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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Jesus Christ, this book has 100000 chapters! And that's because there are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

  Anyway, Sea of Rust starts off as yet another western with robots, set in a post apocalyptic desert, where machines with guns act and feel like people in a lawless land. But as the book progressed, it became more of an exploration of what means to be alive, what meaning we derive from life and what means to actually live as opposed to just survive. It wasn't a literary or philosophical masterpiece or anything, but it did carry a nice punch to the gut in some scenes. The book became better as it got close to the end, to the point that I could have considered reading the next book in the story, if there was one.

  In fact, there is another book in the series, but it's a prequel. Film writer types, right?

  There are about three major twists, one that you kind of guess from the beginning, one that I should have seen, but never thought about and another that is more or less a hope to get into another genre later on. There are also some major plot holes, but just a few and they underpin the story, so you just have to ignore those if you want to enjoy the book.

  Robert C. Cargill is a film writer as well as books, he did the Sinister films and Doctor Strange and The Black Phone, the last two having seen and enjoyed. His writing is good, although you feel the cinematic nature of it. Writing from the perspective of robots did help with limiting things to just sound and visuals anyway.

  I liked the book, although I didn't feel it spent enough time creating the world or its characters. A world of machines should have been orders of magnitude more diverse and interesting than what's in this. It's one of those stories that need to be told in a certain way, and the world around is just a prop for it. It feels linear and without breadth. If I were to compare it with anything, it would be the Fallout TV series, but seen only from the perspective of the ghoul.

  The anime Dan Da Dan has a funny and endearing first episode where two awkward high school students dare each other to test each other's paranormal/alien beliefs. And what do you know? Both find stuff! But then it gets into the same terrible Japanese clichés of monster of the week and new nakamas and high school dramas.

   The start music is fun, too, which probably hits hard when you first watch the series, but then, together with the content, it fades into the background.

   But the first episode is worth it.

  I tried reading some Philip K. Dick in my early years and didn't like it. But not I am older and wiser, ready to process the brilliant ideas in PKD's books. No longer will I feel that a paranoid stoner on a bad trip in the '60s is writing random stories about how reality is not real and consciousness creates new ones again and again and again, just to spite me personally. That's just the hubris and ecocentrism of youth. Right? Right?!

  No. Ubik took me forever to finish because I didn't like it. The writing was good, but inconsistent, moving from philosophical to direct, just like a stoner would when writing about unravelling reality. The characters were there just to push the plot, however flimsy, forward, while the scathing satire of the capitalist system was just caricaturesque and lacking any depth.

  Worst, this is one of those story types that I personally despise. You will understand when you get to the end, if you get to the end, what I mean, because I don't want to spoil the book. It was short and still I dragged myself to finish it. I am sure it was brilliant in 1969, but 55 years later it's just quirky. 

  To be fair, this is not supposed to be one of this best books, so maybe there are some that I will just love if I try hard enough. But I prefer other authors.

  I picked up the book and I went "Oh, no! the writer of this book is called qntm. He must be one of those YA Twitter writers!". No he isn't! Actually, after reading this book, I am determined to read more from Sam Hughes. There is No Antimemetics Division is a wonderful book, blending non Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the spirit of something like The Andromeda Strain in a sort of Fringe-like story, but much better.

  A collection of chapters that contain almost separate short stories, the book slowly constructs this amazing world in which "antimemetic" entities exist. Don't worry about it, a few minutes after you're read my review you will have forgotten about them. The idea is cool and fresh enough, but the amount of attention to detail that the author poured into it raises it to a different level. And then more ideas keep piling up.

  The book starts from quite frightening situations that boggle the mind and challenge the way we see reality, then continues to consistently up the ante to ridiculous scales. Yes, some things are slightly contradictory and hard to accept, but image this is happening in a world that your brain screams it couldn't possible exist, while the clinical scientific and technical viewpoint of the main characters convince you it just as well might.

  I've already put another book from this author on my to read list. I loved this book and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

  I like Sam Neill. He is a good actor and he played in some movies I really like. Funny enough, he doesn't mention those! Instead he focuses in ones that meant more to him and that I mostly haven't watched.

  Did I Ever Tell You This? is a large collection of small anecdotes from the author's life that he decided he needed to write down when he was diagnosed with cancer. They are funny, heartwarming, but strangely impersonal, like stories one tells at a wine table, meant to entertain, not share, offend or expose. For that reason alone it was hard for me to finish the book.

  Imagine being at a party with friends, having fun, Sam bloody Neill being there telling everyone how he most certainly did NOT fuck every woman in London. It would be great, right? Only he keeps talking and talking and talking. Very little about the dramas in his life, the marriages, the children, he just goes on and on about funny things that happened to him, when he was working with people that he thinks are all great, women, and people of color and Aboriginals and all wonderful actors and human beings. It gets old fast! That's this book.

  Now, I like the guy and he came off well out of the book. The problem is that I don't feel like I know him more now than before. He's an average Kiwi, happy to have been chosen to join a great cast of film people and trying to make good with what he got. Humble like. Kind. Funny. Doesn't feel like a real person at all!

  Anyway, the book was fine. It was just overly long and not hitting hard enough.

  Nick Cutter went to the store, bought the largest bag of horror tropes and then poured them all into The Deep. Imagine a cross between Event Horizon, It and The Thing, with every other horror cliché you could think of sprinkled in and you get this book. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Do you feel the horror? YEAH! But does it actually have any impact? No. It gets so horrid so fast that your mind just goes numb and asks itself why is it reading the story at all.

  The Deep has it all: horrible parents, child abuse, loving couple torn apart by child abduction, child fears, parental murder, psychopathy, body horror, supernatural horror, cosmic horror, claustrophobic horror, animal cruelty, interdimensional evil, gore, hopelessness, losing your mind, nightmares, global pandemic and, king of them all, "let's separate!" horror. Well, I am being a bit mean, because by that point nothing really mattered, but you get my drift.

  I guess there are two types of horror as far as I am concerned: intriguing and numbing. The first one is always built on hope, hope that the some character has a chance, if only they would make the best choices and would have a bit of luck, they could pull through. Maybe add some irony, something ridiculous that gives that person an edge when it matters most. The second one is just pointless witnessing of the suffering of another when they have no chance in hell they could pull through. The Deep veers really fast and really soon towards the second category. The horror is strong, but without a reason to exist. And boy does the guy fail to make the right choices!

  Yet, if you watched Event Horizon and thought it was great, like I did, maybe you will love this book, too. Personally I think this felt more experimental than, err... deep.

  Yes, I confess, I only expedited the reading of Mickey 7 because there is a Mickey 17 movie adaption with a pretty big budget and cool cast. I already see your eye roll for yet another review about an unreleased movie and not the actual book, but I promise I am writing about what I've read, so stick around :)

  This is a book akin to The Martian or maybe more the Bobiverse books, with which it also shares some plot elements: first person, light action, reasonable and emotionally stable protagonist and capable of being replicated after he dies or, as is the case of this story, when people thought he died. I had fun with it, read it really fast and served as a great palate cleanser after a really annoying book I slogged through before.

  It's not a masterpiece of literature, but it's good and fun. Edward Ashton is a decent writer and if I had an issue with his craft is with people being too consistent in their behavior. They all are neatly placed into their nice little boxes and they never get out of them, even in the face of traumatic deaths (of others or their own). The book also kind of drags, focusing too much on trivialities and less on the interesting aspects of the characters. However, this is the setup book, a first in a series as is tradition, so maybe the next volume, Antimatter Blues, will be better. I intend to read it, too. Maybe not immediately, though. Let's see how I feel about the movie.

  Talking about the movie, I think it's clear they are going to change the plot significantly, therefore the different title. And I get it. The story is about colonizing an alien planet after years of relativistic travel, a lot of internal monologues, flashbacks, and shortened stories of other colonies from books that he reads, but also gruesome deaths and insectile alien life. Hard to cram that into a movie and keep within the budget.

  A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers is one of those books. 25 different short stories about how liberals, gays, women, non neuro-normative people and people of color are abused or openly hunted by possible future American systems. And the regimes described are quite awful indeed, yet the overall feeling one gets from reading the book is just eye rolling disbelief. I only read it because I like how Victor LaValle writes, problem is he just edited this collection and wrote none of the stories inside and it was a grind to get this read.

  I blame the first story. It was so beautiful and reasonable, where a librarian shelters people from both sides of a divided America and they come together in discussing a single book they had all read. It set a tone that I couldn't wait to get more of. And the second story was the most strident, hysterical, yet at the same time bland piece of literature I've ever read! And it was followed by a lot of similar stories, where everybody who was gay, of color, autistic, female and sometimes all of the above was openly and legally terrorized by a system run by the evil conservative Whites. The tonal shift was so brusque I felt literary whiplash!

  Maybe when your subject is systematic abuse of minorities and you're also part of one or multiple of these minorities, it's pretty hard to get openly rejected. That's the only reasonable explanation I could find for the wide variety of quality in these stories. There were some that were really good. Unfortunately, only a few of them and most of the others could only kindly be called mediocre.

  I just couldn't believe it! The same people who were afraid of an ever more improbable future (The Handmaid's Tale feeling heavenly in comparison) in which non-normalcy is illegal, were describing with glee how the wheel was turning. For example, there was one where a genetic time travelling bomb backfired and all of America was now diverse. That kind of laughable diversity, with no national identity, just a bunch of people all being different from each other, looking different, yet having a united community and all of the American problems magically gone.

  I couldn't shake a quote from my head: slaves don't dream of freedom, but of becoming masters. The same people that were afraid of intolerance wrote short stories about us vs them, where "them" were caricaturesque inhuman villains and deserved everything coming to them.

  For sure there is some emotional catharsis to imagine a terrible future in which everything you hate is openly evil, thus giving you permission for all the fear and hate and extreme fantasies. Imagine Death Wish, but now the hero is a gay woman in a wheelchair killing fraternity bros. How is that not a movie already? Barf!

  What do you remember from the Terminator movies? It's the Skynet killer robot, obviously, the people who seem to always be related somehow, and a hero that needs saving for the sake of their work in the future, but running for their lives in the present. In Terminator Zero you get all of these, to the point that they feel a little overdone. But the animation is good and the story is interesting, adding some logical elements that I've only seen in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I liked a lot and wanted more of. I loved that they set the action in a clearly different timeline than our own and also tried to make it clear the ridiculous cycle of trying to fix the past from the future.

  Unfortunately, they've decided to add children to the mix. And I mean children that need a nanny, not 24 year old Claire Danes. Most of the time it's the children and their very Japanese emotions filling the screen, while their father, a mysterious tech mogul, keeps saying cryptic things almost until the end of the movie for no good reason. The Terminator is thankfully not in the shape of Arnie and the human fighter from the future is a woman. It also is set in Japan. The series ends with a promise rather than with closure, although I doubt they will make a second season.

  It's eight episodes of 20 minutes each, but I think the story was a little too simple for 160 minutes and it could have easily been a more concise two hour animation film. What's the difference, really, between a series you release all at once and a feature film anyway?

  While I applaud stories said in animation - readers of this blog may already know that I believe that's how you do and say brave things today, especially in sci-fi and horror - being a Terminator story meant it was locked in some preestablished framework and couldn't be too creative. Just consider taking some pages out of Screamers, for example, and you understand what I mean. I would watch seasons and seasons of Terminator anime than hope for something decent in live action anymore. The thing is that they already are very far advanced in special effects, but those also cost a lot of money, meaning that you either underdeliver on viewer expectations or have to make a whole bunch of money to break even. Animation is not like that and it's also a lot more flexible.

  All in all I liked the show and I recommend it, but don't expect too much.

  In The Memory Police Yōko Ogawa describes a small Japanese island ruled by "the memory police", an organization with apparent total power and no opposition whose entire purpose is to make sure the things that "are disappeared" are physically destroyed and arrest anyone on the island who is able to remember them. A very interesting metaphor on the things that only hold value if we remember and fight for them.

  Unfortunately, in this book no one fights for anything! I expected some sort of revelation on how this magical police can make disappear concepts from the minds of people so thoroughly that they can't even put them back in their memory when holding them in their hands. Or some sort of solution to said problem. Some sort of misguided attempt at a revolution. Something! But these are Japanese people, if things are supposed to disappear, they go with it until they are all gone.

  Was the author trying to convey the same frustration that I felt while reading the book? People so ritualistic and conformist that they basically amount to non playing characters, running the same routine until someone turns the game off? Because this frustration only combined with the ethereal quality of internal monologues who noticed things happening and ... then did nothing at all.

  I can't say the book was not decently written and the idea was intriguing, but if you expect the story to go anywhere, well, it doesn't.

  The Stories of My Life is the autobiography of James Patterson, said to be "the most popular storyteller of our time" of which I honestly had not heard before, written in a bunch of very short and out of order chapters, a la Mrs. Bridge, in which he repeats incessantly to outline everything. Very ironic. I liked the character more than the book.

  You see, James Patterson is a type of person that you can't help but admire: he is good at sports, he is good at school, he is good with women, he is good with business and he is a famous writer. And all of this not because anyone handed anything to him, but through hard work and dedication. This guy is the American Dream made flesh.

  He meets famous writers, actors, sports people, business people, several presidents of the United States and so on, he becomes the CEO of the advertising firm he basically interned at and all of this while being nice to people, loving and caring about family and friends and feeling pretty good about himself. And all of this without cocaine!

  So I liked the main character, very inspiring, despite the times having changed so much as to make such a person impossible nowadays, but I can't say I liked the book. The shuffled nature of the stories doesn't really help. It's clear the guy had the outline of the story he wanted to tell, so why write it this way? It didn't improve anything. Is it to clarify that life is a string of scenes and their order and the narrative we tell to ourselves are not that important compared to doing the right thing at the present time? Perhaps. But then it's inevitable that the reader is going to try to unshuffle the scenes into something comprehensible.

  And then is the always present question with an autobiography: how real is all of this? I've read some that sound real and others that feel like the prose version of "Biggest & the Best", by Clawfinger. Are there things in the artificial gaps the author creates between these anecdotes that he doesn't feel like sharing or maybe is not even aware he doesn't? Are the stories in the book overblown to inflate the author's ego? Well, I don't think so. The book actually feels right. Maybe it's not at all accurate - after all that's what a writer's job is, to make things up - but it felt honest.

  What it didn't feel was personal. You see, Patterson is a good writer, he writes with humor and wit, but I didn't feel he was writing about himself, but about this character called Jim Patterson. While honest, it also felt overpolished, the edges smoothed off, and personal is what an autobiography should feel like, something perhaps even more important than being written well.

  Bottom line: really inspiring, felt real, but also impersonal enough to not merit the full mark. I liked it.

  Fortune's Fool is something that feels like Game of Thrones, but set in a 16th century type of world inspired by Spanish and Italian history, focused on a woman ex-princess, now warrior. A lot of intrigue, world building, betrayal and feudal machinations. I didn't feel like going through with it, though. 

  It's not that I didn't like Angela Boord's writing, I just didn't feel like going through the motions with the female ingénue, betrayed by unscrupulous men, forced to see the world as it is, harden, then get betrayed again in a somewhat cathartic situation that will bring closure to her teenage trauma.

  Bottom line: I might pick it up later, if I feel like reading about feudal intrigue and cruelty, but at the moment I choose not to.

  What a wonderful book! Something that feels like a spiritual sibling of The Santaroga Barrier, by Frank Herbert and written in a similar style. The slightly outdated writing style might put you off, but the story is really interesting and well crafted.

  John Wyndham is the author of novels that were adapted by TV and movies that, to be frank, I was a lot more familiar with than the author or his books. These include The Day of the Triffids, Children of the Damned and Chocky. However, I have to say that Trouble with Lichen might be the most interesting by far.

  The plot revolves around a mysterious lichen that contains a substance that can prolong life by slowing down metabolism in a way that doesn't affect anything but growth. Independently discovered by both a seasoned scientist and his brilliant female employee, the substance affects the very fabric of human society.

  I have to admit I just took the book out of my list and started reading it. I expected some popular science book about lichens and instead I had to read a lot of feminist philosophy written in a 1930's type of English writing style. But I continued reading and I was not disappointed. Yes, the plot is not airtight and there are parts that are either anachronic or sometimes less relevant to the main theme, but the parts that are there are thought provoking and captivating.

  Some of these themes include: women fighting for their rights and getting them, only to then not use them because of societal conformism, world changing discoveries that are immediately threatened with seizure, stifling, destruction by people and organizations with power, political and economical manipulation of the masses, the danger of knowing or owning something of power and value without the proportional means of protecting it and so on. In a way, it reminded me of the wonderful movie The Man in the White Suit which also contrasts what we say we want with what would actually happen if we got it.

  Bottom line: if you get past the olden writing style and some anachronisms you will get your mind excited by some fundamental ideas underlying the functioning of our apparently benign society. I can't recommend it enough. Read it!