My mate Dr Lucy Rogers has written a book! This is a charming and thought provoking exploration of everything that goes on above our heads. This isn't an impersonal and imperious manuscript, it's a deeply personal and joyful book filled with science, anecdotes, and the thrill of discovery. It's spectacularly accessible. Written in a relaxed and casual tone, it encourages domestic science. I…
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After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the modern consequences of those events? This is the story of the Scottish Witch Trials - with brief forays into England and abroad. It examines the central tension of whether witchcraft was real to the…
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I was left somewhat unconvinced by this book. I liked the concept - a series of interrelated stories all told in different styles. Much like the film "Lola RenntRun Lola Run" there's a briefcase full of cash, a cast of morally ambiguous characters, and a meandering philosophical discussion about the nature of economic salvation. It slams together the naïve and the cynical into a bunch of …
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When I finally invent time-travel, the first thing I'll do is go back in time and give everyone a copy of this book. Published in 2014, it clearly sets out the likely problems with true Artificial Intelligence (not the LLM crap we have now) and what measures need to be put in place before it is created. It opens with The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows: Which, frankly, should be the end of …
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Short stories offer you the chance to dip briefly into a world and then skip out so there's not much time for development; just straight in to the plot and off we go. But this is all exposition and very little action. Rather than let the plots develop naturally, there are just vast passages of infodumping. I'm sad to say this is a rather dreary and insipid collection of stories. Some of the…
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Mars is the only planet entirely populated by robots. This book is a catalogue of the history of robotic explorers. Nary a human-crewed mission is mentioned, except in passing. Instead, we get to look at the practicalities of landing a little robot a million miles away, the people that made it happen, and the politics which inevitably stymied things. And there is a lot of politics. One of the…
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Apparently I reviewed the previous version of this book four years ago but have no real memory of it. Did you ever have a dream which was vividly realistic yet somehow slightly askew from reality? Obviously there is no antimemetics division, nor could anyone write a book about it. If they did, their mind would instantly be liquefied and their mere existence would be purged. So, why is there a …
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What can a fifty-year-old book teach us about cybersecurity? Written just as computing was beginning to enter the mainstream, The Electronic Criminals takes us into a terrifying new world of crime! Fraud over Telex! Ransomware of physical tapes! Stealing passwords and hacking into mainframes! The books has a strong start, but gently runs out of steam because there simply weren't many…
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I'm a fan of R.F. Kuang's books - but this is the first which I've found laugh-out-loud funny. What if your University advisor died and the only way to graduate was to descend into hell and bring him back? In a terrible sort of way, I'm glad that Kuang had such a miserable time at University. Being able to mine that psychotrauma has led to the brilliant Babel and now the excellent Katabasis.…
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Everyone knows that Black people didn't exist in the UK until recently, right? Despite mountains of evidence of everything from Black Tudors and Victorian actors, some myths perniciously persist. What was the experience for Black Britons during the second world war? I find it fascinating how the US cultural hegemony rewrites history. I've heard people in the UK talk about "Jim Crow laws" as…
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Remember back in the early 2010s when any moderately popular Twitter account could become a book (or even a TV series)? This is a collection of Tweet-sized "overheard in" stories. All set in book shops. Isn't it funny that some people don't know how books work! ROFL! Aren't the general public strange? LOLOL! That's a bit harsh of me. It only rarely becomes mean-spirited. But in a book this…
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This is fun, silly, charming, and much better than The Murderbot Diaries despite being superficially similar. Imagine you are an interstellar ship and, of course, your AI is conscious. What would you do if your passengers were killed - not by a terrifying alien, but by Count Dracula??? What if, on the return journey, another set of your passengers were similarly slaughtered. Except, this…
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