Nine Princes in Amber describes a world in which only one place is "substance", the great city of Amber, while all others, including Earth, are just "shadow". Roger Zelazny doesn't really explain what is the difference, but we catch glimpses of the way Amber people can alter reality and that some of the things that happen in shadow cannot happen in Amber. Gun powder, for example, or perhaps even electricity. Great power can be channeled through tarot cards that hold the images of the children of Oberon or some other things, former king of Amber, while his numerous sons and daughters scheme and plan to take over the throne. The cards are drawn by a weird magician that seems to hold no political power, despite his amazing skill.

I took advantage of a flu that restricted me to bed in order to listen to the book in audio format, narrated by Roger Zelazny himself. While I enjoyed it, I didn't feel it taught me anything new. It was a pretty inconsistent story, as well. Princes and princesses and nobles, acting all smarty and aristocratic, dueling with swords and the occasional bow or crossbow, and some of the classic cliches encountered in this sort of context: like never killing your noble opponents, but imprisoning them or torturing/displaying them in order to demonstrate power.

In the end, the main protagonist remains a mystery. He starts with an amnesia, but soon he recovers his memory, making the entire memory loss kind of pointless. It is never quite spelled out who he is as a person, or what was it that he did on Earth. In truth, the book feels more like an introduction to the world of Amber, more like a teaser really, leaving the exposition of real character or description of the worlds to the following books. It is one of the first books from Zelazny, so maybe it will become better in the future. It is not explained why someone would want to rule Amber, either, as any other shadow world looks more appealing.

Even if I haven't fully enjoyed the story, I did promise a friend I would finish the entire Amber series, so we will see. After finishing it, I reserve the right to torture my friend in order to display my power by making him read something truly awesome and unsettling. I have not yet determined what yet, but a dark bird of my desire will carry my message and he will live in fear.

Zelazny himself died in 1995. I found a page written by George R. R. Martin, a beautiful remembrance of a mentor and friend. Apparently, he wrote the character Croyd (The Sleeper) in the Wild Cards series, one of the most interesting characters and appearing in many of the stories, even if very rarely as a main protagonist.

The News: A User's Manual is a short book that reads like a thesis for improvement of the way news is reported. Why, asks Alain de Botton, is news trying harder to be "accurate" than to tell the entire story so that people can understand and feel it? Basically it is the old Star Trek trope when Spock or Data or Seven of Nine tell the time in milliseconds when all was actually needed for the purpose on hand was how many hours more or less. Just like in there, the news, as seen by the author, does not understand either what the whole story is (lazy reporting) nor what people need (or indeed what the purpose on hand is). Like a global organization struck by autism, it just repeats the same terrifying and intimidating bits of human suffering, only to ignore the good, the humain, the inspiring and the overall effect on the audience.

I will put is clearly: Botton is right. However, he is discussing news from the perspective of human betterment. Just like people eating too much and exercising too little that the news organizations are being paid from, they couldn't suddenly do what is right as opposed to what brings the money or the audience likes to see. Some of the points he makes could, presumably, be used in national televisions, the ones that should be apolitical and tasked towards the education of the audience, not towards making profit. Alas, such televisions do not exist anymore, I think. I believe, however, that the book was never designed as a how-to manual for news organizations, but for the people watching it. Imagining the news style that Botton is describing can make us, the viewers, understand not only why we watch the news as they are, but also what they do to us.

The book is split into several chapters, all of them containing sections which contain at least an introduction, a description, a comparison, an analysis, a damage report and a suggestion for change:

• Politics
• World News
• Economics
• Celebrity
• Disaster
• Consumption
• Conclusion

What I found interesting was the psychological analysis of why we are attracted to some types of news items and what effect they have on us. I especially liked the comparison between "terrible tragedies" and the original Greek tragedies. According to Botton, telling what happened in 100 "unbiased" words is less engaging or instructive than going deeper and explaining the situation and the motivations of the people that did terrible things. Why, it is so much easier and comfortable to condemn a murderer of children as "sick" than to try to imagine what he has in common with you and in what situation you would snap that horribly. However, that teaches you and educates you more in life.

The Botton line (heh heh) is that without context, any information doesn't mean anything and makes us feel nothing. To overcome this, news makers are showing the most brutal and shocking things that they are allowed to show, just in order to elicit some semblance of interest. Instead, giving us the whole of the story, making us aware of how people from distant places live before stuffing down our throats how they died, might be more memorable and instrumental to make us feel something useful.

I found myself comparing news media to the justice system. There, a trial with no representation and due process is considered a sham. Both sides need to tell their story to the best of possibilities. If every news item is like a trial, its purpose making the audience judge a situation or a purpose, surely the same must be true. I do believe that Botton would have made his point more popular if he would have taken the stance of the lawmaker than the one of the psychologist. On the other hand, that would have deprived me of an instructive book that exposed many of the mechanisms through which the news is making us feel good while causing so much (hopefully) unintentional damage.

Not everybody is happy about his book, especially professional reporters. Here is one review from The Guardian: The News: A User's Manual by Alain de Botton – review

More helpful, here is a video of Alain de Botton himself discussing some points made in the book:

If you are interested in astronomy and the kind of space science that can be applied now, not in some distant future, this is the book for you. It describes the technical aspects of asteroid mining, an industry that is in its infancy (or should we call it still in the womb?), but is the only thing that can plausibly connect humanity to space. There will be no habitats on Mars, no colonization of the solar system, no interstellar travel - not for humans, not for robots, without the resources contained in asteroids. It is a short book, but filled with information and, as Lewis himself says, You presumably did not buy this book to be hyped by some huckster. If you did, I hope you will be sorely disappointed and not recommend the book to like-minded friends.

Dr. John S. Lewis is the chief scientist for Deep Space Industries, a space mining company that requires a separate blog post just to familiarize people with it. He is a world renowned asteroid resources scientist, with many written papers in the field, and also the author of Rain of Iron and Ice and of Mining the Sky. I hear you may consider these two part of the same series and, thus, you should probably try to get them before you read this book, even if it stands alone nicely.

Asteroid Mining 101 is filled with many pages on geology, minerals and general chemistry. I have to admit it is not what I expected, however true to its title. I thought I would read a little about asteroids, familiarize myself with the general concept outside my general knowledge of it, then read about the DSI's technical designs for spacecraft that would be used for prospecting and mining asteroids. Instead, it is a description of the concept of asteroid mining, followed by deep analysis of the issues that are involved and possible solutions. Reading it, one realizes how far we are from designing robotic miners when we haven't even developed the mining techniques that would work in space. Almost universally, the methods used on Earth rely on either gravity or heavy use of air, water or liquid fuels. It was therefore my first intention to criticize the book for being too geological in nature, but I end up praising it for it.



The book is structured as follows:

• a very short introduction on the structure of the Solar System and on various spacecraft that can help prospect asteroids
• a heavy geological description of asteroid composition, mineralogy and origins
• classification of asteroids, including a very nice list of techniques used to calculate the various characteristics used
• actual statistics on asteroids in the solar system
• economical analysis of a space mining based economy
• actual scenarios for finding, landing on and mining asteroids
• appendixes with even more detailed information

From these, mineralogy and classification take more than half of the book. The mining scenarios section is small, but understandably so: Lewis tried to make this book as lacking in speculation as possible, and I have to admire him for that. This is not a book to make you dream, it's a book to make you think. This has the downside that there are no discussions on the politics of the matter, with the exception of nuclear fission energy not being politically feasible for spacecraft propulsion. Even if requiring speculation, I would have welcomed a discussion on the possible uses of asteroids as planetary weapons, conflicts in space or even the legal chaos of who owns what and what enforces law. The author is neither a military man, nor a lawyer, so these are subjects for other people.

Several ideas stand out in the book. One of them is that the true valuable resource in space is water. It is abundant and useful for everything from propulsion to radiation shielding and sustaining of life. The so called precious minerals are completely different in space, yet bringing platinum metals to Earth would have a very little profit margin and a very short one, until the market stabilizes on the planet. On the opposite side of the spectrum, nitrogen would be the limiting factor of an industry that could theoretically sustain millions of billions of people, while fissionable materials like uranium or plutonium would be almost missing. Energy has the same problem. In space, solar power would be the main if not the only source of energy, while the types of fuel used on Earth would be either too expensive to use, impossible to produce or irrational to produce (like high energy fuels containing nitrogen). Metals like titanium and aluminum would require too much energy to extract from the stable compounds that they are found in and are of little general use in space. Return on investment cycles would be long in space, maybe longer than the average political cycle. And so on.

Actually, I would say that this is the main idea of the book: how different a space economy would be, from the technical to the administrative. Problems that are insurmountable on Earth are easy in space and the other way around. What we need to make this work is to develop the techniques required, from the ground up (I know that this expression presupposes gravity and a planetary surface, but let's go with it), because out there we need to relearn everything from the beginning. It shows the potential of the asteroids in the solar system, the possibility of expanding the human civilization millions of times its current size, then it presents you with the difficulty of planning all of this from Earth, where everything is different. It is one of the books that demonstrate unequivocally why we need to go out in space and why we need to stay there: we need to begin to "get it".

In a way, and that is my speculative contribution on the subject, it is also a sad book. It makes it obvious how difficult, if not impossible, it is for the average Joe, commuting to work every day, worrying about mortgages and child education options, to understand what awaits us in space. By extension, how impossible is for politicians to do anything about it, even if they understood the concept and wanted to actually do something. Therefore, the need for private initiative is made clear and evident.

House of Cards - Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth is a very good book that needs more recognition. It describes and really criticizes the lack of scientific method in psychology and debunks the myth of the experienced psychologist as well as many others that are now taken for granted in the field. Unfortunately the book is also very detailed, filled with expositions, repetitions of concepts and statistical information on the studies that prove the author's point, so it is rather difficult to read; it is certainly not a book you take to help you relax. Every psychologist in the world should read it, though, as well as any aspiring students or people considering going to therapy.

To make it clear, this is not an anti-psychology book. It continuously says that therapy helps. What it also says is that the amount of training and experience of the therapist is statistically irrelevant. That irritates the author tremendously, as he is a psychologist himself and desires that his chosen scientific field evolve and ... well... become a real science. Robyn Dawes unfortunately died in 2010, at the ripe age of 74. During his life he studied human irrationality, intuitive expertise and statistical applications in medicine and psychology. No wonder that in House of Cards, he is ranting against the practice of psychology as it is today.

A few concepts in the book are very interesting and quite frightening. After WW2, a lot of people came traumatized and needed mental attention. At the time, a psychologist needed to be a psychiatrist as well, having gone through the university and studied medicine; they were all doctors, with a Ph.D. degree. So what they did in the US was to create another type of degree, called Psy.D, letting people without medical training enter the field, with only minimal instruction. This created the myth of the intuitive expert who can tell things about people because he has experience, having little else. Dawes proceeds to mercilessly debunk this myth.

In order to do that, he uses - what else - the scientific method. He gathers data as objectively as possible and then tries to find correlations. One correlation that is not found is one between amount of experience (or indeed, formal training) and positive results. One that is, though, is that therapy does help. We just don't know (or better said, we don't know how to quantify) why. One obvious reason would be that, in order to come to therapy, people need to accept they have a problem and then make the first step in solving it: showing up. This alone shows that the person is already actively pursuing healing, a major step into healing themselves. He also analyses diagnosis, often using standardized tests that presumably can help a specialist determine mental issues and their type. However, presented only with test results, the experts don't really get to any useful conclusion.

Dawes is not stopping at psychology, even if that is his main focus. In one chapter he speaks of studies that have proven that doing a thing for a long time doesn't necessarily teach you anything, especially if there is no immediate feedback on whether what you did was good or bad. This also applies to some types of medical diagnosis. And yes, those people went through school - that has the main purpose to promote people who can get through it much more than to provide a comprehensive body of knowledge - and graduated, but when faced with ambiguous symptoms, they pretty much randomly guess what the patient is afflicted by. Think about that when you go to just one doctor and he tells you that he knows what you have because he's experienced.

Anyway, as I said, the book is difficult to read, it is more like a scientific paper and, as much as I wanted to finish it, I realize that I am not an aspiring psychologist, nor am I planning to go to therapy soon. Also, since I have people close to me interested in the field, it wouldn't help to talk to them about how they don't use the scientific method and they are not real doctors ;). Joke aside, this book is invaluable for anyone in the field. Not for me, though, and so I decided to indefinitely postpone reading it to the end.

Childhood's End is a really interesting book. It is actually a series of medium length stories set in the same world. It starts with a sort of Independence Day kind of invasion - a peaceful one, though - it continues with the effects on the human world after decades have passed and then it ends with a human evolutionary leap that explains the entire book so far. The reason why I loved it so much is that a vast majority of the ideas in the book have withstood the test of time. Written in 1953, Childhood's End is remarkably modern and rational. Well, maybe today's world is not particularly rational, so maybe it is more modern that the present, which is remarkable :)

Arthur C. Clarke seems to have had an obsession with alien encounters - and by this I mean advanced species that have good reason to come to Earth, other than wanting to steal our water or mine our gold or other stupid thing like that. He wrote 2001: a Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama, both about humans suffering of culture shock after a meeting with an alien species. Personally I think Rendezvous with Rama should not have had sequels, perhaps even Space Odyssey; for me it seems like Clarke continued some stories that had great success, rather than needing to continue those stories.

Anyway, Childhood's End is like that: alien creatures just oversee the evolution of our species on Earth, intervening only on minimal occasions. I loved the idea because it is a quick and dirty sci-fi solution for historical and all too present issues like borders, religion, corruption, politics and all those ugly things that appear like magic when enough people get together. I also loved the kind of Christian metaphor of daemons being directed to oversee and guide the human race, without them being privy to "God's grace", so to speak.

It is not an easy to finish book, as it isn't really an emotional story. There are no heroes that one can identify with; it is just a descriptive, rational, logical narration. It is a good book, though, one that I am glad to have read listened to as an audio book.

Dan Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics, the field that is trying to analyse economics via human behavior studies. In his book, Predictable Irrational - The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, he is arguing that the simple model of market forces constraining people to behave rationally to maximize gain is false, as people are not rational and will never be rational. He then goes to explain various mental fallacies that we are subject to, complete with experiments testing and proving them.

The book is rather short and easy to read, split into 15 chapters and some annexes. Here is a summary:

• Chapter 1: The Truth About Relativity - People assess the value of something relative to something else that is known. Thus people can be "primed" by being exposed to items that are priced in a certain way, influencing the value they give to something else. Think supermarkets and the three category of items: cheap stuff, expensive stuff and one item that is insanely expensive. Relativity will make people to buy the expensive stuff.
• Chapter 2: The Fallacy of Supply and Demand - Again, value is not really an objective thing, coming from supply and demand, but by comparing to other things. The example given is that of black pearls, at first no one would buy them, but the importer chose the most beautiful and best, created a line of insanely expensive jewels and advertised them everywhere. Soon black pearls were in demand and at a much higher price than normal pearls.
• Chapter 3: The Cost of Zero Cost - Ariely argues that zero is a price in a category of its own. He makes an experiment where people have to choose between average and good candy and they are asked to pay 2 cents and 14 cents, respectively. People overwhelmingly choose the good candy, since the price is not that high. However, when the price of the average candy drops to nothing and that of the good candy to 12 cents (so the financial gain is the same for the same quantity) people switch sides and take the average candies.
• Chapter 4: The Cost of Social Norms - One of the most interesting for me, this chapter discusses how people function on social norms until someone introduces the market norms (tit for tat), in which case the social norms go out the window and the situation may even become really embarrassing socially. Imagine Thanksgiving dinner at the house of mother in law, nice roasted turkey, good wine, the wife's recipe was used for the delicious desert, everybody is happy. What happens if the man thanks the hosts and attempts to give them money to cover the expense? A lot of interesting experiments expand on the concept.
• Chapter 5: The Power of a Free Cookie - A reverse of Chapter 4, it considers what happens when you get something for free as opposed to having to pay for it. When a colleague comes to the office and brings cookies, people take one or two, taking into consideration that other people in the office need to get a cookie. However, if people are asked to pay a cent on the cookies, they usually take more, again market rules trumping social norms when money is involved.
• Chapter 6: The Influence of Arousal - Rather funny chapter, but really interesting. It shows that people, when sexually aroused, change their behavior significantly. That is not a surprise, but that change is so large that those people themselves cannot predict what they will actually do. Consider this when you rationally "plan" on how you are going to behave when exposed to temptation or strong emotions.
• Chapter 7: The Problem of Procrastination and Self Control - People tend to value the present much more than the future. People plan to save money or lose weight, but are deflected by present moment temptations. Can something be done about it?
• Chapter 8: The High Price of Ownership - People tend to overvalue the things they already possess. In an experiment, Ariely proves that people would not buy the things that they are trying to sell at the price that they would themselves ask. This is used in economics when people are offered the option of "trying out" something and only when they actually "have" the item, decide if they want to give it back.
• Chapter 9: Keeping Doors Open - One AI researcher came with the idea that intelligent behavior arises spontaneously when trying to maximize the available options. Ariely argues that this kind of behavior is not intelligent at all. He does clever experiments with doors that disappear if not opened in an interval of time and observes people periodically open them just in order to keep them there, even if they gain less by not visiting more lucrative rooms.
• Chapter 10: The Effect of Expectations - This chapter seems to be incomplete. It is argued that if expecting to enjoy or not enjoy something, the enjoyment will be proportional to the expectations. Personally I feel that this only happens in cases where people can't really tell the difference between good and bad. I often face the opposite effect when watching a movie that I expect to be good and hate it when it is merely average.
• Chapter 11: The Power of Price - Similar to Chapter 10, this shows how we feel we get more from something that is priced higher. The placebo effect is also discussed here. Interesting, indeed.
• Chapter 12: The Cycle of Distrust - Economics says that there can be no hundred dollar bills on the ground because someone would have picked them up already. Making fun of this view on things, Ariely discusses dishonest offers that look like great deals, but instead are taking advantage of your gullibility. He argues that originally trustful people quickly lose that trust when cheated and it is hard to get it back. He gives an interesting example where they installed a stall offering free money. Only about one in five people even approached it.
• Chapter 13: The Context of Our Character part 1 - Both chapters discuss the level of human dishonesty, but show that circumstances change the amount considerably. In an experiment he gives people the chance to cheat after doing some word memory tests, but people almost don't cheat at all if the words were related to honesty or moral codes.
• Chapter 14: The Context of Our Character part 2 - In this it is shown that people are more likely to cheat if they can rationalize the value of the thing they steal. A concrete example is that they are less likely to steal money than something one step apart from money, like a worthless token. The difference is quite significant.
• Chapter 15: Beer and Free Lunches - A kind of good bye chapter, this shows how people are influenced in their choices by what other people in their group chose. He makes a clever experiment where people order from several types of beer, either publicly or on a piece of paper. Depending on the culture, they choose differently or similarly to what people before them chose.

Overall I found the book informative. If one can integrate the teachings of the book, the benefit for one's life would be great. Unfortunately, Ariely shows that this kind of rational illusions are predictable, and that people need to make great efforts to dispel them. I leave you with a video presentation from Dan Ariely on TED, just to give you a taste of what he is like and what he does.

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The Martian is a short and easy to read book about a guy being abandoned on Mars by mistake. Andy Weir writes most of the book as the astronaut's log entries, but in a colloquial and funny way. I started reading the book since there are a lot of people that praised it and there is also a Ridley Scott movie being made from the book. I hope it won't suck (*cough*Interstellar*cough*).

What I found really appealing is not only the subject matter and all the science and engineering involved, but also the positive attitude of the main character in the face of adversity. All that science and engineering was cool too, though :) and presented in an easy to digest way (there are no equations anywhere :-P). After a while it becomes difficult to suspend disbelief since there are accidents after accidents and Mars really is being painted as the bad guy, trying to kill the protagonist, yet he always finds a way out of the problem at hand. I mean, if they make the movie follow the book, they need Matt Damon in it just because he has all that Bourne training and he needs it to survive the set. Yet one cannot help rooting for Mark Watney, anyway. There are some politics involved as well, but not that much; basically NASA is presented as an organization of scientists that want to get the job done, even if some are more cautious than others.

In summary, I think this is a book that any space geek should read. I finished it in two days, so it's not really a waste of anyone's time.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, all!

I thought I would write this post as a Christmas present and let you know about this very cool book. I've read the Harry Potter books and so I could appreciate this book more, as it is fan fiction, however it can be read separately; my recommendation, though, is to know at least something (like having watched the movies) about the Harry Potter universe.

That being said, imagine that Harry Potter would have been a slightly different person, a combination between Sherlock Holmes and Richard Feynman, maybe. Highly intelligent, having read a lot of really serious books and having understood and integrated them into his own philosophy, this Harry Potter goes to the Hogwarts school of magic for two reasons: to apply the scientific method to magic and, having discovered its mysteries, take over the world and stave off death.

Imagine what such a character would do with the stern and moralizing lectures of Dark Ages tutors and you can see why this book is really really funny. But don't take it all as a satire. The references, both serious and in jest, are real. The teachings and methods applied are real. All in all, from every book about children and young adult heroes that I've read so far, this one presents the best role model yet! And I include Ender's Game here (which is also referenced in the book when Harry's adoptive father is comparing the two - hillarious).

I would have to say that I've finished the book, but I didn't actually do that. And that is because the book is not something put on paper and sold by a publisher, instead it is an ongoing story that is offered freely on a blog-like site. Yes, you can read it online. And I have read all that was written yet and, if you consider the parallel universe of the original Harry Potter books, we are about a book and a half in.
Update: I have actually finished the book. :( The writer actually finished writing it after 122 chapters. The ending was pretty cool, too, but I really wanted more. He writes "This is the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I will write no sequel myself; I have said what I set out to say, and it is done. You have my enthusiastic consent to write within this universe yourself, if you wish.".

So, the bottom line is that I love this book, even if a little inconsistent in the sense that the style and the ideas do not keep the same sort of rhythm throughout. You can read it at its completely free site: HPMOR. Its author, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky is a scholar of human rationality and artificial intelligence. I don't know much about him, but let me tell you that, after reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I am eager to familiarize myself with his work. I highly recommend this epic undertaking, which probably started as a satire, until its characters gained enough consistency to define their own solid and inspiring story.

I accidentally heard of the Wild Cards books a few weeks ago, but the concept fascinated me. The plot is that of an alternate America in which an alien virus caused massive deaths, but also strange mutations in 1946. The virus, something a bunch of aliens wanted to test on Earth as a bioweapon, kills 90% of its victims, mutates in horrible forms 9% of them, but also gives powerful abilities to but 1%. This 1% are called Aces, while the deformed ones are called Jokers, the analogy with a deck of cards giving the series its name. What is even more interesting is that this is like an open source literary universe, edited by George R. R. Martin, but in which a lot of writers are creating content. First book was published in 1987, and more and more were published and still are in the present. Some of them are collections of stories, some of them are full featured books; they all happen in the same universe, same heroes, and Martin is making sure they are ordered chronologically and have consistency. I found the concept intriguing.

Anyway, I've already read the first two books and started reading the third and I like it. It has the feeling of the Union Dues stories and Watchmen: dark, bleak sometimes, pulling no punches when it is about human pettiness, base desires or social ugliness. It also has some positive messages and classic "good wins in the end" stories. I was impressed by the faithful following of American history, including savage McCarthy witch hunts against jokers and aces, a Vietnam war with the appropriate Flower Power anticulture, complete with actual historical figures that somehow get affected by the virus (like the werewolf Mick Jagger).

Now I am not saying that this is the best book series ever written. It certainly has boring or lagging parts, some of it is slightly puerile (after all it is a superhero series), but so far I enjoy it. It is worth mentioning that there are 12 books published by Bantam Books before a "new cycle" appears, published by Baen, then two from ibooks - a publishing house that suddenly went down - and now Tor Books is apparently publishing the rest (a revival, it is called). 21 books so far and another one set to be released this year. In other words, some books may be better than others and I can only discuss my feelings after reading the first two.

In conclusion, it felt weird to not have heard of these books until now. Certainly they gained more popularity with Game of Thrones getting all this attention, but still, an alternate history superhero series of more than 20 books should have had some impact on me so far. I am glad I finally got wind of them and I enjoy them so far. I hope I find a system of filtering the books, though. I don't know if I am ready to read 20 books at once.

  A Fire Upon the Deep is a really strange book. The writing style of the author, Vernon Vinge, reminds me a lot of Asimov: the describing of scenes that are clear in his head, but the willingness to move immediately over concepts or ideas that are not, the sometimes obnoxiously long dialogues, the direct way of saying it as it is. In fact, without knowing anything about Vinge, I bet that he is an engineer, maybe even a computer scientist. And I won. The concepts of the book range from high hard sci-fi to naive depictions of kilobyte per second communication. So, in all earnest, I thought the book was amateurish, meanwhile reading it from cover to cover in a few days, just like one of Asimov's books. Still, for a book written in 1992, it felt terribly outdated.

  The plot is a combination of story arches. The main one is the emergence of an evil artificial intelligence that plans to take over the galaxy and the quest to retrieve the ultimate weapon that would defeat it. Then there is the story of a medieval alien race of rat-wolf analogues that think in packs, making an individual from several bodies acting together. And finally there is the internal dynamic of the group that embarks in this quest of quests. Some interesting ideas are being thrown around, but almost always with terrible naivete, such as the Internet Relay Chat type of communications between interstellar civilisations or the distinction of several Zones of the galaxy in which technology and space travel can work at various speeds. The alien creatures, in their vast majority, are badly described with embarrassing slip-ups like using the word "zombie" or some other typical human colloquialisms in an alien context, however some ideas are ingenious. I will list here the way the "tines" use ultrasonics to group think and act like singular entities, while being able to use sound for "interpack" communication. The way a soul of such a creature is affected by the death, addition, injury or indeed torture of one of the individual bodies is also explored, with various degrees of success. The creation or manipulation of an entire race of people in order to further the goals of a "godly" intelligence is also an interesting twist.

To sum it all up, from the three main story arches, the pack intelligence aliens one was the most thorough, while the one relating to AI and space travel and communication was the least. Amazing coming from a computer scientist. In fact, I would have liked the book more if its sole subject was about the accidental marooning of two children on a starship in the middle of a strange alien feudal world. The rest felt clunky and frankly completely ridiculous in most cases. I still read it with interest, although I don't intend to read anything else from Vinge.

The title of Altered Carbon refers to flesh, human flesh in particular. Richard Morgan describes a world in which people record their experiences while they live, then get transferred to other bodies when their own die or if they need to go to another planet or if they are rich enough to want a different experience or alternate bodies just for the sake of it. The alteration of the normal relationship between consciousness and physical existence is the backdrop of the book.

The good part about this cyberpunkish story is that it is personal enough and simple enough to read in one gulp. I did that, always wondering what was going to happen next and excited enough to not get distracted by something else. The bad part is that most of the props are used only to further the story and are never explored in depth. The way people are always so easily "re-sleeved" into another body and yet almost never walk with different bodies at the same time, the way "Meths" - rich people that are practically immortal, having cloned bodies waiting in case anything happens - have all this influence, but in the end fear laws and have a conscience and human failings, just as if they didn't live for centuries, and so on. I could have gotten over that more easily if all these rules would not have been waived aside whenever the main character needed them waived.

The plot is that of a detective story set in the future. A former Envoy - soldiers trained to easily switch bodies and move from planet to planet to preserve The Protectorate - is sleeved back on Earth to investigate the suspicious body-death of a rich and influential man - a Meth. During this mission, he lives dangerously, gets people to try to kill or manipulate him, women to fall for him - quite a lot actually - and in the end solves it all. So in a way, it's an interstellar James Bond.

Some of the elements in the story are haphazardly thrown around and never explained or having any connection to the main plot, like an apparent discovery of Martians, also an interstellar civilization, long gone for reasons unknown and remembered through racial memory only by whales. It was a silly proposition and pointlessly left in the book, but for me it served to show that the writer is not perfect and, even if his first book is not perfect either, it still was a nice enough read for me to do it in one swoop. Morgan has written another two books with the same character, Takeshi Kovacs, and in the other two the Martian motif is truly explored. I may end up reading them.

In conclusion, Altered Carbon is more pulp fiction than cyberpunk, with a strong backbone of detective story with a moral and a thin body of future world, disruptive technology and exploratory writing. Even if it felt naive at times, it was a pleasant read and I don't regret wasting a Saturday finishing it.

The Windup Girl, acclaimed by many as a very good book, shows a Thailand that Paolo Bacigalupi declares as "a future version", but given scientific realities I would call it an alternate world Thailand. Wikipedia calls the book "biopunk", although I wouldn't quite call it that way, either, as the bio bits in the book didn't feel absolutely necessary to the story; more of an eco-thriller, perhaps. The book takes place in a nation that is fighting the encroaching ocean, in a time where global warming is rampant and sea levels have risen. Also, there is no more oil, no real use of electricity or combustion and everything revolves around genetics. Large elephant derivations are used to generate power; "kink-springs", a sort of mechanical energy battery, are powering just about everything; cats have been engineered to color shift to blend into their environment; human derivatives have been created, sterile, but beautiful and always healthy, slaves for things varying from military use to sex toys. But the most important element of this strange world is the overwhelming power of genetic companies. The same ones who created successful and copyrighted versions of food crops, they also released horrible diseases onto the world, making their products the only viable alternative and creating a depopulation incident.

In the book, Thailand is one of the last countries to resist the "calorie companies" through a combination of cultural and religious fanaticism, but also with the help of a hidden seed bank and a defecting company geneticist. The country is rife with political and economical tension and the main characters of the book are all caught up in this large game. You have the artificially created girl who was left behind by the Japanese and now is a sex toy to be abused every day for the pleasure of others, the AgriGen company man, his only purpose to get his hands on the seed bank, the Chinese refugee from Malaysia, where the brown skinned Muslims took over the country by ethnically cleansing anybody else, the different Thai factions and their agents, all playing the field amongst the "innocent" population of Bangkok.

The thing is that the book is not really about the "windup" genetically engineered girl, but about this world that Bacigalupi is describing. The girl herself has a pivotal role in all of this, but she is merely a secondary actor. I feel like the author wanted to give this impression of all the characters of the book, that they are transient, unimportant, even the human race as a whole, even when they are the driving force of the events around them. A very Asian perspective from a European, I guess. The writing style is good and fluent and I rarely got bored, even when the events described were not terribly exciting. The plot focuses almost exclusively on people, with the technical or logistical aspects thrown in there as afterthought. I think this is what makes the book a good one, because any inconsistency with our own world can be easily dismissed, at least for lack of evidence.

Bottom line, The Windup Girl is a very nice book, well written by Paolo Bacigalupi to describe an alternate future version of Thailand. The fantastical elements of the book are there mostly for support of the story, which in its essence is not really science fiction. One could easily imagine the same plot in a real world country, maybe modern Thailand itself. But, if you are going to write a philosophical commentary about human society and our place in the world, why not place it in an imaginary universe, as well?

I met a few friends for a drink and they recommended to me (or rather seemed amazed that I had not heard of it) Dragonlance. I looked it up and, to my chagrin, found that it is a huge series with over 20 books and a lot of short stories - actually, in 2008 there where over 190 novels in the same universe. Resigned myself to read them all, I googled for the right order in which to read the saga and came up with Chronicles, which is a trilogy of books, as the correct starting point.

As in the story, there is balance between the good and the bad in my assessment of the books. For one, I will not read the rest of the books and waste a lot of my time, but for the other, I already start regretting reading the first three. You see, the entire plot seems to have the only purpose of supporting a canon of the classic fantasy genre that the writers have thought up.

Probably emerging from games of Dungeons and Dragons, like many fantasy universes, the world of Krynn has nothing remotely original. There are elves, humans, dwarves, goblins, dragons, pegasi, unicorns, centaurs, and other races like that. From the very first pages, you meet the heroes that form the quest party and they seem to have gathered all the possible cliches in the genre in their travels: the dwarf is old and grumpy and complains a lot, the half-elf is tortured by his double ancestry, the knight is rigid and honorable, the mage is tiny and frail and frustrated about it, his big (twin) brother is huge and completely non-magical, etc. In fact, the mage character is the only one which seems remotely interesting, all the other being busy posturing most of the time, like real size commercials for their D&D class and specialization.

But what I thought was the most offensive of all was the premise of the trilogy. Beware, here be dragons... and spoilers. Do not read further if you think you might want to read the books.

You see, the world has been reeling after a huge Cataclysm, a fiery mountain hitting the planet and causing havoc. At the end of the book we learn that the gods, in their infinite wisdom, did that because the world was too unbalanced towards good! And we learn this from the good god, who for the entire duration of the story just nudged our heroes in one direction or the other while the evil god was amassing armies and killing everybody. How is that for balance?

Even so, you can hardly complain about a book being cliché if you don't read more of the genre and, to be honest, except for a few books, I didn't really read much fantasy. So I had an opportunity to enjoy this, even if the writing was simplistic, the characterization almost non existent and the story bland. But there was something in the books that kept me at arms length from enjoying it. It finally dawned on me in the middle of the second book, when, after reading about the emotional turmoil of everybody, having the men pair with the women - unless they were there for comic relief, like the dwarf and the kender (which one could consider a pair, if I think about it) - and making chaste promises to one another (like not having sex until they can focus on the relationship and stuff like that)... after all that, I realized that Dragonlance was written by two women. (Even later I realized that one of the women was actually a man. Shame on me! The rest of the review stands)

I don't want to sound misogynistic here, I really wanted to read something cool written by women, but for a series entitled after a weapon - albeit something long and thin, with a thick bulbous appendage at the tip - the story was surprisingly devoid of any detailed battles, tactics, strategy or even decent brawls. The heroes are always running around, talking about their feelings or thinking about them and, in case there is a huge battle between the forces of good and evil, quickly skips forward to the conflict between the two women that love the same man.

Also, as if it all wasn't formulaic enough, no one really dies from the group, unless it is something that fulfills their purpose in life, while the support cast keeps perishing without anyone actually giving a damn. Check out the bit where an entire ship crew - including the woman captain and the minotaur second that I had read a lot about in previous pages - just die without the characters even remembering it. Or the battle of the knights with the dragon armies, where one phrase describes how the knights held, but half of them died. Just like that. I may have written more about that bit than there was written in the book.

To end this terrible rant, if you thought Wheel of Time was childish, as I did, this is worse. T'is true, the fair maiden that hath captured my heart and recommended the books hath read said scrolls of wisdom when she was 16, so that might explain her fond memories and my tortured journey towards the end of the story. I also really really wanted to believe that by writing more, the authors would become more skilled at it. It didn't seem to be the case. I refuse to read another dozen books just to keep the faith.

In conclusion, I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone, including children or young adults - to which I think the story would be tantamount to poison, teaching all the wrong lessons in the worst possible way. These books sucked lance!

As always, this post will reflect my personal opinion. I know that The Listeners is a classic book, one that has been cited by SETI as a major factor in the project becoming known and supported by others. I know that at that time, doing a reasonable sci-fi book was a feat. I know that the writer was a believer in the contact with aliens and human nature and so on, and thus he must have been a nice guy, with similar desires to mine and other space-looking people. However the book annoyed me to no end.

The first and biggest of all problems is the insistence of the writer to add to the book all kinds of quotes from various works, many of them in a foreign language - that is, other than English. It was the reason why originally publishers refused his manuscript. Now, even if I understand the language, I don't know the quote. There is an annex at the end of the book that translates everything, but really, when a character randomly interrupts a perfectly good conversation to spout something unintelligible in another language, that guy is an asshole!

Then there was the construction of the book, the Project being presented like something that held sway over the human heart. All you had to do to convince anyone of anything was turn on the speakers so that they hear static, while the main character would do PR work, knowing exactly what to say to manipulate the other person. I would not have a problem with that, if the manipulation would not be completely obvious and most of the time completely ridiculous. It felt like a Naruto episode where the other ninja, filled with power, suddenly decides to switch sides because Naruto is such a nice guy. I know I don't inspire confidence when I compare a classic sci-fi book with a Japanese manga, but for me it was the same quality of work, which may be entertaining, but not great.

All the people and events changed in order to conveniently support the plot. It felt fake and it is a lousy writing technique, more suited to pulp. I did not enjoy that.

As for the plot itself, it is about this Project, which is pretty much SETI, that suddenly receives an alien signal piggybacked on 90 years old radio transmissions. What people do and say is so underwhelming that it felt like I was wasting my time while reading the book. That is why it took so long to finish it. My conclusion: while a classic for the science fiction genre, I did not enjoy the book or empathise with its characters. The plot is difficult to swallow and the story is very dated. I would not recommend it.

Written in 1951 by George R. Stewart, Earth Abides describes the end of civilisation by way of a deadly pandemic. The main character is an intellectual, used to observe rather than do, therefore he gains comfort in the idea of observing the end of the world. He is immune to the disease, as are few others, and so he becomes not only the observer, but the patriarch of a whole new tribe of people.

The pace of the storytelling is rather slow and the story itself spans several decades, until Ish dies of old age. The book is clearly well written, and I would say well thought, as well, but I take issue with Ish's character. He is proud of being an intellectual, of reading books, he worries all the time about the fate of civilisation, but he really does nothing to share his knowledge or do something of what he is thinking of. I know that's a trait I share, unfortunately, but his level of passivity is insane.

If at the beginning of the book I was relishing the description of the single guy finding ways to survive, both physically and mentally, then liking the way the little group of people was growing into a tribe, then I kept waiting for something else to happen. Instead, they all become complacent, living in houses they didn't know how to maintain, using products from abandoned shops they did not care to learn how to make, forgetting how to read, and so on. The biggest calling of an intellectual is to continually learn and teach. Instead, in what I see as great hypocrisy, Ish is merely content to be slightly more learned than the people around him, thinking to himself like he was reading from the Bible, even if he considered himself as an atheist rationalist, then having hopes that his child will grow to be an intellectual and spread it around, as he was doing none of that. He just complained endlessly about how stuff should be! That was infuriating.

Perhaps that is why it took so long to finish the book, as the ending felt horrifying and even insulting to me: people living like the old American indigens and caring not one bit of the immense body of knowledge that came before them. Perhaps what was worse is that this scenario seems very plausible, too.

What was refreshing (if you can use this word for a book that is 60 years old) is that there were no depictions of warrior groups roaming the land, looking for slaves or whatever, or any other type of antagonistic situations that required heroic violent response. It seems to me that this is almost a requirement in modern apocalyptic sci-fi, if not in most of it.

The style of the writing and the thoughts of its main character are a bit dated, but not terribly so. Electricity is not really useful for much other than lightning and maybe listening to radio, so they don't feel they need to maintain it one bit. Women are not as learned or smart as are the men, but that's OK, because they are women. It is normal for some people to not know how to read. A man can decide for another what is best, just because he thinks he is smarter, and it is only civilised to let them choose for themselves and completely optional. Buildings are mostly wood, so a big fire would burn a town to nothing. And so on and so on.

I can't put my finger on it, but there is something 50ish about the mindset of the lead character that definitely feels alien to me now. Perhaps the idea that, even if he were to make the effort to teach the children to read, the only books that would be of use would be technical or science. That's an incredibly weird point of view to find in a fantasy literature book.

Anyway, as one D.D.Shade lamented in a 1998 review of this book: When you're talking to someone you just met and you discover they 'love' science fiction, and you ask with great anticipation if they have read Earth Abides, the answer is "No, should I?". I agree with the man. The book should be read and should be known, as a classic of the genre and a reminder of how "the first Americans" thought about these things. Don't expect to go all "Wow!" while reading it, but as it stands, there are few books that are as thorough about the end of civilisation as this one.