This is a fascinating story told on an almost geological timescale. It is a tantalisingly glimpse, into a much larger world. It is a story of contradiction - there's an epic universe, but we're stuck in a parochial backwater. It is full of un-human creations - yet its politics are firmly a reflection of the 2020s. I loved the story - it's almost impossible to describe how wild it gets - but found myself continually frustrated with the po-faced nature of the characters. The protagonists are…
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The problem with autobiographies is that every anecdote ends with "needless to say, I had the last laugh!" This corporate-autobiography is no different - as it details the rise and impact of Bellingcat - a team of investigators and journalists. I am in awe of Bellingcat - and have seen them give talks on a couple of occasions. This book is a thrilling account of how they perform "open source" investigations; solving crimes with freely available data. But every few pages, I got an uneasy…
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The central schtick of this book is a cliché brilliantly delivered. Take a side-character from a beloved book and retell the story through their eyes. I only have hazy memories of reading 1984 - where Julia is little more than a femme fatale. This book is an explicit and visceral journey through Julia's life in Airstrip One. We see how, from her point of view, Winston Smith is little more than a pathetic dreamer. His childish fantasies of toppling Big Bother are the last gasp of a snivelling …
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This book is a rather pleasing wander through two interconnected topics. From the earliest chat rooms (A/S/L?) all the way to haptic-feedback in the Metaverse, this breezes through the way sex has advanced the technology and the resulting impact technology has had on sex. The book is well illustrated - skirting a fine line between being overly prudish and unnecessarily graphic. There are diversions into the religious weirdos behind some online dating sites, the original cam-girls, and BBS…
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I love Fforde's provincial epics. They are dystopias set in the endless wastelands of suburban England. Whole new worlds brought to life in sleepy villages. The Constant Rabbit isn't exactly subtle in its politics - fears that "the Rabbits" might out-breed us leads to a rise in an anti-rabbit dictatorship. But it is the way he deftly weaves polemic and punchline that is so delightful. ‘Rehoming rabbits in Wales’ policy was won on a slender majority and with half the country not voting at al…
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Like a million fans, I have a precious memory of (briefly) meeting Terry Pratchett and getting him to sign something amusing. I hold on to it dearly. This is half-way between a biography and autobiography. Parts were clearly dictated and recorded prehumously and are interspersed with observations from others. Terry's voice shines through although, as forevermore, I was left longing for just-one-more quote. In among all the amusing asides, perhaps what I found funniest was just how bitchy the …
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This deserves all the accolades going. A perfectly rendered tale of childhood best-friends-forever growing up and trying to make video-games. It is funny, well observed, and grim. It's sort of like Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity" for the 21st century. There's a desperately sad trope about how some men believe that women are a video-game where, if you put enough friendship in, you eventually get rewarded with sex. This is the tangled and twisted tale of how some people believe that, if you put…
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This is an astonishing book. On the one hand, it's the basic "Harry Potter" trope - a young orphan is gifted, gets sent to school to learn magic, becomes pals with the other weird kids, has adventures, and fights a monster. Except here, Harry is Chinese, is sent to Oxford University to learn magic, and faces up to the reality of colonialism and Empire. Oh, and the magic is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I lived in Oxford for several years (although, thankfully, I wasn't a scholar) and…
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I am decidedly unconvinced by this book. What do you do when you are too interested in the world? This is a problem I have; everything is interesting! How do you pick? What if I spend time studying the wrong thing? What if I never complete any of my madcap projects? How do I pick and choose? This book purports to help "Scanners" get their lives in order. I sort-of identify with that - so can this book help me regain focus and get on with my life? No. Not really. Essentially, it is a…
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A week is a long time in politics and a couple of years is an aeon in AI. Published in 2019, just before the dawn of the LLM, this is an overview of all the weird and charming ways Artificial Intelligence can go wrong. It is fully of delightfully silly examples and rather charming illustrations. Lots of the examples are drawn from the always-entertaining AI Weirdness blog. But it does suffer from being somewhat dated and having an over-reliance on lists. The constant "I trained an AI on…
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Ach. This is a hard one to give a lower review score to. I loved MRK's Lady Astronaut series - but this crime-thriller fell a little short of the mark for me. Part of the problem with setting a whodunnit in the future is that you have to assume criminal detection technology gets better. That means an author has to find a way to nobble cameras with privacy force-fields and bypass biometric security. It becomes rather dissatisfying to have all the protections of modern society hand-waved away. …
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OK. What the actual fuck? This starts off as a rather charming period piece - 1920s hotel will all the guests snowed in - and then gradually descends into horrifying madness. I'm used to the bizarre worlds created by Kate Mascarenhas - but this took the creepiness up to an extreme level. There's an almost fetish-like description of the scenery which helps with the world building. At first I thought the creeping around the hotel was a bit "Famous Five", but it builds up the supernatural…
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