The focus of Writing Tools is more on the journalist than on the novel writer. Of course there is a lot of overlap, but some of the tools there may feel either not relevant or truly gold, since book writers would not write about them so easily.

Roy Peter Clark lists the 50 tools (55 if you have the revised edition) in four categories:

• Nuts and Bolts - about the use of language: verbs, adverbs, phrase length, punctuation and so forth
• Special Effects - various creative ideas that give inspiration and direction to writing
• Blueprints - overall planning
• Useful Habits - various solutions for common problems or for improvement

I will list the entire 50 entries at the end of the review.

What I liked about the book is that it is direct, to the point, listing the tools so that you can always pick up the book and refresh your memory on how to use them. Being so many, it is impossible to just skim through the book, unless you already know and employ most of the ideas there. I feel like I have to practice, practice, practice in order to absorb everything there is inside the material. It's not a huge thing, though, like something Kendall Haven might have written, but still it is packed with information.

I am unable to understand if the source material is still under copyright or maybe Clark made it available for free. The book is sold on Amazon, but you can also read it as PDF online or listen to it freely on iTunes.

Now, for a list of the tools, something that I have shamelessly stolen from another review, because I am lazy:

• Part One: Nuts and Bolts
  • Begin sentences with subjects and verbs.
  • Order words for emphasis.
  • Activate your verbs.
  • Be passive-aggressive.
  • Watch those adverbs.
  • Take it easy on the -ings.
  • Fear not the long sentence.
  • Establish a pattern, then give it a twist.
  • Let punctuation control pace and space.
  • Cut big, then small.
• Part Two: Special Effects
  • Prefer the simple over the technical.
  • Give key words their space.
  • Play with words, even in serious stories.
  • Get the name of the dog.
  • Pay attention to names.
  • Seek original images.
  • Riff on the creative language of others.
  • Set the pace with sentence length.
  • Vary the lengths of paragraphs.
  • Choose the number of elements with a purpose in mind.
  • Know when to back off and when to show off.
  • Climb up and down the ladder of abstraction.
  • Tune your voice.
• Part Three: Blueprints
  • Work from a plan.
  • Learn the difference between reports and stories.
  • Use dialogue as a form of action.
  • Reveal traits of character.
  • Put odd and interesting things next to each other.
  • Foreshadow dramatic events and powerful conclusions.
  • To generate suspense, use internal cliffhangers.
  • Build your work around a key question.
  • Place gold coins along the path.
  • Repeat, repeat, and repeat.
  • Write from different cinematic angles.
  • Report and write for scenes.
  • Mix narrative modes.
  • In short works, don’t waste a syllable.
  • Prefer archetypes to stereotypes.
  • Write toward an ending.
• Part Four: Useful Habits
  • Draft a mission statement for your work.
  • Turn procrastination into rehearsal.
  • Do your homework well in advance.
  • Read for both form and content.
  • Save string.
  • Break long projects into parts.
  • Take an interest in all crafts that support your work.
  • Recruit your own support group.
  • Limit self-criticism in early drafts.
  • Learn from your critics.
  • Own the tools of your craft.

The book was nothing if not captivating, its pace much better than for the Magicians trilogy, but as in those books, it was really really difficult to empathize with any of the characters.

The story in Codex is about this investment banker who is having the first vacation in years, actually a small transition time between switching from his US job to a London based one. This makes him feel disconnected and somehow gets tangled in a project to arrange the library of a very wealthy family. The problem with this character is that he doesn't seem to chose anything. Things just happen to him, kind of like with Quentin in the Magicians, and he goes with them, only to get disappointed or surprised at the end. His friends, the people he randomly meets, even his adversaries appear at the exact time when the story requires them, making the book feel like a string of unlikely happenstances a rather aimless character just stumbles through.

There are some interesting parallels in the book, analogies between the beginning of romantic literature and the emergence of computer game fantasy, and probably the literary and historical details in the book hide some deeper meaning as well, but it's Lev Grossman's infuriatingly detached, almost dreamlike perspective that made me not care about it at all. Strangely, all the literary research going on in the book and the altered mood made me think of House of Leaves, only that was orders of magnitude weirder and better written.

As for the ending, I think I can safely say now that it's typical Grossman: the main character becomes aware of the delusions he was living under, both relating to his goals and the people around him. The veil gets lifted and the world goes back to the usual confusing pointless drag that it is for most of us. The author doesn't seem to care about the need of the reader for a happy ending, and I would normally applaud that, yet to use a depressingly realistic ending to a story that felt torn out of a night's dream seems a bit pointless to me.

Bottom line: I actually enjoyed it better than The Magicians, perhaps because it was shorter, better paced and I could relate to the main character a bit more. However, it is not something I would recommend to people. It felt too much like describing a man during a heatstroke, always dazed and confused, spinning wildly out of control of the things happening around him, a hapless victim of his immature feelings and a situation he is out of his depth in.

I will be reviewing all three books in The Magicians trilogy, by Lev Grossman, as they are one complete story with a beginning and an end, as well as an overarching moral. My review of the first book only, from the perspective of someone who enjoys the (very different!!) TV show, stands.

To understand The Magicians you need to understand who Lev Grossman is: a book critic for Time magazine. As such, he must have had a very strange experience trying to write after probably demolishing a lot of other writers for their lack of skill or overuse of tropes. Therefore some sort of alarm bells must sound when he undertakes to writing a "trilogy of fantasy books", a concept that is a meta-trope in itself. I believe he attempted to break the mould of the genre by using flawed every day characters on a journey that is less heroic as closer to real life: random things happening to you, bad things which you can't avoid, defeat or change, even if you try, which sometimes you don't, because you are scared or bored or selfish. At the end of said journey you are altered, but is it a better you, or just an old damaged version of the dreamer kid you started out as?

For this belief alone, I say that the books were decent because they achieved their purpose. The topics approached are more adult, the characters different from the plethora of fantasy heroes, the elements that seem to randomly appear get resolved somewhere in the far future rather than in the confined timeframe of an "episode". I loved the concept and therefore I liked the books.

However, that doesn't mean everything is rosy in Fillory. The characters are barely built up, the reader starves for some understanding of why people do the things they do or even think or feel in a certain way. Important influences such as home, childhood, parents, siblings, good friends are being ignored and abandoned, while the action of the people in the books are more often described than explained. Satirical references to well known works in the fantasy and science fiction genres pepper the books, but those stories at least attempted some consistency, while The Magicians, especially the Fillory part, feels like an LSD trip of an autistic dork.

The worst sin the books commit, and that is in direct conflict with what I think their goal was, is to make the characters almost impossible to empathize with. All of them move through the story like pieces on a board, almost indifferent to their surroundings and the people that accompany them and mostly annoyed. Whatever deep feelings they do have come out as quirky and obsessive, rather than real. It was with great dissatisfaction that I realized that the character I most identified with and believed real was The Beast, which is a terrible villain for most of the first half of the story. People died, were hurt, tortured and violated, resurrected and I couldn't care less. Mythological monsters and weird random creations were epically battling at the end of the world, and I was just bored, waiting for something interesting to happen.

Bottom line: good idea, bad implementation. Interesting to read, but hardly something that I would recommend as good writing.

I'm seeing a pattern here already. After The Expanse, which surprised me with how good the TV show was compared to the books, now The Magicians does the same. There is something to be said about hindsight and when you are adapting a series of books for the small screen you get a lot of resources that the writer himself did not have when he began. I have a feeling that many things that happened in the first season of the TV series will not even happen in the second book. The plot has been changed as well, quite a lot, to the point that now I will be reviewing a book that has at most half of it to do with what you might have seen on TV and another half that you probably won't see even in the future.

In The Magicians, the first book in the series with the same name, Lev Grossman describes a pretty dorky character suddenly finding that magic is real and he is a magician. But while it starts like the typical fantasy story, it continues quite differently, with a school of magic that doesn't seem to care about its students much, a way of learning and doing magic that is never quite explained, but described as tedious and difficult, and an overall depressing view on the world. The main character isn't even very heroic, quite the opposite, he really does think and feel like a 'dork'. If anything, he is a coward and a person who's few feelings are confused and pretty much self involved. His friends are none the better and the entire thing soon started to take a toll on me, who failed to empathize with anything and anybody.

Another issue with the book is that it is rarely consistent. Things happen without much explanation and then they turn into others. Modern culture references mix with awe of magic and then seriously fucked up shit, only to slip into irony or even slapstick comedy. It gets the reader curious about what is going to happen next, but always on the brink of "why am I reading this?". Myself I am sometimes completely engrossed in a bit of the story only to see it end abruptly and leading to nowhere. Doors to other realms are opened and nobody really cares for it for any reason other than to become kings and party all the time. People die or characters do some really shitty things, but the others are all calm and going on with their lives.

So yeah, I don't know if I should recommend the books yet. The show is levels of magnitude better so far, in story, consistency and character development. Even if I could buy into the whole borderline autistic asshole of a main character, which I was ready to, the sudden and often context switch made me really difficult for me to enjoy the series so far. However it is original and I have not read a book that sees the world quite in the same way. If you are tired of the same old fantasy stuff, The Magicians is a bit more adult and hard to put in a clear box, touching real young people topics, like sexuality, alcohol, drugs, depression, uncertainty, the search for happiness.

Nemesis Games felt like a fixer-upper. The authors had already established a pattern in the books from The Expanse, mainly a psychopathic villain and the motley crew of the Rocinante saving the world through bouts of coincidence and luck that are impossible to believe, and so seeing the exact same formula used again in the fifth book was a disappointment. However, they had another issue: the characters of the story were not very clearly defined. Having hinted since forever that each of the people on the ship had a heavy past, James S.A. Corey decided to explain almost all of those pasts in this book. The fact that the disaster was epic made the book easy to read through, in that "what happens next" trance, but it felt the book version of an elevator show. It even ended badly, with conflicts unresolved and a cliffhanger "to be continued" scene at the end. The sixth book of the series, Babylon's Ashes, is supposed to be published in April this year and seriously I am asking myself if I want to continue reading it.

To be honest, the book was not bad. It was just so recklessly slapped together using book writing rules that it felt like a commercial TV show. And I don't mean one of the good ones like, ironically, the first season of The Expanse, I mean those long winded cop shows that lead to nothing. I wasn't the only one to notice that the characters in the series have not really evolved one bit since they were introduced, despite having passed through five separate world saving scenarios. Taking a page from their mentor, George R.R. Martin, the authors just let the alien presence linger in the shadows, having no role whatsoever besides the one of stage prop. Meanwhile, all the conflict, all the struggle is between ordinary humans. This appeals, but then it bores. And yes, I have to admit to myself, the feeling I am left with after reading Nemesis Games is boredom.

Perhaps if at least one of the books would have explained the actions and motivations and background of the villains, other than being sick in the head, I would have liked the series more. I know that there are short novellas that try to do that and I did try to read some, but after a few tens of pages I gave up. If the books feel like an endlessly rehashed formula, the novellas feel like those quotes from fictional people and books that some sci-fi writers adorn their chapters with. If I make efforts to feel anything for the people in the books, I feel absolutely nothing for the sketched out secondary characters in the novellas.

So there, after reading the five books one after the other like there was no tomorrow, my final verdict is 'meh'. Perhaps they should have hired Brandon Sanderson to finish up the series. That guy is good at that. Hey, Brandon, can you write three books in The Expanse, starting from the second book, Caliban's War, and ignoring the rest?

Cibola Burn is the book that worried me the most. James S.A. Corey had created a world in which the Solar System has been colonized and Abaddon's Gate, the third book in the Expanse series, had ended with humanity gaining access to one thousand new star systems. I liked the Solar System background and I really thought the fourth book was gonna suck. Well, while being some of the same old thing as the other books and maybe even better written - so a better book - it also sucked because I could easily imagine Picard and The Enterprise going on a mining colony to settle a territorial dispute and, beside being PG-13, having almost nothing changed.

The plot of the book is about Holden and the Rocinante being sent to mediate a situation between the representatives of an Earth corporation and the people who had landed on the planet before the corporation had even filed a claim. You have your familiar characters like the crew of the Rocinante and Miller and even Havelock (Miller's former partner, now a security employee of the Earth corporation), you have your psychotic leader types that mess everything up while the good guys hesitate to just shoot them, you have the very human characters with children that need to be saved, you have the overwhelming but dumb alien presence and the snowballing crisis that drives it all. I thought the story was a bit of a rehashing of the same ideas and therefore I enjoyed it less than I would have if I had read it standalone. I know that successful series are based on successful books and must present kind of the same so to not alienate its readers, but as the intergalactic situation changes dramatically, damn if I don' feel the plot should vary a little, too.

Given that science and technology have always played a big part in the Expanse, you get to see more attention to the details than from other authors, but so far Cibola Burn felt to me like the least scientifically accurate so far. And yet I liked it, because it is well written and it drives the reader through the story and makes most characters likable and one wonders what the hell would they do if they were in the character's shoes.

Cibola is the Spanish transliteration of a native name for a pueblo (Hawikuh Ruins) conquered by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, also one of the seven mythical gold cities that the conquistadors searched for in vain.

The authors known as James S.A. Corey have planned the series of books The Expanse to have three volumes. As such, Abaddon's Gate feels like a wraparound of the stories so far, while also remaining a good standalone feature. However, because of the overwhelmingly positive response for the series, it was continued for another three volumes, and now three more are announced. There are also various novellas in between books. That is a problem, since this book ends up undoing what the first two started. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here, just be warned that this review may contain spoilers, without which I couldn't possibly comment on the plot of the book.

If you are only interested in my general opinion of the book, I believe it is consistent with the quality of the second. There are more characters, but also less compelling ones. There is a great mystery, but a rather bland one. There is a danger, well... several of them in succession, but they feel a bit artificial, just to keep the tension going. I am not complaining, but I am also not thrilled. As in Caliban's War, there are several characters that seem put there just to annoy me. There is this lesbian preacher that always needs to save the souls of everybody around, for example; she kind of felt like someone nagged the writers to put more progressive characters in, like writing about giant alien artifacts in space is not progressive! Fortunately, she is also important to the plot, so she is not just added there like condiment on food, yet the parts of her philosophizing about the meaning of God bored me to tears. Then there is a psychotic captain that doesn't seem to be a person at all. He just randomly appears and does stuff, and I am not the only one noticing this. And there are more, but I don't feel the need to complain that much. Here be spoilers!

The story revolves around a ring like structure that the alien "protomolecule" has constructed outside the orbit of Uranus. A random ship goes through revealing it is in fact a wormhole. An entire fleet of ships gets in, for various reasons, and again Holden and his crew are in the middle of it all. Yet their roles are quite limited up until very close to the end of the book, the main character here being the sister of Juliette Mao who seems to be seriously unhinged, moving from dangerous psycho killer to kind person who wants to fix things. Quite a lot of psychos in this book. The end opens up a wormhole hub, thus allowing access to the stars. And that is what I take offense with.

You see, the beauty of the series, as made clear by the TV show actually and less by the books, is that it presents a plausible solar human occupation, something close by, that we could achieve in about a century or so, given the magical fusion Epstein drive. It goes into the social, the economic, the political, less in the technical, but still quite a lot. It brings hope. Then there is this alien thing that we don't understand which throws a wrench in our understanding of our place in the Universe. So much to explore there (unintended pun, I assure you). Yet, the end of the third book in The Expanse opens up the stars, even more magically than the Epstein drive, ending the promise of a realistic hard science fiction universe and going towards the implausible and yet so overused "humanity among the stars" trope. I really hope they don't fuck this up for me!

Bottom line: I feel like this book had flaws in its characters, while the story was kept ablaze just by random dangers and conflicts that did not engage me as a reader. Yes, I wanted to see how it all unfurls, but I couldn't care less about the people involved. While it certainly has kept me entertained and it is a good book, I couldn't help begrudging this as well as the ending, which for me ended the promise of exploration and colonization of the Solar system, while going into that all too trodded interstellar medium (hearing me about it it seems like it is seething with stuff, but I mean the literary medium).

P.S. Abaddon was a gate associated to the realm of the dead from the Hebrew Bible.

The second book of The Expanse is much better written than the first, however the story is a little weaker. There are more of the details one would already be familiar with from the TV show, the character of Chrisjen Avasarala is introduced and chapters are written from the perspective of many more characters than just Miller and Holden. That means there are many more chances to completely dislike a chapter if you hate the character. For me, that character was Prax, someone who would endanger everybody and himself with random emotional outbursts. Perhaps he was put there just to offset the slightly similar behavior of Holden, who now looks like the paragon of professionalism in comparison.

The plot revolves around yet another alien infestation, this time on Ganymede, only it is not clear who or what is actually responsible. The already angered Mars and Earth navies use this as a pretext to attack each other, while the Rocinante crew find themselves agents of the OPA, sent to find out what happened. As opposed to Leviathan Wakes, the book adds two major female characters, Avasarala and Bobbie, a Martian marine, and a lot of the story is about their interaction. In truth, what the Rocinante does on Ganymede is almost inconsequential until they make contact with the two women, which felt like the main characters of the book, if I had to choose. This is also a sign of a better built world, in which one has to struggle to identify the lead characters.

While the book was clearly better (some even suggest it is the best in the series), I didn't find myself attracted so much by the story. Instead of a mystery, like in the first, we pretty much discover from the beginning what is going on and only halfheartedly root for the characters to get in the same position the reader has been all along. I like Avasarala's character, but in order to show how badass she is, we have to go through all the political machinations in the UN which I couldn't care less about. Bobbie was slightly more interesting, but she starts off with such low confidence that until she gets to embrace her role there is so much filler. And Prax... don't get me started on that asshole! He is central to the Rocinante crew quickly finding out what has happened, but for the rest of the book he just drags along. He would have been a perfect character to be killed off, adding to the darkness of the tale.

And I think this is where the books and the TV series diverge the most. While the show is perfectly content to show a dark, hopeless world, the books fight to maintain some sort of feeling of normalcy, of hope, leading to reasonably happy endings. The show recognizes that in a Solar System built on exploitation, armed spaceships and politics there is no hope for the little man, there is no silver lining, there are just people trying to survive while colossal forces push them around like leaves in the wind: another reason to watch the series, at least the first season, before starting reading the book.

Bottom line: Caliban's War, by James S.A. Corey, contains no reference to a character called Caliban, which is a Shakespeare character. In the play The Tempest, Caliban is a part-human monster and slave who rebels against his masters. Even starting from the title, the authors spill the beans on what the story is all about. While I enjoyed the book and now I am reading the third one in the series, I can't help wishing they would have maintained the tension and mystery of Leviathan Wakes.

I absolutely love the TV series The Expanse and so, after ten torturous weeks in which I would alternatively get filled with joy at the release of another episode, then fall into despair when it ended, I've decided to cut out the middleman and read the damn book. And now that I've read it, I have to say that I am really glad to have seen the show first. It's not that it is a bad book - it is not, it's very good - but the show is better and having the characters in the series blend with the ones on the page is turning them into something more fleshed out, more complex. And I am not the only one thinking that.

For example, in the book the viewpoint alternates, chapter by chapter, between Miller and Holden. The chapters don't even have other titles other than these two names. In the book Naomi is a slight romantic interest, but nothing more than that. Amos is just there, doing stuff. Alex is barely fleshed out. It is Holden who is the undisputed captain of the Rocinante and that's it. Similarly, Miller's partners or even Anderson Dawes are just shadows of the complex characters they appear in the TV show. One of the things that I really loved about the show was that it was reasonably accurate scientifically and I kind of thought the book would be even more detailed about it. In the contrary, it was not. The authors even said in an interview that they never intended to make a hard sci-fi thing, but just to tell the stories of people in the less used fictional period between stuck-on-Earth and interstellar humanity. The weird language melange that is shown in the TV series is only vaguely mentioned in the books. Also the Earth lady in the show is not in this book at all.

But enough about the show. Leviathan Wakes is the first in The Expanse series of more than five books, written by James S.A. Corey, which is actually a pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, both collaborators of George R.R. Martin (Franck was his personal assistant, for example). More than five books because there are also some interstitial short stories and I am sure they are going to write some more stuff. The plot of the book is about people living and working in space. You have densely populated Earth, a colonized Mars that is undergoing terraforming and the Belt, people living on the large asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And of course, people being people, they hate each other. Enter an unknown entity that lights the powder keg for reasons unknown that are slowly revealed as the book goes on.

Miller is the typical noir detective, cynical, not trusting, obsessive to the extreme and trying to prove to the world and himself that he's still "got it". Holden is the typical good guy, wanting to save everybody and hoping that all will be well if people just know the truth. Their dynamic is interesting, but for me the story was more captivating when they hadn't met each other. The first season of the show ends when the book is about half way through, but from then there is a period of inactivity, one of those parts when everybody knows what is going on and still they have to go through the movements. In real life this is where the role of the characters would be over, but since it is a book, the same characters continue the story, although it feels a bit disconnected. The ending of the book is epic, in its grand scale, but almost boring from a literary standpoint.

Bottom line: I will continue reading the next books of The Expanse, however I have to say that I am shocked at the difference in quality between the show and the book. Probably it is much easier to do that when you have good actors carrying the load and a lot more book material to work with before you start envisioning your world, but still awe is the feeling I am getting from the TV show.

I wasn't expecting much from this book, as another from the same page offering free books from their authors was kind of disappointing. However, this is a true book: it is long enough, well written, with developed characters and with an end that delivers closure to all the story arcs. Indeed, it closes all of them so well that is kind of weird to see that it is part of a series, containing the same characters no less. I mean, come on, how many times can the same people save the planet? Shut up, Marvel!

It was surprising to me to find out that Breakthrough was Michael C. Grumley's debut book. It is professionally written. Nothing exceptional, mind you, but nothing you can possibly find wrong with it. And the subject of the book was complex and interesting, involving talking dolphins, undersea aliens, covert military operations (no, it is not a Seaquest ripoff), which reminded me a little of Creatures of the Abyss.

The ending was a bit rushed, I guess, and contained that annoying trope "You are not yet ready, humans!". Fuck you, aliens, if all you've got to show for your evolution are plans to either destroy or patronize us! Plus some crowd pleasing death avoidance which felt wrong. But overall it was a good book, way above what I would call average. Since it is offered for free, you can download it and read it right now. And if you like it, the author offers even more free stuff on his site.

I've got this from a website where several self published authors shared free e-books for promotion purposes. I chose Better World because of its description: "The last humans spent centuries searching for a new Earth. Now they face extinction.
For three hundred years, arks have carried the last remnants of humanity through dark space. The ships are old, failing, and every colonist must do their duty to ensure the fleet’s survival." Pretty cool premise, if you ask me.

Now, Better World is not accidentally a free book. It is short, ends with a "to be continued" and has no other purpose than to pull the reader into Autumn Kalquist's Legacy Code series. To me it felt a bit amateurish, which is weird. I would have thought something that would pull your audience into your work should be better edited, if not better written.

The basic plot revolves around this 18 years old girl called Maeve, a low class citizen of the colony ships fleeing Earth to find a better world. The story starts with her trying to kill herself, while a dogooder boy who is obviously hot for her stops her at the last minute. I found it interesting that the heroine of the story starts off as weak, egotistical, scared, with low self esteem and living in a world where she is pretty much powerless. Everything that - if the book were written by a guy - would have prompted people to denounce his misogynistic view of the world. Yet every writing book worth mentioning affirms that the character has to begin as powerless and defective in order to evolve. And indeed, by the end of the book you find that Maeve realizes her own strength and courage when faced with true challenges, not just with teenage angst.

However, the scenes lacked power and, whenever something interesting happened, the author introduced new characters and new ideas instead of focusing on the potential of the current situation. Maeve wants to kill herself, a savior male is introduced. She rebels against authority, a younger more naive girl is introduced in order to suffer the consequences for her. The young girl gets hurt, a love interest - another girl - appears out of nowhere to take away focus from the shame and guilt. An "enforcer", a weak minded man drunk on his policing power, is making her life hell, she reminisces about her dead parents, killed by another enforcer's decision in the past. Every single time the plot was getting close to good, something was introduced that devastated the tension and the potential and gave the reader the impression that the story evolved as Kalquist wrote, with no clear idea of who her characters were or what the final shape of the plot will be.

And then there was the climax, the moment I was waiting for, when our hero gets stuck on an unforgiving planet with her torturer as her only ally... and they just walk a little to another group of people where she shows how good she is at fixing things. So much potential down the drain. Bottom line: the author comes off as a beginner in writing, but at least she is not pretending her work is the greatest and/or puts her friends to post positive reviews. Even with this short story I could see the wheels turning smoother and smoother as I went along, which probably means her writing will improve. Unfortunately, as standalone work, Better World is not more, not less than space pulp fiction, with no real impact behind the characters or the storyline.

I really missed reading a good science fiction book and when I was in this vulnerable mental state I stumbled upon this very positive review on Ars Technica recommending Ann Leckie's trilogy Ancillary. Ars Technica is one of the sites that I respect a lot for the quality of the news there, but I have to tell you that after this, my opinion of them plummeted. Let me tell you why.

The only remotely interesting characteristics of the Ancillary series is the premise - that an AI gets trapped in the body of an "ancillary" soldier that was used as only a physical extension among many others - and the original idea of using no gender when talking about people. You see, in the future, the empire language has lost its need of defining people by gender and therefore they are all she, mother, sister, etc. It is important that the genre is translated into our backward English is all female, as to balance the patriarchal bias of our society. Way to go, Ann! The books also won a ton of awards, which made me doubt myself for a full second before deciding that notorious book awards seem to be equally narrow in focus as notorious movie awards.

Unfortunately, after two books that only exposed antiquated ideas of space operas past, boring scenes and personal biases of the author, I decided to stop. I will not read the third book, the one that maybe would give me some closure as the last in the series. That should tell you how bad I think the books were. On a positive note it vaguely reminded me of Feintuch's Seafort Saga. If you want to read a similarly out of date space opera, but really good and captivating, read that one.

You see, it all happens on ships and stations, where the only thing that doesn't feel like taken from feudal stories are... wait... err... no, there is nothing remotely modern about the books. The premise gets lost on someone who focuses exclusively on the emotions of the Artificial Intelligence, rather than on their abilities or actual characteristics. If I were an AI, I would consider that discrimination. The same ideas could be put in some magical kingdom where magical people clone themselves and keep in touch. I don't know who invented this idea that the future will somehow revert to us being pompous boring nobles that care about family name, clothes, tea and saucer sets (this is from the books, I am not making it up), but enough with it! We have the Internet. And cell phones. That future will not happen! And if it would, no one cares! The main character acts like a motherly person for stupid or young people, no doubt reflecting Leckie's mood as a stay-at-home mom at the time of writing the books. You can basically kill people with impunity in this world of hers, if you are high enough on the social ladder, but swearing is frowned upon, for example.

OK, ranted enough about this. I don't care that her vision of the future sucks. I wouldn't have cared if her writing was bad - which it isn't. It's not great either, though. I do care when I get flooded with review titles like "The book series that brought space opera into the 21st century", by Annalee Newitz, or "Ancillary Justice is the mind-blowing space opera you've been needing", by Annalee Newitz, or "Why I’m Voting for Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice", by Justin Landon - a friend of Annalee Newitz' from the Speculative Fiction compilations, and "A mind-bending, award-winning science fiction trilogy that expertly investigates the way we live now.", by Tammy Oler, who is writing with Annalee Newitz at Bitch Media. Do you see a pattern here?

I have to admit that I think it is a feminism thing. So enamored were these girls of a story that doesn't define its characters by gender, that they loved the book. Annalee's reviews, though, are describing the wonderful universe that Leckie created, with its focus on social change and social commentary, and how it makes one think of how complex things are. I didn't get that at all. I got the typical all powerful emperor over the space empire thing, with stuck up officers believing they know everything and everything is owed to them and the "man/woman of the people" main character that shows them their wicked ways. The rest is horribly boring, not because of the lack of action, but because of the lack of consequence. I kind of think it's either a friend advertising for another or some shared feminist agenda thing.

Bottom line: regardless of my anger with out of proportion reviews, I still believe these books are not worth reading. The first one is acceptable, while the second one just fizzles. I am sure I can find something better to do with my time than to read the third. The great premise of the series is completely wasted with this author and the main character doesn't seem to be or do anything of consequence, while moving from "captain of the ship" to "social rebel" and "crime investigator" at random.

This book was recommended by Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror and Stack Overflow fame. He liked it, I wasn't impressed. In The Last Policeman, Ben H. Winters attempts to describe a world that is powerlessly waiting for the arrival and impact of a 7km wide asteroid. While smaller than the one that killed the dinosaurs off, it would still pretty much end human civilization and most of the life on Earth. As a result, people are killing themselves in depression, quit jobs to "go bucket list", nothing is working, nothing gets repaired, etc. In all of this, a detective is trying to solve a case that looks like just another suicide, but he feels it's not. It is an interesting concept and it was well written by Winters, but I had difficulty believing in the world he was describing. More than that, except rumors of something Iran is planning there is no mention of any other country. I believe that in this situation a lot of people would inertially and routinely continue what they were doing until they figured out that it doesn't make sense (and that probably it didn't make sense to begin with), but there would certainly be more aggressive social changes that the author completely ignores. Plus that "going bucket list" would certainly become frustrating once you can't go on a cruise because no one is sailing the thing or you can't enjoy your favorite food because the restaurant got closed.

Worse than that, at the end of the book I was pretty satisfied with it. It was short, to the point and while not perfect, it was enjoyable. And then I learn that it is part of a trilogy. This automatically diminishes the act of reading it somehow and the book entire by the fact that I can't convince myself to read the other two books. So yeah, bottom line: I thought it was kind of average.

Write Right! is a monster. It goes through every step of writing a book, including the one that the author, Kendal Haven, considers the most important: editing. Then, in its second half, it contains exercises for improving writing. The intended audience of this book is teachers of creative writing, not just beginner writers, so that makes it even more valuable.

The mystery for me was how can someone write about captivating and engaging writing in a book as dry as Creative Writing Using Storytelling Techniques. I understand it is mostly a manual, but it was really difficult to go through it, as it was full of information start to finish. Now I must reread it at speed and make a summary of the techniques in order to even begin to absorb the huge amount of very useful information in the work. Not to mention actually doing the exercises at the end.

What I really liked about this book is that it is very algorithmic. At every page I was considering - and still am - how I might codify this into a software to help me evaluate a piece of literature and maybe even suggest improvements automatically. If I am to extract an essential idea of the work it would be "editing is very important". The author acknowledges the need to write fast, from your gut, to lay the words out there, not even considering spelling or grammar, just vomit your thoughts onto the page, but then he submits that the process of evaluating each scene, each chapter and the book for structure, wording, verb uses, sense involvement, specificity of language, action, dialogue, sequels (not book sequels, but that thing that details what characters think and feel about what just happened), etc. is perhaps the most important in translating that story that you have into an interesting book to read. And after getting a final version you are happy about, he makes you eliminate 15% of the words. Ruthless! :)

Let me make this clear, though: writing is damn tough. It consists of two parts: observing the world and describing the world. In a recent post I was complaining at how bad I am at the former, but this book makes it clear how complex is the latter. Making the written word express what is in your brain at the moment of creation is extremely difficult and complicated. This book helps in defining exactly what that is and give you tools to do it and improve on doing it. A great tool!

To sum it up: This is not light reading. It is a manual for writing teachers (what the hell are those? I wish I had some in school). It helps tremendously if you are self-taught, also. It requires multiple readings or at least a summarizing effort at the end, to structure it in a way that makes it easy using it as a reference. And then, of course, are the exercises for improving writing which take the second half of the book

Stephen Toub wrote this document, as he calls it, but that is so full of useful information that it can be considered a reference book. A 118 pages PDF, Patterns for Parallel Programming taught me a lot of things about .NET parallel programming (although most of them I should have known already :-().

Toub is a program manager lead on the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft, the smart people that gave us Task<T>, Parallel, but also await/async. The team was formed in 2006 and it had the responsibility of helping Microsoft get ready for the shift to multicore and many-core. They had broad responsibility around the company but were centered in the Developer Division because they believed the impact of this fundamental shift in how programming is done was mostly going to be on software developers.

It is important to understand that this document was last updated in 2010 and still some of the stuff there was new to me. However, some of the concepts detailed in there are timeless, like what is important to share and distribute in a parallel programming scenario. The end of the document is filled with advanced code that I would have trouble understanding even after reading this, that is why I believe you should keep this PDF somewhere close, in order to reread relevant parts when doing parallel programming. The document is free to download from Microsoft and I highly recommend it to all .NET developers out there.

Date Published: 7/16/2010 File Size: 1.5 MB