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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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…
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This is a curious and mostly charming book about therapy. It is presented as a (somewhat contrived) Socratic dialogue between Skynner the teacher and Cleese the pupil. Skynner lectures on while Cleese interjects with "that's too clever to be convincing" and other witty remarks. It is fun to have a somewhat sceptical interlocutor but it does get a little wearisome after a while. The basic of…
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Everyone raves about this series, so I thought I'd grab the first book. It's basically fine, I guess. It is moderately amusing having the Muderbot be an awkward teenage boy who just wants to watch videos and cringes when people stare at him. But it is a bit one-note. Similarly, evil corporations hiding details from exo-planet surveyors is a trope which has been a thousand times before. This…
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This cybersecurity book is badly written, contains multiple offensive stereotypes, is technically inaccurate, and spends more time focussing on the author's love affair with the New York Times than almost anything else. Seriously, if you take a drink every time the book mentions the NYT, you'll spend most of the chapters drunk. Which, to be fair, is probably the best way to experience it. The…
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This is an excellent "dipping" book. There are nearly 200 articles ranging from short anecdotes, multi-page synopses of complex topics, and quirky little asides. Rather than a linear history of computing, each short chapter ends with a multiple-choice "GOTO". From there, you take a meandering wander throughout retro-computing lore. Some paths lead to dead-ends (a delightful little Game-Over…
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