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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I'm not a paper fetishist. The smell of old books does nothing for me. But I'll admit to a slight sense of wonder when I held this 86-year old book in my hands. What is feminism? This is an out of print, and somewhat obscure, attempt to answer that question. Out of the shadow of the Great War and barely a decade after universal suffrage in the UK, one woman decided to catalogue the autobiographies of prominent women in society. Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, was the wife of…
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Turns out, you can just relive your childhood for £2.99 on eBay! I was exactly the right age when this book came out, and I was the perfect target audience. A boy in a sleepy suburb finds a mysterious device which allows him to understand every language. Could it be… Aliens?!?!?! It's all biking to the woods, arguing with siblings, navigating growing up, and living in a diverse community. Oh, and aliens, obviously. The book is slim - 130 small pages - and easy to finish in an hour. Although …
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My friend has published their first novel - and it is a cracker! After a calamitous accident, the Fairy realm is cut off from the mundane world. Only one trickster remains, a sprite by the name of Mainder who is now trapped on our side. All seems to be going well in his little corner of the world, until a plucky team of archaeologists start digging around the shattered ruins of the portal between worlds. It isn't a startlingly original take on a well-trodden subject; but it isn't intended to …
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I want to live in the world where this book is true. But I think I'm too cynical. Adam Greenfield has expertly diagnosed the problem we're all about to face. With ecological collapse comes societal breakdown. This "failure cascade" will bring unimaginable suffering. What can we do to give mutual aid and help save ourselves and our communities? The answer is building a series of "Lifehouses"; community hubs which can serve as a way to re-invigorate local decision making, give aid to those who …
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I've bumped in to Ken Banks a few times over my career - and he has always been a kind, inspiring, and dedicated chap. How did he get that way? This book is part autobiography and part an explanation about how people can find purpose in life. It is refreshingly secular on the latter, and curiously impersonal on the former. While Ken's childhood family is recounted in great detail, his wife and children get only a fleeting mention. A large part is dedicated to his ancestors: It’s about l…
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Another one in the Panopticon series. Bouncy sci-fi which scattershoots its plots all over the place. VR, Mission to Mars, evil AI, underwater cities, eyeless technomages - this has it all. It probably has a little too much crammed in. But, hey, it's a great ride. A cliffhanger every other chapter, vaguely plausible science, and mortal danger at every turn. It looked like I was about to be part of my first space battle, and it would be fought with blunt instruments. The series are a great…
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I hate it when I DNF a book. But "Soul of a New Machine" is just dull. It's sort of a hagiography of an obscure company which once made a 32 bit computer. All the men (and it seems to be mostly men) are in turns dull, agressive, or just dicks. As a sample quote: Grinning, he went on: “We’re trying to maximize the win, and make Eagle go as fast as a raped ape.” I completely see how staggering this book must have been on publication. The mix of fake-it-till-you-make-it and move-…
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This is a decent slice of sci-fi. It's the sort of story that probably could have been written any time in the last 100 years. The sole survivor of the human race is picked up by friendly aliens and spends his life as a specimen of scientific and cultural curiosity. And then... events occur! It's all rather silly fun. The aliens are all pacifists and spend more time negotiating rather than blasting. We bounce from world to world looking for remnants of civilisation. There's mild peril and…
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