We are changing the furniture and repainting the walls in the apartment, so naturally, the first order of business is to dig into closets, drawers, bags, boxes and various regions under existing furniture and throw away as much as possible. It is a strange feeling, one that makes me remember a past and dead self, one that was hopeful, smart, crazy, in love, using technology and doing stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend nowadays.

I dug into old CD albums, remembering with much nostalgia the movies that I was watching and intending to keep forever. The movies are still around, CD players are almost gone. I had to use my wife's laptop to read the CDs, as mine would only accept a few of them. Well, that's because it's broken, but still. Among the CDs I found old source code and material that I had gathered from friends, jobs, the Internet, hacking. I felt like an archaeologist digging through the remains of old civilizations, ones we hold dear and towards which we feel a strong sense of ownership, but with which we have nothing in common.

Here it is: the Palm VX PDA that was built in 1998 and still works now, with the same battery, if you can just find a way to connect it to a computer so you can upload new stuff to it. Here it is: the Nokia E60 phone that worked flawlessly for more than ten years. I bought a smartphone to replace both of them just five years ago. But also, here it is: an external modem I had forgotten I had; I still wonder where I used it, if ever, and how I got hold of it. Same for the audio/video/infrared wireless transmitters and receivers that allowed me to watch movies from the computer to the TV in the other room. Tens of meters of Ethernet and all kinds of connective cables, forgotten in an age of ubiquitous digital wireless connection just forgotten in the odd corners of the house. Remains of two desktop computers (that I could still make work if I had the inclination) linger like the fossilized bones of extinct creatures.

I feel a mix of gratefulness, nostalgia, loss and that I am fucking old, all at the same time. I wonder where I could find people that still value these things that I dug out from my past and that otherwise will soon become anonymous and amorphous junk. Geez, look at the 6 CDs of utility software, stuff I still remember fondly and stuff I have never used: antivirus, archiving, communication, VoIP, OCR, document processing, all software that is in heavy use today but you would be hard pressed to find people still recognizing these particular incarnations. Music that I still have in my playlist on CDs almost twenty years old. Games that I had worked on that I have forgotten ever doing. Random writing from when I was so young I feel embarrassed just to remember.

And this is just from a 50 square meter apartment that we moved into just ten years ago. I can't even imagine how people do this when they move out from their childhood home, where they and their kids have lived for generations. What do they find? Do they even recognize it? What happened to all the people that I once was?

Occasionally I ask myself if I really am an "ist". You know: misogynist, racist, classist, sexist, bigot, and so on. Or maybe I am "one of the good guys", a progressive feminist antiracist. And the answer is yes. I am both.

I've just read a really long feminist article that - besides naming white bigoted men "the enemy" and showing them the smallest bit of empathy just because "if you mess with them, they mess with us women when they get home" - had the author wonder how come so many of the people who got outed by the latest wave of misconduct allegations were people who declared themselves progressive and even wrote or shared content towards that. And the answer is really simple and really uncomfortable for all purists out there: we are all a bit bigoted. More than that, sometimes were are really leaning towards a side and then we change back, like reeds in the wind. I think that's OK. That's how people are and have been since forever. The answer is not to pretend we are different, but to accept we have that side and to listen to it and converse with it in order to reach some sort of consensus.

The animal brain has one job and one alone. It has to heavily filter all the inputs from the real world and then create a manageable model of it in order to predict what's going to happen next. Shortcuts and pure yes and no answers are heaven to it. If you can look at one person and immediately infer things that will help you predict their behavior from simple things like sex or color of skin or the way they dress, the brain is ecstatic. Try telling it that no, that's not good, and instead of the limited statistical experience model that it uses it should instead rely on the morally curated amalgamation of acceptable experience of other people frustrates it. It's not a human thing, it's not a mammal thing; if you could express this idea to an ant, it would get angry with you. The brain wants - if not even needs - to be racist, sexist and other isms like that. What it wants is to take everything and put as much of it in small boxes so that it can use the limited capacity it has to navigate the things that are not labeled in one way or another.

So yes, physiologically we are too stupid to not be bigots. All bigots are stupid. We are all bigots. In order to not be, or at least not behave like one, you have to be motivated. Messing one's entire life in a matter of days with an onslaught of sympathetic and coordinated allegations would do that quite well. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, any more than it would be to "kill off" people who disagree with you. Therefore in matters such as these I cannot help feeling sympathetic towards people who are quite literally dicks. It doesn't mean I agree with what they did, it means I don't agree with what anybody did. And in such moments of sympathy I hear the parts of me that current society wants erased shouting for attention: "See, we were right! We are dicks, but these moralists are überdicks!" I listen to bits of me that want everything wrong with the world to be the fault of poor people, women, people from other nationalities, races or religions, certain jobs or certain types, having certain cars or behaving or dressing in a certain way. It would be so easy to navigate a world like that: just kill off the Jews and black people, put women in their place, write code only in C#, rename the island of Java to DotNet, be happy!

Yet it is obvious it doesn't work that way. Not even white males wouldn't want this to happen, most of them. How do I make the voices shut up? Clearly witch hunting offenders until their lives are more upended than if they stole or ran someone over with their car does not work. And the answer, from my own limited experience, seems to be contact. Whenever I am inclined to say all Chinese or Indians are stupid (which is numerically much worse than being antisemitic and so many people from my background are guilty of it) and I meet a brilliant Asian programmer or entrepreneur or simply an articulated and intelligent human being I am forced to revisit my assertion. Whenever I think women can't code and I meet young girls smarter and more energetic than I am I have to drop that, too. Whenever I want to believe black people smell or are violent or are genetically faulty and I see some Nubian Adonis talking high philosophy way over my head, I just have to stop. If these people would all go hypersensitive, get offended by everything I say or do and gang up on me for being limited in my view, I clearly won't be motivated or even have the opportunity to grow out of it. Of course gay people and Jews are responsible for all evils on Earth if they are the ones making my life hell. And it is also easy to remain bigoted if I surround myself with people just like me. I've read somewhere a statistic that showed racists usually live in areas where they lack contact with people of color.

Basically, what I want to say is that I see no reason why someone would want to be paranoid. Either there is something wrong with them or people are really out to get them. And it is so easy to label someone "the enemy" and just pound on them, so easy to blame anyone else for your troubles, so easy to enter the flight or fight mode that is encoded in our very beings. I see this with my dog: he avoids big dogs since a big dog attacked him. If he continues this trend, he will certainly avoid getting attacked again by a big dog, while trying to get acquainted with them might result in injury or even death. It's so easy to decide to avoid them, however nice they smell and how nice they play. For him it is a very limiting, but rational choice.

Hide your inner bigot, cage him in the darkest depths of your soul, and it will grow stronger, malignant, uncontrolled. This is what civilization, especially the forced kind, does to people. It makes them think they are something else, while inside they are cancerous and vile, just waiting to explode in the worst way. Instead, I propose something else: take your bigot for a walk, talk to it, introduce it to people. Maybe people will start avoiding you like the plague, but that's their own bigotry at work. And soon, you will probably be the progressive one. It's hard to be a racist if you have a black friend and difficult to be a misogynist when you meet wonderful humans that happen to be female. You will make the bad joke, you will expose your limits and the world around you will challenge you on them. But in the end, your limits will expand, people who matter will understand and appreciate your growth, and frigid feminazi Jew lesbos can go to hell.

You know that joke, about the guy who wants to become progressive, so he is searching for a gay friend? Why not try it the other way around? Find a bigot near you and make friends.

In both these positions, White to move and mate in two moves. Can you spot them?

[SetUp "1"]
[FEN "2B5/K7/6p1/3QpNbb/4Pkp1/3P4/3PqP2/5RN1 w - - 0 1"]
1. Nd4 Qxf2 (1. .. Qf3 2. Ne6#) (1. .. Qe1 2. Ne6#) (1. .. Qe3 2. dxe3#)
(1. .. Bh6 2. Ne6#) (1. .. Qxe4 2. Qxe4#) (1. .. g3 2. Nh3#) 2. Ne2# *

[SetUp "1"]
[FEN "7b/3PKn2/1R2N1P1/1pr1k3/1N3p1Q/1pP1r2n/4pR2/BB6 w - - 0 1"]
1. Nd4 Nxf2 (1. .. Rcxc3 2. Ndc6#) (1. .. Rc8 2. Re6#) (1. .. f3 2. Re6#)
(1. .. Bf6+ 2. Qxf6#) (1. .. Nd8 2. Qxh8#) (1. .. Nfg5 2. Qxh8#) (1. ..
e1=Q 2. Re6#) (1. .. Rc6 2. Ndxc6#) 2. Re6# *


Here it is in video format:

[youtube:ueht7DBP5dc]

Until recently, all I knew of Jack London is that he wrote White Fang, which I read when I was a child and to my shame sometimes mix up with Romain Gary's White Dog, and To Build a Fire, which is a short story I really liked, but which I mostly use as an example of how cold some places on Earth are. At a friend's recommendation I started reading Martin Eden and I really loved it.

Slowly building the characters and with careful attention to details of action and thought and feeling, London is both heavily autobiographical and feverishly critical of society as a whole. An extreme version of his own history, Martin Eden's character is a street ruffian who had to fend for himself since he was eleven years old. A chance meeting with a beautiful young girl from high society makes him want to be more so he dedicates his life to reading, learning and becoming more like the ideal he believes people in high society embody. Handsome, strong, very smart and blessed with good health and powerful will, he does just that, in short time managing to cross the cultural gap and then continuing to grow and learn until he even becomes a critic of the people he saw as gods just a few years ago.

There is so much more to the book, though. The transformation carries the reader through every strata of society, dissecting behavior, culture and belief, making bold philosophical claims while making one feel and understand from the point of view of this amazing character and others. At the time of the writing, the book was not well received, mostly because of the ending, which I won't spoil here, but how premonitory it was to describe similar events to the actual fate of the book itself! Now it is considered one of the best Jack London books and the one he is more known for.

I've read the Andrew Sinclair introduction after I've finished the book, which is what I really recommend to everyone, since it spoils the entire story. From the intro we learn that the book is heavily based on the author's own life and also of the differences between Eden and London's stories. Sinclair also criticizes some parts of the book, where the writing was not as good or was discordant with the rest of the work, but I personally liked every bit of it. Used to a classical story structure, I always expected some things to happen which did not or happened differently, an early sign that so much of this is based on real life. But also, I feel that having Martin Eden be endowed with so many positive attributes made the book a bit less accessible that it should have been, for the character is a beast of will and life force, of health and capacity of work. London was not as fortunate himself and many a reader will probably feel as I did, that the book hints that only an extraordinary person can break away from their position in life and maybe it isn't worth it anyway. Intended as a critique of individualism and personal ambition, it falls a little flat when we encounter the person London probably dreamed to be.

Bottom line: a powerful book on the nature of life values, as they are taught, believed, chosen and created, about how illusion can spur one to magnificent deeds and hard achievement sour the taste of life itself. It talks of the inner and outer drives of people, making them both majestic and ridiculous. It felt realistic and somehow uplifting and terribly depressing at the same time. I highly recommend it.

You will quickly understand why I felt the need to say I was unbiased, but let me first demonstrate how much unbiased I was: I went into this raw fruits store, with an errand from the wife, and wanted to get something from me. Usually I like the caju and macadamia nuts, but I didn't want to have the conversation about why did I spent so much on something I eat out of boredom, so I looked around to get something else. And here they were, packaged and sold just like any other dried fruits or nuts: bitter apricot kernels. So I bought a 200 g bag.

Back in the office, I opened the bag up and I started eating. They were bitter as hell, but I didn't mind it much. I was eating some of them, then switching to candied ginger (which I'd absolutely love if it weren't so sweet), then back again. After a while, though, I'd had enough. About half of the bag in, I couldn't really find a reason to keep eating them. My colleagues had all refused to eat (and spit) more than half of one. But I was curious what they were actually for. People who love bitter tastes, maybe?

So went on the Internet and KABOOOM! mind blown. Just for scale, try to look for yourself at the dimensions of the can of worms I'd just opened: apricot kernels.

Turns out that the "active ingredient" in the apricot kernels is amygdalin, a substance that turns to cyanide in the gut. Yes, you've heard that right: I had just bitten the tooth, dying for the motherland before I could spill the beans. Google had already failed miserably, by serving first a page that explained how Big Pharma and governments conspired to keep this wonder drug from the public. The second page was Wikipedia, then every single conspiracy nut site, sprinkled with the occasional very dry scientific study that bottom lined at "we don't really know".

But I am getting ahead of myself. At this point I was already severely biased and I first need to describe my earnest experience to you. Short story: accelerated heartbeat, fever, terrible headache and nausea that lasted for half a day. Also, didn't die, which was good.

Back to my rant. So, some guy looked at the chemical structure of amygdalin and thought it looked like a B complex vitamin, so he named it vitamin B17. It was quickly marketed as a cure for cancer, despite numerous trials to show that it wasn't. And no, it's not a vitamin for humans either. It is not made in the human body, but it's not needed, either. The bag was not labeled anything dangerous, because it came from the outside of the European Union, which has a law regarding this. Here is some advice for both the EU and the US. Turkey was OK, though, so it only said "great for cancer, eat 5 to 8 seeds daily, not all at once".

So how fucked was I after eating about one hundred of them? A European Food Safety Authority article said that eating three kernels exceeds the safe level for adults. A toddler could do that from just eating one. An article from Cancer Council Australia detailed the child fatalities due to ingesting apricot seeds. Another article was telling me of an adult who got poisoning, but he was both stupid and extreme (he was taking a concentrated extract) and didn't die anyway. A thousand other sites were telling me how amazing my health will be after I had just eaten ten times the daily dosage they suggested.

Drowned in the sea of controversy regarding apricot kernels I've decided to look for the chemical and medicinal treatment for cyanide poisoning. Step 1: decontamination. It was kind of too late to go to the toilet and do the anorexia thing. Step 2: take some amyl nitrite (and then some intravenous things). Wait, that's a party drug. I could maybe get one in a sex shop. There was no home remedy and most of all, even if the amyl nitrite seems to work, no one seems to know exactly why other than the vasodilating effect it obviously has. Another possible antidote is (ironically) hydroxocobalamin, also called vitamin B12a. In the end some vitamin C and a headache pill did wonders, just in case you eat a bunch of apricot kernels and feel awful. Obviously, if it were a serious condition I would have died at the keyboard, trying to wade through the marketing posts and the uselessly dry official reports. Also, not enough easily available party drugs, I dare say.

So, days later the bout of shaky hands, fever and the horrible headache that only blood oxygen deprivation can bring, I decided to write this post. I doubt people will find it with Google, but maybe just my immediate friends will know not to eat this crap.

A pilot for the much awaited Stargate Origins series was released. My prognosis: it will be a disgusting flop, yet remember that Stargate SG-1 was kind of terrible in the beginning and it went very far in the end. Since SG-1 and Atlantis went really over the top, the only solution was a prequel, but considering the Stargate universe, I bet it will be very difficult to reconcile any prequel with the events in the existing series.

First of all, there is the distribution format: it's a web series. Instead of a pilot episode lasting 45 to 60 minutes, they released three episodes, 10 minutes each. The "webisode" format doesn't give me a lot of hope. However, this might be a marketing ploy, to check how many people are actually still interested in the franchise. If they see they have a big fan base, they can always improve the show or start a serious one.

But now comes the real bummer: the quality of the show, from the productions values to script and acting, is abysmal.

They went with the gender swap crap: female protagonist, female director, etc. Yet instead of a character we can sympathize with or want to be her, we get an abusive, annoying and very stupid person who, if they were male, would have been pathetic and offensive. As female, it grates the nerves. See the scene where, tied up, surrounded by Nazis with guns who have her father hostage, she spits, bites and says "you're a dead man" and "next time I'll really make you bleed" to a Nazi officer. It does feel like the role was written for an adolescent, maybe prepubescent boy, then it was changed just a little for a 19 year old woman.

Which brings me to the next point: the Nazis. The Nazis again, portrayed as they always are: ugly, mean, pompous, fanatical, always mentioning their Führer, stupid, narrow minded, etc. How can you do any good writing with cardboard characters? The answer: you can't. Start a show like this and you miss out the opportunity to see the Americans, British and Nazi Germans cooperate against the teachings of their respective cultures in order to defeat the Goa'uld threat. I have high hopes for the camerawoman, who in all this disaster seems to have escaped with good characterization and a decent actress.

Last, but not least, the production values would have been bad in a student project. Almost no post processing, the special effects are horrid, the soundtrack is slapstick from other series and there are some moments (an alien landscape seen through a window which is an obvious pastel drawing, for example) that make you wonder which 10 year old genius made that for a school project.

So you have a cheap production that a few fans in a basement would have done better, marred by bad setup, unusable characters and stupid writing. All of these can change: money can be spent, writers and directors changed or motivated, step taken to improve something that fans have been waiting for for a long time. However, what cannot be changed are the actors. The lead actress is bad, as are the two "young good guys". There is no getting around that. The others are not much better. Even Connor Trinneer, who you might remember as Trip, the engineer in the Star Trek: Enterprise series (and was also in a few episodes of SG Atlantis) and in this plays "the father", acted dazed and confused, as if asking "how did I get here? what am I doing?" in every scene. He was probably regretting taking the role. And he is 48 years old, he could have played the dad without the cheap white hair and mustache.

Bottom line: Trying to YoungIndianaJonesize Stargate was always a tough sell. Doing it with such lack of respect for the franchise and to the cinematic art is mind boggling. Didn't they want to succeed with this? I am baffled. Here is the trailer.

Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer, is a very short book that seems to be inspired by the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. The same timeless quality, thoughtful introspective characters and a weird area that seems to defy the laws of physics and biology. But nothing is truly revealed, or learned, other than the somewhat senseless thoughts that the main character has. The other three women quickly succumb to the influence of "Area X", so we are left with a weird chick moving around in an unexplainable place with unfathomable rules. If Dallas' Pamela would have woken up from a dream at the end of the book, it would have meant just about the same as the actual ending.

I only read the book because of the upcoming movie. I am fairly certain that it will be better than the book, which manages to bore in half the pages of a decent story. It isn't that I disliked it, it's that I did not actually like anything in it. Everybody is acting crazy and without context and in the few pages that bring some context, it's the boring relationship between the lead and her husband and I couldn't care about any of them.

I am sorry, but when you write a book about a scientific expedition, it's customary you write about characters that behave like scientists, not like directionless drunkards with self-traumatic histories. I don't understand how this book won any science fiction award. It is well written, but it's barely average. I am not going to read any of the other books in the trilogy.

The Atrocity Archives tells the story of a technical computer geek enrolled by force in the British governmental organization that keeps us safe from supernatural threats. By Charles Stross' own admision, as a mix of Len Deighton and H.P.Lovecraft by way of Neil Stephenson (with a bit of Le Carré and Flemming thrown in for good measure), the book seeks to bridge the emotional catharsis of facing one's fears (the realm of the horror) with the desire to reveal the truth of the thriller. Bundled with it, the short story The Concrete Jungle, continues the saga of our protagonist.

I liked the book. A master of technobabble and fast paced intelligent action, Stross first came to my attention with the wonderful Accelerando, which I will never stop recommending. In the Laundry Files series, he tackles with equal humor horrors that could suck the universe dry of energy and life and things like bureaucracy (less efficient versions of the same thing) in government agencies. The pace is alert, the writing good and easy to read, the characters sympathetic if a little too shallow, funny, punny and, once I got into it, this book was almost impossible to put down.

I don't know if I will continue with the rest of the series, but as science fantasy goes, The Atrocity Archives is a pretty good book.

Written as a 19th century explorer's memories, this book subtly achieves several things, effectively and decently. First of all, it is a sort of fantasy, although really if one removes the dragons, it's pretty much normal history. Second of all, it is a feminist story, but one done well. Instead of describing the horrible things done to women by evil cardboard characters, we get an intelligent and driven female hero that makes the most of her advantaged situation to expand her goals and enrich her life, despite social norms, but supported by friends and loving family. She is young, attractive, but not extraordinarily so, and her fascination towards dragons and science books leads her towards a career normally reserved for men. She is inspiring as a model, rather than complaining about her helplessness. She gets by through her efforts and skill, not by magically being gifted super powers. The fact that the action is set in a reasonably old period so that folk don't get touchy about it, but close enough so that it describes people that thought themselves the pinnacle of civilization helps with making the reading comfortably remote, but seriously instructive. Thirdly, it is written in an easy to read way, a personal memoir that can be understood by adults and children alike.

As such, I think A Natural History of Dragons is one of the few books that can claim to have made the world a better place, as it provides both escapist pleasure and educational value. That doesn't mean it's a perfect book. Marie Brennan's educated Victorian noblewoman style starts off as refreshing, but quickly gets old, the details providing less and less context and just filling up space. The book is well written, but at times I just wanted to get past the way people were dressed or how the architecture influenced the mood of the main character. The title is misleading at best, as the story is marginally related to dragons and instead focusing on one person and her incidental fascination with them. You learn almost nothing "scientific" about dragons but you sympathize while you observe this young woman desperately trying herself to understand more.

In conclusion, this is a book that I would gladly give to a hypothetical young daughter to read. As an adult, it is light enough to be enjoyable. The world is built thoroughly and perhaps the next books will be more action packed, while expanding on our view of it. The story is a bit lackluster, but nothing to complain about. It reads as a light fantastical autobiography. A more alert pace would have made it more accessible, but it would have probably detracted from the character's voice.

I really tried to read and enjoy this book, which is highly rated and reviewed, which makes me wonder whether there is something wrong with me. Whatever the reason, I couldn't even finish it. Everything in this book is grating my senses, from the writing style to the scenes details, from the editing to the basic story outline. If you've read Dexter (the book the TV show is based on, not the TV show itself) you will have found a similar plot, but as I thought that book was bad, this one felt worse. I can't imagine who in their right mind would give this a full rating.

I've found a blog post by the author, Matt Hilton, that describes the unfortunate period in which he wrote the book. His seventeen old daughter just died. Maybe that affected the writing style, maybe the fact that it was written in several versions that then were edited into this one. I don't know. He has my sympathy for his loss, but not for PreterNatural. In his situation I would have expected to at least get the grief part right. Instead the character lives with the mind of his family's murderer in his head and has humorous dialogues with it.

It's a bad book. I won't recommend it in any way. Considering this is the first and only book in the Carter Bailey series, I think even the author probably agrees with me.

New Scientist is a science oriented news site that has existed in my periodic reading list for years. They had great content, seemingly unbiased and a good web site structure. But they went greedy. Instead of one in ten articles being "premium" now almost all articles I want to read are behind a pay wall. While I appreciate their content, I will never pay for it, especially when similar (and recently, event better) content can be found on phys.org or arstechnica.com completely free. So, I feel sad, but I need to remove New Scientist from my reading list. I understand there is an effort in what they do and that quality requires investment and cost, but brutally switching from an almost free format to a spammy pay wall is unacceptable for me.

The quote So what's the moral of this story? - Moral? Our stories don't have those! perfectly describes the narrative of LaRose. The book is well written, there are a lot of very well described characters that go through their own arcs that intersect often and in uncommon ways, but you are just left with knowing a bunch of people better than before you began reading the book.

Louise Erdrich describes an intertwining world of traditions, history, real life, strong emotions, cool heads and above all, the feeling that it all somehow makes sense (without it actually reaching that point). It could have easily been completed at the middle of the book or continued for a few more volumes, it lacks finality, with the last chapter feeling forced in the way that it tried to complete some concepts. I can imagine Woody Allen saying "It involves Native Americans" after reading it for twenty minutes.

Given what I've said above, it's difficult for me to rate such a book. I enjoyed reading the words, but did not enjoy the book. I ground the words into submission with the whole intention of finishing the story and then reading something else. I loved the characters, even if the myriad of details about them did not interest me in the least. I learned about a people that is, as the book itself recognizes, rapidly going extinct. Is this a good book? Yes! Would I have read it if I knew what I know now? Probably, because I am vain like that. Should I have read it? Probably not.

Bottom line: I will rate it above average, because it most obviously is, but that's about the only reason.

What the hell have I tried to read? It felt like a Google bot trying to describe random YouTube videos, a meaningless brainstorm of a neural network trained on black and white images, an intentional insult to anyone attempting to make sense of the book. At a mere 260 pages (on my smart phone) I thought that no matter what the subject or writing style, I would finish it, but after 60 pages of understanding nothing and using all my will power to continue, I've decided to call it quits.

It "helped" that I had no idea what I was reading. I just picked a book at random from my library and started it. I didn't know Herta Müller was a Nobel laureate for literature, I didn't know she was part Romanian, nor did I know of the Romanian movie based on the book. I could just read and enjoy the content. Or not. I don't know how I can describe this book in a way that is comprehensible. I had to read the synopsis of the movie in order to understand what The Fox Was Ever the Hunter tried to say! I am Romanian, I've lived through communism, even if I was just a kid at the time, I should have no reason not to at least understand the basic plot of the book, but I didn't get it. Eyes just glossed over the pointless descriptions, unnamed characters identified by body characteristics or clothing, useless details and unrelated chapters. One chapter ended in "The comb's teeth were blue." It wasn't a particular comb, it didn't feature in any interesting way in the story (had it been one), it was just a piece of detail that should have conveyed the lack of interesting things in the gray communist era or something. The book is filled with stuff like that.

Bottom line: I didn't find any positive thing to say about this book. No sentence that made me feel something, no interesting fact, no eye opening writing style, no plot or character that made any sense or brought any pleasure as I was reading it. It was like being so thirsty that you try to drink desert sand. It works just as well as this book. I hate it with fervor.

Persepolis Rising went into an interesting direction. One that I don't particularly like, but interesting nonetheless. The seventh book in the Expanse series is happening about 30 years after the sixth. You have to remember that lifespan is slightly longer in the future, so that's not a show stopper or a revamp with new characters. It also featured yet another condescending asshole who wants to rule everything using the protomolecule.

Now, the thing I love about The Expanse is the locality in the Solar System, the exploration of the near future society of space that is mere decades away from now (assuming we discover the Epstein drive, hmm...) Moving the action on other planets in other systems, more into the future and messing with alien tech doesn't help that. Instead it is turning it into yet another Stargate or similar franchise, where they just up the ante until there is no more up and people are bored. The authors have dodged the same bullet a few times in the past, though, so it just may be that they are aware of this and careful to thread the fine line between hard sci-fi and the ability to relate to what is going on in the story.

There isn't much about the story that I can tell without spoiling it. Some dudes want to go Roman Empire on the 1300 solar systems available and "civilize" humanity. Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have different ideas. However, the book basically ends in a cliffhanger so if you hate that kind of stuff, I recommend you postpone reading it until the eighth book is published. I liked the writing, the pacing and again I read it in mere days. Is it a masterpiece, not really, but it reads well. Now I have to wait until I can get my hands on the next book to see where the story is going, but considering that plans are to end the series with the ninth book, I wonder if I shouldn't just wait until they are all written and spare myself the misery of ending up with another, larger, cliffhanger at the end of the next part of the story.

Conclusion: I liked it, but I would much rather have read another dozen books about the Belters and how they made their home in the asteroids. If you think about it, the last few books did away with even the pretense of space colonization realism and it is always a small pain seeing how the stories always favor planets, which are not only less rich with the type of materials needed in space, but also have a lot more limited space. Asteroids can support trillions of people, and that in this Solar System alone. But that's another rant altogether. Just make sure you calculate the exact energy and reaction mass you want to spend in reading and then waiting for the next part of the story, which may not be published yet.

I was left a little disappointed by the books in the Expanse series. The TV show was doing great with the ideas in the books masterfully woven together, while the books were turning more and more into pulp. The greatest sin, for me, was that they took the action out of the Solar System, which was the main quality of the Expanse concept. Well, I am happy to report that, without a large increase in quality, Babylon's Ashes has returned to be a Solar System story, complete with intrigue, space war, politics and the Rocinante finding itself in the middle of everything important, again. It may be formulaic, but it's the formula that I like! Plus, it is clear that the quality of the TV show is feeding back into the books, which is great.

So Holden and Naomi need to deal with the fact that her psychotic ex-boyfriend and father of her child is a mass murderer who is leading the whole Solar System to war, chaos and finally starvation. Some characters die, which put Holden even more in the spotlight. Quite pointless characters are preserved, like Prax, which I personally despise, and others are added, like the pirate captain Michio Pa. In this book, the authors are tying up the loose ends: the state of the Solar System, the war, the situation at Medina station. The path toward the future is still in the balance at the end of the book. It's almost like asking "so, do we do cool Belter culture Solar System stories or do we pulp it out in the alien worlds?". Well, I will read Persepolis Rising next.

Conclusion: I liked the book enough to read it in a day or two and it made me want to read the series again.