The Metrozone

As I stated on Twitter, when I was a kid, I wanted to be James Bond. Decades later, I want to be Samuil Petrovitch. And I think it goes without saying that I'm still a kid. I talked about the first Petrovitch book here: http://theonethousand.blogspot.com/2011/10/equations-of-life.html So you might want to read that.

I won't go into detail about the second and third books here, but I will say that I think they're even better than the first. The action, the stakes, the hero, the writing, they all make me excited to read. How often are you excited while reading? It almost never happens to me.

I read the second a few months ago and just finished the third. I like to take a little breather between books in a series, although it's possible I'll jump into the fourth book soon. You can find info on all of them here at the author's website: http://www.simonmorden.com/books/

Start reading already!

Equations of Life

Samuil Petrovich is a street smart Russian mathematical genius with an ugly past living in London twenty years after Armageddon (What I believe was a terrorist-initiated world-wide nuclear attack), who inadvertently gets caught in the middle of a war between Japanese and Russian mobsters. He even less advertently seems to kick off a new end of the world scenario brought to reality by something called the New Machine Jihad. His closest ally as hell and shrapnel rain down on all sides? A combat-trained amazonian nun in body armor.

I dare you not to read that.

I rarely pick up books these days without recommendations or at least knowing something about them, but I picked up Simon Morden's Equations of Life based solely on the back cover copy (so kudos to whoever wrote that). Even so, I expected to be disappointed because I'm a fussy reader and start a hell of a lot more books than I finish.

However, I could tell in the first chapter that I might be pleasantly surprised. Although the story opens in a near future slum that William Gibson would be comfortable writing about, Morden's writing is cool in a way that's different from the dense Gibsonian stuff that I love and am used to. I don't know exactly what he's doing but it feels fresh and I sure needed some fresh. There were one or two small slowdowns along the way, but otherwise the characters and action carried me to the end and a good conclusion that also leads into the next two books, Theories of Flight and Degrees of Freedom, which I now own and look forward to reading

These books all came out within three months of each other this year, which surprised me. I thought that maybe they'd been released more slowly in the UK and then brought out all at once here, but I don't think that's the case. This is a good thing, because as soon as you finish one, you can grab the next.

And I recommend you do so.