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 grew alongside him, like chubby old fingers on glass, like rain on a coffin. He would here die, too, …
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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 unpretentious demeanour. It is chock-full of photos with lots of before-and-after shots - to the point…
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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 diary entries and third party storytelling. But it is just so dull and trite. I found the foreshadowing …
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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 during the aftermath of the 2nd world war. The books makes the compelling case that the UK's obsession …
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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. At the heart of nearly every story is paranoia and poor mental health. Perhaps I am a robot? Or…
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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 - as well as the somewhat saddening death of naïvety. It's hard to overstate just how fun this book …
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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 she cannot understand. And then... nothing. The story meanders along with the occasional twists and …
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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 subsequently republished in a collection called "The Variable Man" in 1957. It is impossible to find a …
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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 clear that her heart was in the right place and she was making a huge impact in the world. The s…
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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 practical solutions. Now, some of the solutions you'll be unable to implement unless you're an elected…
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The first section of this book are, frankly, dull. It's the sort of sneering, middle-class soap opera which leaves me cold. Entitled twats ignoring the world around them. It's a stultifying atmosphere which nearly made me stop after a few chapters. And then... It's amazing just how well that cloying sense of safety is gradually shattered beyond repair. I knew very little about Biafran War. It is a harrowing period of history. Told through the eyes of ambiguous and unsympathetic characters,…
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It occurs to me that I mostly read modern books. But sometimes I dip into the classics to see what modern literature is built upon. Quentin Crisp was - depending on how you read his autobiography - famous for being infamous, notorious for being Proud before Pride, or an uncompromising icon of studied awfulness. The book veers wildly between achingly painful prose and unimaginably bitchy barbs. Every page is stuffed with acid-drops of social commentary. About my immortal soul I did not…
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