This starts out as a delightfully silly and charming book about the bureaucracy of Time Travel and ends up as something darker and more thought provoking. What would happen if the UK Civil Service had access to TIME TRAVEL!?!?! It's a brilliant idea for a novel and is written with a seemingly-real understanding of the number of forms, systems, emails, and subterfuge needed to set up such a premise. It is perfectly observed - both in terms of the protagonists' lived experience and their…
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Either I'm particularly thick, or this is the most over-written and under-explained academic claptrap I've read in some time. Some of the language is pure poetry: the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion It doesn't actually mean anything. You have to be able to parse unexplained concepts like "an oedipal calendar" and deal with interminable footnotes which blithely declare "postmodernism release heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened". …
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This is a peculiar murder mystery novel. In truth, the murder mystery takes second-place to the internal monologue of a protagonist who is viscerally disgusted with his corporeal body. The majority of the book is about the protagonist's neuroses, self-loathing, and contempt for both himself and others. The central schtick is great - can a hacker solve a murder at a tech conference? - but there's very little in the way of detective work. The central mystery is mostly solved by hacking the…
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This is an exquisitely detailed and righteously determined look about the how and why of Digital Government. Richard Pope was there at the beginning of GOV.UK and helped steer it to the magnificent beast it is today. He reflects, clear eyed, on the various successes and failures of the geeky attempt to turn the state into something approaching modernity. He's forthright on his views about the lack of vision in most projects: The aim of most digitization programmes is the status quo,…
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Neal Stephenson's "Seveneves" is one of those massive, crushing, momentous, century-spanning and era-defining hard sci-fi novels. It starts with the immortal line "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." Classic! It dives into a world plagued with Kessler syndrome and the grimly inevitable consequences for the future of humanity. Scalzi's latest book is cheesy homage - fromage if you will - to that giant of literature. It asks an equally important question. What if,…
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This is a real mixed bag of a book. Some of it is outrageously fun stories of real-life diplomacy and derring-do, and other parts are tediously basic information with plenty of padding. I suppose it's helpful for the uninitiated to understand the lay of the land but, when mixed with the frequent name-dropping, comes across as one of those senior leaders who is desperate to prove they are still relevant. Much like Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet, you have to just accept that some…
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I was 25% of the way through reading this when I purchased the sequel. It is an utterly compelling murder mystery - not least because the death doesn't occur until well after the halfway point. Who dies? Why? Who did it? Why?! With every paragraph I felt myself trying to decipher the characters' motives. A murder mystery set in an amateur dramatics society is a bit Simon Brett but this has much more bite. The premise is that we are reading through the evidence in a legal case. All we see…
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I think I highlighted something in every chapter of this book. If you live an average lifespan, you'll probably be alive for around 4,000 weeks. I've used up over half of mine. Fuck. This book is a slightly curious mix of the practical and the philosophical. It makes a compelling case that, insignificant as we are, we should try to enjoy our allotted time. That doesn't necessarily translate to "make the most of it" or "have the biggest impact possible" - but more like "live in a way that…
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This is a fucking audacious thriller! I literally stayed up way past my bedtime, tearing through the chapters, gasping out loud. The core of the story is simple - a woman steals her dead friend's manuscript and passes it off as her own. Will she get caught? The hook (for want of a better term) is that the plagiarist is white and the original author is Asian-American. It's often said that most racists don't perceive themselves to be racist. Because the book is told from the point-of-view of…
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This is an excellent pop-science book. It gently weaves a personal tale (nearly getting crushed by a whale) into the current cutting-edge research of animal communication. It takes in along the way philosophy, geopolitics, and the crushing inevitability of death. At its heart is this question - if modern AI is brilliant at extracting semantic meaning from unstructured data, can it do the same with whale song? Mustill's joy of discovery is wonderful. He's adept at weaving autobiography into…
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I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in this series - Her Majesty's Royal Coven. The basic premise is that there is a secretive cabal of witches which run a shadow government organisation. There's skulduggery, slattern-ish behaviour, and sexy scandals. And lots of violence and death. And a big dollop of modern-misogyny to make it particularly zeitgeisty. It is delightful in its playfulness with language. It relishes in its tropes: She had finally become the thing he feared. The thing she…
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What is our life? Is it the days we live or the way others perceive us? The comedian Adrian Edmondson steps us through his life. But, as he points out, what we remember and what we're interested in isn't necessarily the most significant part of the subject's life. In 2016 I adapted William Leith’s book Bits of Me Are Falling Apart into a one-man play. It took six weeks to do the adaptation, four weeks to rehearse it, and it played for a further four weeks at the Soho Theatre, a small London v…
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