Installing Linux on a Dead Badger [Paperback]

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger is one of those rare treats: a book that, when you're finished, you feel impelled to share with all your friends, if only to have someone else to swap the jokes with.

The collection is a slender volume, maybe 110 pages long, with about 12 stories or so. The titular piece is written as a set of instructions for using Linux to create your own zombie badger (with an Appendix for additional instructions and warnings for use with alternate species or unsupported animals). The following eight stories are written in a journalistic style, immersing the reader in an alternate universe where this sort of software opens up whole new vistas. In the manner of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, these individual stories combine to create a strangely familiar world. The author blends humor with eeriness in a heady, must read mix... In this world, teens run wild with their borderline illegal Linux installations, zombloyees usurp the jobs of less cost efficient living employees, companies install a new requirement for the ruthless (some might say bloodsucking) world of middle management, IT networking goes to extreme dimensions, playing dead might be the only way to survive, and the relentless killing machines of a previously unknown "pest" become the season's hottest pets...

I found the last three stories in the volume to be somewhat less involving. Perhaps this is due to the shift to a more "familiar" writing style, less "you are there" gonzo and more traditional first/third person narratives.

While the first of these ("The Great VuDu Linux Teen Zombie Massacre") is certainly a part of the previous world, it makes the mistake of repeating the content of the titular piece. In its previous appearance as a story in Spacesuits and Sixguns, this repetition would have been necessary to keep unfamiliar readers up to speed. Not so here. I wonder if the piece might have benefited from more insight from the complexities of an actual wetware install, instead of a seemingly verbatim recounting of the manual... However, the rest of the tale proves to be a hoot, bringing a whole new levels of fun to the terms "IKnowKungFu" and "fire fire fire".

The final two stories are disconnected, though they each have their charm (particularly the piece titled, "In the Shadow of the Fryolater," which involves the hilarious and bizarre encounter between a restaurant worker and a rather megalomaniacal sea critter). That they seem related to the other stories only thematically seems to detract from their punch somewhat... At least for me. Then again, by this time I was chugging along at a pretty good clip, with all the previous pieces buzzing around my brainbox.

Still, good stuff.

This is a short story collection about cybermancy and necrotechnology -- most of the stories are set in a parallel reality where you can use the dark arts to raise the dead, and then use the other dark arts -- computer programming -- to control them.

One of Snyder's strengths in this collection is disguising her fiction as news articles or technical writing. The title story is actually written like a software guide, instructing readers on what kinds of software will need to be installed to raise the dead (like a Duppy card, FleshGolem software, or ItzaLive programs, for you Mac users), and well over half of the other stories read like something out of the business or technology sections of your local paper or a national newsweekly.

Can't imagine necromancy as big business? Obviously, you've never considered the financial benefits of replacing your living employees with zombies who will work for 20 hours a day for a bucket of cow brains. Not to mention the benefits of networking your office computers with eldritch extra-dimensional demons who will deliver your e-mail and make market predictions for the price of a few delicious kittens. Sure, there's a problem with cthonian horrors sucking out your soul, but everyone's gotta make sacrifices in business, right?

Verdict: Thumbs up. If you like your fiction with healthy doses of humor, horror, and computer in-jokes, this is definitely something you're going to enjoy.

Snyder is hilarious. Her use of characters and creatures from myths and legends, to re-depict IT situations by superimposing these beings from a supernatural realm onto real-life computer industry events, describes them in a new light, with tremendous insight and humour. The twelve articles collected here are fun for any Geek on your gift list.

The wit and wisdom displayed in this book are exceptional, with everything from step by step instructions on how to install Linux on a dead badger, to using your dead badger to fight zombies. This book has it all, from stories about IT helpdesks starting to staff with zombies to cut down on cost, to using vampires as supervisors to keep the zombies under control and working, to management having no brains to begin with so the zombies have no interest in eating them anyway.

Pick this book up for yourself, for your geek friends or anyone in IT or computer science; they will ROTFL while reading it.

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