Installing Linux on a Dead Badger and Other Oddities by Lucy A. Snyder

If you've ever read Charles Stross's "Laundry" novels, or his magnificently chilly story "A Colder War," and thought to yourself, "this is really great, but I wish it was shorter and done for laughs," then Lucy Snyder is the writer you have been looking for.

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (And Other Oddities) collects twelve stories, all of them humorous, and most of them in a post-Onion neo-non-fiction style. Touchstones include zombie movies, H.P. Lovecraft, and geeky culture in general.

This is a short book, and it's mostly made up of complicated jokes for geeks, so I'm not going to get into detailed story notes. Snyder does create something like a world in these short pieces, though -- she rings changes on the same concepts through several stories (or barefacedly repeats her own best ideas over and over again, if you prefer) that collectively add up to a slacker's-eye view of a somewhat more interesting (in the "ancient Chinese proverb" sense) world than our own.

This is a short book (barely a hundred pages), and difficult to find; it was published by a micro press and probably isn't available many places. (On the other hand, I just looked it up on BookScan, and discovered that there's plenty of stock in one of Ingram's warehouses, so anybody's local store could easily order it.) But, if the idea of creating a zombie badger through Linux is already making you giggle, you know that you already want this book.



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Listening to: Bess Rogers - Bulldozer
via FoxyTunes