By @edent · Book Review childfree FIRE money · 300 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review evolution science · 250 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review chinese NetGalley Sci Fi · 2 comments · 200 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review Sci Fi · 1 comment · 2,050 words · read ~536 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review · 200 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI Book Review · 250 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review CyberSecurity security · 1 comment · 400 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review Sci Fi · 3 comments · 150 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review Sci Fi · 2 comments · 150 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review Sci Fi · 1 comment · 200 words
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... […]
Continue reading →