Thanks to BookSirens for providing me with a review copy. This is an intriguing self-published novel with a backstory almost as interesting as the plot.

The story is a descent into paranoia as an author is convinced that an AI is plagiarising his work. As the madness takes over, he's forced to confront whether his creative processes are genuine or not.

It raises some excellent questions about whether AI can replicate art. It also posits some solutions for ensuring genuine human content. Without going in to spoilers, I think some of the methods the protagonist comes up with might be the only way to "prove" that a human has created a work.

The pace is excellent - with some well-placed plot twists. As with any self-published novel, it could do with a little tightening up. Some of the characters have oblique motivations which need a bit more exposition.

A note on AI use. There's a novel-within-a-novel which is genuinely generated by an AI (as the author freely acknowledges). I think this is an acceptable use of generative AI - the prose it produces is utterly risible and cliché ridden. It works as a nice contrast to the human generated text.

I suspect more and more authors will turn to AI fears just as they turned to pandemic allegories a few years ago. This is a decent attempt to capture a moment in time when authors stared into the abyss and found only themselves staring back.

Despite vowing not to read sequels of books I love, I'm constantly surprised that regression to the mean is an iron-clad law of the universe. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the series, so eagerly gobbled up the second. What a burlap fool I am.

What was charming and wry in The Satsuma Complex is now overdone and clichéd.

The violence, which was an undercurrent in the first book, is now too pronounced and too grim to be funny. Yet the constant tomfoolery with language undermines any built-up tension.

The language is gorgeous though. Bob Mortimer has an ability to conjure the most ridiculous similes and metaphors. It's impossible not to be entranced by his panache.

The ending is, frankly, a bit unearned and unsatisfying. It feels like a word-count limit was reached and the quickest solution was found.

This is the most overwritten book I've ever read. Unfortunately, Alan Moore knows exactly how much polysyllabic pressure it takes to transmogrify base coal into precious gems.

With lines like "his shaved suede skull made him look like a wilted thistle" and "There was a rumour of pink lipstick circling her mouth" you know you're in for a treat. Even better than the joyful prose of Bob Mortimer's Satsuma Complex.

I'm also pretty sure Moore is actually a wizard. I've just finished reading a book about Black Britain in Wartime - which features Ras Prince Monolulu, who also appears in this book. Along with M. P. Shiel - who I did my GCSE coursework on. And, no spoilers, but I'm fairly sure I'd met other characters too. The only logical conclusion is that Moore is stalking my brain.

It is an epic tale full of rogues and reprobates. The story is excellent even though the plot follows a fairly basic structure. Although set up to be a series, it is a satisfying stand-alone tale.

My only real criticism of it is the trope of the "failing light of English magic" - much like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Shades of Milk and Honey, Sorcerer to the Crown, Babel, and a hundred other books. Britain was a great (magical) power and it's up to our hero to Make Magic Great Again. Well, sort of. I suspect that's going to feature more heavily in the sequels.

A pleasure to read and I look forward to both Alan and I being bitterly disappointed in the Bowdlerised Apple TV miniseries.

Ooooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute.

This isn't like how Groundhog Day became On The Calculation of Volume or Sliding Doors became The Names, instead this is a new and twisty concept rendered through the lens of a chick-lit comedy.

It's proper laugh-aloud funny, while playing with all the clichés of both sci-fi and romcoms.

The thing I liked most is that Lauren is an active and intelligent protagonist unlike, say, Carol Sturka from Pluribus. Sturka never engages with the premise of her odd situation, she doesn't try to discover the rules of the world she's living in and is content to let things happen to her. Lauren spends a good deal of time at least trying to get to grips with the (un)reality of her husband-dispensing portal. I found that made for a rather gratifying story and didn't leave me shouting at the pages "JUST TRY SOMETHING!"

It's also refreshing to follow the adventures of a (slight) antihero. Lauren mostly knows when she is being monstrous. She flings between feminism and self-directed misogyny - with a smattering of misandry. Her discrimination against those of us men who wear socks with individual toes is, of course, an unforgivable sin.

The pacing is excellent - with an perfectly timed plot twist just as things are settling down. The afterword talks briefly about the multiple possible endings that were considered. I'd love to know what ideas were rejected although, in retrospect, there's only one narratively satisfying conclusion.

I read a lot of science fiction - probably more than is healthy - and The Husbands is a welcome addition to my shelf. The practicalities of the plot-device are as unimportant as how Warp Drive works; science fiction is about exploring the possibilities of a fantastical situation. If you could instantly swap your spouse because they lost the TV remote again - would you? In a world of no consequences, what would you get away with? If you discovered a break in reality, what would you try in order to exploit or understand it?

The Husbands gets fairly dark. Never grim, exactly, but it gnaws away at the cosiness proffered by domestic bliss. Although Lauren can be a bit of a bitch, the story just about strays away from making her morally repugnant. An exemplary piece of storytelling.

My mate Lisa has written a book!

Along with her pal Matisse, she takes us through the practicalities of publishing communications which are accessible to all. This isn't just about the theory - it takes us across multiple legal jurisdictions, ethical frameworks, and business cases. Once it is done convincing you of the necessity of the work, it begins to explain how to actually create useful and accessible comms.

Some stuff you may have heard before. Everyone knows to add alt text, right? But this goes in for a slightly deeper dive, explaining how different publishing tools expose it, how to get the most out of it, and where it can all go wrong.

Usually books like this focus only on HTML. That's great - but there is a world outside the Web. So this goes through the steps to make PDFs accessible (a necessary evil!) and other tools which comms professionals may be regularly using.

It also doesn't just focus on the US hegemony. Instead there are statistics and case studies from dozens of different countries and cultures. It also looks through the youth lens - are TikTok's bouncing subtitles good for accessibility? For situational stuff like not having headphones, probably but for people with cognitive impairments probably not.

Each chapter ends with "Key Takeaways" and a decent summary of what you've learned. You probably won't read this cover to cover, but it is worth diving in to the chapters which meet your needs. Some of the stuff was intimately familiar to me - but I had no idea about how to make Podcasts accessible.

There's a bit of AI stuff splashed through, as is de rigueur, but it is realistic about its current limitations and how harmful it can be if misapplied.

The book ends with a chunky checklist. I suggest printing it out and stapling it to anyone in your organisation who says accessibility is a waste of time.

What's better than one Adrian Tchaikovsky novella? Three Adrian Tchaikovsky novellæ! Or is it "novellii"? Either way, a delightful triptych of stories on a common theme. On the surface, they're about travelling to a new destination (Space! The Future! For-Copyright-Reasons Not Narnia!)

Except, deep down, they're about loneliness. No matter how far or fast we run, no matter where or when we go, we can't outrun ourselves. When you enter the void, sometimes the void enters you.

There's also the constant theme about the hunter becoming the hunted. All three of the stories reminded me a bit of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - in that I was never quite sure if the characters were simply delusional and waging war on an enemy of their own making.

It brims with a pathos which I find rare in modern science fiction. That's offset with the perfectly placed British humour within it. Yes, there's a touch of the Weir/Scalzi "Only I, a nerdy guy, can save the universe in a self-knowing way" - but those authors aren't brave enough to mention Reading town centre or have their hero hail from Stevenage. Whereas Tchaikovsky knows what's up with the Furries.

An excellent collection of tales.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is available to buy now.

This has an excellent narrative structure, some beautiful prose, and I just didn't enjoy it.

The story is Sliding Doors meets Same Time Next Year mixed with a distressing amount of domestic violence.

A mother faces a difficult choice. Should she name her child after her abusive and violent husband? In one strand she does, in another she doesn't, and in the third she makes a compromise. We rejoin the story every few years to see how our protagonists are progressing.

It mostly works and pushes us to consider how much the path of our life is influenced by factors outside of our control.

I have a real difficulty with books about violence. All of the characters are unsympathetic - trapped by tyrant but also trapped by their own inaction. I also struggled with how pedestrian and limited it was. In a world where you can read anything, why would you choose to spy on your horrible neighbours? Like a tawdry soap-opera it offered nothing more than misery and heartbreak. Fine if you need that sort of substitute empathy, but it left me feeling grubby and unsatisfied.

To be fair, the characters in the book address this:

‘Why read them if they make you feel bad?’

‘Because I’m hoping one of them might feel like me,’

It isn't a bad book - although it does veer into cliché a little too often - and the structure is interesting enough. But I found its subject matter too distressing to be enjoyable,

Book Club Discussion

This isn't the sort of book I'd normally pick up - but it was chosen by the book club I attend. The majority of readers rated it higher than I did. Here are some of the things we discussed.

The central message sees to be that, no matter how hard you try, the tragedy which infects your life can never be escaped. I found that depressing and disempowering. The domestic dreariness was stifling and just left me irritated with the passivity of the characters.

The evil father is an arsehole - but a one-dimensional arsehole. I get that there's a risk to humanising an antagonist, but other than a brief mention of his back-story there's nothing about him. I didn't want a justification for his actions, but he felt like a cartoon villain.

Even when one character gains a moment of happiness, it is offset by another's misery. No matter which path is chosen, someone always ends up broken.

Are we "destined" to meet the same people, no matter what path we take?

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 don't mean bakery, I mean the sorts of observations you can do at home without access to a multi-million pound laboratory. The afterword of the book contains dozens of resources for people who want to get involved in science. Dr Rogers eloquently makes the case that you don't need to dedicate yourself full time - it's perfectly acceptable to engage with it on your own terms.

What I liked most about it was that she gets her hands dirty. It would have been easy to write a literature review from the comfort of a safe and dry office. Instead we get a travelogue of all the places she's been - each trek through the forest, every laboratory, and all the foreign festivals are brilliantly recounted. It's a proper adventure from America's tornado alley down to the Vatican Archives.

I find it remarkable how slow some modern science is. As she points out, "there have been only eight transits of Venus since the telescope was invented" - our knowledge rests on the shoulders of giants, but they can be slow, lumbering beasts.

If, like me, you only have a hazy memory of the science you learned at school, this book will top up your knowledge (and vocabulary). It will reignite your passion and curiosity about the world around you - and make you want to buy a round the world ticket to chase solar eclipses!

After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women⁰ 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 accusers, or just a convenient means to oppress troublesome women. The descriptions of the imprisonment, torture, and state-sanctioned murder is visceral and horrific.

It's also rather stark in its modern assessment of the historic context:

Nonetheless, it’s important to remember it was a proper legal trial, with evidence being put forward and the judge assessing it and carrying out legal tests. Some people think that witchcraft trials were carried out by angry peasants waving pitchforks. Perhaps this is a more acceptable way for a modern person to think about it. No one wants to think that a judicial system can get it so wrong. But it did, with catastrophic consequences for those accused.

The book is mostly good, it's a spin off from the Witches Of Scotland podcast and that's reflected in the writing. As with any parasocial¹ entertainment, it attempts to centre the authors and bring the audience along for the ride - so there's lots of descriptions of the libraries the authors visit, how things make them feel, how enamoured they are with their podcast guests. I found it a little distracting, but it's obviously right for their main audience.

Similarly, there's an attempt to bring the past to life by imagining a little monologue from various historic figures. I found that a little unconvincing; I dislike putting words in peoples' mouths. But with sparse primary documentation, that may be the best way to bring these characters to life. It's also well illustrated. Too many books eschew pictures - but this has a nice collection of woodcuts and portraits to contextualise what we're reading about.

One little nitpick, the book makes the claims:

Life was hard and life expectancy was around 35

and

Lilias was an old woman, at least 60 years old and possibly as old as 80. At a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is now, even the lower estimate was still a considerable age.

That's not quite right. Although the average life expectancy was low, that's the average at birth - with a large number of infant mortalities dragging down the average. When you look at the full data, you'll see people used to live long lives even in the distant past.

In a way, it reminds me of Invisible Women. A national tragedy hidden from view.

It builds to a rousing end. There are parts of the world where witchcraft is still taken seriously - with devastating consequences. The febrile atmosphere which led to unfounded accusations against women is still prevalent even in modern societies.

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 uneasy conversations.

I loved the slow-burn of the first story - the way it gradually revealed more and more about the characters. But throughout I was left wondering "where is this going?" The answer, disappointingly, was nowhere.

That's the heart of my problem with the book - it was compelling and frustrating in equal measure. The author herself states it best:

The reader needs something to hold on to. A glimmer of hope

It was stylish, there's no doubt about that. The texture of each story was gorgeous. The plotting was inventive and the morality interesting. I also enjoyed the bluntness of the social politics of economics. I just felt the whole was much less than the sum of its parts.

I read this as part of a new book club I'm attending. Thankfully, everyone else seemed to agree that it was a bit of a let down.

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 the discussion. Oh Scronkfinkle, why didn't they listen to you?

This book attempts to set out they why and the how of protecting humanity from the (inevitable?) arrival of machines which we would describe as "superintelligent". That is, capable of human-level reasoning and understanding, but unlimited in terms of speed, working memory, and accuracy.

For example, automated trading algorithms caused a "Flash Crash" of the stock market in 2010. Unchecked machines very nearly destabilised the financial work. As Bostrom writes:

[…] while automation contributed to the incident, it also contributed to its resolution. The pre-preprogrammed stop order logic, which suspended trading when prices moved too far out of whack, was set to execute automatically because it had been correctly anticipated that the triggering events could happen on a timescale too swift for humans to respond. The need for pre-installed and automatically executing safety functionality—as opposed to reliance on runtime human supervision—again foreshadows a theme that will be important in our discussion of machine superintelligence.

So where are those safety functions now? Are any of the AI providers building in guardrails to prevent atrocities? We know that some LLMs are restricted from sharing details about devastating weapons of mass destruction - but there seems little else put in place.

The book is mostly accessible but veers wildly between casual language, deep philosophical tracts, pointed snark, and the occasional dive into maths and physics. For anyone with even a passing interest in the progression of any technology, it is a worthwhile read.

Many of the predictions are spot on:

As of 2012, the Zen series of go-playing programs has reached rank 6 dan in fast games (the level of a very strong amateur player), using Monte Carlo tree search and machine learning techniques. Go-playing programs have been improving at a rate of about 1 dan/year in recent years. If this rate of improvement continues, they might beat the human world champion in about a decade.

In fact, AlphaGo achieved mastery at the end of 2016.

In the slightly longer term, the cost of acquiring additional hardware may be driven up as a growing portion of the world’s installed capacity is being used to run digital minds […] as investors bid up the price for existing computing infrastructure to match the return they expect from their investment

As I wrote about in "AI is a NAND Maximiser" this too has come to pass.

While LLMs weren't yet invented when this was written, there's an excellent prediction about how an AI could become a pernicious psychological adversary:

Caution and restraint would be required, however, for us not to ask too many such questions—and not to allow ourselves to partake of too many details of the answers given to the questions we do ask—lest we give the untrustworthy oracle opportunities to work on our psychology (by means of plausible-seeming but subtly manipulative messages). It might not take many bits of communication for an AI with the social manipulation superpower to bend us to its will.

Indeed, I think it is clear that this is already happening. While I don't ascribe malice (or any other motivation) to the AIs, it is clear that their makers have a bias towards obsequiousness.

Other predictions are perhaps a little wide of the mark:

if somebody were to succeed in creating an AI that could understand natural language as well as a human adult, they would in all likelihood also either already have succeeded in creating an AI that could do everything else that human intelligence can do, or they would be but a very short step from such a general capability.

We're a few years in to the LLM revolution and, while we can quibble about what "understand" means, it's clear that natural language can now mostly be interpreted by computers. But that doesn't seem to have made the leap to general intelligence, nor the acceleration of art and science.

Others are hopeful but possibly a bit naïve:

A future superintelligence occupies an epistemically superior vantage point: its beliefs are (probably, on most topics) more likely than ours to be true. We should therefore defer to the superintelligence’s opinion whenever feasible.

Yes, there probably are modern concepts which have more in common with "phlogiston" than reality. But if a scientist were to time-travel back to the early 1700s, how easy would it be for them to disprove the theory? Perhaps AI ought to exist in the "trust but verify" space?

It is slightly over-footnoted, with no distinction between citation and diverting passage. There's also a tendency to go off in fanciful directions - the stuff on genetically enhancing humans goes on a bit too long for my tastes. Similarly, the philosophy of maximising happiness by emulating brains and virtually doping them seemed unconvincing.

That said, some of the thought experiments are both fun and profound - the seminal "Paperclip Maximiser" was introduced in this book.

There are some downsides. An over-reliance on specific individuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky crowds out some of the other important thinkers.

One of the suggestions made has already fallen:

One valuable asset would be a donor network comprising individuals devoted to rational philanthropy, informed about existential risk, and discerning about the means of mitigation. It is especially desirable that the early-day funders be astute and altruistic, because they may have opportunities to shape the field’s culture before the usual venal interests take up position and entrench.

The "Effective Altruism" movement is now hopelessly compromised and seemingly in tatters. Similarly, the cult of rationalism has taken an unfortunate turn to the bizarre and dangerous.

Nevertheless, it's hard to argue with the philosophy. Whether or not "superintelligence" is ever achieved, we should have systems in place now to protect us. It's the same as any other technology - the time to set up nuclear non-proliferation agreements and the systems to monitor them was before we invented them.

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 stories start out with an interesting premise but then just fizzle out. There's a reasonably good idea in "The Materiality of Emotions" which describes people buying little trinkets which induce emotions in them. Again, emotions as drugs is well-worn stuff, but this builds up momentum nicely before suddenly ending.

The highlight is "Spectrum" which has some delightful world-building but, like the others, it's rather derivative of older stories. A woman's space ship crashes on a strange planet and she tries to befriend the local hominids. You've almost certainly read it before.

Overall I found it underwhelming.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

And there is a lot of politics.

One of the weakest areas is the political analysis behind the stories. For example, a Soviet Lunar rover is described as being "daubed with the sickle and hammer" - but there's no derogatory mention of the stars, stipes, and eagles on American craft. Similarly we hear about "the Soviet plans to invade Mars proceeded unabated" - there's no deriding description of the American plans to colonise various planets. The efforts of the European Space Agency described as "[m]ore than fifty industrial contractors from fifteen nations were involved in construction. Safe to say, it was a logistical nightmare." - while ignoring the various back-room deals that led to the American space programme being distributed around their country and their resultant logistical problems.

It isn't relentlessly pro-American (there's lots of descriptions of their failures) but it feels a bit one-sided.

There are some gorgeous photos spread throughout the book. Sadly, the ebook relegates most of them to the end rather than interspersing them with the text. At least one of the images is incorrect although, thankfully, the attribution hyperlinks to the correct photo on NASA's site.

I'm being a bit down on the book. It is a decent enough look at all the problems faced by space agencies as they tried to send machines into the void. For those of us in the computer industry, it is depressing to continually read about how we're often the weakest link:

On 2 September, a computer command was sent to Phobos 1 to turn on the gamma ray spectrometer. A single hyphen had been left out of the code, transforming it into an order for Phobos 1 to shut down. There was no way to turn it back on.

Yikes! The book is full of titbits like that - minor errors which led to major catastrophes.

It's a good starting point for anyone with an interest in space exploration and how technical and political challenges can be overcome.

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 new version of the book out and is it worth reading again?

As the copyright page says:

Earlier versions of this material were previously published in serial form on the scp wiki under Creative Commons 3.0, and subsequently self-published by the author in ebook and paperback format. The work has been substantively revised and updated since.

As the FAQ makes clear, getting a "proper" publisher to put money into a CC project is unlikely. So many of the original elements have been rewritten and reworked. The writing, plotting, and characters have all been substantially improved. The ending, in particular, has become something quite special.

The story itself is still recursively memetic and a metacommentary on itself. The bug-eyed-monsters are mindbending and the good guys are all morally compromised. The concepts are gorgeously impossible and the pacing is exciting.

There's simply nothing like it.

The eBook is mostly well formatted. Excellent use of monospace fonts for reports, there are accessible redactions where suitable, and the images all have alt text. Weirdly, one "monster" is named వ - a character which failed to render correctly on my eBook. That gave it a rather sinister appearance! The ghosting of eInk made it look like there were faint words behind the various redactions which was delightfully spooky. An excellent book and a satisfying update.

However, it is worth noting that ███████ this book will ██████████ ██████████ ██████████████ and could lead to ████ █████████████ ██████████████. Although the retailer won't accept refunds on any book stained with █████████ █████████████████ ████ or ████ ██████████, it is possible to summon ██████ ████████████████████ ████████████ ███ ████ ███████████ in an emergency.

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 electronic criminals in the mid-1970s! Instead, the book is over-stuffed with "Catch Me If You Can" tales of chequebook fraud, stolen aeroplane tickets, and regular blackmail and bribery. It isn't quite a how-to guide for the budding fraudster, but it isn't too far off.

Nevertheless, there are some amazing and mind-boggling computer crimes described:

Computer print-outs concealed the massive fraud and fakery. Tapes were programmed so that computers would reject incriminating data and accept and produce only what would support the conspiracy. Computers were also used in playing hide-and-seek with investigators by switching data damaging to the swindlers from one code to another, just a step ahead of the authorities.

One common refrain is that the law of 1975 hadn't caught up with the reality of modern crime. In the above case, the…

… investors decided to sue IBM for $4 billion, claiming that the company’s inability to manufacture a swindle-proof computer had contributed to their loss. Despite the fact that IBM had claimed their computers are virtually tamper proof, the case was thrown out of court. Obviously no one can be expected to be perfect, not even an IBM computer.

And in another:

In a recent case in France the accused was charged with sabotage. He had intentionally erased valuable information recorded on a magnetic tape by passing it through a strong magnetic field. However, since the tape itself was undamaged the court ruled that no offense had been committed. The jury was directed to issue a verdict of “not guilty.”

Many of the "electronic" crimes are able to be facilitated by poor physical processes:

Computer center near London, England: Unguarded side door hooked open to allow employees to step out for fresh air. Top secret military and industrial information was stored in the center’s files.

Anyone who has done an ISO 27001 audit knows that pain!

It isn't just computers and data-tapes that are discussed. There's rather a large section on phone-tapping and eavesdropping bugs. Rather terrifyingly, there's also a section on what we might now call "Deep Fakes":

On tape recordings, words can be rearranged and new words can be built up from an assortment of syllables. The process is somewhat like fitting together bits of a jigsaw puzzle. Simply by inserting or deleting “nots” in a taped voice recording, affirmatives can be changed to negatives and negatives to affirmatives. Words can be borrowed from one part of a tape and fitted into another so the entire meaning is changed. By the same techniques, inflections of words can be altered.

Oh, and drone warfare!

Today there are infrared cameras that can indeed see you in the dark, even portable TV cameras that can record pictures by moonlight, and radio-controlled miniature aircraft (some that can hover like helicopters) to carry these cameras to subjects that someone wants to photograph.

As with any good book on the subject, it spends plenty of time talking about how to defend oneself from these attacks and the downside of protection:

Another scheme, called “hand-shaking,” requires the inquirer seeking information from the computer to correctly answer a personal question, something known only to him, before he can find out what he wants to know. This slows down the running of a business. I remember sitting in the office of a man who has a computer terminal on his desk. In the middle of our conversation a question came up and he said: “Wait a minute. I'll get the answer from our computer.” He put the question in by typing on the keyboard. The terminal’s screen lit up and displayed another question: “In what month was your mother-in-law born?”

It also predicts the rise of music and film piracy; albeit by analogue means.

Rather pleasingly, it doesn't just limit itself to crimes committed in the USA. It acknowledges the pervasive nature of criminality and goes into some detail about cases in the UK, France, Germany, and Italy.

It is always fascinating to look back on our industry's history. Much like 1999's Information Warfare and Security by Dorothy E. Denning, we have to constantly go back to see what assumptions we have baked in to our processes.

I'll leave you with this rather chilling excerpt from the prologue:

Our world is still a fine place in which to live—a better one perhaps than any previous generation has enjoyed. But some of the people in it are causing serious problems. In 1974 many people experienced diminishing respect for persons in high places who acted as if they were above the law, and this led to a loss of respect for the concept of leadership itself. We should not confuse diminishing respect for a president with respect for the presidency, for example. Our society needs people in high places. It cannot function without leadership at every level, from the head of a household to the manager of a business to a chief of state.

What is missing in our society today is the necessary preparation and training for the responsibilities of authority in high places. If parents in the home and people in business and government never learned the lessons of fair play when they were growing up, we cannot expect them to know how to play fair when they reach high places. Consequently we all suffer every time “the boss” makes expedient judgments rather than proper moral decisions.

If coming generations are to be spared the tragic consequences of even more widespread corruption, the teaching of morality in the family and in the school ought to be as important to us as curbing inflation and other socioeconomic problems. Our children should be taught how to deal with everyday actions fairly and ethically. They should be exposed to those philosophical and ethical concepts, with practical examples that illustrate the alternatives of right and wrong so that they are better able to cope.

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. This is almost a love affair to the idea of being the perfect student.

It's also deliciously catty:

She had never gotten round to trying Proust, but Cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read Proust, and she figured Hell was a good place to start.

The plot is, almost literally, Alice in Wonderlabyrinth. A metaphysical excursion through logic and fallacy, pausing lightly at revenge, with a quick diversion through intersectional feminism and its limits. Much like the play Copenhagen, the characters often exist as a way to explore the nature of reality and how it conflicts with academia.

Perhaps it is a smidgen too long, and there are some weird Americanisms which perhaps should have been caught in the edit. A few of the observations about Hell being a writers market or modelled on an essay crisis are a little too on the nose - but, you know what, it is tremendous fun.

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 though that was a thing that happened in the UK. It wasn't. While there were barriers and racism (as the book makes clear) the experience of Black people in the UK was vastly different than it was for African Americans. To the point that white American GIs were routinely castigated for trying to impose their vile racism onto our country.

What makes this book special is the contemporary reports and modern interviews. There are some amazing stories to be told and it is fascinating to hear first-hand accounts. The book also contains a list of prominent Black people living in the UK (including their addresses) which feels a little like padding - but then this is fleshed out with mini-biographies of most of them. What is astounding is, given the range of people living in Britain, you occasionally get little revelations like this:

Only one black evacuee has ever been interviewed for a television documentary.

Some people profiled are, for want of a better word, ordinary. People who had normal lives, kept the home fires burning, and took part in ordinary civic life. And then there are guys like Ras Prince Monolulu who were bona-fide celebrities.

It is fair to say that modern Britain's relationship with the notion of "Empire" is complicated. When the call to arms came, people from the farthest colonies rushed to aide the "motherland". In many cases, they were initially rejected due to formal or informal colour-bars. The social acceptability of and legal ramifications of these practices is evidenced in Constantine v Imperial Hotels Ltd.

But for every story of casual and institutional racism towards people who came to help, there are stories of love and acceptance.

The English people opened their homes to us, we were invited out for dinners, teas, no problems at all. There were problems with the American forces, but it didn’t hinder us.

As with any history book, some of the language used can feel a little shocking or distasteful. History is never easy to engage with, but this book presents an even handed look at a turbulent period. It ends a little abruptly, but it is an excellent overview of the literature. Recommended for anyone who wants to understand our history.

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 short, it rather contaminates the joy.

That said, this one will live rent-free in my head for a while:

Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?

It's the sort of stocking-filler book which is reasonable for perusing on the loo. Light-hearted but ultimately disposable.

Still, at least Neil Gaiman found it funny enough to leave a blurb…

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 time, by a Werewolf? How would that make you feel? Would it drive you mad? Could you cope with the bullying from other starships? Or would you feel the need… the need for REVENGE!

As I said, silly and campy fun. It is episodic adventure with just the right amount of Hammer-style horror and not too much technobabble. All the classic monsters are here - depression, intrusive thoughts, envy, fear.

Oh, and Frankenstein’s spider.

As an ebook, it makes great use of fonts - which give it a delightfully retrofuturistic feel. There are some fun binary Easter-Eggs as well.

This book doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a sociology textbook, travel guide, history book, or guide to the mysteries of the world? Subtitled "the temporal misadventures of a social psychologist" it veers between hard data and well-worn anecdotes until it becomes a sort of self-help book for the time-poor 1990s American executive.

Despite being well-caveated against the "dangers in making generalization about the characteristics of places" and the dangers of stereotyping, it does do a lot of both! There's an unhealthy obsession with then en-vogue Type A Personality Type and a little bit of over-reliance on anecdotes and just-so stories. Yet, at the same time, the data kind of bears that out. Certain countries and communities do have different concepts of time and this leads to markedly different behaviour.

It doesn't quite go down the Sapir–Whorf path - but there's certainly something about the way cultures refer to chronological concepts which shapes how prompt they are to appointments!

The data are fairly brief and presented only in tabular form. I assume, much like Hawking, they were told data and graphs turn away casual readers. The book is extensively referenced, although there's not much about reproducibility of either their or others' data. It is stuffed with great quotes about the nature of time and how technological developments have wreaked havoc on otherwise idyllic communities. Some of the history stuff is revelatory.

While it does span the world, the book orbits the twin loci of American and its then-archrival Japan. The Japanese economic miracle was in full swing when this book was written and there's some hand-wringing about whether Japanese concepts of time are incommensurate with Western (read American) notions of productivity.

The end section contains eight lessons which can be applied by anyone who is changing country and culture - they're designed to help you mesh with your new community as you adapt to their rhythm of life.

If you're happy with a meandering philosophical Smörgåsbord of ideas, this has plenty to keep you interested. I'm sure it is rather dated now, but it is fascinating to see exactly what value people around the world place on time.