This reminds me a lot of most of ADF's novels (and please bear in mind that I'm a serious ADF fan): slow start, but the further you get, the harder it is to put down.
Spoilers TOS: Identity Theft by Greg Cox Review Thread
- Thread starter David cgc
- Start date
A solid "Above Average," with an outstanding finish.
Love Torvig he was so cute! His friendship with Keru was sweet
(I miss the relaunch universe
)
Last edited:
fun read so far. but my how copy editing standards and proofing have fallen! three major typos before page 50 alone. not greg's fault of course. but come on!
I don't recall noticing any typos.
Well, I did proofread the page proofs before the book went to press, but I guess I missed some stuff. Sorry abou that.
There are always some typos that manage to survive no matter how many times a manuscript is proofread by how many different eyes.
In the newsletter I edit, it is a regular occurrence that I'll find a typo -- most recently, the error was literally one of typography: two paragraph breaks that shouldn't have been there -- while I'm stapling and binding the print edition. If I'm lucky, there will still be time to reprint the page; if not, it goes in the mail as it is, and then gets corrected before the PDF edition goes out.
as an author myself (academic), that's certainly been my experience.
Honestly, these days it's become increasingly rare to find a book of any kind which doesn't have some glaringly obvious spelling or punctuation errors. I suspect increasing reliance on software spellcheckers or grammar checkers is to blame, which still don't always take context into account. Sci-fi can be especially difficult, given there are many made up words and terms which would get flagged by a spellchecker. It's easy to see the author or editor would eventually coach themselves to overlook those flagged words to the point of missing actual misspelled words.
Dunno how it works with modern spell-checkers, but the one in WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS allows you to very easily add words to the dictionary.
"Used"?
It is my word processor of choice when working on my DOS box or my DOSbook, either by itself for letters &c., or in combination with Xerox Ventura Publisher (DOS/GEM Edition 3.0) for cookbook pages, for the newsletter I publish, or for writing fiction.
To say that I am not a M$ Word shop would be a major understatement. If somebody sends me a .docx file for the newsletter, it makes extra work for me that wouldn't be necessary if they sent either plain text or RTF.
And I recently acquired a copy of an open source freeware program that will (with a few intermediate steps, including workarounds for a glaring bug) allow me to generate signatures from a PostScript data stream out of Ventura, thereby giving me the capability, if it came to that, of singlehandedly producing a hand-bound, hand-Smyth-sewn, hardcover edition of my novel.
But I've just veered waaaaayyyyyy off-topic, so I'l shut up about this digression.
I just read this book and really enjoyed it.
I am kind of disappointed it didn't give any new perspective on Janice Lester (madness induced by the machine or something) but I think it was a much better use of the technology. It reminded me of the episode of the Prisoner "The Schizoid Man" that has stuck with me.
I liked the Chekov focus and how even at middle age, he's having ridiculous romantic adventures.
The relatively sympathetic take on the assassin was a good twist too.
I am kind of disappointed it didn't give any new perspective on Janice Lester (madness induced by the machine or something) but I think it was a much better use of the technology. It reminded me of the episode of the Prisoner "The Schizoid Man" that has stuck with me.
I liked the Chekov focus and how even at middle age, he's having ridiculous romantic adventures.
The relatively sympathetic take on the assassin was a good twist too.
^
OMG! Someone besides me who used that program!
I used WordPerfect for years -- until my editors basically ordered me to switch to Word because that had become the industry standard.
You realize that you were using versions from after Corel did what they did to everything else (i.e., turned it into WinDoze-only bloatware. Of course, what they did to Ventura was far worse: turned it into a PageFaker knock-off).Proud user of WordPerfect v10 on my old laptop and v11 on my OmniBook.
Thankfully, since I don't make my living writing fiction for publication, can easily generate camera-ready PDFs for either single pages or multi-sheet folio signatures, and am quite capable of literally self-publishing, down to personally printing and binding the books, I am the one in a position to tell a potential publisher "My way, or the highway."
And I will release my novel under Creative Commons before I give up complete and unreviewable control over the typography thereof.
