I enjoyed these two books highly. It's gonzo science fiction, with great nasty aliens and rip-roaring action that doesn't force you to think too much.

I have no plans to pursue the remaining volumes because at the end of Vol. 2 they introduced some new characters along with tedious and uninteresting interpersonal relationship drama.

But the stuff I liked, I really liked.

As you were.

I heard about this, that it was a robo-pervy tribute to Heinlein. Sounded like a winner to me. But alas, it is astoundingly, mind-bogglingly boring. I couldn't get through it.

You live in this thing, and in doing so you damage it. You are a parasite in your castle. Everything you do, and have to do, decreases the value of the property.

In this way, a house is like a physical organism. Every aspect of the physical structure requires constant care and attention — flooring, walls, baseboards, plumbing, fixtures, doors, outside walls, roof, gutters, lawn, landscaping — all of it sucks away your money and time until you are like a bloodless fish lying on hot cement, gasping desperately for the oxygen that is all around you but that you cannot absorb. Then your house falls down on top of you, killing you utterly.

You walk around your house, and everywhere — everywhere you look, you see things that could be improved if you only had the money to do so. The front porch, with its chipped, disintegrating cement, the back steps with the cracked step, the gap under the back door, the crumbling brick work at the base of the garage, the dying tree in the back yard, the paint peeling off of the soffits, the ominously bulging brick work in the outside basement stairway, the basement floor that leaks and floods in the heaviest of rains, the basement door that leaks when it rains at all, the outlets in the living room that don't work because they are tied to a set of switches that doesn't work, the various light fixtures that don't work because there is bad wiring somewhere, the counter-top in the kitchen that is starting to curl up from the wall, the kitchen flooring that seems to develop new holes every month, the Vitrolite glass tile that has cracks and damage in various places but that can't be repaired because it is no longer manufactured, the full-size ceiling fans that were inexplicably installed in the upstairs with its 7.5 foot ceilings so that you interfere with the blades when you take your shirt off, the bathroom with its towel racks and soap dishes that have broken off, leaving ugly rust-holes in the tile (Vitrolite here as well), the shower head that can't be replaced because the threads have been stripped off so that a new shower-head will not grip, the outside flowerbeds populated by inherited plants that need completely stripped and replaced with plants that have a modicum of compatibility, the paint peeling off the wall in the basement, the spot where the front door leaked and damaged the basement ceiling, and whatever fucking else is wrong that I'm not remembering.

These flaws and imperfections whisper to you as you move through the house, and what they whisper is, "You don't have enough money to live here." The house disintegrates around you, shrinking the value of your investment on a daily basis while your mortgage payment guarantees we won't have the extra money to do anything to stop the inexorable slide into a 5-digit listing price. The only thing you can do to find peace under this roof is to close you eyes, plug your ears, and sing, "La la la…" So that's what I've been doing.

Fuck home-ownership. Fuck it in its stupid ass.

The upshot of all this is that you get a more organic feel to the mix, and therefore a looser listening experience. I'm liking it.