Teaser Tuesday: “Bandwidth”

So recently, I was reading a book called Bandwidth, by Eliot Peper:

This is, essentially, a cyberpunk book, although it’s not Neuromancer-level cyberpunk where you’re actually inside the digital realm; instead it’s more along the lines of you have an implant that feeds you a constant stream of information from the net, kind of like the glasses worn by certain factions in Daemon, by Daniel Suarez*. Now, normally, this would be right up my alley, but unfortunately, this particular book contains so much in the way of florid description that my eyes quickly glazed over at the plethora of adjectives, and I actually didn’t get much farther than the scene from which this Teaser is taken:

A magnificent wood bar lined the entire left side of the vast space, shelves upon shelves of exotic liquors rising up behind bartenders in bow ties and red suspenders. Oil lamps sputtered on chains hanging from the ceiling, casting everything in a warm uneven light. Booths lined the wall opposite the bar, and tables filled the space in between, legs resting on thick Persian rugs.

Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

So why, if I failed to finish this book, and therefore, obviously, didn’t like it very much, did I bother to do a Teaser Tuesday for it? Welllll, let’s proceed with a couple more sentences and find out.

At the far end of the hall, a trio of vizslas napped before a roaring fire in a hearth the size of a bull. One of the dogs stirred, raising its head and transfixing Dag with intelligent golden eyes.

Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

The book does, of course, get a few extra points for having vizslas in it, and for knowing what they look like. It wasn’t enough to make me continue reading, but I did skip ahead almost to the end to make sure the vizslas were all right. (They were.)

Meanwhile, work continues on Blue Roses! In this scene, somebody has taken some of the titular roses somewhere they shouldn’t be—a garden center, in fact—and thus caused them to be used for a purpose that was not intended: Animating lawn decorations.

It turned out there were four roses in the bucket, meaning the little stick man ended up with three little stick pets: The pig or lamb or whatever it was supposed to be, a ladybug, and something that looked like a frog had eaten, or been eaten by, a giant spider. She was mildly surprised he hadn’t put one of the roses in a stick woman—there was one, with hair made of long braids of twigs hanging down its back—but maybe the stick man didn’t swing that way. 

James V. Viscosi, Blue Roses

Gives new meaning to “stick-figure family”, I guess …

* If that sort of thing sounds interesting to you, I would highly recommend Daemon over this book.