Sign in with Facebook
M.J. Willow's Reviews > The Prince and the Program
The Prince and the Program (The Mordred Saga, #1)
by
by
The weird thing is, I'm not entirely sure why I like this book so much - half the time I barely understood what was going on, but at the same time I could not put it down, wanting to know what happened next, and I already know this will be added to my re-read list.
Mordred is a fun narrator, and the story has lots of things I really like - magic, tech, Arthurian legend, romance and humour. Even cyborgs and zombies. Well, sort of. All the coding and engineering stuff was definitely over my head, though, and I still haven't figured out how Mordred's internal clock - running off the time in his native plane - related to our 24-hour system, and he mentions the time a lot. Enough that it got a little annoying for me, especially whenever Mordred's clock seemed to jump six hours when the narrative suggested it couldn't have been more than half an hour in our time.
I'm also not sure if I like the ending, but then again, that's one of the reasons this story is in my re-read pile. It was a challenging read, but very enjoyable.
Mordred is a fun narrator, and the story has lots of things I really like - magic, tech, Arthurian legend, romance and humour. Even cyborgs and zombies. Well, sort of. All the coding and engineering stuff was definitely over my head, though, and I still haven't figured out how Mordred's internal clock - running off the time in his native plane - related to our 24-hour system, and he mentions the time a lot. Enough that it got a little annoying for me, especially whenever Mordred's clock seemed to jump six hours when the narrative suggested it couldn't have been more than half an hour in our time.
I'm also not sure if I like the ending, but then again, that's one of the reasons this story is in my re-read pile. It was a challenging read, but very enjoyable.
Sign into Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ to see if any of your friends have read
The Prince and the Program.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
August 3, 2012
– Shelved
March 2, 2014
–
Started Reading
March 2, 2014
–
Finished Reading
A little bit of explanation about the time: There's definately a system for Sunless Planes Time, but I went at it ass-backwards. Firstly, SPT time as recounted by Mordred, and in Inquisition/JCN emails, are part of an Easter Egg -- lay out all the times in sequence as they appear in the book, convert them to binary, then to ASCII, and you get a poem by Alan Turing (part of his "Messages from the Unseen World" postcards to his student, Robin Gandy) which was later inscribed on his headstone:
Hyperbolids of Wondorous Light,
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbour there waves which somehow might
Play out God's holy pantomime.
Then I had to go backwards, and determine what special circumstances and natural phenomenon could result in such a timesystem. The geography and physicality of the Sunless Planes grew out of this, actually. I'll be talking about this in more detail in Book 2, but essentially in a world without a visual Sun, the primary influence you feel would be the movement of the gravitic subsurface point of the moon. Add to that movement in all 3 dimensions, and Euler rotations to have a constant frame of reference to the main subsurface point, and you get a very pretty spiral set of numerical increments. A "minute" in SPT is a time-unit of varying length depending on where you are with relation to the subsurface anomaly.
Again, I'm really glad you liked the book despite the technical bits :) I was worried they would put a lot of readers off....