To be honest, I've reached the beginning of the third book in The Faded Sun Omnibus and I've decided to stop.

It was 1978. Religious people living in the desert under strict rules and brandishing swords were still cool and not considered terrorists. C.J.Cherryh decides to write a story about a fierce warrior race that works in the employ of others to wage space war, driven by a very exact culture that emerged in the desert. They carry black veils that only let show their eyes and are very partial to rituals and hand to hand combat. No wonder humans kicked their asses, but even they are terribly anachronistic. They have waged 40 years of war with the humans, under the contract of the Regul, fat immobile and amoral beings that care only for their own tribe's well being.

Reminds you of Dune, the Freemen and the Harkonen? Well, this is where the similarity ends. Where Dune was deep, these three books are tediously drudging through all kinds of futile rituals and each character is painfully introspective, to the point that tough warriors bred for battle are recognizing and thinking about their feelings of fear all the time. Worse, nothing really seems to be happening. It takes a book for a ship to get to its destination.

And the book has aged poorly, even when in the whole thing there are maybe a page of technical descriptions, probably less. There is no mention on what makes the ships run, what types of weapons are used, how computers work, etc. A ship just "fires" and it is never even described in what way.

But the ultimate sin is how little sense it makes. I mean, this is the age of Star Wars, where... errr... people on starships wage battles with swords... OK, the author isn't the only one who screwed stories up, but the Mri are presented as this scourge of the battles, yet they don't know technology or can even read or write, they are appalled by mass warfare and prefer hand to hand combat (like real men!) and are strict in what they are allowed to do, know or even think. It's like giving space weaponry to the Flinstones. OK, you get the Jetsons, but how is that supposed to be terrifying or a match to the voracious human penchant for mass destruction? And there is more. After 40 years, we learn that people have never captured Mri alive, never studied them. The Mris themselves are accompanied by huge bear like semitelepathic animals that they never name or even know how they reproduce. Unlike Frank Herbert, who was obsessed with ecology, Cherryh feels no need to explain how a species of huge carnivores exists on harsh desert planets that are almost devoid of life and water or how three completely different species can share air and food, or how the animals and plants on a different planet are the same as from one that lay 120 planets away, or how language and culture stays the same for 80000 years. A lot of things just don't make sense, including the story's main premise, which is the fear that humans and Regul alike carry for the Mri.

Bottom line: if it were nice to read at least, I would have given it a shot, but after two books of people thinking in fear about what others are thinking of them, I gave it up. It was just tediously boring.

Now, Cherryh was at the beginning of her illustrious career and there are books written by her that I liked. I just hated this one.

The City in the Middle of the Night reminded me of Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis, only way lighter. The same female centric focus, the slight weirdness of descriptions and feelings that comes from a truly different perspective. Charlie Jane Anders describes a planet far away from Earth, a colony that devolved after humans reached the planet until it got to feudal levels of government and technology. The planet is tidally locked, so people live on the narrow edge that separates frigid night and scorching day. There are some aliens there as well. Pretty cool story and concept, so much so that I hated it when the book ended and it was NOT a trilogy or a saga or whatever. Hard to please me, right?

The writing style isn't on par with the richness of the concepts, though, and I was also thrown off often by gaps in the understanding of science, social norms and even sensory descriptions. Yet once I understood the author is a transgender woman with sensory integration disorder, it started to make sense. The main characters are all women. There are no real romantic or familial relationships between them, unless counting the fact that they are always feeling things strongly and lying together in beds without doing anything. The lack of sexuality in the novel is refreshing but going a long way in the other direction until it feels eerie. And they often react physically or mentally in such overblown ways that it's hard to empathize. Stuff like someone saying something and they suddenly go to a corner to heave, or having seen someone smile or being touched in a certain way just short circuits their brain. There are a lot of leftover threads in the book, things that get partially described and you just wait for them to be explained later on and they just don't. Also the mix of first person perspective for Sophie and third person for everybody else is strange and forces one of the characters as the main one, even if maybe a reader would relate better with somebody else.

So I had difficulty in rating this book. I would give an excellent rating to the world building and the concepts presented there, but an average on characterization (even if most of the book is about what characters do and think and feel). I would rate some descriptions of internal struggle and emotion as great, but others really lame, especially when it comes to characters who seem to be designed to be thrown away later on. The writing style is not bad, but not great either. It's a mixture of brilliance and average that is hard to reconcile into a single metric. I mean, I could describe the entire plot of the book in two paragraphs; the rest is just people bumbling around trying to make sense of the world and themselves. No character has a real back story, except a few defining moments that feel pulled out of a hat, and they are understandably confused all the time. Who are their parents? Everybody in the book is an orphan. Why so many descriptions of invented food if does nothing for the plot, yet no sex, only a rare and weird longing sort of platonic love? Why is everybody so casually violent, yet so disgusted with violence in their inner thoughts?

It seems to me that this is a book that only some will be able to connect to (the others will get delirious and murderous). I liked the ideas, I liked the characters, it's just that they are coming from nowhere and ultimately going nowhere.

The book might put you off at the beginning, as it starts with a no bullshit nomenclature chapter. It basically says: "This is how I am going to call things in this book and if you don't like it, talk to people who actually care about semantics". The rest of the book continues with the same directness and I believe it is one of the works' best qualities.

Good Germs, Bad Germs starts like a few other books on the subject I've read recently, with a short history of how people have looked upon disease and its causes: Hippocrates' humors, the (all bad) germ theory, vaccines, antibiotics, the bad antibiotics and the good germs, modern understanding of immunity. And yet this is just the first half of the story. The rest is about new ideas, actual therapies and studies, real life cases and attempts to bring this new knowledge into the public domain.

I really liked the book. It's easy to read, easy to understand. Less of the story-like or anecdotal writing style of some other works and more to the point. I also liked that it doesn't take sides: one therapy has to go through wholly unreasonable FDA hoops to be allowed to even be tested in humans, the author points both positive and negative aspects of being prudent. Is it ridiculous that the lack of communication between American hospitals hides invisible epidemics that then get reported by Canada or Europe and end back into the States' headlines as foreign diseases? Jessica Snyder Sachs just reports on the facts, letting the reader draw their own conclusions.

Bottom line: I thought it would be just a repeat of the same information I've become familiar with lately, yet it was not only a different way of tackling the same subject, but also a lot more information about actual attempts to use it in real situations. I recommend it to anyone trying to understand how we stand in this coevolution with the microbes living inside and outside us.

Knights of the Borrowed Dark is a typical fantasy story filled with tropes like: "the one", "son of..." (or "noble family" or "everybody is related to everybody"), "secret war (for no good reason)", "light versus dark", "evil must be fought with swords", "no one tells you anything, even if it makes no sense", "dark king" and so on. The main character is a Mary Sue, an orphan who doesn't know his parents and has lived his entire life in an orphanage, but somehow is a balanced, well read individual who favors rationality to emotion, yet has no problem using both. Add the trope of trilogy to this and you have a complete picture.

Now, does that mean I was not entertained? Nope. It was all fun and games and I've finished the book in a day, yet I can't but be disappointed in both the formulaic nature of the story and the fact that I liked it anyway. The bottom line is that Dave Rudden writes decently and has enough skill and humor to make the same story you've read or seen a dozen times already feel pleasant. So read it, if you like that kind of thing, but don't expect anything above ordinary.

I liked the book, but not a lot. Ian Frisch is an investigative reporter who happened to enter a circle of disrupting young magicians who want to shake the industry and make it ...err.. fresh again. Really didn't intend that pun. However, if you expect revelations of how tricks are done or the deep exploration of the human soul, you won't get a lot of satisfaction from this book.

Full title Magic Is Dead: My Journey into the World's Most Secretive Society of Magicians, it feels more like a roadie story, where the young author gets sucked into a group of charismatic artists and ends up in their group. You can't use it as a barometer of the state of the magic industry, as the story is pretty one sided. The writing style isn't that great either, with some of the ideas repeated several times and none of the emotional bare stripping of the soul that I've come to love in autobiographies. There is no big drama or action of any kind - this is not Point Break or The Magician or anything. Moreover, the "secretive society" isn't all that secret, it is just a club of people hand picked for their innovative contribution to what many see as a stagnant industry and that many people know about. The title is pretty confusing as well, since it is not about magic being dead, alive or anything in between, but rather the pinhole perspective of the author while seduced by this group of very talented and interesting people.

As an introductory work in the world of magicians as a whole, it works pretty well. There is a lot of name dropping and some starter resources for wannabe magicians. It presents the mind set required to do magic in a way that satisfies not only you, but the customs of the magician community. But that's pretty much it. I can't recommend it, while I can't criticize it too much either. I would call it average.

The Priory of the Orange Tree is a typical fantasy story, with realms, heroes, heroines, dragons, magic and the mandatory evil one. It is a large book, that others would have made a trilogy out of; considering it is a single story, I find it most honest that the author published it directly. Samantha Shannon writes really great for a 27 year old and considering she already has under her belt a seven book deal under which she already published four (The Bone Season series), she seems to be doing good. People even hailed her as the next J.K.Rowling, which I personally would think it feels annoying rather than flattering.

So what is the book about? There are several countries with different religions that all stem from the same event: the bounding of The Nameless One, a huge evil dragon with intents to conquer the world. Some think all dragons are evil, some think dragons are cool, some think only some dragons are evil and the others are gods, and so on. There are conflicting stories about who is the hero that defeated evil a millennium ago, too. And of course, evil is stirring once again and a new generation of heroes rises to the occasion. They are mostly female, although some males are prominent in the story. Also, at least three characters are gay and one may be asexual.

About the gay thing, I found it not annoying. Although major events of the plot depend on the love towards another person of the same sex, it wasn't forced towards the reader and it didn't feel like it was glue added to the story. But it was also funny, because in the whole book romance is either gay or really short, chaste, doomed or kind of second rank. I imagine this is how a gay person reads a straight romantic story, where homosexuality exists on a conceptual level at best.

The point is that the story is not difficult at all, except at the beginning when you have to get acquainted with too many characters in too many countries all at once. Then it just flows, sometimes a little bit too smoothly, towards the predictable end. I read it all in a weekend. The main characters are complex and competent, although the minor ones are kind of one dimensional. If anything, I was disappointed with the villains. They were cartoonish, almost. I mean, the most evil of them all was called The Nameless One, like some extra that has one line in a public bathroom in a movie: "the guy in the bathroom". He didn't even have a "same thing we do every thousand years, Pinkie!" moment. Lazy as hell, all the dirty deeds were done by his henchmen... errr henchfolk? And that ending...

Bottom line: nice story to read, above average clearly, but not something to be amazed by.

I've had a blast reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a humorous take on Harry Potter if he were educated in science and not just another emotional teen lucky enough to be "the one", so as I was reading A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero? I was really hoping it wasn't just a one off. And it wasn't! Although much shorter and not so rich with references, this novella from Eliezer Yudkowsky is just as funny as I hoped.

A self proclaimed translation of a Japanese manga that was never written, the story follows a girl that gets summoned into another realm as the virgin hero to save the world from evil. However, the reason she is still a virgin is habituation to Internet pornographic depravity and losing interest in any normal relationship. The world she arrives in is a world of prudes and the power of the magic there relies on one) being a virgin and two) asking prudish demons to do something awfully depraved so that they refuse.

I won't spoil it for you, but it's funny and short and I recommend it highly.

I guess when your main work concerns the sex organs of animals, you have to own a healthy sense of humor. That is why, even if I wasn't terribly interested in the subject, I continued to read the book mostly because of Menno Schilthuizen's writing style. This book - full title Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves - kept being funny and captivating, despite being about a niche subject treated in a very scientific way.

But having read it, I don't regret a thing. There are a lot of interesting insights to be drawn from the book, things I wouldn't have probably thought about for myself. The focus is on sexual organs - mostly in invertebrates, but not only - an area that is both fascinating and rarely explored in a rigorous fashion. Why are they so important? Because in almost every species they are changing from generation to generation faster than anything else. Many species that basically look the same, having evolved in the same particular niche and maybe even from common ancestors, have wildly different genitalia and strategies for impregnation, an intriguing fact that leads Schilthuizen to explore the theory of sexual evolution, in other words changes determined by the choice of partners. You know, like the Pompadour hair style...

Forget human sex, or even mammalian sex. It's spiders, insects, worms and snails that will amaze you with the weird and kinky adaptations in their romantic lives: females that store the sperm of various pretenders and only use the one from the guy they liked most, spoon like penises used to scoop out the sperm of rivals before climax (humans have this, too, BTW), complicated female organs and mechanisms meant to thwart male attempts at forceful insemination and males who choose to stab their mates and short circuit the whole thing. Oh, and did you know snails are hermaphrodites? How does that work?

Bottom line: a very well written little book that may surprise you both through how entertaining and interesting it is. No, a penis is not just a syringe and a vagina not only a hole that accepts anything you put in it. In this book you will learn why, how sexual organs evolved and, indeed, continue to evolve faster than any other organ in most species.

Tiamat's Wrath comes after a roller coaster of a ride. I absolutely loved the TV show so I started reading the books, concluding that the show was better. Of course, being good, it almost got cancelled until it was picked up by Amazon (thanks, Jeff!), but I continued to read the books. The part that I loved, the realistic colonization of the Solar System, got quickly left behind in favor of Stargate-like portals to other worlds, not one but two God-like alien races and, in the seventh book, a Nazi-like occupation of the entire humanity. Like? Even the small hints that suggested space travel using (impossibly efficient) fusion drives takes months and years got left behind in favor of fast paced action. The books themselves followed the same pattern of going bad, then coming back up again and being amazing, with the only commonality being the crew of the Rocinante, smack in the middle of everything, somehow always influencing things at planetary and civilization level.

So how was the book? Predictably bad. Predictably good. Equal bite size chapters that tell a rather bland story until the end when everything comes together in a cathartic way and kind of makes up for the rest. The writing style of the two authors known as James S.A. Corey is professionally good, without anything outstanding. The characters are empathetic: a major one dies, one is reborn, a new one appears. The same roller coaster and the expected, but still annoying, desire to read the next book when I know it will take another year for it to be written.

As far as I know, the next and ninth novel will be the last of the series, which is painful, because The Expanse, for me, was the perfect blend of pulp and space science. Typical to serialized American fiction it went too far too fast (leaving its soul behind to catch up). Yet I still enjoy it. I wonder what my response would have been without the TV series. Still, if you are new to the subject, I recommend you read the first three or four books, then watch the TV series.

I remember reading Greg Egan books when I was very young and loving them, so when I've seen he was still writing, I've decided to read one of his earlier books: Diaspora, published in 1997.

It's hard to describe it in a way that makes it justice. Imagine a poker game where you bet not with money, but with imagination. You look at the cards, you think you've got a good hand, and you place all your imagination on the table. Greg Egan looks at you, looks at his hand, looks at what you put down, then bets 100 times more. And while you are looking at the table, unbelieving, you realize that his bet spreads out in multiple dimensions, more than you can handle by orders of magnitude of infinity. It was like that.

The book is about a posthumanist era on Earth where most people have chosen to live in virtual constructs called polises. They have translated all relevant biological and mental functionality into the Shaper language which polises run. As the book describes the birth of a new citizen, its ascendancy to consciousness, there is no actual story. In that way, the whole book is rather dry, because it is about reason and science and mindblowing theories of consciousness, physics and mathematics. And that's only the beginning. Split into several parts that have common characters for no other reason that they've been described before and that are mostly independent, the book's driver is first a gamma ray burst that destroys the fragile remnants of the Earth's biosphere and then another, more colossal catastrophe that threatens the entire galaxy. That's basically the whole drama, the rest is just mental exercise as humanity explores, then escapes the universe into a infinite multidimensional ladder of universes that makes faster than light or time travel as ridiculous as it is pointless. I mean, really, the entire plot of the book revolves around a completely new theory of how physics work which is described (in layman's terms, with explained diagrams) by Egan.

Bottom line: filled with real scientific theories and ideas that transcend just about anything you thought means anything, the book is at the same time amazing and difficult to enjoy. It starts as something that you have a hard time wrapping your head around, but you can just about do it, then goes on exponentially from there. It's Asimov on steroids (if steroids would be produced by femtoscale machines using the complete simulation of all possibly interactions in a living human body stored into a single neutron-as-a-wormhole). I am at once both elated and terrified to read one of his recent books.

Favourite quote: "Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do - knowing no better, having no choice".

I am conflicted about this book. On one hand, the subject is of terrible relevance and needs to be known by as many people as possible. On the other, the authors are not very good writers: the whole book feels like a big blog post, filled with repetitions, personal opinions and little in the way of hard data. Most of the information in it I already knew, but that's because I am fascinated with the subject. If I didn't know it, I would have probably loved the book.

But what is The Hidden Half of Nature? It's an ecology book. It explains how microbes are the unsung true heroes of plant growth and animal health, including humans. While we cling to narrow views of us versus them and try to kill anything that doesn't agree with us, our lives, our food, our health and our lands depend on the biological health of the microbiome. And it makes a lot of sense. Why would a plant develop a way to absorb nitrogen or break down rock, if all it has to do it exude some sugar and bacteria or fungi are going to do it for it? Why would animals develop complicated organs to break down complex molecules like cellulose when all they have to do is make a space where microscopic creatures live off them and give the animal simple nutrients back? How would it even work to evolve completely independent of the life that you can't see with the naked eye, but outnumbers and outmasses any macroscopic life? We thus learn that most microbes are beneficial and imbalances are much more dangerous than a specific species of a bug.

The book starts with the authors, David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé, husband and wife, buying a house and dreaming of tending a garden, only to discover that their yard had almost no soil. Bringing a lot of organic matter to decay and be assimilated by microscopic life and then other creatures, from insects and worms to birds and other animals, they are shocked to discover that soil recovers much faster and in inexplicable ways than they were taught. Following the rabbit in its hole, they embark on a journey of discovery on how the microscopic influences every aspect of the macroscopic. It all starts with soil, but then it goes into nutrition and health and it all comes together: the idea that good comes from the health of the entire ecosystem, as all we can actually see with our eyes are big enough to be counted as such, colonized and tended by microscopic creatures that have evolved and cooperated with us to reach an equilibrium.

We become familiarized with the concept of dysbiosis, or dysfunctional symbiosis, and how it affects the nutritional values of food, the quality of the land, our chronic and acute diseases, cancer, allergies. Parallels are drawn: the digestive system as roots, a person as an ecosystem, our gut as a garden. All in all a fascinating and cutting edge subject where the ecology, the systemic health on all levels, is the important driver of our lives.

Yet the style in which the book is written really put me off. I started finding reasons not to read. The first half especially. The book starts by bemoaning the dry style of scientific publications and vows to tell the story in a way that anyone can understand. That means a lot of dramatizations, personal opinions, very little in the way of sourcing the ideas other than a name here and there. And whenever they were getting into something promising, they skirted on the details. I believe that if this book would have moved just a little bit away from the conversational blog-like style towards the Wikipedia format it would have been at least twice as valuable.

Bottom line: a book that most people should read, but I wish it would have been written differently.

I was browsing the selection of films on HBO Go and I have to say, for someone who is used to the options available on torrent sites, the films and series that are available there are both incredibly diverse and woefully inadequate. But if there is something that I am grateful for with that particular network, it is Billy Crystal's autobiographical play. It's called 700 Sundays and it is everything I have come to love about actor biographies... in video format. Within two hours of wonderful acting and playwriting, Billy finds the way to tell the story of his childhood, adolescence and adulthood without once getting into the things we actually know him for: acting, comedy, Hollywood. It's so wonderfully personal that is feels a bit too intimate, like someone describing in detail their love life.

Boy, does this guy love. There is this cliche about comedians that are essentially depressed and fight it, for a while, with humor, until their inevitable depression and subsequent suicide. Billy Crystal is nothing like that! He owns every scene, he fights for his audience and he is proud of his legacy. He is blessed, even while he mourns the death of his parents, because while they were alive, they loved him with all their strength and while he is alive, love is what defines him.

Bottom line: it is two hours of wonder. Whether you watch it on HBO Go or download it from somewhere, it is a must, it is absolutely necessary that you watch what a 67 year old master of storytelling and comedy will make out of his life story. I like biographies and this it one of the best, created in the medium Crystal feels most at home: stand up comedy.

I was half expecting the show to be freely available on YouTube or something similar, but in this day and age, quality is always behind some paywall. I leave you with a trailer to the show and I urge you to see it:

[youtube:S2BhJg7nGjA]

Part of the TED Books series, Asteroid Hunters is a tiny booklet, with few ideas other than those expressed in Carrie Nugent's TED talk: Adventures of an Asteroid Hunter. They even repeat. It feels like someone wrote a blog post and was in the mood to write and then they thought to make it a book, but without adding more material to the original post.

Nugent presents the job of asteroid hunter, which makes it technologically feasible to detect potentially dangerous asteroids years before they have a chance to do damage to the Earth. In that time frame, changing the rock's trajectory would be within our means. Let us do our job and fund it, she says, and the Earth will be safe from an asteroid impact, a predictable and preventable event.

Bottom line: that's the entire book. No funny anecdotes, no personal stories or insights, no analysis of the world of asteroids and meteors outside the job of finding them. It's informative, terribly bland and a bit repetitive. I didn't like it.

High Stakes is so full of interesting and delicious horror that I am willing to forgive the bland and boring setup in the previous Wild Cards book, Lowball. A mosaic book like many others in the series, where different characters are written by different authors, it describes the coming of a supernatural horror that can change reality itself. People (normal, joker and ace alike) get turned physically and psychologically into rage filled monsters that want to eat babies and kill everything for the glory of their dark god. Even if some sections were reminiscent of the bore in Lowball, with love between people and worry and relationship issues, the bigger problem of the end of the world took precedence and made this into one of the best books in the series.

In many ways it reminded me of the early Wild Card books, when the virus was still a thing of awe and fascination, horror and fear, but with even more oomph. I think this particular volume washes the sins of many of the recent others that kind of forgot what the Wild Card was all about. I do hope this becomes a trend and the next books are at the same level.

It was difficult to finish Lowball. First of all, I didn't remember a lot of the characters that were supposed to be well known. That's on me. Second of all, a lot of pages were dedicated to the personal life of one or another, including family squabbles and marriage proposals and all that. I don't know about you, but myself I didn't need or want to read that. It made the book feel boring and lifeless. But the worse sin of the book was that it was unbalanced.

Melinda Snodgrass describes action that happens in the middle of Jokertown, a small area of New York populated with jokers, people affected by an alien virus that changed them into impotent ugly monsters, then extends it to the outskirts and eventually other countries, involving as hero characters: a local police officer, a SCARE agent, his old friends, local jokers who are slightly aces (aces have advantages conferred to them by the infection) and - did I mention - their significant others, mothers in law, etc. The scope keeps shifting from aces and law enforcement agencies that are paralyzed for no real reason to regular people who somehow do more than anybody else, from international intrigue to very local issues. Some of the stuff that happens bears no real relevance to the main plot.

The book eventually became a bit more focused and the action started to pick up. And when I was finally getting to the point where something was going to happen and closure was close, the book ended. What the hell happened? Not even an epilogue. Abruptly everything ends with a cliffhanger that you can't even understand and credits roll. The next part of the "triad" of books seems to be High Stakes. I will read it, too, because I want to read the Wild Cards books in their entirety, but to be honest, I don't think I even enjoyed Lowball.