Crooked Little Vein
Burned-out private dick Michael McGill needs to jump-start his career. What he gets instead is a cattle prod to the crotch. The president's heroin-addicted chief of staff wants McGill to find the Constitution—the real one the Founding Fathers secretly devised for the time of gravest crisis. And with God, civility, and Mom's homemade apple pie already dead or dying, that time is now. But McGill has a talent for stumbling into every imaginable depravity—and this case is driving him even deeper into America's darkest, dankest underbelly, toward obscenities that boggle even his mind.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2010–2022years
50% recommend25% neutral25% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug." -- Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis
- Redliners by David Drake. Burned out soldiers are sent to baby-sit a planetary colonization. Fortunately for the story it turns out to be a planet full of monsters. Baen Free Library.
Accelerando, Iron Sunrise, and Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. Singularity stories.
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. Supernatural meta-fiction with half the story in the footnotes. Reminiscent of the movie Donnie Darko.
Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Private eye gets retained by the White House to track down the other U.S. Constitution. To quote William Gibson, "Stop It. You're frightening me."
Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg. Story of his teenage daughter's descent into manic psychosis.
A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett. Kids' stories, so they have wall-to-wall story, unlike some of his more situational adult books.
James H. Schmitz science fiction stories. Available from the Baen Free Library of digital books.
- Hah! I'm an Ellis fan, or at least a fan of his Comic Books (or are they Graphical Novels, I never learn), but I didn't really get along with Crooked Little Vein. I honestly don't remember a single piece of the plot (it's 15-ish years since I read it), but I do remember that I got the feeling that his main objective was to gross me out. A bit like Garth Ennis, but it novel format. I get a bit annoyed when (it's a bit too obvious that) the author's main objective is to play his audience rather than to tell a story.
- Fiction, mostly.
Declare, by Tim Powers. Cold war espionage with black magic. Entertainingly bleak, and probably did a lot more weirdness with real history than I knew how to appreciate.
Producing Open Source Software (http://producingoss.com/), by Karl Fogel. A very thorough look into all sorts of practical matters in running a large open source software project.
The Engines of Light trilogy by Ken MacLeod. Entertaining, though a bit erratic. Makes a bunch of Forteana fit in a hard SF framework. Also the second MacLeod book I've read that has a weird pixie dust immortality treatment that seems incongruous with the rest of the technology level.
Matter by Iain M. Banks. Culture again after Algebraist. Still good.
The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett. Finally got around to reading this one. Was surprisingly fresh. It would have been interesting to see Pratchett write more science fiction after this and Strata around 30 years ago.
The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. Another old SF book. This one wasn't very fresh, seemed like two or three different novels stapled together, with bits and pieces that might work pretty well if it weren't for the other bits and pieces.
Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Not a lot of surprises, if you know what Warren Ellis tends to write. Basically a road trip novel through various degeneracies in America. Fun, but tends to go for gross-out warrenellisisms in favor of overall coherence.
Neuropath by Scott Bakker. A technothriller about all sorts of fun things you can do by directly rewiring peoples' brains with near-future neurosurgery. Bakker's chilly philosophical outlook doesn't pack quite the same punch in an already mostly rationalistic setting as it did in the Prince of Nothing fantasy books. Sticks with a single not particularly unsympathetic viewpoint character and therefore avoids the problem in Prince of Nothing where you'd often end up in the head of someone you really don't want to be anywhere near.
The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan. Smullyan writes various essays inspired by Taoism. Quality varies, but Smullyan is generally fun to read.
On SF by Thomas Disch. Beautifully acerbic essays by someone who takes science fiction literature seriously and doesn't let it off easy. And just plain likes to insult people. Representative, though noticeably dated sample: http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472068968-1.pdf
Denner's Wreck by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Watt-Evans has an specific style of writing from what follows from the setting and premises rather than going for the most dramatically obvious plot. The results are hit-and-miss with his fantasy novels I've read, but work a lot better here, where the legends of a bronze-age civilization end up emerging from a science fiction setting. Watt-Evans' narrative style supports the plot where the traditional stories end up not really being what they seem to be.
The Official Book of Ultima by Shay Addams. It tells how Richard Garriott's obsession with programming in high school lead to the Ultima game series, which were one of the most notable computer games in the 80s and became the flagship product of Garriott's Origin Systems company. Also documents how the games grew from Ultima I being programmed by Garriot alone learning as he went along into Ultima VI developed by a large team. There is much detail about Ultima VI, which was being developed as the book was written. Much of it also conflicts with the game that ended up being released, and I ended up wondering whether this was about the game changing during production or just Addams getting his facts wrong.
