Xevious Consulting

We recently had some family over for the holidays that have spent the last year playing Words With Friends over iPhones and Facebook. Someone suggested playing a "real" game of Scrabble. We looked in our game cabinet and found a travel edition of Scrabble with 3/8" tiles and three tiny tile racks. We broke out the card table and sat down to play. The first word played was "QUA". Is that a word? What are the challenge rules again? After the first move it was obvious that there was a flaw with this plan: someone would have to keep score.

Fans of Michael Crichton know the formula. You take a sliver of technology, let it go awry, and then send in a mixed team of experts to stop it or rescue the previous team. What you get is Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, Coma, Runaway, Disclosure, etc. These books are ripe to be made into movies as they are full of interesting characters and action. In the case of Lost World, the novel was written specifically to become a movie. One of Crichton's latter books was called Prey. In this 2002 novel that follows this same formula we have a bunch on nano-sized robots escaping and our hero team has to stop them. The novel 7th Sigma starts off in a world that has been ravaged by a creature similar to the one we see in Prey.

I just finished reading Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi. This is a reimagining of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy. John Scalzi brought he bit of classic sci-fi up to a modern style. The story features a prospector, Jack Holloway, and his dog who stumble upon a valuable gem deposit on a planet devoid of intelligent life. Jack also finds an animal about the size of a cat that he calls a Fuzzy. The story continues into a legal drama to determine if the Fuzzy is sentient. The story is very good and a good homage to the original.

Kristine Rusch has created a future where Earth is part of a sort of United Nations of planets but in this UN the Earth is about as important as Tuvalu. I've only read the first three of the novels but I am looking forward to the next one. I made the mistake of reading them out of order.