeking freedom.

I read this based on a Twitter recommendation, which is kind of like clicking on a spam link? Okay, no, not really. But it was well worth it. How can you resist a story that contains a love declaration like "I LOVE YOU ... COME TRY THE NEW DREAMWIDTH DOT ORG OF SEX"?

Link here: "The Peacock," up at Strange Horizons

(See how I avoided making it blinking and scrolling? It's because I'm understated.)