Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

Theme Switcher:

Book Review: Babel - R. F. Kuang

· 3 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~980 times

Book cover featuring the dreaming spires of Oxford. The page is ripped in two and the Tower of Babel is no longer there.

This is an astonishing book. On the one hand, it's the basic "Harry Potter" trope - a young orphan is gifted, gets sent to school to learn magic, becomes pals with the other weird kids, has adventures, and fights a monster. Except here, Harry is Chinese, is sent to Oxford University to learn magic, and faces up to the reality of colonialism and Empire. Oh, and the magic is based on the…

Book Review: Refuse to Choose! A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love - Barbara Sher

· 4 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~508 times

Book cover of a spiral notebook.

I am decidedly unconvinced by this book. What do you do when you are too interested in the world? This is a problem I have; everything is interesting! How do you pick? What if I spend time studying the wrong thing? What if I never complete any of my madcap projects? How do I pick and choose? This book purports to help "Scanners" get their lives in order. I sort-of identify with that - so can…

Book Review: You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane

· 1 comment · 250 words

Book cover featuring a hand drawn robot.

A week is a long time in politics and a couple of years is an aeon in AI. Published in 2019, just before the dawn of the LLM, this is an overview of all the weird and charming ways Artificial Intelligence can go wrong. It is fully of delightfully silly examples and rather charming illustrations. Lots of the examples are drawn from the always-entertaining AI Weirdness blog. But it does suffer…

Book Review: The Spare Man - Mary Robinette Kowal

· 1 comment · 300 words

Book cover in an Art Deco style. Two people stand in a dome floating over Mars.

Ach. This is a hard one to give a lower review score to. I loved MRK's Lady Astronaut series - but this crime-thriller fell a little short of the mark for me. Part of the problem with setting a whodunnit in the future is that you have to assume criminal detection technology gets better. That means an author has to find a way to nobble cameras with privacy force-fields and bypass biometric…