I'll throw out a recommendation for Neal Stephenson, if you're not already familiar. I like all of his stuff, personally, but the books "Zodiac"[0], "Interface"[1], and "The Cobweb"[2] (the latter two co-authored with his uncle) I think would be a slam-dunk for you, based on your list.
I've got REAMDE and maybe Cryptonomicon? finished though quite a few years ago. I've had a couple of false starts with Anathem though I think I've been told it just gets started slowly.
I liked but didn't love the Stephenson I've read. Unlike William Gibson novels I've read, Stephenson is a solid 7 or 8 out of ten for me (maybe I should have added another category in my list). Your suggestions will probably make it on to my list.
I suspect "Interface" will be up your alley. It isn't anywhere near as literary as Gibson. It has become wildly more plausible as it has aged.
Anathem is definitely a slow start. If anything once it gets going it moves too fast. I'd argue it doesn't spent enough time exploring the world the reader suddenly finds themselves in.
If you haven't, check out Bruce Sterling. His "Heavy Weather"[0] might well be up your alley, too.
Similar experience w/ my daughter (now 12 y/o) here. We read the heck out of children's books when she was little. There were nights when I really didn't want to slog thru the same Suzy Spafford[6] book again, but I did it anyway. I think it paid off. My daughter is an avid reader now.
She says she still wants me to read to her, so I do. This year was a bit sci-fi heavy, and we've decided to target more fantasy and literature in 2026.
This year's books included:
"Below the Root", "And All Between", and "Until the Celebration" - The "Green Sky Trilogy"[0] by Zilpha Keatly Snyder. We held off on playing the "Below the Root" video game[1] but I'm hoping that as we get into winter weather and outside time becomes more scarce we can get to it. It's arguably the final book in the "trilogy".
"Redshirts"[2] by John Scalzi. We've been slowly making our way through Star Trek TOS in the last couple years so. That gave her enough cultural fluency with the tropes in the book to make it effective.
"To Say Nothing of the Dog"[3] by Connie Willis. My daughter adores Victorian England and comedy. This book also turned her on to Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)"[4] (which I'm still working thru on my own-- I do not particularly love Victorian England but it is a good book).
Besides the books I read to my daughter, I also read Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries"[5] series myself. I'm vaguely interested in the television adaptation. I'd love to hear what somebody who has read the series thinks of the TV version.
I read the series and have really enjoyed the TV show. It felt like it was made for fans (the portrayal of the embedded show, Sanctuary Moon, was wonderful and I felt like whoever did their hairstyles had an immense amount of fun), yet accessible without knowing the story. Murderbot’s self-narration was good; I wanted more since it drove so much of the book but what was there in the show carried its personality well.
Alexander Skarsgard pulled the character off well. My mental picture of Murderbot from the books was very different but now when I re-read the first book after watching the show, I heard his voice. I still feel slightly sad they didn’t get a more genderless or gender-ambivalent actor (he looks male, the bot was agender before the show) or tried to portray him differently… they could have reduced this but the way they filmed him assigns gender to an ungendered character.
The other actors were all excellent too. I felt far more of a sense of them as a team and individuals than I remember from the first book.
If you enjoyed the books I think you’ll enjoy the show, except for me that it has changed my picture of Murderbot and I am not sure for the better, in terms of what I felt were social / identity values the books encouraged.
Thanks for the analysis. I've been reading it with a thought toward how I might've adapted it for video. The narration seemed incredibly challenging (and kept making me think of "A Christmas Story", of all things). The integration of "Sanctuary Moon" sounds particularly fun.
I definitely see Murderbot as genderless and seeing it as gendered is going to be weird. Fortunately, the series isn't particularly "dear" to me and I think I can deal with the trauma of having my mental pictures wiped-out by somebody else's.
(There are properties like "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash" that I hope are never adapted to video and, if they are, I will steadfastly refuse to ever see, because I can't imagine anybody else's mental pictures will be better than mine...)
One of the most eerie experiences in my life: I was just finishing the second-to-last book in the series and had a kidney stone. Talk about empathizing with a character...
Voice-controlled phone systems are hugely rage-inducing for me. I am often in loud setting with background chatter. Muting my audio and using a touchtone keypad is so much more accurate and easy than having to find a quiet place and worrying that somebody is going to say something that the voice response system detects.
I hate those, too. Especially when others are around.
The interface is so inconsistent between different implementations that they're always terribly awkward to navigate at best, and completely infuriating at worst. I don't like presenting the image of an progressively-angrier man who is standing around and speaking incongruous short phrases that are clearly directed towards nobody at all.
But I've found that many of them still accept DTMF. Just mash a button instead of utter a response, and a more-traditional IVR tree shows up with a spoken list of enumerated options. Things get a lot better after that.
Like pushing buttons at the gas pump to try to silence the ad-roll, it's pretty low-cost to try.
I'd forgotten how heavy CRTs are. A local surplus auction has a really tempting 30's inch Sony CRT for sale cheap, but when I saw it was over 300lbs I had to pass on it.
I really should re-read the series. I enjoyed it when I read it back in 2000 but it's a faded memory now.
Without saying anything specific to spoil plot poonts, I will say that I ended-up having a kidney stone while I was reading the last two books of the series. It was fucking eerie.
Partial downloads weren't useless, though, as other commenters have said.
The PKZIP tools came with PKZIPFIX.EXE, which would scan the file from the beginning and rebuild a missing central archive. You could extract any files up to the truncated file where your download stopped.
ICMP packets pretty much always carry some data (even though it's not _strictly_ required). This data is what is padded when the user asks for a ping with a specific packet size (e.g., when debugging MTU issues).
In some applications, using an ICMP payload and getting a quote of the IP header + 8-bytes of the original packet back in ICMP error messages is part of the application. For example, traceroute utilises the fact that it gets part of the payload back in a ICMP TTL exceeded message to identify _which_ traceroute request was being responded to.
you're right it's not continuous, you'd have to send another ping once the first one is finished. Your data is only "stored in the network" until the ping completes which would be a few hundred ms or so and then another ping has to be sent. If a single ping fails i wonder if the whole "fs" is corrupted or if there some kind of error handling built in.
Did the limewashing impart some kind of protection to the masonry? I know water infiltration and freeze/thaw cycles, particularly with soft brick, can wreck masonry.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_(novel)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_(novel)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cobweb_(novel)
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