A very comprehensive guide to the curriculum for the 70-315 exam. It provides plenty of raw information, worked examples, and hands-on exercises. The material is of a higher quality than most exam preparation books, and the number of typos and outright errors is small. Don’t expect an introduction to ASP.NET, though, or a particularly good way of learning it from scratch. Even though it’s billed as a “training guide,” it asssumes a certain amount of knowledge of the product. It also illustrates some exam points with techniques that no-one in their right mind would use in real life. This is not a guide to ASP.NET “best practice.” It’s designed to get you through the exam, and it does that very well.

This is the second book in Bujold’s Chalion series, and it looks like the series is here to stay. She’s having far too much fun with this world to give it up. Paladin Of Souls see the focus of her attention shift from Cazaril to the formerly cursed dowager Royina Ista. Now that the curse is lifted, she longs to be free of the prison of manners and ladylike custom she has been trapped in for so long. She decides to undertake a modest pilgrimage, just to get her out of Valenda castle and away from her supposed servants and ladies-in-waiting, who insist on treating her like she is still mad and cursed and incapable. The battle she has on her hands just to escape from her well-meaning but ill-informed custodians is just a shadow of what she will encounter along the way.

Ista is in interesting character, one who will be familiar to anyone who has read Bujold’s other books. She is headstrong, a natural leader, constrained by her position in life, and determined to defy others’ expectations of her. There are obvious parallels with Cordelia Naismith and Ekaterin Vorsoisson, but that’s no bad thing. I found the highly mannered, historical romance writing style a bit difficult to get to grips with at first, but it soon becomes transparent. Bujold clearly loves Chalion, its religion and its magic, and she leaves the way clear for plenty of further adventures. They’ll definitely be worth looking out for.

Cayce Pollard is a cool hunter, a woman with an instinct for the next big thing, and an allergy to excessive branding. She is also a dedicated follower of something called “the footage,” a mysterious series of film fragments that someone, somewhere, is posting on the web. No-one knows who they are, what they mean, or even if the clips are from a finished film or a work in progress. While working on a big job involving a major corporate rebranding, Cayce gets persuaded to find out where the footage is coming from.

Although the hunt for the footage makes for a fine plot, driving the action from London to Tokyo to Moscow, it’s really Cayce herself, and the people she meets that make the book more than a simple mystery thriller. (Which is just as well, because the ending suffers from Sidelined Protagonist Syndrome, although not as much as, say, Greg Bear’s Vitals.) Hubertus Bigend, the charming entrepreneur; Parkaboy, the enthusiastic footagehead she interacts with via forum and email; Voytek, the artist who collects old ZX-81 computers; Dorotea, the über-bitch designer and former industrial éspion; and so many more.

Gibson’s prose is smooth like Belgian chocolate, and cool like an Armani glacier. The last third of the book is more plot-driven than character-driven, but Pattern Recognition is never less than a delight to read. Each page is an adventure, each sentence a treat. Exceedingly worthwhile.

Broken Angels is Richard Morgan’s second book, a follow-up to the excellent Altered Carbon. Although they both feature the hard-bitten Takeshi Kovacs as the hero, they take very different tracks. Altered Carbon was a dark, SF detective thriller; Broken Angels is a fast-moving treasure hunt adventure with mercenaries, greedy corporations, mysterious alien artefacts, sex, and guns. Lots of guns. Morgan’s writing is graphic and assured, and the plot rips along at a roaring pace. There are a lot of twists and betrayals–perhaps too many for an action-based book like this. Not all of them can be resolved during the climax, and so there is a long cool-down chapter afterwards, in which the characters have to explain everything that couldn’t be worked into the main plot. Nevertheless, it’s a cracking read–classic space adventure for the modern eye.

This book is quite clearly pitched at the intersection of people who love movies, and people who love writing, i.e., aspiring screenwriters. (It suited me down to the ground.) The first part of the book consists of fascinating and funny anecdotes about his long and successful career as a screenwriter, mixed with snippets of advice about writing for the movies. In the next two sections, he goes into more depth about screenplays and how they work. In the last part, he presents a rough draft of a new screenplay–written for this book–and critiques of it by other famous writers. I love reading and listening to people talk passionately about their craft, whether it’s joinery, cooking, or writing. Goldman has a witty, self-deprecating yet simultaneously confident tone, and he is a joy to read. Which Lie Did I Tell? is an informative, and highly entertaining book.

Argh–this book had the potential to be really great, but it falls apart about two-thirds of the way through. It starts out as a fast-paced science-fiction detective story. We’re not quite a century into the future, and the technology of has enabled people to make temporary copies of themselves. These copies are called golems, or dittos. They’re made of specially engineered, recyclable clay, and they only last a day. At the end of a day, they have to inload their memories into their original, or they will run out of stored energy and die. But they are true copies, with all the intellect and emotions of the real people they are copies of.

Albert Morris is a “ditective”, a detective specialising in ditto copyright violations and other property crimes. Dittos are considered as property. They are expendable, and have virtually no rights. The story starts by following a green copy of Morris (all dittos are colour-coded) as it tries to escape from a band of thugs, so that it can return to the real Morris, and inload a set of memories that are crucial to the case he is working on. Brin proceeds to use the structure and voice of a detective novel to elaborate on the society that this ditto technology has created, on the benefits, problems, and practicallities inherent in having copies of yourself running around, and on the philosophical consequences of self-multiplication. It’s a beautiful blend of SF and crime fiction, and Brin’s light narrative touch makes it a sheer joy to read.

The problem comes when Brin deviates from the detective thread, and turns the novel into “pure” science fiction. SF relishes taking a world in flux, or a society on the brink of enormous change, and cutting to the heart of the issue. It finds the people directly involved with the technology/conflict/disaster, and puts them under a microscope in order to tell the larger story through these characters. This means that ultimately the story is not about the characters themselves: they are secondary to the “Big Idea” the author wants to write about.

This is where Kil’n People goes wrong. It starts off being about the characters, and then switches to being about the Idea. The Idea happens to be really good and interesting, but it’s the characters that drew me into the book, and I was disappointed when it wandered off into metaphysics rather than staying with the murder mystery. The pace, and the whole feel of the book changed, and not for the better. Had Brin stayed with the mystery, and resolved it without trying to explain the whole nature of his fictional universe, it would probably have been the best SF detective story I had ever read. He could have carried it on as a series, and he would have had me hooked for life. But he didn’t, and so it has to go down as a just another good SF story, full of ideas, with interesting characters and a satisfying plot. Good, but not great. Damn.

When I bought Sidetracked, I had no idea that Henning Mankell is Swedish, and that this is an English translation of his book. Being bilingual, I’m always a bit wary about reading translations. I’m always wondering how much of the author’s original tone is being lost. How many figures of speech just do not survive being moved out of their original tongue? What is the translator adding in order to compensate? So usually I consider a translated work to be a collaborative effort between the original author and the translator. In this case it’s Steven T. Murray, who has also translated many of Mankell’s other novels, and he does a fine job.

Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad police finds himself investigating a series of brutal murders where the victims have been scalped. The victims are also rich and well-known, and so there is a lot of outside interest and pressure for him to solve the case. At the same time he has to deal with his sick father, and figure out a way to tell his girlfriend that the case will mean he’ll have to cancel their holiday. It’s these family connections that lend Sidetracked a lot of its interest. You get the impression that Wallander (and the rest of the Ystad police force) is much more than just a cop: he is a son, a father, a lover, and a friend. Despite the viciousness of the crimes, the book feels gentle and innocent. Wallander is constantly wondering how the Sweden he loves so much can produce such a deranged killer. Despite his cynicism, he genuinely believes in the goodness of his country and its people.

I used to really enjoy Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone books, but I went off them for a while in the middle of the alphabet. Somewhere around M or N she wandered away from the things I liked, focussing more on Kinsey’s past and less on her detective work. (I like my murder mysteries the way I like my Regency romances: just a shade too inventive to be labelled formulaic, but safe and predictable in tone and overall content.) With Q, Grafton and Kinsey are back on form.

Unlike most of the Grafton books, Q is for Quarry uses a real-life murder as its starting point: the unidentified body of a young woman, found in a quarry in 1969. Now, years later, Kinsey Millhone is asked to look into the murder along with the original investigating policemen. Kinsey’s sarcastic tone works nicely with the acrid personalities of the cops, both of whom are facing their own mortality. There is the usual assortment of interesting characters with undiscovered pasts, dogged legwork on Kinsey’s part, and a faintly embittered outsider’s view of social structures and functions.

At the end of the book is a note from Grafton herself, about the Jane Doe who was the genesis of the book. She explains which details she has added to the true story (the presence of a tarp, for instance) and which are original (the pattern on the victim’s trousers). She also includes a facial reconstruction, on the off chance that a reader may recognise the dead girl. The serious postscript would make a pooly written book seem tawdry, but Grafton’s prose and plotting, the sheer humanity of her characters, is not shamed.

Anyone who reads Gibson knows he knows cool. His worlds are full of that intangible quality; his characters make Neo from the Matrix (who could not have existed without Gibson, of course) look dowdy. But this is the first book where he’s talked so explicitly about coolness. His protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is a “coolhunter”, finding the Next Big Thing and passing judgement on proposed brands. Ironically, she is violently allergic to excessive branding, breaking out in hives if she flies Virgin Atlantic and experiencing panic attacks when faced with the Michelin Man.

Anyone who reads Gibson knows he also knows the online world. Again, though, Pattern Recognition takes a new look at a favourite topic. In this case, the characters exist in the real world, but are members of an online community whose group dynamic drives some aspects of the plot. As a long-term member of an online community myself, I instantly recognised the personalities and situations that crop up in any such group, from newbie floods to sock puppets and troll-baiters.

The story centres around snatches of a black and white film that have been released on the Internet. The “footage” is so compelling that several online groups have formed to investigate it, and so mysterious that the groups haven’t learned anything. The plot follows Cayce’s travels from London to Tokyo (a Gibson staple) to Russia in search of the source of the footage, accompanied, aided and hindered by a mix of odd personalities.

It’s standard Gibson, with fast motorcycles and obscure technology. Fun. In some ways, though, Gibson builds the mystery too well. I was almost disappointed to find out the truth about the footage, not because the solution was weak, but because the enigma was so compelling. Apart from that, however, I did enjoy Pattern Recognition.

In this follow-up to the Nebula award-winning Darwin’s Radio, Bear picks up the same characters 12 years after the first outbreak of the SHEVA virus. The first part of the book, ostensibly about the Rafelson family, can also be read as a highly critical commentary of topical Western issues: racism, domestic terrorism, SARS, HIV, universal surveillance and loss of privacy, the erosion of civil liberties in times of crisis, corrupt and uncritical media, and political power obtained without the consent of an informed electorate. Bear hits the point home hard: the vague “they” we fear are, in fact, us. Part two takes a more traditional science fiction route, following the heroes as they make their scientific, social and personal discoveries. Part three is about hope. Unfortunately, although parts 2 and 3 are necessary to wrap up the story, they lack the insight and urgency of part 1, and felt like a let-down in comparison. I think the book would have been much more powerful if Bear had decided not to go for the “happy” ending, but that’s his choice.