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Been putting together the Otherwise Award list. Got to this book, the 2004 co-winner, which was published under 4 different titles, depending on which country. I added this edition, which was the first edition in English. Then added the Finnish, German, and US editions. Everything looked great.

Then I added the book to the Otherwise list, and everything broke. Every time I refreshed Johanna Sinisalo's page, the editions would show up differently. First as two separate works. Then as five. The edition that showed up in the Otherwise list switched to the 2010 edition (which has a shitty cover). Then finally four works showed up on Sinisalo's author page.

I painstakingly added the editions back to this work and corrected the entry on the Otherwise list. The editions seem to be sticking to the work this time. However, there are still three other works that have duplicate information for editions from this one.

Took me a while to finish this, partly because it's a steady stream of what a bunch of bs comes out of Tesla and Musk, but also I'm reading the ebook which is filled with links to the sources, which generally is a good thing and shows how well this book has been researched and not just a diatribe, but it means half the time when I swipe to next page I jump to the bibliography.

Overall, it buttresses my existing anti-Elon disposition (and the book predates the antics of the past year) with a lot more detail about things that went wrong or were lied about and got people killed, and filled in some company background which I didn't know or had forgotten from Ashlee Vance's Musk bio, which I have trashed a bit recently because seems to have tied his career to profiling Musk, but fair's fair, this book does rely heavily on Vance's material (minus the stuff about his relationships because who cares about that except when gets sued by his exes).

The book gets a bit shaky talking when referencing both the Silicon Valley software industry and traditional auto industries, portraying their "best" practices as things that actually happen and not aspirational (or bureaucratically buzzwordable), and there's an analogy to the Blackberry keyboard which I found mystifying but reminded me I wish I still had one. Plus that's one of the few tech companies I can think of that I used to admire that hasn't turned evil as far as I know (perhaps not a coincidence, Canadian).

Ronnie Bottoms kills Lorraine Fell and stuffs her body under some rocks in Central Park, which is also where a mysterious all-powerful alien box is. Lorraine talks the box into letting her convince Ronnie to bring her back to life. She has to possess Ma Lin, a former South Vietnam soldier who took care of enemies of the state, because he sits next to Ronnie. Ronnie then returns to Central Park, digs up Lorraine's body, and by the power of the Silver Box, brings Lorraine back to life. They spend the night in a hotel where Lorraine tries to fuck her murderer (and would be rapist) but he can't get it up. Then they are jailed because Lorraine has been missing and they used her credit card. After a bit of being roughed up by the cops, a lawyer hired by the Silver Box springs Lorraine and Ronnie.

And at this point they are all transported somewhere else in the galaxy where Ronnie (yes Ronnie the wanna be rapist) explains that Ma Lin now contains a molecule of an intergalactic race called the Laz and the Silver Box, tells Lorraine and Ronnie their quest is to save earth from the Laz molecule.

Yes. That is the story so far. I'm sure there's a reason why all of this is set up this way, but I am not willing to read through to the end to find out because it sure as hell won't be worth it.

DNF at 22%