It's only part-way through the first chapter that you realise that this is all true! There really was a Premonitions Bureau running in the UK (albeit under the auspices of sensationalist reporters). People gave serious study to the idea that some people could foretell specific tragedies before they occurred. Books were written, television interviews were given, national campaigns were run. And in the end... Nothing. This is the story of mental health failings across the board. Not just in…
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I usually don't like reading endless sequels of sci-fi books - but I'll make a gleeful exception for Anne Currie's "Panopticon" series. What if the METAVERSE but IN SPACE! With a MURDER! C'mon, how can you not love that? At its heart is a classic Asimov mystery. Why would a robot kill a human? It is mixed in with a deliciously disturbing dystopia ("But I want to be under constant surveillance!") I'm never quite sure whether I would want to live in the world she's created - but I sure do enjoy …
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My wife and I are planning on being DWZ DINK FIRE. That's a lot of letters to say we want to retire early and not leave any money to our non-existent kids. This book is a (slightly shallow) exploration of 26 people on similar journeys. They're all American (or now living in the USA) so it has a slight bias to talking about things like 401(k) and medical bills which are absent in most other parts of the world. The author is a CFP® and, at times, reads a little like an advert for their …
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This is a fluffy and breezy wander through some of the oddities thrown up be evolution. It's also well illustrated and, luckily, most of the picture suit eInk very well. Of great interest to me were the tantalising asides - for example, a formerly enslaved man taught Darwin the art of taxidermy although very little is known about him. The book is full of delightfully distracting details like that. Along with extensive quoting from Darwin, it really helps to contextualise the history of our…
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This is a curious - and slightly unsatisfying - collection of short stories. There's no cohesive theme; some are about space travel, some alien invasion, some about madness on Mars, some about interstellar religions. You bounce around between themes without much chance to reflect on how different authors tackle the same subject. The stories alternate between Chinese authors and English-speaking authors. Again, it feels a little disjointed. Will general audiences not read Chinese sci-fi unless…
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In 1818, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein - setting the stage for modern science fiction. A mere 9 years later, Jane Loudon published "The Mummy!" which, to my mind, becomes one of the earliest works of speculative science fiction. Set in a 22nd Century England which is ruled over by a wise queen, a pair of scientists fly their personal hot-air balloon to Egypt where they use their galvanic battery to re-animate the mummified remains of Cheops. Disaster, naturally, befalls them. The story…
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After reading Laline Paull's The Bees, I was eager to read her next work. The Bees was about Bees, obviously. Pod is about a pod of dolphins - and their oceanic friends and society. Weirdly, this is the third book I've read from the perspective of cetaceans. Both The Idiot Gods and Startide Rising deal with similar themes - how to represent the complex world of sea creatures into sometime weird yet understandable. Pod has exactly the same story as The Bees - an outcast tries to find her…
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Hmmm... I was left a bit unconvinced by this series of essays. They feel like casually written blog posts - or hastily dashed-off Sunday Supplement articles. I was expecting a bit more rigour and investigation. The book treads over well-worn ground - most Silicon Valley companies are trying to recreate Mommy tidying their room via AI, Uber is trying to eat the world, algorithms leave us in filter bubbles. It's interesting, but hardly new insights. The essays have a heavy focus on love. And…
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This is a curious book. It starts out as a look at the security of everyday objects, but quickly becomes a series of after-dinner anecdotes about various security related issues. That's not a bad thing, as such, but a little different from what I was expecting. There's no doubt that Mikko walks the walk as well as talking the talk. Almost every page contains a bon mot. For example: Working in information security is sometimes a bit like playing Tetris: your successes disappear but your…
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They say you should never judge a book by its cover. I picked this book solely because of the title. I didn't even read the blurb. Frankly, I'm delighted to have stumbled onto something so good! It's a near-future sci-fi story with an actual bibliography backing up its science! That's one of the things which makes it so good - all of the biological research is based on experiments done by real scientists. It's also full of joyous snark abut the practical reality of living in a technological …
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Thoroughly disappointing. It's a rip-off of about a dozen Asimov stories about domestic robots. Robot helps child. Robot gets religion. Robot Misunderstands world. Robot is abused. It baffles me why this was nominated for so many prizes - I guess judges don't read enough old-school sci-fi? It's written in Ishiuro's dreamy, wandering style. I enjoyed that on his previous books, but here it feels like a parody of himself. The plot is linear and unsurprising. There are subtle hints of…
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This is a tough little compilation to review. It's a collection of mid-1980s stories all grouped around the loose theme of "Cyberpunk". What is Cyberpunk? Well, I'm not quite sure. And neither is the book. Some of the stories are high-tech tales of people fighting the system and sticking it to the man! Others are... allegories about original sin in gargoyles? That said, they're all interesting stories. Mostly by men, which is a bit disappointing. But they convey some spectacular predictions…
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