John Higgs is a fool. Well educated and researched, but a fool nonetheless. In The Future Starts Here: An Optimistic Guide to What Comes Next he attempts to portray an optimistic vision of the future, but comes off as unconvinced himself. The main chapters of the book feel separated and often contradict each other. And that's sad, because some of the information and ideas presented are really interesting.

  You've seen this type of book before: it starts with research and interviews, then it's compiled into a documentary style narrative that is skewed towards a particular idea. This one is trying to say that the future is not as bleak as we make it out to be, that technology has the potential to enrich our lives if we are careful with what we choose to do with it, that the environment has the potential to recover and thrive if we choose to be mindful of it, that we can escape the trappings of the capitalist mediated dystopia that everybody delights in being terrified of and that young generations of people are trending towards empathy and awareness. You get the gist: things will be better if we make them so, even if the author himself seems to lose faith in humanity as a whole a lot of the times.

  The problem arises when Higgs starts contradicting himself or using some really cherry-picked examples that he doesn't often understand. The first chapter tells of how we can't build a bright future without imagining it and that media today is biased strongly towards the negative, including fiction with its many dystopian visions. We should be focused on truth and hope. A strong start. But then he starts talking about artificial intelligence, of which he understands little, showing a strong humanistic bias and bringing Penrose's quantum microtubules intelligence as a hopeful argument, obliterating his previous points.

  He talks about the neurological effects of stuff like watching the (terrible and uninformative) news, using social media and being exposed to advertising, how it changes us in ways I didn't think of before. Strong chapter. Until he starts talking about how individualism is bad and the new youngster trend of seeing each other as part of a network is the hopeful future. Only "network" and "friendship group" are just modern terms for "tribe", yet another way in which social interaction and belonging uses the same oxytocin mechanism he described in detail and warned about just a chapter before.

  Then he goes on and on about how the new generations - which he blissfully describes from a purely Western liberal perspective, ignoring all of the silent unmediated youngsters he forgets exist - are focused on emotional well being, awareness of their environment, capable of holding multiple contradicting ideas in their head and using the one that works best, like that's something new and positive. But then he talks of how intransigent these new hopefuls are with any ideas that are not about emotional well being, environment awareness or contradicting the handful of ideas they use to shield themselves from actual truth. And then, to top it off, speaks highly of the Greatest Generation and hopes this new one, coming from the 2008 economic crisis, will be similarly practical and emotionally grounded.

  But it's the ending that makes it all feel very funny. Funnier than a book about an optimistic future published early 2019, that is. The author concludes that people find meaning in their immediate unmediated interactions with other people and reveals that, in writing this book, he "experimented" by only presenting information from people he personally knows and met. He wanted to test the idea that your direct connections are more meaningful than any exhaustive research through impersonal papers or news items.

  Bottom line, he artificially constrained himself in a bubble, wrote several small papers on various future related subjects, then bundled them all in a book that manages to contradict itself about almost every major point made.

However, to focus on truth and hope, there is a way to enjoy this book in the spirit it was written in. You have to consider it as a conversation with a random guy. You don't have expectations of journalistic objectivity and scientific research when you talk to other people. You take what they say with a grain of salt, you pick and choose which parts of their discourse is interesting, useful or entertaining, and you have a pleasant time. If you do that with this book, you can learn some really interesting tidbits from what is basically a guy rambling.

  If I had to use one word to describe Three Axes to Fall it would be: lazy. The title is lazy, as it has no connection to the content. It only gets worse from there. The characterization is lazy, the same repetition used ... repeatedly... to convey emotional depth, the random characters doing random stuff just in the nick of time, the relationships started haphazardly and ended stupidly or not at all the inept enemies that have a lot of power and do nothing with it except boast and bluster, even the book cover is lazy. But the worst part is Sam Sykes was too lazy to finish the story or even remember why he started it.

  Remember Sal? The woman so brutally betrayed that she wants to burn the world to get revenge? Sam doesn't. In the first book she was an angry, driven, asshole who could spare no quarter for anything that wouldn't further her deadly goals. I liked her then. She was smart and surprisingly funny. In the second book she was turned for no actual reason from an anti hero to a tragic hero, a repentant protector who kills tens of people with her sword in a single fight and still keeps running. In this third book she is a tired, exhausted, fleeing person who thinks about things, reflects a lot and whines the entire book, until she forgets who she is and stumbles into being a messianic savior surrounded by a fast and furious family.

  Now imagine John Wick, hunting for the people who killed his dog, the only living thing reminding him of his dead wife, and then somehow deciding he wants to do something else and start a hobby, finding forgiveness in his heart. It's almost that bad. I could have forgiven (heh!) this book if it were half as short and ended prematurely because the writer died. But no, it's just a lazy, half-assed non-ending that leads to nothing except a long final chapter in which people part ways smiling wisely and wearily after doing fuck all the entire book.

  You want to know what happened to her magic? Nope. You wondered why her list grew from what seemed like a short one in the first book to more than thirty names? Nope. You frustrated she barely started on that list before she let it go? Who cares? How about the frenemies she made, who grew along with her trying to kill her, like Velline and Tretta? Nah! Want to know where the gun gets its bullets anymore when Liette is not around? Bah! This goes on and on and on.

  Bottom line: a captivating book lost its way in the sequel and collapsed in the third, with no meaningful closure or payoff for reading through 2500 pages of story.

  The first book in the Grave of Empires series felt refreshing. A new magical steam punk world, an interesting roguish hero and entertaining fantasy adventures. I needed that, for some reason. Yet reading the second book, Ten Arrows of Iron, filled me with disappointment. It's not a bad book by itself, it's just so much less good than the first.

  First of all, it's basically a heist story, a genre that I despise with all my heart. But even without that, it's inconsistent, repetitive, lazy. There are even some scenes where Sal oscillates between having no weapons, using a sword and an axe that she lost in a previous scene. A lot more characters have been added, while the ones in the first book were eliminated or sidelined, yet all of these new characters are almost cardboard, doing stuff that's in their character sheet, but for reasons often not consistent with previous behavior and that feel artificial.

  Yes, the scope of the battles is huge, the threats are cosmic, the body count horrendous, the romantic angles multiplied and pumped up, but I felt almost nothing as Sal just went through the motions, one moment hurt and exhausted, the next killing hundreds of people with a sword and a gun, the next flirting with the people who want to kill her. The writing is using the same formulas that worked in the first book, but repeated again and again, until they lose their strength. And so many things just happen because they have to happen. The last scene, where she randomly finds a guy in a tent on the road she was randomly travelling on was soo bad!

  But I feel the worst transgression was that Sam Sykes changed the character of Sal the Cacophony from a damaged person seeking revenge at all costs to an anti-hero, who is kind and thoughtful and ultimately good, only misunderstood while she kills whole communities. I had no need of that. The original single-minded character who sometimes did something good by mistake was enough for me.

  Bottom line is that I hope the character can be salvaged in the third book, but I fear it might not happen. Falling in love with your own character is a sure way to ruin them.

  One day Sam Sykes woke up and said to Diana Gabaldon: "Mom! I can write a lot of huge fantasy books, too!". I like his writing, so this is good, but Seven Blades in Black, the first book in the Grave of Empires series, is a 700 page book, which is bad. It was a very entertaining and captivating story, which is good, but it ended 90% there, which is bad. Still less than the 850 pages of the first Outlander book, which is good. Just wanted to end things on a good note, so that it will never be said that Siderite is not graciously optimistic. And handsome.

  Weird paragraph? That's kind of the vibe of the book. The story is about a mysterious bounty hunter with a strange magical gun, who is looking for seven mages to kill. As the story progresses we get world building, action, magic, death, friendship, romance and a slow explanation of what the hell this was all about. Since it's one of those books where the main character is telling her story to another character, it's written in the first person, which gives it a bit more humor, as Sal is both cocky and possibly an unreliable narrator. I did get a bit of The Usual Suspects while reading, but it's not quite like that.

  I liked the story, I liked the world, with the two magical vs technological groups that both boldly claim to fight for peace and stability while destroying everything in their path with their pointless battles. I thought the romantic angles were kind of strained, to be honest. The ending is almost satisfying, but it ends on a weird vibe, with still some stuff to be resolved. It felt like an artificial cliffhanger: read my next book! Funny thing is that it worked. I plan to read the next book in the series next, but it's going to hurt my rating of the book.

  Bottom line: if you like the classic likeable rogue trope, the grandiose adventures and fast action in an almost steampunk world that is both alien and similar to our own, then you will like this.

  In The Horror from the Hills - which is quite a silly name, because not much happens on the hills to begin with - an archeologist brings back to America the statue of an ancient malevolent god. Well, it doesn't bode well, I can tell you that. It's published in 1963, but it feels written decades earlier. I thought maybe it was an artistic choice, but no, it was actually published prior in 1931 in a serialized form. In Weird Tales! Remember those?

  A Lovecraftian story, it features the usual high class gentlemen whose passion is knowledge and science, talking very convincingly in archaic pompous terms and being very sensitive to how things ought to be and are not. They kind of bring a sleeping god in the U.S. and, feeling bad about it, strive to save the world. It made me feel nostalgic for the eras where science and rational thought would solve problems in stories. Well, they do solve it with a death ray, basically a sci-fi bazooka, but Frank Belknap Long is an American author, so it tracks.

  Did I like the book? It was strange, like Lovecraftian mythos books usually are, but also weirdly progressive. There is an entire scene where a policeman explains how he is going to solve the crime by finding a Chinaman, spewing all kinds of ridiculously false preconceptions that the main character is disgusted with. And while people are often repulsed, offended or otherwise unwilling to put horrible things into words, the book just feels old, not laughable.

  Funny enough, apparently this is an H.P.Lovecraft story, or rather a dream that he recounted to Long, which then published it with Lovecraft's permission almost word for word. Poor Frank wrote all kinds of stuff for decades, but what he is most known for are short stories in the Lovecraft universe. I do not mind that, to be honest.

  Bottom line: a fine short story to bring you back to an age where things were very different and remind you that whatever nonsense bothers you today, it shall pass like all things do.

  I almost gave up on We Sold Our Souls after falling asleep a few times on it, but I pushed through and I am happy I did. It reminded me of Tim Powers' Last Call, but being more straightforward. In a way it's also a last call to  wake up, be human and don't buy into the dullness taking over the world.

  Grady Hendrix does a good job generating the feeling of a doomed world in which nothing seems to matter anymore to anyone and in which the only salvation can come through raw creativity, also known as metal music. The book starts kind of slow and then does something explosive, then gets to some parts that are hard to understand, then goes back into something slightly unexpected. It's inconsistent that way, perhaps following the riffs of metal. The character of J.D. for example, seems to pop up out of nowhere, knowing more than he should and doing stuff just because the plot needs it. Or sometimes our heroine evades notice with ease only to fall into a crowd of perfectly coordinated people wanting to kill her. But if you push through the book, it provides quite a few nice surprises. Once I got into its rhythm, I couldn't put it down.

  You can consider this a metal modern version of a fantasy quest. The hero needs to get somewhere and do something to save the world, while the forces of good and evil are swirling around them. There is a lot of music lore in the book, but not so much as to become oppressive or intrusive. I found it amazing that the author wrote lyrics for the fictional Troglodyte album. Or is it fictional?

  The ending is... not as satisfying as I expected, with many things remaining vague. But that's OK, as most of the book is metaphorical.

  Bottom line is that I liked the book, but it could have been better. 

  Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence is not so much a scientific book as an informed opinion piece. I kind of had different expectations for a book that starts with a chemical name for a neurotransmitter.  This book is about addiction, not dopamine per se. Anna Lembke is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University., so she knows what she's talking about.

  I am torn between me agreeing with most of what the book says and an instinctive dislike of the author. She came off to me as a conservative American prude, talking about the positive results of the Prohibition or prosocial shame and skewing statistics to make a point. But, really, when I try to pinpoint the things she said that I feel are completely wrong, there aren't many. She is just honest with herself and with the reader. Yes, she is appalled by the patient who builds machines to masturbate him and shares this online, but she doesn't lack the empathy required to help him. Yes, she does believe the Prohibition had positive effects, presenting statistics about it, but she's aware of the organized crime effect of it. Yes, she believes shame has a positive effect, but only in a community that also supports you and guides you to get out of the situation you're in.

  I guess my instinct is to reject any social solution to one's personal problems, so that might be it. I also have a rather addictive personality, so it might be a defensive reaction. So let's discuss the book, and not how the author felt to me.

  Starting with the end, here are the 10 steps that Lembke recommends for handling addiction, defined in the book as any behavior that causes harm to you or your group that you are having difficulty stopping:

1. The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain. - this is something to take note of
2. Recovery begins with abstinence. - I partly agree with this
3. Abstinence resets the brain’s reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures. - this is a reductive idea, contradicted by the book's thesis, since things to get addicted to are all around us and part of what is considered normal social life
4. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine-overloaded world. - self-binding is putting barriers between you and the thing that addicts you. - agreed.
5. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain. - agreed.
6. Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure. - I agree that facing your pain opens the door to more pleasure, but depends on the context.
7. Beware of getting addicted to pain. - this is another thing to take note of. Pain and pleasure are not antonyms inside the brain, they are closely related in a functional sense.
8. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy, and fosters a plenty mindset. - this is one of her central points in the book. I fully agree.
9. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe. - tribalism is something that automatically repels me.
10. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it. - I am not doing that, and I should. However, going fully in the other extreme is probably worse.

And I agree with most of what she says. We live in times of abundance, where the next fix to escape reality is right around the corner. And doesn't it feel good? Apparently... not. People are more and more dissatisfied with their lives, even when those would have appeared miraculous even to people living in the '80s. It might not be hard drugs, but alcohol, maybe weed, maybe a video game or two, maybe romance novels, maybe TV series or news watching. The act of escaping reality makes us feel less real ourselves and that is what leads to that feeling of unmoored loss.

  However, I don't agree with everything. One of the things that bothered me from the beginning was the way she presented statistics. Comparing absolute values of population size today and in the 1980s completely ignored the global population nearly doubled since then. Also showing relative percentual statistics between the same kind of values means nothing. I can't imagine someone as mature and educated like the author could make these kinds of mistakes unknowingly.

  Then there is this idea of abstinence. I personally know what this is the method that works best against addiction, too, however it works best because it is the easiest. Just like I agree with her that our hysterical overprotection of children deprives them of skills they should have learned before they go into the world by themselves, using abstinence to evade addiction is also a type of escapism. An addict dreams of two things: the thing they are addicted to and living a normal life where they are not addicted. Well, being perfectly honest with yourself and others and going to meetings and relying on others to not relapse is all nice and good, but it's not a normal life. It's still the life of an addict. And while abstinence from hard opioid drugs is obviously a good idea, I don't know what to say about stuff like reading or watching movies. Start with abstinence, but that should be the first step only.

  As for the prosocial shame, I almost agree, because in principle having people to lovingly point out your mistakes and help you get out of them is a good thing, but I don't think that the social groups Lembke was thinking about are also what I would be willing to accept.

  Bottom line: something fell a bit off to me, a bit culty, in this book. I think I reacted to the overconfidence of how the author expresses her opinions. However the content is very informative and informed, while also reenforced by personal experience as a therapist. The book is also short, you can read it in a few hours, so I recommend it, but with a personal warning of caution.

  When I started reading Dragonsbane I expected something light, young adult, typical dragons and magic and heroic women. And it was, but it was more than that. Barbara Hambly adds a lot of depth to her world, her characters, imbuing them with meaning and subtly anchoring them in real life.

  For example, our hero isn't only a mage, but also a mother, maybe a reluctant one, someone who has to always choose between her craft and her love for family. I understand how a writer might feel like that and after reading the "light book about dragons and magic", so will you. Or how gnomes are being bullied and discriminated against, but it's not empty virtue signaling when the author explores how hidden power (normal power, not magic) is being used to influence people to do that, for nefarious reasons they are not even aware of. Characters who are weak find strength, characters who seem powerful reveal their inner weakness and in the end victory is brought not by magical power, but by knowing yourself and accepting it as it is: mature strength of character.

  Yet, all of this complexity is subtle. You don't have to pay attention to it. One can just read it as a typical magical dragon quest just as well. It's not one of those books that you can reread multiple times, but I appreciate that a kid might enjoy this just as much as an adult, for very different reasons.

  I liked the book, so I might read the sequel as well. Not the best book ever, but a very pleasant surprise.

  Hah, if I'd have looked at the cover I would have probably chosen to read something else. Something that Ann Leckie absolutely loved is definitely not for me. If books had gender, A Memory Called Empire would be 100% female, as it focuses primarily on social cues, personal feelings and attachments, romantic connections, poetry, connotations of every word said, yet everything is so naive in terms of power or violence or even sexuality, like a children's story. There is almost no mention of technology or space travel, people meet face to face all the time, touching each other for whatever reasons and feeling things, and it all happens in a bureaucratic empire where social expectations are high and complex. This could just as well have been set in the 18th century Earth with some little magic McGuffin instead of the tech one Arkady Martine used, and none would have been the wiser.

  The main character is an ambassador from a tiny space station republic to the large empire of the region, which dominates, technologically, militarily, economically and culturally. Everybody dreams to be part of the empire, while they are slowly being devoured by it. So, again, could be any historical era. The ambassador is greeted by someone from the empire who is attached to her as aide. Now, they almost immediately become fast friends, with some romantic tension between them. Imagine this happening: the Chinese ambassador to the US receives an American aide who immediately befriends and helps them reach their goals, sometimes in defiance of American protocols, culture or even authority.

  The book continues in the same vein, with a lot of cultural references that mean nothing to the story, but at least add to the world building. The magical tech that the station uses is an imago, a machine that records one's experiences and personality in a chip that can then be implanted in their successor, as an advisor. The empire could use it, but their morality and laws prohibit it. A lot of intrigue around this little device that any decent security service would find out everything about in days. There are some civil war ideas, some future alien invasion hints, but mainly it is an old fashioned PG13 whodunnit given a sci-fi veneer.

  Bottom line: I found it extremely boring, fell asleep numerous times and only finished it out of spite. It wasn't bad, for sure, but it was anathema to what I enjoy. If you're a typical sci-fi reading guy or if you tried Ann Leckie and found it ridiculous, maybe you should reconsider reading this.

  Awkward: The Science of Why We're Socially Awkward and Why That's Awesome started great! I mean, it immediately opened my eyes in terms of how to define awkwardness, why it's even relevant to other people and the reason they are keeping score. It then proceeded to give algorithmic solutions to blending in social situations even if you are awkward to begin with. Ty Tashiro even mentions that we have two relatively separate systems in our brains: the analytical and the social, and when you use one you inhibit the other. It made so much sense! I immediately started recommending the book, without having read it all.

  However the rest of the book was not as amazing, or at least this is how I felt. Instead it felt inconsistent, like a collection of separate materials that somehow were shoe stringed into a book. Still good, but compared to that stellar start, relatively weaker.

  There was one more thing that bothered me, probably saying more about me than about the book, but there were places where American liberal agenda seemed to infect the scientific discourse. I guess being an awkward individual who managed to become a relationship and social psychologist would adopt some of these concepts as a blending in mechanism, yet it felt a little jarring, like the author "sold out" accepting ideas that forcefully come with his acceptance in the crowd.

  It was funny to me that the metaphor (a very good one, it turned out) to describe how awkward people see the world compared to social ones was a Lion King Broadway play. No one watches those outside some population of the U.S., why would you use it as an example?

  Anyway, the idea is this: awkward people have more intense focus, but also a narrower one. They are compulsively attracted by specific things, ignoring everything else. Normal people just have a broader focus on everything, intuitively making connections between disparate signals, while for an awkward person it takes conscious effort to switch focus and combine things in their head. This leads to advantages and disadvantages, since they can focus on research, invention, refining of knowledge and so on, but they are "felt" by society at large as weird, because they miss social cues which determine social status and even interpersonal trust.

  An interesting question at the end was: if being awkward is something that makes one a social outcast, how come it was not eliminated by evolution. And the answer is that less social people are actually more free to explore the edges of human knowledge and behavior, thus fighting stagnation on the level of entire groups. Groups without their awkwards die off.

  I loved that a lot of vague social terms that we normally use were described and even defined analytically, complete with some ideas and concrete actions on how to reach specific goals. A lot of time when people analyze such psychological traits, they do it from the perspective of a normie. It was nice to get not only the definition, but also the theorems behind, so to speak. 

  Bottom line: I really recommend reading the beginning of the book. The rest you can consider optional, even if it's still very interesting and informative.

  I occasionally try to add to my list books that have won literary awards, so that maybe I start to get what writing masterpieces are about. Unfortunately, most of the time I get to read obtuse and pompous works which have reached the top due to some alignment of agenda or talking about something fashionable. I guess this is somewhere in between.

  The Essex Serpent is certainly not a bad book, but it is boring as fuck. Imagine a gothic novel set in the 19th century where the focus is a giant serpent somewhere in Essex. A science leaning recent widow (coming from an abusive relationship, no less) is fascinated by the possibility of this creature. Around her orbit a socialist maid and good friend, a handsome priest dedicated to his terminally ill wife and a talented but unattractive surgeon who has a crush on the widow. Women kind of win, men sort of lose, but with some dignity. That's it in a nutshell.

  Now imagine that at every turn of phrase, EVERYTHING is being taken into focus: what people have eaten, eating and what they thought about it, what people have said, felt, felt that someone else feels or thinks or about what they said, colors, smells, sounds, social norms, romantic tension, you name it, it's there.

  I cannot believe many writers would have the talent to write like Sarah Perry, but I feel there are even more who wouldn't ever want to. You have to dedicate attention and effort to dig out the meaning of every sentence and then have the memory and fortitude to weave that meaning into the story that you think the author is trying to tell. There is a saying you shouldn't walk faster than what is needed to look around, but there is a difference between looking around and combing the plane of experience for every single thing. 

  Personally, I gave up after a quarter of the book, when I realized I didn't care about the characters, the world, the time or even the giant creature. This is categorized as fiction, but it's just a slightly dramatic historical tale that just happens to not be about people who have actually existed, although it is inspired by true events.

  Imagine a Western with guns and outlaws and the like, but the world feels like in the times of the Roman Empire, there is magic and technology (fueled by magic) as well as characters that without being exactly the same, are clearly inspired by dwarves and dark elves.

  The Incorruptibles is seen through the eyes of a dwarf. He and his gun slinging human partner partner are caught in the machinations of rich and powerful Ruman nobles while being attacked by dark elf-like creatures. The story is dark and while it provides a kind of happy ending, it's a gritty tale.

  I've previously read a two novellas anthology from John Hornor Jacobs and I felt a similar vibe there: he draws inspiration from history and the worlds and characters of other writers and make them his own, blending them with a lot of creativity. However, the stories are a bit slow and not always enjoyable. They are gripping, though.

  I don't know what to feel about this series. I liked the book and it could be considered stand-alone, but it opened a lot of avenues for new stories and there was a lot of foreshadowing and world building, so it does feel a little incomplete without the rest of the (hi)story. However, I am not sure I want to invest in it, although I am tempted.

  Bottom line: a gritty magical Western hybrid. It was good.

  David Brin was 30 when he published Sundiver in 1980, but the book, his first, feels much older, almost van Vogtian. The writing style and subject matter further strengthen the feeling. Imagine a bunch of humans and aliens in the future, diving into the Sun to communicate with a newly discovered race of intelligent beings there. A tree alien, an uplifted chimp and others are part of the expedition.

  All the tropes of sci-fi pulp are there: a youngish protagonist of the same age as the author, romance, mystery and its deductive solving as well as its revealing in elaborate group discussions, the belief in the power of meditation and trance to improve the mind, people having Erich von Däniken as the prophet of the origin of the human race, lasers, fist fights, hints of colonialism, and so on and so on. The book is very entertaining, but it's spectacularly outdated. I guess the lasers and the Däniken references place it after 1960, but ignoring that, one could believe it was written in the '40s.

  There are some ingenious ideas in the book, though. In this universe, intelligence is believed to never have been evolved by itself, instead "patron races" uplift existing native animals to intelligence, generating a complex web of patrons and clients. Not humans, though. They have been partially uplifted then left to their own devices, thus placing them in a dubious middle of the hierarchy, while kept away from the somewhat monolithic culture of the galaxy. Humans are both exotic and quaint, ignorant and arrogant, daring to know things they figured out for themselves rather than spoon fed by "the Library".

   I don't think I will read more of this series, but I might read more from Brin, whenever I feel the need to go classical without diving into a time compression bubble.

  It's not that Titanium Noir is a bad book, but it's the same tired cliché of the cynical private investigator trying to unravel a simple murder that turns out to be a global conspiracy that makes the reader think of social issues. The sci-fi is almost incidental, so I kind of listened to a third of the book, then fell asleep and woke up close to the end and I didn't find anything exciting in it. A disappointment from something that has such a cool title and intriguing cover.

  Nick Harkaway is the son of John le Carré and he mostly writes fantasy, apparently, but in this he went a bit, just a tiny bit, towards science fiction. Not enough to induce me to finish the book, unfortunately.

  Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup is a book worth of a political thriller miniseries, only too real. It shows the 10+ years history of Theranos, a "unicorn company" formed only on personal charisma and lies and which reached a top valuation of ten billion American dollars at its peak. Billions, with a B! It also shows how that can happen within the American economic, political and social system, which - if you ask me - is much more damning and interesting than the exposure of Elisabeth Holmes and her cronies.

  John Carreyrou also had the faith, training and backing of a powerful journalistic entity just to be able to bring this to public attention, something to be considered in this climate of journalistic consolidation into partisan corporations that care nothing for the truth. It would have been so easy for this to have continued for years, unchecked and uncheckable, if it weren't for this tiny detail.

  To boot, this book will be extremely triggering to anyone working in a corporate environment, especially Americans. Let's play some corporate bingo: sociopath CEO claiming their vision is paramount to anything and anyone, older generation Indian management that feels the lives of employees belong to the company, paranoid NDA backed culture where people just disappear without any mention to the remaining employees, totalitarian control of data, communication and the general narrative, backed by law firms hired on millions of dollars to intimidate anyone who might challenge it, inner-circle privileges given to loyal individuals, university dropout visionaries that consider any technical hurdle something to be solved by lowly multiple PhD holding peons and not something that can hold them back, even if they themselves are technical imbeciles, yes-men culture where dissent or even mere criticism is considered treason, to be punished by immediate termination, public humiliation and legal action. The list can go on...

  I can't recommend this book enough. It's not entertaining in any meaningful way, instead it's terrifying. Imagine being in a situation where you have the knowledge, the certainty, the moral high ground, the awareness of your absolute right in a matter, only to give it all away because someone with a lot of money sics a law firm on you. Imagine bullying at every level once you have haphazardly signed some documents that you assumed were standard corporate operating practice, but instead signed your soul to the company. Imagine trying to tell people that something is terribly wrong, only to be met with dismissive comments on your character and expertise, just because someone believes in a PowerPoint presentation more than in any deity and because you are not part of the in-group.

  But one thing that the book did not discuss, although it implied heavily through out its length, is how can something like this happen. How is it possible that somehow law can be corrupted to stop people from reporting unlawful acts? How can a company be created and thrive and be financed by people on promises alone, while heavily educated and well informed naysayers can be summarily dismissed at any moment and their input suppressed? In fact, this is a direct and informed criticism of the way American society works at the higher levels. Theranos was a symptom that, unchecked, led to Trumpism. There are direct parallels between the mindset of the management in this 2010 company and the political system taking over in the 2020s, with mindless loyal cronies being hired for all of the critical jobs on a wave of populist faith.

  Even more spooky is the strong desire people felt for this book be a hit-job, to have the young female charismatic Elisabeth entrepreneur somehow be the victim of the male dominated system, the disgruntled employees, the Svengali 20 years older lover and irate Indian bully, the vengeful journalist, all working together to stop her from playing her fantasy of becoming the next Steve Jobs. You can imagine a Scooby Doo moment where she could have just made everything work out if it weren't for the pesky kids. But the truth documented in this book shows that, while certainly some sort of victim, Holmes was a mentally deranged individual who still managed to play the entire world and reach wealth and prestige even some nations in the world only dream of.

  Bottom line: you have to read this book, even if it's very long, terrifying, frustrating and its "happy ending" only demonstrates that you have to make a LOT of mistakes for justice to happen when you have enough money and political backing.