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Book Review of User Friendly

User Friendly
Readnmachine avatar reviewed on + 1506 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2


Collection of Spider Robinson's short stories along with a few essays. Robinson has a deft touch and comes up with interesting concepts, but when read in collection, there's a certain recurrence of particular metaphors or turns of phrase, as if he were so pleased with them that he couldn't bear to use them only once in his career. That's distracting. Highlight of the volume is probably his speech "Seduction of the Innocent" in which he foresees dire consequences for a species that would rather sit on its collective butt and play video games than make the effort to learn to read and thereby learn to think.