I really enjoyed the first three: they were pretty obviously just a bunch of short stories set in the same universe. The later books where he tried to write actual novels were not great though. He could do great short stories, but IMO wasn't much of a novelist.
boatswain
I'm in the US, and I bike about 6 miles in to the office; with rush hour traffic, it'd probably take me about that long to drive in. Plus, I get some much needed exercise.
Text of an average book is 100,000 letters;
I'm not sure where you're getting that value. The low end of word count for a novel is 50,000. If we say the average word is only 5 characters, we're looking at a quarter million letters and another 50,000 spaces for a short novel (200-250 pages). Throw in some more for punctuation and formatting, of course. If you're a fan of big epic fantasy/sci-fi you're probably closer to a million words.
It's a reference to your username
That's a great point, thanks for adding it!
Because I'm not really that invested. The Steam launch will have the effect of making me check it out, so I guess that will at least work as intended.
I was really excited about this game when I first heard about it, right up until I learned it was Ubisoft. Their involvement makes me pretty dubious, so I'll wait and see how hard they crank the monetization handle, and also what the reviews look like.
I've frequently not been on boats!
"Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?"
Halting State was great. It actually took me a couple of chapters to realize it was all 2nd person. That's the book that got me into Stross.