okay i'm having a break from stephen baxter, he's mighty weighty, both in concept and style, i love what he does, it's a huge scale and he looks at it from an interesting perspective, humanity at the end of evolution needing a redemption, feeling guilty for all the suffering that has gone before, the weight of human suffering weighs down upon them like unresolved burden, a gravity from which there is only one escape. pulling out a quasi religious concept through science baxter succeeds as a novelist and science fiction writer. the ending was unglamorous and he avoids the sexy temptation of a final conclusion. i liked where he took me, pondering evolution, it's many branches and the fact at some point it will end in a singularity. what happens then.
very good book, 'transcendence' the third in the series but second in the xeelee time line.

i take a break and am now in el narco, by ioan grillo an english writer / journalist who has written a harrowing report on the drug trade in mexico from the growers and traffickers to the police and political implications, its brutality like you would not believe, it will make you think twice before you snort your next line, all you coke freaks who wank on about how politically correct you are should fucking fly over to mexico and apologise personally to the families of the dead for your dumb choice in drugs, if reading this book won't make you think before you snort that line of glamour then nothing will. tens of thousands of deaths for you to put that into your nose. i hate coke, i don't like coke people, and now i know why, there's a karmic value attached to feeling good with it. the women i have met who use it are actually worse than the men but that's just my opinion and i'm only two chapters in. cocaine and ice are not marijuana. cocaine has its place, i know that, but certainly not under the conditions that exist now. if you have any humanity just say 'know' because the cocaine you snort up into your nose cost far more blood and misery than you want to even know about. actually misery don't even come close to describing the brutality and violence attached to it, why, so you can feel good for a fraction of time, talk shit and inflate your ego. forget it sister, snorting coke under the present circumstances, you're holding the smoking gun.