I’ve linked to Shamus Young’s Twenty Sided blog before. He puts a lot of time into his blog and what he writes there, often explaining technical concepts in plain, easy-to-understand language. He has run a great series on procedurally generating a nighttime city and a 3d terrain engine.

I was happy to hear that he was working on writing a fiction novel, The Witch Watch. He’s actually written two novel type things before, one of them the freely available “Free Radical”, which is loosely based on the old First Person Shoot “System Shock”. I never played System Shock, I actually never really got into first person shooters. I did play Bungie’s Marathon (look it up kids, also now freely available as Aleph One) but never got too far. I kept getting lost and confused, and people were shooting at me. It was too much pressure.

I did actually, come to think of it, complete one “first person Shooter”, Portal. But that was more because it was a great game and allowed me to take my time to think about things without getting shot up all the time. Or lost as much.

Anyway, I didn’t know anything about System Shock, but I have read a lot of cyberpunk and I do know a lot about computers. So I was really happy to read Shamus’ take on the genre, and also thought he did a great job of writing about Cyberpunk and computers without making all the dumb mistakes about computers that people who don’t know about programming make. You can get a kindle version for free at the link to the left, and I highly recommend it. You won’t beat it for the price (free!) so you can’t lose much by taking a chance on it.

More recently, Shamus wrote an autoblogography, and then turned that into a book (linked to the left.) Shamus didn’t enjoy school much and homeschools his own children. While I never really fit in at high school, I don’t think I had a bad experience. I made some great friends, worked hard, learned a lot, and had some fun. I’m not sure that I would have described it as such at the time, but that is probably more just about being that age with others kids in a social situation. At any rate, you can read Shamus’ take on his education process in the book “How I learned.” It is also full of funny stories and is a run read itself. You can read through it on his blog as well, so give it a try.

Once you are done with all of that content I linked, you can then decide if you want to buy his book “The Witch Watch.” I really enjoyed this book. It is completely worth the price – I think he has dropped the price all the way down to $5, which is my impulse purchase price for books now. I’ve been reading a lot more with the Kindle, and taking chances on books with lower prices and finding some really good stuff. For $5 though, The Witch Watch is a steal. It is well written, has a very well-thought-out magic system, and has interesting characters, as well as a strong female lead. The only knock I have on her is that she is a bit too appealing as a smart, confident, skilled, and attractive character that seems like a dream come true for geeks, but that isn’t really too hard of a flaw to overlook. Better than the default of assuming that a woman couldn’t be all those things at any rate!

I highly recommend the Witch Watch! If you liked Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris then you will like the Witch Watch. And if you haven’t read Elantris, I recommend that one too!