Working on Saturday...no fun

I am sitting here working a Saturday BIC (butt in chair) shift at Cisco and not enjoying it all that much. One of the benefits/curses we have in Cisco TAC is that we can volunteer to work on weekend and get extra pay. When I first started here I was all over that but I found myself starting to get irritable and grumpy and not knowing why. I finally figured out I was working six days a week every week. While I was studying for my CCIE I cut drastically back on the amount of BIC I work and I really enjoyed it, the problem is that now I don't want to work any at all and when I am forced to I don't really enjoy it. Anyway, I am stuck on a conference call with a customer and, obviously, not paying too much attention. To kill the time I have been reading all the blogs linked off from Nina's blog. I came across a note in one of her friends blogs where she admits being a science fiction fan. I am so excited that I am not the only one. I love good science fiction. When I was in high school and college I read quite a bit of it but kind of gave it up after that. A while back I was thinking that I hadn't read any good science fiction in a long time and decided to re-read some of my favorites from a while back just to see if I still liked them or if I thought they would stink. Well, I have read a couple of them and the verdict is in, I still like it. So I am going to list 3 or 4 of my favorites


Neuromancer - William Gibson

Read the reviews here and you will see this guy has a fanatical following.

This is my all time favorite science fiction novel and one of my favorite novels of any kind of fiction. William Gibson basically invented all the internet jargon we use today in this book (cyberspace, virus, firewalls). He envisioned the way that people would work in an age of shared computer resources. All that stuff is interesting and all but the thing that makes this book so great is the way he writes. It is sort of a cross between the pulp fiction writers of the 50's and the Beat writers. His characters are all people on the fringes of society who have questionable characters and motives. They are all well drawn and interesting. I highly recommend this book. One thing I will mention is that Nina tried to read this and was a bit put off by one "intimate" scene early on. However, it is not really graphic and there is only one.

On a side note, another non-science fiction book of William Gibsons that I highly recommend is Pattern Recognition. About a lady whose job it is to figure out trends before they happen. Very well written and interesting.


Dune (series)- Frank Herbert

If you are a science fiction fan you have probably already read this series. These are books I thought I would read again and think that they were stupid but I really enjoyed it again. It is probably because of all the political intrigue more than anything that gets me involved. If you haven't read this series and you are interested in science fiction, then you should. It is a seminal work.


The Robot and Foundation series - Isaac Asimov


Two more seminal science fiction series. The movie I robot does not do the whole robot series justice. These are both very "big idea" science fiction. By that I mean that they are very interested in how society will evolve in the future. The Robot series are concerning mans relationship with machine and the Foundation books deal with government and bureaucracy. I haven't read these in a while but they are classics so I don't doubt they have held up well.




Chung Kuo (series) - David Wingrove

These books are out of print and kind of hard to find but if you can search them out they are well worth while. I want to preface this to say that, unlike Neuromancer, these books are fairly graphic. They are based on the idea that in the future the world has come under the control of the Chinese, because of this it is very male oriented, and the characters sometimes are misogynistic and violent towards women. I'm not saying the whole thing is like that but there are a few instances. Anyway, this is very similar in feel to the Dune series, in that you have a small group of people who want to overthrow a very powerful ruling class. The world the author creates is so real and interesting that you can't put it down. I think there are 7 books in the series and I am about through book 2 again and I like it every bit as much as the first time I read it.




Next time I will talk about movies maybe. So long