My friend Dr Joanna has written a marvellous book! Full of bone-eating snot flowers, stuffed with silly footnotes about antlions, and gorgeously illustrated. This is a quick rattle through over a hundred weird - and not-so-weird - animals. It is always amusing and occasionally gross. Banana Slugs, man... YEUCH! It is surprisingly adult in places, probably best for older teens who will snigger…
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World War 2 was won by many men with big guns and feats of daring-do. Sure, the boffins in Bletchley might have helped a bit - but it was bombs, muscles, and blokes which saved the day. Well, that's what we're all taught, right? Would it surprise you to learn that a significant contributor to Victory in Europe was a woman? Britain's first "James Bond" wasn't a suave man leaping from building to…
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I don't usually back Kickstarter campaigns - but I love sci-fi & fantasy, and I don't think I've previously read any from Ukraine. So this was an instant buy - and it is a delight. As with any translation, you have to accept that the phrasing may sound a little "foreign" and you won't immediately get all the idioms and references - but that's all part of the fun, right? A tiny drumming sound…
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People who fart about with computers like to give themselves highfalutin titles. We're not programmers; we're architects! Yeah, nah. I wish I knew who recommended this book to me so that I could properly thank them. It is an astonishing series of life lessons viewed through the lens of architecture. Even to a lay-person like me, it was an accessible work - helped by Brand's friendly and…
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I did not get on well with this story. I know every novel has to be about The Pandemic, but this feels like it really wants to hammer home that Boris Johnson wasn't an especially good PM. I mean, yeah, we lived it. We know. At its heart, a story about how a family survives from the Second World War until the end of Covid might be interesting. It pops back and forth in time. It flips between…
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As the Middle-East convulses in yet another bloody war, and with no end in sight to the barbarity, we're all looking for a way to understand the horrors unfolding. So I went searching in the past. What set the seeds of today's conflict and was there any way to prevent it? This is a dispassionate and, it has to be said, dry look at how the British intelligence agencies operated in the region…
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Imagine a world with inter-city rockets, where tourists still use film cameras. Where self-driving trucks sport a wide array of sensor apparatus and record all their data onto miles of magnetic tape. Where the latest Androids are life-like and can perfectly clone a dead man's speech, yet are powered by punch-cards. People make video calls from public booths which eagerly accept coins as payment. …
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This book is outstanding. It's the mid 1980s, you're administrating a nascent fleet of UNIX boxen, and you are tasked with accounting for a 75¢ billing discrepancy. Naturally that eventually leads into an international conspiracy involving the FBI, NSA, and an excellent recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It is a fast paced, high-tension, page turner. There's also a sweet moral core to the story …
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What if the heroine in a Jane Austen novel had visions of the future and the past? That's the rather compelling premise of Time Squared. But, ultimately, it doesn't really fulfil the promise. It starts as a fairly standard regency-style novel - which of the two dashing brothers will our orphaned heroine marry?!? Our protagonist sometimes has headaches which lead her to see glimpses of a future…
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Everyone smokes in the future. It is such an obvious truism that sci-fi writers can predict faster-than-light travel, yet fail to see that manly men won't be smoking pipes on board their spaceships. Someone recommended that I read "Autofac" which is the sci-fi version of "The Magic Porridge Pot". But the story was surprisingly hard to find. Originally published in a magazine in 1955, it was…
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I was saddened to hear of Kris Nóva's untimely death a few weeks ago. I had her book "Hacking Capitalism" on my eReader for several months, but hadn't got around to reading it yet. Never put these things off. The book is a complicated but fitting legacy. It absolutely showcases Nóva's ideas, ideals, and potential. Perhaps a little overwrought in places, and a little underpowered in others. It's c…
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This is beloved firebrand Cory doing what he does best. Rallying the rebellion with righteous indignation and a no-nonsense approach to fixing technology's ills. If you've read any of his fiction, or listened to him talk, you'll know what to expect. An overview of how big tech has screwed us over and the consequences of those machinations. Unlike other writers, Doctorow provides eminently…
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