Book Review: The Empyrean by Katherine Franklin


Book cover with a glowing green planet.

Palia’s emotions are in turmoil. After watching her son succumb to Empyrean fire, she barely escapes the same fate. Guilt ridden and alone, she will not stop until his killer is brought to justice. The Protectorate forbids Ferrash to have emotions. That suits him, since he cannot avoid the people who control the Empyrean. Making this sacrifice prevents them from hijacking his feelings and using them as a weapon against him. When Ferrash spots Palia’s ship venting atmosphere, he is for…

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Book Review - Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal


Book cover.

Over the last 20 years, open source software has undergone a significant shift—from providing an optimistic model for public collaboration to undergoing constant maintenance by the often unseen solo operators who write and publish the code that millions of users rely on every day. In Working in Public, Nadia Eghbal takes an inside look at modern open source software development, its evolution over the last two decades, and its ramifications for an internet reorienting itself around i…

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Book Review: The Medusa Chronicles - Alastair Reynolds & Stephen Baxter


Book cover - a spaceship flies past Jupiter.

Inspired by Sir Arthur C. Clarke's short story A Meeting with Medusa, this novel, with permission from the Clarke Estate, continues the story of Commander Howard Falcon over centuries of space-exploration, interaction with AI, first contact and beyond. All brought to life by two of our greatest SF authors, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds. Howard Falcon almost lost his life in an accident . . . and a combination of human ingenuity and technical expertise brought him back. Not as…

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Book Review - Future law : emerging technology, regulation and ethics


Book cover featuring a cyborg holding the scales of justice.

How will law, regulation and ethics govern a future of fast-changing technologies? Focuses on the practical difficulties of applying law, policy and ethical structures to emergent technologies both now and in the future. Covers crucial current issues such as big data ethics, ubiquitous surveillance and the Internet of Things, and disruptive technologies such as autonomous vehicles, DIY genetics and robot agents. Asks where law might go next and how to regulate new-phase technology such …

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Book Review: The Idiot Gods - David Zindell


Book cover featuring an Orca drowning in pollution.

When Arjuna of the Blue Aria Family encounters three signs of cataclysm, he leaves his home in the Arctic Ocean to seek out the Idiot Gods and ask us why we are destroying the world. But the whales’ ancient Song of Life is beyond our understanding, and we know nothing of the Great Covenant between our kinds. Arjuna is captured, starved, tortured and made to do tricks in a tiny pool at Sea Circus. His love for a human linguist gives him hope, even as he despairs that other people twist h…

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Book Review: IBM and the Holocaust


Book cover featuring an early computer.

Published to extraordinary praise, this provocative international bestseller details the story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides a chilling investigation into corporate complicity, and the atrocities witnessed raise startling questions that throw IBM's wartime ethics into serious doubt. Edwin Black's monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and …

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Book Review: Future of Another Timeline - Annalee Newitz


Book cover featuring a clock wrapped in petals.

A story of time travel, murder, and unlikely allies separated by centuries, battling for a world in which anyone can change the future. 1992: Beth, a teenage riot grrl, witnesses a murder and realizes something is deeply wrong with her life--maybe it's her best friend, maybe it's her dad, or maybe it's the strange woman who keeps trying to warn her about what's coming. 2022: Tess, a time-traveling geologist, journeys to different eras for her research, while secretly hoping to correct a …

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Book Review: Disability and the Tudors - All the King's Fools by Phillipa Vincent Connolly


Book cover featuring King Henry the 8th.

Throughout history, how society treated it’s disabled and infirm can tell us a great deal about the period. Challenged with any impairment, disease or frailty was often a matter of life and death before the advent of modern medicine, so how did a society support the disabled amongst them? For centuries, disabled people and their history have been overlooked. Very little on the infirm and mentally ill was written down during the renaissance period. The Tudor period is no exception and p…

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Book Review: Glass Coffin by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch (Darkwood Book 3)


Book cover. An ornate clock stands at five minutes to midnight.

The tyrannous Huntsmen have declared everyone in one village to be outlaws, since they insist on supporting the magical beings of neighbouring Darkwood. Why won’t they accept that magic is an abomination? Far from being abominable, the residents of Darkwood are actually very nice when you get to know them, even Snow the White Knight, who can get a bit tetchy when people remind her she’s a Princess. In order to stop the Huntsmen from wiping out all magical beings, Snow and her friends hav…

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Book Review: Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott


Book cover featuring an eye trapped in a rigid box.

In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyses failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not—and cannot—be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author bui…

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Book Review: Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo


Book cover featuring a Black woman wearing a colourful headscarf.

This is Britain as you've never read it. This is Britain as it has never been told. From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a…

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Book Review: After Meat - The Case for an Amazing, Meat-Free World by Karthik Sekar


Book cover of a bioreactor painted to look like a cow.

This self-published book is a bit of a mixed bag. There has been a lot of thought put into it but, in the process of explaining the author's theories, they've forgotten that brevity makes a book like this readable and enjoyable. It could really have done with a strong editor to tighten things up. The first two chapters are filler. There's a mini introduction to evolution and the basics of the theory of knowledge. I'm not really sure what they're doing there. It seems to be an attempt by the…

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