Various Thoughts

Daemon’s Mark is the fifth book in Caitlin Kittredge‘s Nocturne City series. First and foremost, the summary on the back of the novel appears to have been copied from Witch Craft. That aside, there aren’t all that many problems with it. Luna continues her slow progression toward becoming a likable character, while the supernatural abilities of the universe’s various denizens continue to take a backseat to standard dangers such as guns, tranquilizers, and reinforced steel cages.

Nalini Singh‘s latest Psy-Changeling novel, Bonds of Justice, surprisingly enough mixes up the standard order of events somewhat. All the previous novels had one half of its future couple ‘hot’ and aggressively pursue the relationship while the other would be ’cold’ and try to avoid the relationship. This one has both parties pursuing each other with equal fervor more or less from the beginning. As for the background plotline featuring the Psy’s fracturing society… it continue apace, with sides having been drawn among the councilors.

Neuropath is a thriller by R. Scott Bakker I picked up on a whim when I ordered The Judging Eye. Now, normally I don’t read thrillers and so had no idea what to expect. Even if I did… I probably would have been surprised that the book is more philosophical dissertation than novel. The characters are just arguments (or perhaps proofs) and the setting is merely window dressing.

Generally speaking this wouldn’t be a problem since philosophy can provoke interesting discussions. It didn’t work out that way in this case because I already viewed its ‘radical viewpoint’ as self-evident reality. Probably because I’m a sociopath. Regardless, reading it was akin to reading about how the grass is green and sky is blue; not particularly interesting.

There was, however, one point I found myself disagreeing with. A comparison is made between the brain and a computer, which is accurate enough for the most part. The problem comes when it’s inferred that because you understand the brain’s programming language you can accurately predict how it will respond to various stimuli. That is not necessarily true. While I haven’t worked with many different types of programming languages, the ones I have all included at least one "Random" function. A command that would return a random value from between a set of defined boundaries.

Brains, like computers, could very easily have certain responses tied to those "Random" functions depending upon their logical syntax. So while you would be able to predict that one of several actions could occur, you could not predict precisely which one.