Wow, talk about an eerily prescient book. I thought this was new, I must have brought it for cheap on BookBub, it came out September, 2019. A female rock-n-roller is just breaking through, when terrorist attacks & a pandemic cause a shutdown of all public gatherings.
Fast forward a few years, another female becomes a talent scout for Big Music. She looks for talent in illegal underground live performance venues. Shocker, Big Music, who records 3d performances & restages them in virtualities, is not looking out for the best interests of anyone but themselves.
Not too tense, but, again, shockingly prescient of the COVID shutdowns. But interesting, defying the shutdowns in the book has a leftist feel, where during the real pandemic, it became a rightist shibboleth.
A fun & easy read, check it out. Hunh, I just noticed I flagged this book as Politics rather than Science Fiction.
On an impulse, I reread 1 of my fav books: "Last Call", by Tim Powers, 1992, 560 pages, 203k words.
A fisher king story, with tarot cards & weird theories of luck. What's not to like? It was longer than I expected.
I was going to power through & read books 2 & 3 of the trilogy, "Expiration Date" & "Earthquake Weather".
Kobo showed the books but wouldn't let me order them. I opened a ticket with support, a few days later, they told me it was fixed. Nope.
A few days after that, they told me it was a content problem, & they were turning it over to the content team.
A few days after that, the books were gone from Kobo. Sorry, they no longer exist.
During this whole experience, I am of course thinking, "Oh fuck, it's a goddam AI.". As the Bullshit Apocalypse proceeds, I fear we will increasingly be having to live with systems that work only statistically - they work a lot of the time, but for some other %age of the time, they fail miserably. We will live in a world of completely unreliable systems. Frustration upon frustration.
But, the techbros will get big $$$! &, all the glorious slop! I'm still saying, 2-3 years until the concensus is, "Can we get a do-over on this AI thing?"
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