Short stories offer you the chance to dip briefly into a world and then skip out so there's not much time for development; just straight in to the plot and off we go. But this is all exposition and very little action. Rather than let the plots develop naturally, there are just vast passages of infodumping. I'm sad to say this is a rather dreary and insipid collection of stories.

Some of the stories start out with an interesting premise but then just fizzle out. There's a reasonably good idea in "The Materiality of Emotions" which describes people buying little trinkets which induce emotions in them. Again, emotions as drugs is well-worn stuff, but this builds up momentum nicely before suddenly ending.

The highlight is "Spectrum" which has some delightful world-building but, like the others, it's rather derivative of older stories. A woman's space ship crashes on a strange planet and she tries to befriend the local hominids. You've almost certainly read it before.

Overall I found it underwhelming.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

This is an astounding bit of high-concept sci-fi. Imagine a world where crossing a border literally split your body in two. A young woman emigrates from South Korea - one version of her stays in Seoul, another version goes off to live in New York. This is the way humanity has always existed. People bifurcating and dealing with the consequences.

It is heady stuff. The book spans life, love, politics, religion, and folklore. It layers on narrative and meta-narrative. Like any debut novel, there are too many ideas to be contained and the plot seems to spill beyond its pages. What would the fascist ICE do with immigrants who were mere clones of the people they left behind?

The dizzying implications of the story are matched only by the gorgeously intricate plot. Does the tale need to occasionally be told in the second-person? You don't think so, but you also can't think of a better way to illustrate how strange it is to argue with your other-self. You enjoy all the literary and scholarly references and find they add poetic texture to balance out the increasing tension.

Unlike other hard sci-fi, it doesn't spend too much time on exposition; it gets drip fed to the reader. But it is happy to dive into the practicalities of a world where refugees might leave behind more than just memories. There's a small but necessary amount of technobabble, and a large but necessary amount of moral philosophising. Tuvix did not die in vain.

Sublimation lives up to the hype. It is dramatic, powerful, intriguing, and - above all - fun.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. Sublimation is available to pre-order now for delivery in July. I recommend reading it twice.

This is an an interesting and varied set of sci-fi/fantasy stories. Some barely a couple of pages, others cutting short at just the right time. They are all on a similar theme - the strife between parents and children. Whether it is a twisted take on classic fairy tales, or a dive into the far future - there's always something interesting going on.

Samantha Mills has a excellent eye for neologisms and isn't afraid to deploy humour with sometimes devastating effect.

The titular "Rabbit Test" is excellent but - like most of the others - it is a riff on some genre classics. That's not a bad thing; it's always fun to explore tropes from a different angle. Each story is entertaining, but most left me thinking "now where have I heard that before?"

One of the lovely things is the story notes at the end. Like a little behind-the-scenes feature on a DVD extra. More books should give the reader a glimpse behind the writing process.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. Rabbit Test is available to pre-order now.

Given my blog's domain name, I don't write nearly enough about Shakespeare. Luckily, the good folks at NetGalley have sent me Irene Coslet's provocative new book to review.

Who was the real Shakespeare? It's the sort of low-stakes conspiracy theory which is driven by classism ("a low-born man couldn't write such poetry!"), plagiarism ("he stole from other writers!") and, according to this book, sexism and racism.

From the blurb:

Now, in this intriguing and well-documented book, Irene Coslet conclusively demonstrates that Shakespeare was a not a man, but a woman: a dark-skinned lady, of Jewish origin, born into a family of Court musicians from Venice, and the mother of the English-speaking world. Her name was Emilia Bassano.

Yes! In your face, Bacon! Get stuffed, Marlowe! Edward de Who?!

The life of Emilia Bassano is genuinely fascinating. The book offers some excellent insights into the lives of women, Moors, and Jews during the time period. The analysis of the sexual politics - both in the plays and real life - are both interesting and well researched. For that reason, I have to give it some stars.

The book starts with Kuhn and his ideas about paradigm shifts - the more tweaks we have to bolt on to a model, the more likely it is the model will eventual collapse and a new model will emerge. I'm 100% behind that - given the deficiencies in Shakespeare's biography, people keep adding more and more fantastical explanations to it. But the counterpoint is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

So, what evidence is there that Emilia Bassano was the writer of Shakespeare?

• Shakespeare's name is an anagram of "A-She-Speaker".
• Beatrice from Much Ado shares the same Myers-Briggs type as Emilia Bassano.
• The names "Emilia" and "Bassano" pop up in several plays.
• If you fold the portrait of Shakespeare in a certain way, it looks like a portrait of Emilia.

And so it goes on. Sadly, the evidence presented rarely rises to the level of circumstantial, let alone extraordinary. Some of it is of the sort found in the discredited Bible Code. If you selectively squish the data, you can make it say anything:

Here, the author exploits the similarity in Hebrew between the word Portia (PRT) and the word lead (YPRT). Portia (PRT) is nested within the lead (YPRT), embedding one one term inside the other to create multiple layers of meaning. Only a person who is fluent in Hebrew [...] would be able to make such a pun.

This book is a monument to what happens if you start with a conclusion and then selectively pick only the clues which support your case. There's no testing of the evidence against other candidates - for example, the author describes folding the Droeshout portrait in a specific way until it looks a bit like one of the portraits which might be of Emilia Bassano. It's a bit "Mad Magazine Fold In" - but can the image be folded different ways? Are there other people that it looks like? Sadly, the folded image isn't included on (dubious) copyright grounds.

There's also no mechanism suggested. Let's suppose that Emilia Bassano did write all these plays and poems. What was the method whereby "The Man From Stratford" took them and passed them off as his own? Was there payment? Why did she keep writing if they were being stolen? Wouldn't someone have noticed her slipping in all these "clues" about the true authorship and then removed them?

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea of trying new ways to look at old problems and I genuinely found some of the analysis interesting. I tried to keep an open mind and to steelman the arguments. Nevertheless, I found most of it unconvincing.

Here are some of the arguments I have trouble with.

Scholars agree that the plays are ‘feminist’ but have not been able to explain why the author was interested in gender issues.

To which a suitable response might be "Hath not a man eyes? hath not a man hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" It also ignores all the decidedly unfeminist tropes and characters in Shakespeare.

Emilia Bassano tells about this portion of her life in Cymbeline through the character of Posthumus Leonatus. Posthumus is the son of Sicilius, a reference to the Sicilian origin of the family. Sicilius has two other sons, who both die prematurely, an allusion to Lewis and Philip, Baptista and Margaret’s sons who died in infancy.

You could pick any random character out of any play and find someone in history who it could be an allegory for.

But, again, there are some reasonable arguments that Shakespeare may not be who we think. Emelia Bassano certainly had some of the background necessary:

The playwright had direct knowledge of the Veneto region. The playwright is familiar with the Commedia dell’Arte. [...] In 1582, Emilia Bassano travelled to Denmark, and that journey, according to Hudson, provided the material for Hamlet. [...] They all stayed at the Castle of Elsinore – which is renowned today as the setting of the play Hamlet. The delegation met two prominent Danish noblemen: Georgius Rosencrantz and Petrius Guildenstern

Most of these arguments seem to be taken from John Hudson's 2014 book "Shakespeare's Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier The woman behind Shakespeare's plays?" with very little in the way of original research.

The author does prove that there are a few positive connections between Emilia Bassano and Shakespeare. For example, she was the paramour of Henry Carey - founder of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Could that have taken her into the orbit of Shakespeare's theatre company?

Yet, in 1594, Henry Carey was a sixty-eight military General (he died in 1596): it is hard to believe that the creation of a theatre company was his initiative. It is more likely that it was Emilia Bassano’s idea, who was twenty-five and a playwright at the peak of her creativity.

That's just pure speculation! When you go looking for evidence, and squint your eyes, it's possible to make anything seem like a connection:

Ophelia – whose name rhymes with ‘Emilia’ – has a relationship with the Lord Hamlet and gets pregnant. Ophelia is the daughter of the Lord Chamberlain – a reference to the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, who was her fiancé in real life.

The book veers between cold-reading and the Forer effect. For example, the author asserts that one of Shakespeare's characters is based on a friend of Emilia Bassano. How can that be proven?

Shakespeare had the uncanny ability to give an accurate impression of the characters without describing them in detail. There is a painting by Thomas Francis Dicksee entitled Anne Paige (circa 1862). Although Dicksee was not aware that the character of Anne Paige is based on Lady Anne Clifford, his impression of Anne Paige looks strikingly similar to the portrait of Lady Anne Clifford by William Larking (1618): brown-haired, big-eyed and with a rounded face. It appears that the way the audience imagines Anne Paige when reading the play – and the way Dicksee represented her – is exactly how Anne Clifford looked. Same goes with Falstaff: Shakespeare gives such an accurate impression of Falstaff, without describing him in detail, that now we have an idea of how Alfonso Lanyer looked in real life.

I don't know how to fully respond to that. Two paintings looking slightly similar is not evidence! Where are all the other paintings of Anne Paige? Do they all look similar? There's cherry-picking, and then there's this!

Anyway, I give you Dicksee's portait and Larkin's so you may compare their similarity.

Similarly, some of the discussion is of the sort you might have after imbibing a few bottles of wine:

It is fascinating how two very different cultures and religions used the same sounds, Shekinah and Shakti, to indicate the divine feminine presence, and how these sounds can also be found in the name Shakespeare: Shekinah, Shakti, Shakespeare.

Emilia Bassano is the acknowledged author of the poem "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum". Surely a textual analysis of her work and that of Shakespeare's would throw up some similarities? Alas, all we get are:

Prospero asks Miranda: ‘Cants thou remember / A time before we came unto this cell?’. In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum Emilia Bassano says that she lives in a cell: ‘I that live clos’up in Sorrowes Cell’

And

there are many rhetorical similarities between the Passion in Salve Deus and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. For example, Jesus is associated with the colours white and red, like Lucrece. In Salve Deus we read: ‘The purest colours both of White and Red’ (1828). In the Rape of Lucrece: ‘To praise the clear unmatchèd red and white’

Frankly, that's less than nothing!

The book concludes with this:

From the viewpoint of white men and businessmen, the story of the Stratford man is inspiring. It is the story of a white boy, a merchant, with little education, who resorted to writing and miraculously became a genius. Society likes the narrative of the genius, because when we say ‘genius’ we think of a miracle and it does not require much explanation. It is all about magical thinking.

I agree that there's a lot to be said about Shakespeare and race. There may well be arguments about the true authorship of the plays and sonnets - and it is certainly interesting to approach them from a new perspective. The book does a reasonable job of contextualising some of the gender politics surrounding Shakespeare's propaganda for Queen Elizabeth and, similarly, the historical context in which the plays were written. But most of the evidence presented is somewhere between magical thinking and divine inspiration.

Emilia Bassano was undoubtedly a fascinating woman - poet, teacher, entrepreneur, confidant of the Queen - she deserves better than this scattershot ramble through her life.

I cracked open my review copy of Room 706 and settled in for an early night in my hotel room. I was up until way past midnight tearing through the book - my heart pounding. Given that the book centres around a woman trapped by terrorists in her hotel room, it was perhaps not the best choice to read on holiday!

If you were held hostage - what message would you want to send to your family? Would they know that you loved them? Would they need the password for your grocery app? Would they ask why you were having an affair in that hotel?

Ah.

And there's the plot. In many ways, this is a stage-play or - in TV terms - a bottle episode. Our protagonist and her lover cannot escape from a little box of misery. What was once heavy with lust is now brimming over with fear, irritation, and pain. Ellie Levenson beautifully observes all the little moments which go into a day, building up the characters' lives only to tear them down again. I can't work out whether she is a cruel god torturing her creations or a loving creator who allows them to make their own mistakes.

It helps that she's created a protagonist who is just the right side of obnoxious. Their self-justified self-delusion leap off the page. Every minor irritation they experience explodes into bitterness and, just for a moment, you almost believe the lies she tells herself. There are some painfully witty observations about how men and women might react differently to the terror of a siege. It is, perhaps, a little bit heartbreaking to realise your own reactions to the situation would be laughably inadequate and barely more than a cliché.

Perhaps that's the point; we're all trapped in a room of our own making. We fall into the same patterns as everyone else and react with shock when we discover how we've trapped ourselves.

I was desperate for there to be a twist. Some last-minute deus ex. Or even a moment of catharsis. Instead, Room 706 wrings every drop of stress out of you up until the final page. There is no let-up in the tension.

An exhausting and frantic read. Highly recommended.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. Room 706 is released on the 15th of January and is available to pre-order now.

Long-term readers will recognise Ellie from my review of her Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism from 17 years ago. Let's hope we don't have to wait until 2043 for her next book!

This book is astonishingly good. A high-flying career woman thinks she's going through the menopause but she isn't. She's becoming a werewolf.

That, as it turns out, is more than enough of a premise to drive this book.

What I loved was just how well observed the characters are. Our protagonist works in a tech start-up and every character there is someone I've worked with before! I could feel the reality of the struggle between ethics and profitability. I've known people argue to death over font choices. It's the only novel that's made me wince at the mention of "forgotten GitHub permissions and stale deploy tokens". Most books set in offices take a more generic approach to intraoffice politics - but this one is painfully realistic.

Well, except for the lycanthropy.

Although, thinking back to one previous boss…

Even though this is explicitly marketed as a horror novel, it's funny enough that it lulls you into a false sense of security before battering you around the head with entrails. It perfectly balances the supernatural horror with the mundane horror of being an woman in a man's world.

That said, here's a brief content warning - some mild spoilers inside.

A note about some other reviewers getting the hump about "AI". This book deals with the vacuous nature of auto-generated text. It perfectly skewers why having an LLM provide a half-arsed attempt at therapy is a bad idea. As part of that, the author is up-front about using ChatGPT and Apple's predictive text to generate a couple of example pablum ramblings. I think that's a perfectly sensible use of these machines.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. Femme Feral is out in early 2026 and I encourage you to pre-order now. Please! Before someone gets hurt.

Brother Mauro, an older monk, and Nicolo, a young, striving merchant are called by the Pope to traverse the treacherous political, religious, and mercantile terrain of medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire to seek out the powerful Presbyter John, a mysterious king in the Far East who has promised to put his wealth and vast armies to the service of the pope's crusade.

I don't understand why all books nowadays have to be an epic trilogy. There's a perfectly decent story in here - but it is padded out to the point of flabbiness. The dialogue veers between trite and didactic. At times it feels like the author has rummaged around Wikipedia for contemporaneous famous people and thrown them in to the story without any particular reason.

Similarly, lots of the scene setting feels like a needless history lesson, inserted just to bring up the word-count.

He was joined by a thin, muscular young man who played an oud, the Arabic stringed instrument that French crusaders had recently brought to Europe under the name l’oud and were now calling the “lute.”

I loved the idea of a super-smeller going on a journey to find the source of the expensive spices which were entering Europe. A quest of a befuddled monk to reunite the various strands of Christendom also makes for a rich tale. But mashed together - and interspersed with treacherous kings, scheming Popes, and duplicitous pirates - it loses all coherence.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

This should be a fascinating look at how streaming services evolved and the outsized impact they've had on our culture. Instead it is mostly a series of re-written press-releases and recycled analysis from other people.

Sadly, the book never dives in to the pre-history of streaming. There's a brief mention of RealPlayer - but nothing about the early experiments of livestreaming gigs and TV over the Internet. Similarly, it ignores how Big Brother created a generation of people who wanted to stream on their phones. Early pioneers like JenniCam are written out of history. The book is relentlessly focussed on American streamers, with only a brief foray into the UK, Africa, and other markets. There's nothing about Project Kangaroo and how it squandered an early opportunity for streaming dominance.

Steaming only started with Netflix, according to this book. Despite iPlayer launching at roughly the same time, it doesn't make an appearance until halfway though the book. It's also missing some of the interesting aspects of how Netflix built its algorithm, and the privacy impacts of it.

The analysis itself mostly quotes from reports from Enders and other firms like that. It doesn't seem like there was any original research done, and there aren't any new interviews done for the book. Instead it is just a surface-level analysis mixed in with clichéd prose about boiling frogs. It's also fairly uncritical - several sections are just press-releases from big streaming services with little discussion about whether they're accurate. It almost turns into a corporate biography / hagiography rather than a serious look at streaming.

There's very little about the production side. For example, how Netflix squashes cinematograph and how its lack of permanent props storage restricts accurate set-dressing to tent-pole shows.

Although this is a preview copy, the prose feels half-baked.

Overall, the iPlayer is a very high-quality product, providing access to both linear TV and a whole range of content in its extensive catalogue.

That's the sort of thing I'd expect from a student essay rather than a serious book.

Unlike Warez - The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy by Martin Paul Eve, there's almost nothing about piracy and how that drives the behaviour of consumers, producers, and distributors. There's a bit of discussion of Napster, but hardly anything about the more modern cultural impact.

It is maddeningly contradictory. In a couple of pages it goes from:

Consequently, we are closer than we have ever been to having something like global TV. Close, but not actually there.

To:

because of the amount of work available to view, there is no mono-culture anymore.

Which is it?

The book concludes by saying:

With that in mind, the ultimate winner of the streaming wars is the consumer. It is us.

Is it though? There's almost nothing about shows cancelled before they got going. Nothing about whether American cultural hegemony suffocates local media development. It briefly touches on the constant price rises, but never investigates whether it changes behaviours or if they drive customers away. There's not a single interview with viewers - and no attempt to understand whether they feel positive about the way streaming has changed the world.

There's a fascinating story to be told, but this isn't it.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy, the book is available to pre-order now.

This book is ridiculously zeitgeisty. It's all brain-rotting AI, social-media meltdowns, mixed with some cracking technobabble.

She thinks about erasing more: all the practice session recordings; her own encrypted cephaloscripts; the dream-guide neuromesh of her personal AI; the interviews, fan messages, reviews—food for her vanity, training data for her egolets.

Fab! But, for all that, it's pretty realistic. Sure, it's set five-minutes into the future, but all the tech is plausible and all the hacks somewhere in the ballpark of reality. It is much better than The Ministry for the Future simply because all the technowizardry passes the smell test.

The plot is, charitably, basic. A woman has been kidnapped and her husband (who is a suspect) enlists a Private Eye hacker to solve the mystery. But you're not reading to discover whodunnit; you're there to revel in the pitch-perfect future-gazing and cower before the (hopefully not too accurate) predictions around how technology will be subverted to protect the powerful while leaving everyone else helpless.

The neologisms are off the chart - "Darcybots" to help you date, a "Fiscjinn" to interrogate your finances, and an "Oneirofex" to… well, I'll let you discover that! You'll need to have a good grasp of what's going on with modern technology in order to get more than half the references. I've no idea if the book will be intelligible half-a-decade from now. Perhaps we'll have our self-hosted AIs translate it for us?

At times, it feels less like a book and more like a series of parables woven into one story. The ending feels a little rushed - but it fits in with the fast-paced nature of the plot. A great slab of sci-fi to chew on.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy. The book is released in October 2025 - and will probably remain relevant for at least half-a-dozen weeks.

Second Contact is a compilation of Lower Decks issues #1–6. You get a bunch of stories spread out over 145 pages. The great thing about a comic of a cartoon is that all the characters look identical to their TV counterparts. There's no pesky rights issues to get in the way.

The stories are exactly what you'd expect from Lower Decks. The gang have to deal with aliens, not-too-strange new worlds, and some heavy meta-textual crises. And, yes, it is delightfully meta. There are plenty of call-backs to the show, TNG, and the original animated series. Perfect for nerds like me.

It also introduces some new lore:

Kirk sometimes liked to unwind in his quarters by making a fanvid of his own day. This is canon.

There's also the first(?) appearance of the "Starfleet Corps of Rhetoric Engineers" who, as their name suggests, help provide some much needed exposition for the technobabble.

Oh, and we find out that the noise the transporters make is "SVRRRRRMMMMMM". Which seems about right.

The episodic pacing is nice and there is a genuine laugh-out-loud moment every few pages. It doesn't try to do anything new or innovative with the comic book format - it's pretty much small panels, the occasional bigger art piece, and one double-pager.

On a technical note, the speech bubbles are in text, rather than raster, format - so your TTS should be able to read them aloud.

Second Contact is the sort of comic book which will keep you giggling with glee at the misadventures of lovable misfits.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy. The book is available to pre-order now - with delivery mid-September 2025.

It started with a hummingbird dive-bombing Amelia Thomas over her morning coffee, and a pair of piglets who just wouldn’t stay put. Soon Amelia, journalist and new farmer, begins to question the communications of the creatures all around her: her pigs, her dogs, the pheasant family inhabiting her wood, her ‘difficult’ big red horse: even the earwigs in the farm’s dark, damp corners. Are they all just animals reacting instinctually to the world around them—or are they trying to communicate something deeper?

This is a curious - and mostly satisfying - look at the practicalities of interspecies communication. Unlike How to Speak Whale, this doesn't assume that animals have a rich and complex grammar, nor does it make the case for animals having "higher-order" cognition. Instead, this is a fairly practical look at the limits of understanding animals.

Anyone with a pet cat or dog knows that they are experts at some forms of communication. "Feed me" being the primary one!

In some ways, animals are simpler than humans. Hamsters don’t deliberately confound or obfuscate. Donkeys don’t gossip. An iguana will not gaslight you. Animals say what they mean. Yet that’s not to say this content is clear, or that we’re always aware it even exists at all.

The author is open about her limitations and her goals. At times, it rather feels like reading a series of blog posts as she finds a new paper, chats to a new expert, and accidentally acquires yet another animal. Because she's primarily working with her own animals, there's a fair bit of anthropomorphising going on. Similarly, any "do your own research" project is going to be unaware of how to critically assess evidence. That makes it slightly scattershot and homespun. Nevertheless - it is fascinating what she uncovers.

There are some excellent practical tips for understanding the animal experience (I particularly like the idea of going on all fours and trying to understand a pet's-eye-view of the world). There's also an interesting bunch of interviews with scientists who are seeking to understand how and why animals communicate - and whether we can meaningfully exchange ideas with them, or just condition their behaviour.

But, as the book wears on, the author becomes more and more credulous. She goes on a series of courses which - with the best will in the world - seem to have rather dubious outcomes.

Most of what I hear and see over these seven soaking days I need no scientific study to verify. I just sort of know it, the way the chicken guessers and dog listeners in the experiments just sort of knew what the calls signified. I wonder if this has to do with something called the motivational structure hypothesis,

With no external interrogation of what she is doing, the book descends into the pseudo-scientific. The author recounts receiving mystic visions, engages with people who believe they can communicate with animals using telepathy, wanders into the realm of quantum physics, and claims that their horse has a psychic bond with her which causes psychosomatic injuries. Oh, and that her raspberry plants are laughing at her.

It is unfortunate that the last few chapters undermine all the interesting and useful information in the rest of the book.

It is a beautiful PDF which has been gorgeously typeset and lushly illustrated. So many fonts! Sure, it isn't brilliant for eInk but excellent for a tablet or any other full-colour screen.

The language is unpretentious and accessible. It's probably aimed towards the space-obsessed teen market, but I found it delightful.

The authorities were decidedly unchill about all this philosophizing, however, and Anaxagoras was condemned to death for impiety—a charge based on his rejection of religious teachings—after he kept insisting the Sun was a hot and large natural object, not some hunky god driving a chariot across the sky.

There aren't any inline references or footnotes - and links to images would be nice - but they're all all stuffed at the end if you want to find more.

It would have been nice if some of the examples were a little more fleshed out:

Many cultures have imagined themselves as the descendants of celestial objects, or believed that they will ascend to the skies to join their ancestors after death.

But it is an excellent jumping off point for anyone who wants to expand their horizons. The book isn't really in any chronological order so jumps around a fair bit. Full of fascinating titbits - especially radio silence day - and avoids the trap of sticking to just the USA cultural hegemony,

A great starting point for anyone who wants to get quickly acquainted with our (so far futile) attempts to discover alien life.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the preview copy - the book is on sale 30th September 2025.

Except, it isn't really clear who this book is aimed at. Part of it is very casually written - a hint of pop science and a healthy dollop of the personal lives of the scientists. The other part is a rather dense and unforgiving science book which is slightly beyond casual readers like me.

I was suddenly bombarded with sentences about the "tiny epiphysis (tip) of the distal phalanx" and how "the famous Denisova 3, was found in a stratigraphic position" and that "Exogenous DNA comes from the numerous necrophagous organisms that attack the remains after death."

There's very little ramp-up to the science and it suffers from the "Average Familiarity Fallacy" that non-experts have a working understand of the intricacies of a complex field.

It is interesting, and parts of it are downright fascinating:

The team of researchers found that the site’s hunter-gatherers cooked giant carp of up to 6.5 feet (2 m) long, which they caught in a nearby lake. Several burnt flint microartifacts suggest they made fires. In the same layers as the burnt flints, the researchers collected around 40,000 pharyngeal teeth, carp teeth that are found at the bottom of their mouths. These teeth are all that remain of the carp, as heat softens the cartilaginous bones of fish and eradicates the possibility of their preservation. The discovery of these teeth suggests the fish were cooked at a controlled temperature rather than being grilled.

Even if we don’t know how the occupants of GBY made their fires, we do know that they stewed fish. Using X-ray diffraction, researchers established that the thermal expansion of the nanocrystals that make up the tooth enamel suggests their exposure to low to moderate heat: specifically, lower than 932°F (500°C), whereas a wood fire produces temperatures of between 1,472°F and 1,832°F (800°C and 1,000°C). It’s likely that prehistoric people cooked carp en papillote, probably by burying them near their fires after wrapping them in giant water lily leaves collected from the nearby lake.

I mean! Wow! That's some brilliant detective work.

Sadly, there is quite a lot of dusty old bones to wade through before you hit the good stuff. In the end, I found myself confused as to how different Neanderthals and Denisovans actually were.

The (pre-release) copy of the eBook commits the error of relegating all the images to the back. Several paragraphs are crying out for immediately viewable illustrations to help make sense of the text.

If you have a reasonable familiarity with palaeontology you'll probably enjoy this greatly - but it is a little too taxing for those of us with less evolved brains.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

The author has an excellent and accessible way of showing the problems caused by the Climate Crisis - but the "action" part is mostly missing. Take this example:

So something you can do right now to tackle them is to divest your money from them. Find out if your bank still has investments in fossil fuels and if they do, change your bank! It’s a quick and easy way you can take action.

That's a pretty good suggestion. But there's no follow up. How do I do this? What platforms should I use? Which resources could help me? And, sadly, it is fatally undermined by the next line:

It won’t fix the problem but it’s a tactic to get us on the way there.

Although it (quite rightly) eschews rehashing arguments about whether climate change is real, it does meander through lots of other political and sociological theories. Sometimes to the detriment of the core argument.

The fact that the climate crisis is inherently woven together with oppressive systems of white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy, both in its causation and its impacts, means that this crisis doesn’t ask us to leave behind what we are already fighting for, but instead to find a way to connect our struggles

Is it though? Because of the constant need to tie everything back to the original sins of racism and colonialism, the argument gets completely diffused. It isn't enough for us to tackle pollution, we have to tackle everything everywhere all at once.

Similarly, it falls into the same trap as lots of other socialist works.

Truly tackling the climate crisis requires each of us to go to the roots of poverty, of police brutality and legalised injustice. It requires us to move away from capitalist exploitation, which exists only to extract profit. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards our collective liberation because it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues. This is a far more exciting prospect to me.

Is the Climate Crisis tied in with police brutality? There's an interesting discussion in the book about why so many white protestors are willing to get arrested - in part because they believe the police will treat them more fairly than protestors from a racial minority.

Assuming we accept the arguments that colonialism is the root cause of all this, what action can be taken?

Reparations must go beyond paying cheques to individuals and instead be investments into infrastructure, education, healthcare, housing and energy. These investments will raise the living standards of all oppressed people

OK, great idea. But how? That's nothing an individual can do.

It is so frustrating to read paragraphs like:

We have to take action in order to make things better. We have to join movements and take drastic action because the world as we know it quite literally depends on us doing so.

Yes! I agree! Which movements should I join? How can I find them? What can I do to help them? Where should I target my actions?

There are no answers.

Or this:

Campaigns like Clean Air for Southall and Hayes (CASH) are yet another painful reminder that the most toxic substances, most dangerous industries and the most polluted roads are in the backyards of the poor, which in this country all too-often means the backyards of Black people and people of colour.

Brilliant! But did CASH succeed? What lessons can we learn from it? How do I start something like that? Where can I find out more?

Again, no meaningful discussion of the actions people can take.

Or this:

Consumers’ cannot stop climate change because capitalism is not compatible with a climate-just world. But active citizens CAN. Movements CAN. WE CAN when we challenge and disrupt these systems, rather than limiting our power and actions to those which are within it.

I am genuinely fuelled by her ambition and righteous indignation. How do I disrupt these systems? Give me some action I can take.

The title of the book is "It's Not That Radical". The problem is, the book is radical.

The more I read and watched, the more I was overwhelmed by how many alternatives to capitalism there are, and how much there is to know. But the deeper I got into my research, the more I realised that we can’t expect everyone to read ten different books, watch dozens of talks, be able to understand academic papers or have hundreds of conversations in order to work towards a world beyond capitalism.

The problem is, people like capitalism. They continually vote for it. They like having new cars, shiny gadgets, and exciting distractions. Telling people that they have to accept a lower standard of living isn't likely to change minds.

To be fair, the author does realise this. They look back on their past actions and realise how alienating some of them were. It's important to have a Theory Of Change if you want to actually engage with people.

We aren’t actually toning down our demands. We aren’t making them conform to the system. We are just finding a way to communicate our demands so that they will be listened to and understood. I think that, in the contexts we are facing, this sort of practicality is of the utmost importance.

The book is a bit rambly, but does eventually settle on some reasonable action to take. It also correctly points out that every campaign rests on the backs of the often-invisible people doing the ground-work.

Actions and campaigns don’t just spring up out of nowhere – they require a huge workforce with a wide variety of skills. All of these roles are valuable. It’s so much more than people on the streets or behind a megaphone.

The latter half contains an excellent section on the perils of fame and the dangers of cancel culture. It is painfully self-aware and an excellent antidote to some of the gleeful destruction out in the world. There's also some beautiful writing about her personal philosophy, what drives her, and the importance of empathy.

To see no stranger is to open one’s heart to empathy; to try and see every person as a nuanced, messy person.

It becomes refreshingly egoless and uplifting. This isn't about one person, it is about all of us.

The strongest part of the book is the author's rules for action. They are a perfect encapsulation of understanding the theory of change necessary for something to be successful:

Ahead of partaking in any action, I ask myself the following questions:

• Does this have the potential to create lasting change?
• How does this fit onto our roadmap for a completely transformed and liberated world?
• Will this help to shift the Overton Window closer to a place that allows us a liveable future?
• Will this help improve the material conditions of the lives of those most affected and oppressed?
• Could this prevent any of the above?
• Is this just a distraction from work that could truly build a new world?
• What can I do to modify or change this action so that it cannot be co-opted?
• With arrestable actions, it’s also important to add: is it essential for this to be arrestable?

That's an excellent list for anyone to follow.

I am probably not the target audience. If you're looking for a radical view of what needs to be done, or are happy to be radicalised, this is excellent. If you're looking for concrete steps you can take, you might find it a bit lacking.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

There are a few hundred pages of illustrations for you to flick through - but they're all devoid of context. As sumptuous as the images are, they're surround by commentary which wouldn't be out of place on a disused Tumblr blog. There's also a lot of discussion about the various ways cats were tortured and killed.

It is hard to know who this book is for. It is written in such a simplistic tone that at first I thought it was targetted at the children's book market. And yet, despite reading like a kids book, there are numerous references to drugs - with captions suggesting cats are tripping on catnip, or have the fear, or that their mice have been spiked.

Yeah. OK. There's only so often you can smirk at an illustration of a cat licking its bum before the joke wears thin.

Academically, it isn't brilliant. It says that the poem Pangur Bán was written around the year 900CE - it's actually from the 9th century. It suggests that the proverb "Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought it back" is from the Middle Ages, but it is a 20th century invention. It also repeats the discredited idea that Newton invented the cat-flap. There's a bizarre claim that the pub name "The Cat and Fiddle" is a reference to Catherine of Aragon - despite the pub name predating her by more than a century. Similarly, the quote "Even the smallest feline is a masterpiece of nature" is given as Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1530. The only problem is, there's no evidence he said that. Oh, and he died in 1519

I think a few of the image references might be duff, but it's hard to say. Although each illustration is given a provenance, none are clickable. Can you find out more about an image using just the reference "Nicolaus de Lyra super Bibliam, Italy, Latin MS 162, f. 252v, 1402"? I couldn't.

Most of the images are from European works with only a couple of illustrations from Islamic sources. There is a rich history of cats appearing in Japanese and Chinese texts of the same period - but this book ignores them.

It almost dives into interesting territory by giving us factual snippets:

The Book of Kells, has a whole section on kitties called the Catslechtae. It outlines the medieval code of conduct for owning a cat.

Sadly, there is no further information forthcoming. Surely the Catslechtae must have been at least one interesting law to discuss?

The illustrations are gorgeous - but there's absolutely no explanation of them. Why were the cats inserted? What was the symbolism? Do cats appear more than other domestic animals? No idea. Take this caption of "Rocket Powered Cats":

This is actually a fascinating example of cats and other animals being used for warfare. The book could have shown dozens of contemporary examples but it just moves on to the next illustration and half-hearted commentary.

If you look at the pictures, and ignore the text, it is a diverting enough book.

Personally, I'd recommend you read Lolcats of the Middle Ages or Cats get off the page from the British Library.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

Scalzi's latest book is cheesy homage - fromage if you will - to that giant of literature. It asks an equally important question.

What if, without warning and for no apparent reason, the moon turned into cheese?

That's it. That's the novel.

It is gloriously silly - but no less reverent to humanity. Rather than focus on one single story, the book floats around a dozen different people. We sample the plebeian to the rock-star, President to hausfrau. Everyone gets to bathe in the moonlight (cheeselight?) of the story. And what a story! As with any good slice of sci-fi, it is light on the technobabble and high on the everyday drama.

Yes, there are obvious parallels to the shared emotional trauma of Covid, but it doesn't dominate as a theme. And, of course, the fractured nature of our shared reality is likely to be the focus of most literature for the foreseeable future. Scalzi instinctively understands what makes sci-fi absurd and how to gently squeeze the humour out of it. Because sci-fi is intrinsically funny. It's about us playing a massive game of "what if" and seeing where it takes us.

The laughter is offset with just the right amount of heartbreak. The moon turning in to cheese isn't all fun and games. No one gets off scot-free, but all the villains get their just desserts. It is impossible to read without a smile on your cheeks and a lump in your throat.

As with his two most recent books - The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain - these are stand-alone novels. There's no massive trilogy to commit to reading and no prior knowledge is assumed.

If you've read Neal Stephenson, Andy Weir, and Mary Robinette Kowal, you'll probably get a little bit more out of it than the casual reader. It is fully of fun little sci-fi references and tropes, all expertly shaken out for a daft laugh.

The book is released in March 2025. Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy - the rest of you will have to pre-order.

The good news is - I have an advance reader copy. So I get to revel in it now!

I appreciate that you might not consider that much of an upside. But sucks to be you, I guess?

Scalzi's writing reminds me why I love to read. It is fast, funny, and filled with righteous ire. The plot is... look, it's identical to Scalzi's other books. "Who? Me? A nerdy guy is called on to save the world? But all I have is my nerdy references and a healthy dose of meta-awareness!"

Much like his last book "The Kaiju Preservation Society" this is a brilliant and funny novel with a delightfully sideways look at the tropes of super-villains. It perfectly explains why villains always have cats on their laps.

I suppose my one criticism is its over-use of "show, don't tell". You know that movie trope where the entire conflict could have been avoided if the characters just explained things to each other - but inexplicably don't? I felt that frustration throughout the entire book. So many chapters were literally just "I could tell you what's going on in a 5 minute chat - but it'll be more dramatic if I just remain enigmatic!" That's fine once or twice, but it gets old fast.

I get that having long passages of exposition don't make for a dramatic or engaging chapter - but it could have used a flashback, or an eavesdropped conversation, or anything other than literally have a character say "I'll let you figure that out yourself."

But, it's a fun popcorny ride. You can't fault Scalzi's zingers and crowd-pleasers. Nor should you - or else he might set his cats on you...

Many thanks to NetGalley for the preview copy.

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 it is intermingled with western tales? It feels a bit like hiding vegetables in mashed potatoes. And it isn't like the English stories deal with Chinese themes or characters - so it feel like a bit of a wasted opportunity.

For all that, the stories are pretty good. There are some amazingly original ideas tucked away in there. Visions of Doomsday and Dæmons, flights into the unknown, and the bureaucracy of inter-planetary relations.

If you're happy with a mish-mash of themes and styles, this is a fine assortment of tales.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

It's chock full of some great archive photos - it really goes for the deep cuts. Although I'm sure that die-hard fans will have seen a lot of these, there's plenty to keep you entertained.

That said, some of the photos veer into "filler" territory. Do we really need photos of the "Allison Research TR804 Kepex (Keyable Program Expander)? Looking for all the world like any another box of electronics covered in switches. Or a modern photo of the outside of Abbey Wood studios?

The writing is informal - occasionally being a little repetitive. But it is full of cited interviews - both modern and contemporaneous - which drill down into how the perception of the album and its creation have evolved. There are also potted biographies of the band members

It also delves into some of the peripheral players in the story. Hipgnosis, the studio which designed the album cover gets half-a-dozen pages full of photos of their (non-PF) work. That may or may not be of interest to you.

I know they say writing about art is like dancing about architecture, but Popoff does an excellent job of recreating the excitement of listening to the album for the first time. He captures the thrill and frustration of making music - as well as a critical analysis of how the tracks fit together.

If you like trivia, large photos of prog-rockers, and a commitment to squeezing out every detail about an album, you'll enjoy this book.

Weirdly, it kinda peters out at the end. But, then, I suspect you're meant to flip the book over and start reading it again 😉

Many thanks to NetGalley and Quarto Publishing Group for the advance review copy. The book is released on the 14th of February 2023.

Throughout history, how society treated it’s disabled and infirm can tell us a great deal about the period. Challenged with any impairment, disease or frailty was often a matter of life and death before the advent of modern medicine, so how did a society support the disabled amongst them? For centuries, disabled people and their history have been overlooked. Very little on the infirm and mentally ill was written down during the renaissance period. The Tudor period is no exception and presents a complex, unparalleled story. The sixteenth century was far from exemplary in the treatment of its infirm, but a multifaceted and ambiguous narrative emerges, where society’s ‘natural fools’ were elevated as much as they were belittled.

Meet characters like Will Somer, Henry VIII’s fool at court, whom the king depended upon, and learn of how the dissolution of the monasteries contributed to forming an army of ‘sturdy beggars’ who roamed Tudor England without charitable support.

From the nobility to the lowest of society, Phillipa Vincent-Connolly casts a light on the lives of disabled people in Tudor England and guides us through the social, religious, cultural and ruling classes’ response to disability as it was then perceived.

I seemed to spend the entire of my childhood learning about The Tudors. My school taught me about the wars, the marriages, the Mary Rose, and all sorts of things. But, it turns out, they missed out a hell of a lot. Much like Miranda Kaufmann's "Black Tudors: The Untold Story" - this book uncovers some incredible details about hidden history. In this case, the author takes us through the Tudors' ideas of, and attitudes to, disability.

You can look at history through any lens. Intersectionality teaches us how various groups have intertwined (and sometimes disharmonious) needs. Both physical and mental disability can mark a person as an outsider - in the same way that race, or class, gender, or religion determines your status in society. Understanding how the UK's culture has evolved gives us a way to view our modern society.

Indeed, the arguments about the welfare state and "undeserving" poor which dominated Tudor society still continue to this day. History doesn't repeat - but it sure does rhyme!

Due to the lack of documentation outside of high society, the book is dominated by the royal family. It is interesting to hear about how Henry Ⅷ needed a wheelchair towards the end of his life - and even had an early stairlift installed in Hampton Court! - it does provide a somewhat limited view. Is infertility a disability? Perhaps if you are a monarch and are expected to provide an heir, it is. But it doesn't tell us much about the lives of "ordinary" people maimed in war, or forced to survive in a world which wasn't built for them. That said, there's an interesting discussion around Shakespeare and the social model of disability.

From a professional perspective, there was a fascinating look at the Elizabethan data collection exercises to count the poor. The book co-mingles the idea of poverty and disability. Again, due to lack of documentation, attitudes to poverty is probably a reasonable lens through which to view the lives of disabled Tudors.

There are a few non-nobles we get to meet - Will Somer and Jayne Fool - their closeness to the Royal Court means that details of their lives are well-evidenced. We get an amazing glimpse into social attitudes around them. Far from being seen as a burden - they were valued members of the household.

The book is a good general overview of a rarely-explored slice of history. But, sadly, it isn't without its flaws. It really would have benefited from illustrations. We get lots of descriptions of paintings - but you need to head to Wikipedia if you want to examine them yourself. The structure is also somewhat confusing - it jumps back-and-forth between Kings and Queens - so you'll need a solid grasp of history to keep it all straight.

Because of the way it bounces betweens themes, it is a little bit repetitious. There are lots of reused quotes - sometimes within the same chapter. So it ends up feeling a little bit scattershot.

That said, it really brought home to me just how poorly history is taught in this country. I had no idea that dissolution of monasteries had such a calamitous effect on the lives of disabled people living there. Nor that "natural fools" (to use the historic parlance) were held in such high esteem. Incidentally, the book uses contemporary language throughout - which can come as a bit of a shock in these somewhat more enlightened times.

It is a worthwhile - and worthy - book. Perfect for anyone who thinks the commonly-taught, rose-tinted view of Tudor society tells the whole story.