Customer Reviews

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger is one of those rare treats: a book that, when you're finished, you feel impelled to share with all your friends, if only to have someone else to swap the jokes with.

The collection is a slender volume, maybe 110 pages long, with about 12 stories or so. The titular piece is written as a set of instructions for using Linux to create your own zombie badger (with an Appendix for additional instructions and warnings for use with alternate species or unsupported animals). The following eight stories are written in a journalistic style, immersing the reader in an alternate universe where this sort of software opens up whole new vistas. In the manner of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, these individual stories combine to create a strangely familiar world. The author blends humor with eeriness in a heady, must read mix... In this world, teens run wild with their borderline illegal Linux installations, zombloyees usurp the jobs of less cost efficient living employees, companies install a new requirement for the ruthless (some might say bloodsucking) world of middle management, IT networking goes to extreme dimensions, playing dead might be the only way to survive, and the relentless killing machines of a previously unknown "pest" become the season's hottest pets...

I found the last three stories in the volume to be somewhat less involving. Perhaps this is due to the shift to a more "familiar" writing style, less "you are there" gonzo and more traditional first/third person narratives.

While the first of these ("The Great VuDu Linux Teen Zombie Massacre") is certainly a part of the previous world, it makes the mistake of repeating the content of the titular piece. In its previous appearance as a story in Spacesuits and Sixguns, this repetition would have been necessary to keep unfamiliar readers up to speed. Not so here. I wonder if the piece might have benefited from more insight from the complexities of an actual wetware install, instead of a seemingly verbatim recounting of the manual... However, the rest of the tale proves to be a hoot, bringing a whole new levels of fun to the terms "IKnowKungFu" and "fire fire fire".

The final two stories are disconnected, though they each have their charm (particularly the piece titled, "In the Shadow of the Fryolater," which involves the hilarious and bizarre encounter between a restaurant worker and a rather megalomaniacal sea critter). That they seem related to the other stories only thematically seems to detract from their punch somewhat... At least for me. Then again, by this time I was chugging along at a pretty good clip, with all the previous pieces buzzing around my brainbox.

Still, good stuff.

This is a short story collection about cybermancy and necrotechnology -- most of the stories are set in a parallel reality where you can use the dark arts to raise the dead, and then use the other dark arts -- computer programming -- to control them.

One of Snyder's strengths in this collection is disguising her fiction as news articles or technical writing. The title story is actually written like a software guide, instructing readers on what kinds of software will need to be installed to raise the dead (like a Duppy card, FleshGolem software, or ItzaLive programs, for you Mac users), and well over half of the other stories read like something out of the business or technology sections of your local paper or a national newsweekly.

Can't imagine necromancy as big business? Obviously, you've never considered the financial benefits of replacing your living employees with zombies who will work for 20 hours a day for a bucket of cow brains. Not to mention the benefits of networking your office computers with eldritch extra-dimensional demons who will deliver your e-mail and make market predictions for the price of a few delicious kittens. Sure, there's a problem with cthonian horrors sucking out your soul, but everyone's gotta make sacrifices in business, right?

Verdict: Thumbs up. If you like your fiction with healthy doses of humor, horror, and computer in-jokes, this is definitely something you're going to enjoy.

Snyder is hilarious. Her use of characters and creatures from myths and legends, to re-depict IT situations by superimposing these beings from a supernatural realm onto real-life computer industry events, describes them in a new light, with tremendous insight and humour. The twelve articles collected here are fun for any Geek on your gift list.

The wit and wisdom displayed in this book are exceptional, with everything from step by step instructions on how to install Linux on a dead badger, to using your dead badger to fight zombies. This book has it all, from stories about IT helpdesks starting to staff with zombies to cut down on cost, to using vampires as supervisors to keep the zombies under control and working, to management having no brains to begin with so the zombies have no interest in eating them anyway.

Pick this book up for yourself, for your geek friends or anyone in IT or computer science; they will ROTFL while reading it.

If you made the Monty Python crew work in an office and left a copy of the Necronomicon in the bathroom for breaktime reading, you'd wind up with this book. These stories occupy a delightful cross-genre place between humor, horror, technology, and business.

The author has obviously read too many tech manuals and too many business books, and been driven mad by them. But fortunately it's one of the good kinds of madness, not something scary like a CEO.

I do feel obliged to mention that NetBSD's dead badger support is far better than Linux's. But the book is absolutely fabulous nonetheless.

Lucy Snyder has one of the most unique voices in speculative fiction, and this book is an example of her at her best.

What Terry Prachett does for fantasy, what Douglas Adams did for S/F, what Christopher Moore does for horror, Lucy Snyder does for technogeekism. She twists it, she warps it, and she makes it side-splittingly funny. She is well on her way to creating a lexicon of humor that will have the whole Gen X and Y community feeling even more smug and geekier-than-thou.

The title piece in this collection is a beloved classic to the online crowd; anyone who's ever suffered through a technical manual will be at home with the zombie badgers.

This book also contains one of my favorite stories of all time, "In The Shadow of the Fryolator". Chick lit meets Cthulu via the brain of Lucy Snyder.

I highly recommend owning this book if you want to be cool.

Well, being a fan of every zombie based litature and or media that has come out...pretty much since i can remeber this book takes the cake. Not only does it contain zombies, but it shows how to make them and the nessary tools and items needed to do so. I should have guessed that Linux would have been involved i just dident realize it would be so easy. Now i barely ever have to do any work my self, except for matience on my zombies of course. Iv even taught one to take dictation, although they cant spell worth a D#@N. Over all i loved this book, from obscure hacking references to common problems we could all have with the "living impared" this is a A-1 book in my opinion.

This handbook is priceless. Sure, Linux is free, but learning how to use it properly, a necessity when installed on a dead badger (something I'd been meaning to try) can be tricky (especially for those of us who were trained on Windows machines).

I'd been wanting to explore Linux use and the wider applications of the life-challenged to handle my small business's basic chores--mailing, filing, tax preparation, security--but until I read this book I had no idea I'd need to know which aethernet company would require the least amount of holy water. The need for a priest on speed dial or a martyr-minded virgin had also never occurred to me.

I especially liked the down-to-earth language of the book. Sure, there are some shoutouts to people I've never heard of, and some references to computer skills I haven't mastered yet, but I found it written in a fun, easily-accessible way that made it possible for even my (Windows) challenged brain to keep up.

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger is one of those books that begins with a small chuckle, quickly advances to a chortle and then moves you directly to 'Laughing out loud'. Really quickly. With dry humor and clear prose Lucy Snyder deconstructs hackers, corporate culture and megalomanic alien squids in short order, and with a side of fries.

This collection of sprightly tales begins with the title piece, a pseudo technical manual that should delight geeks and non-geeks a like, particularly those whove sat on hold waiting for tech support. We then proced to corporate vampirism, psychic stock predictions, zombie employees and haunted networks. Luc's prose is funny, fast moving, absurdist and served with a healthy dose of irony. Two stumps up, and way up.

ILOADB is a smart, funny, and often deliciously macabre look at eldritch horrors, necromancy, faeries, and most mindbending of all, corporate culture and values. Where else do people willing to become vampires get onto the middle management track so they can handle the zombies at the call center?

And let's face it, if you've had to look for a job in the past few years, pretending to be a zombie to get reliable health benefits doesn't seem so bad...

Lucy Snyder's sense of black humor and horror blend wonderfully in this collection, and I highly reccomend it to anyone!

This little book made me laugh consistently. It's got plenty of funny stuff for computer geeks, scifi readers, zombie fans, and everyone in between. To get all the jokes you probably do have to be into computers a bit. If you've ever done tech support (or other IT work) and liked Shaun of the Dead, this book should be totally your thing. But I think anyone who likes regular humorous scifi like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would probably find this entertaining.