I loved The Expanse and I hoped for more like that. Age of Ash is not it. Extremely well developed world and characters, but a slow paced introduction into a story that is yet to be unveiled. If I had to compare it with something I would compare it with the animated show Arkane, which was amazingly good, but the book lacks the action and the sympathetic characters.

  I understand that this is Daniel Abraham's style: slow roasting the reader while he introduces enough of the world and people to initiate explosive events and epic action. However, this means this book is very difficult to rate or, indeed, to like by itself.

  The story revolves around two street urchins from the "bad side of town" who get involved into something grandiose that shows what they are truly made of. One of the girls is in full grieving mode after losing her brother, the other is doing everything because of love. Predictably, the positive and negative emotions are influencing the characters in their respective direction.

  What I loved about the book is the writing, the depth of the world and of the examination of the characters. It almost didn't need a story. Almost. But it did.

  I may read the next books in the series, just to see what happens, but I would not recommend this book as a standalone read. And if you like fast pace, read something else.

  The Drowned Woods is a young adult fantasy story. There is a very overpowered main character, a "water diviner", someone with the ability to control water. Although most of the time she seems to control the temperature of water, which is something completely different, but whatever. She has the usual sad story of someone coming from humble origins and then having bad stuff happen to her, usually because of rich and powerful folk, but in the end all of these events strengthen her enough to handle the weight of the consequences of the plot.

  Emily Lloyd-Jones skillfully combines Celtic mythology with Avatar-like magic (Avatar with the bending, not the blue people) and a heist plot in a fun enough story. Which means it has the typical heist structure: assemble the team, do a lot of flashbacks so we get to know the characters, show how their skills come together, start the mission, the twist, the epic finale.

  It's not like I didn't like the book, I just couldn't possibly love it. The reveal at the end is pretty interesting, but not unexpected. Most of the time our heroine is either handling everything, has someone help her in the 11th hour to handle everything or she is (or the reader is) misreading the situation, which means even what could be considered defeat can be retconned later into a complete victory.

  Bottom line: easy to read, reasonably interesting, but not very captivating.

  Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape is like a travelogue for places humans have abandoned, whether because of radiation, poison, extreme weather, natural disaster or depopulation. While I expected this book to be more about the nature reclaiming these places, with scientific emphasis on the species and the methods they use, instead it was a straight up documentary made by a reporter. You know, for the people, by the people, about the people.

  It's not a bad book, quite the contrary. Cal Flyn writes well and has no difficulties describing places and people from an accessible perspective. But that was the problem for me. I wasn't looking for an accessible human perspective from a book proclaiming to be about the "Post-Human Landscape".

  There are several chapters, each with its own theme. Some make you lose your faith in humanity, if you had any to begin with, while others make you actively want to destroy it. I found particularly poignant things like proposals to mildly poison or irradiate nature reserves in order to keep people and commercial interests out or the shooting of a particular breed of enwildened cattle on an island "by conservationists" or the chapters about factories making river water so polluted that it killed on contact and caught fire.

  However it felt a bit like a bait and switch. While a bit disappointed with their direction, I loved the first chapters of the book, relating to plants and animals reclaiming places like Chernobyl, but as the book was getting closer to its end, the chapters were more about people, their feelings, their reasons to leave, stay or return. The book still captures the magic of this wild places, but very little is about nature, the perspective is inherently humanistic and cultural, rather than scientific. Other than that, it was a decent book.

  The Humans started from an idea that I don't really like so much: an alien telling the story of how humans are. I've seen so many of these during the years and they are almost always boring, conceited and full of logic holes. Unfortunately this book is no different. Add to this I did not enjoy Matt Haig's writing style at all and you get a DNF.

  Bottom line: I will not be reading this book.

  The Anomaly is a very cinematic read in the sense that you can immediately tell someone was writing a movie they had in their head. And what a surprise to learn that Michael Rutger is a writing pseudonym for Michael Marshall Smith, who's a screenwriter. That being said, the book was OK. The pacing was good, the ideas interesting and the human aspect of the characters was intriguing. However I couldn't get out of that "pitch meeting" feeling that this is a "What if Indiana Jones was a YouTuber" idea, just filled in enough to be book sized.

  It starts with the members of an expedition trying to find an ancient site mentioned into an obscure and vague old text. These people have a YouTube channel focused on fringe science theories, urban myths and the like, only this time they caught a break when they found a foundation willing to sponsor their trip to the Grand Canyon to find this place. And of course they find it and of course there are some weird things in it and it keeps escalating to the point where "Oh, come ON!" is a very frequent thought.

  So the story was OK, the characters kind of cardboard, but fine, the plot a bit ridiculous - what can you expect, only I didn't really like the ending. The story had reached a place where the entire history of the world is in doubt and from that it dropped to the level of people going home and nothing else happening. What was even the point?!

  Bottom line: this is a perfect book to read in an airplane, where I actually did it myself. It reads fast, it means nothing, it requires very little from you.

  When I was a child, several decades ago, A.E. van Vogt was one of my favorite writers, on the same podium with Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury. Later, I was intrigued of how people never seemed to remember him, while praising loudly the others. So I got hold of whatever I could find written by him and started reminiscing.

  The Voyage of the Space Beagle is more of a short stories collection than a novel, even if it has the same characters spacing out on the same ship. It contains four stories:

• Black Destroyer - a large cat-like alien tries to get the better of the crew
• War of Nerves - an alien civilization makes contact telepathically, with unexpected results 
• Discord in Scarlet - a red alien tries to get the better of the crew
• M33 in Andromeda - a galactic sized alien tries to get the better of the crew
• there are also some connective tissue paragraphs detailing a power struggle in the crew itself

  I know why I liked him when I was a kid. The people are all science and knowledge and decisiveness. They are impressive and sure minded and solve every dire situation with their power of their cunning. They also casually discuss and sometimes enact acts of genocide "on principle alone" because some aliens are too ugly, dangerous or of a different morality. It's an all male crew, chemically castrated like in the military, with not the slightest thought women could contribute in any way. They fly between galaxies with the strong sense of their own intellectual and (if proven wrong) moral superiority. The author puts out there the idea that the universe is several million years old and it cyclically explodes to create another one. The distance between stars and galaxies, as well as their number are ridiculously underestimated. Other knowledge we now take for granted is absent completely from the book.

  So it's a strange combination of strong people and ideas that look and feel ridiculous, insensitive, uneducated and even psychotic. The main reason is that the stories were not written at time of publication, but much earlier, sometimes in the '30s and then the author was constantly fixing them and mashing them together in fix-up novels. The scientific and social change in these 100 years is shocking. Hell, I was gleefully enjoying this 40 years ago! It has the effect of making me see our modern behavior through different eyes. We are as sure now as we were then that we are in the right and that we are a pinnacle of something and everything other is weird and to be changed or avoided. What will we think of present selves a century from now? How pathetic are the five minute dramas that occupy our awareness today.

  Think of this book as a precursor of Star Trek: valiant humans exploring the universe. Only they are as far from Kirk as he was from Picard. Quite intriguing an experience which I recommend.

  Van Vogt died in 2000, but his last short story was written in 1976. He was never considered a great writer even in his own time, despite my own childish preferences, yet he made an impact. I probably am going to read something by him again, maybe not immediately. 

  At the end of Children of Ruin I was bemoaning the fact that Adrian Tchaikovsky moved things too far, too fast, and I was happy to see things go down a notch in the beginning of Children of Memory. Alas, it was all a scam, like those Star Trek episodes when nothing makes sense for the entire show only to get explained by a Deus ex Machina and a bunch of McGuffins at the end, but most of it happens in today's Earth or on some farm or Western setting.

  Where could the author have gone from a multi species confederation of faster than light travelers, capable of eternally sleeping during voyages anyway and, barring that, construct any body and transferring any kind of knowledge back and forth? Just like Stargate (most notably) which started with stranded humans at the mercy of all powerful aliens and ended up defeating gods and travelling between galaxies, the only way was back or some kind of lateral jump, like making episodic books that need not connect except through a common literary universe. I really hoped that would be the case.

  And I feel even worse because, while I hated most of the book, with its Memento-ish rehashings of the same events and with the author himself explaining obvious things over and over again, at the end of Children of Memory was a glimpse of the philosophical underpinnings of the story, and I liked those. Unfortunately those are just at the very end, making the rest of the book mostly pointless.

  Bottom line: I couldn't wait for the book to end fast enough, just to get to understand what was going on, because even if I had an inkling of that, I needed confirmation. And the ending was both philosophically satisfying and invalidating the entire beginning and middle of the the story. So to me it feels like a bad elevator episode of the series, like Tchaikovsky had one more book to write to make this a trilogy and, like me, couldn't wait to get it over with already. 

  Children of Time was split into two stories, one rich with characterization, focused on individual people, and another that felt a little bit like a nature documentary, but was pretty good, too. The science was stretched a bit, but in the end you get a subtle exploration of humanity via another species. Children of Ruin is the equivalent of explosion porn for action movies, though: more, bigger, louder, thus drowning out the parts that came close to what I liked in the first book.

  Adrian Tchaikovsky starts with another pair of obsessive scientists, but there is less focus on their actual personalities and struggles. They become the cause and catalyst of what he really wanted to write about: a civilization of octopuses and a complete new alien species - which of course also reaches sentience. Strangely enough, these take a lot of the book without - to me - providing any insight into our own species or telling me anything really interesting and new about cephalopods or making me feel a lot about any of the characters. In a sentence: this book is less careful, larger but coarser, faster but less inspiring.

  This doesn't mean I didn't like it. The story captivated me and I wanted to know where it goes and how it ends, so I read it really fast. Yet the ending left me a bit disappointed, as I understood that the pyrotechnics ended and the story stands in ruin. Children of Memory seems to go back to the roots a little from the little I've read already, I hope it stays more true to the original concept.

Saturn's Children feels like a book that started as something and turned out to be something else in the middle of it. Charles Stross writes something that seems very fashionable this days: a novel from the point of view of a robot. And not just any robot, but a humanoid female sex robot in a world devoid of humans with which to have sex with. Add some solar system travel, spy thriller mechanics, the occasional sexy comedy, philosophical musings about the meaning of life and identity, even what some people might consider light horror and you get this story.

  Even if I enjoyed it, the book is a mess. The style changes, the metaphors change from something from this decade to something that would only make sense in the far future populated exclusively by robots and back again. The mood changes, the motivation of the characters change. You can't even tell who is who anymore because of the multiple "soul chip" identity swaps. It is all written as a letter, but you can't tell who the letter is addressed to, since it also explains to us stuff that should be obvious to a robot.

  I found the premise of humanity simply fading away into extinction, no war, no plague, no asteroid, just people too distracted to have sex with other people, quite satisfying. I know that Futurama did it too, but it makes so much sense as a solution to the Fermi paradox. The basic idea of the book (once it crystalized into one) was intriguing, but you have to read half a book before it turns that way. The writing was competent, but not really engaging or inspiring. The technical aspects were the same.

  Bottom line: more of a vacation book. You get it and you may even read it to the end if the vacation lasts long enough, but not memorable or interesting enough to care about what happens next.

  I have to admit I had no idea what this book was to be about. I hoped maybe Jennifer Egan is related to Greg Egan, maybe A Visit from the Goon Squad is science fiction or at least something humorous. But it was about random characters (New Yorkers, no less) and their private lives and introspections. The writing was good, even compelling, but I really wasn't in the mood for it.

  Maybe I will retry later on.

  I grew up with cyberpunk novels and I loved them! It made me feel thrilled, scared and hopeful about the future at the same time. So when I heard that William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, published this relatively recently, I thought I was going to see how cyberpunk evolves through the ages, post '90s, but before the true Internet age.

  I rejoiced at that heavy read-a-paragraph-three-times-to-understand style and with a name like Pattern Recognition I was ready for a feast! Only... the main character is a marketing consultant for company logos. The thing is fantastical, but not set in the future. In fact, it reads more like fashion-punk than cyber anything!

  It gets worse! The antagonists are weird and ineffectual, the tension a mere nuisance for the main character rather than a driving force, the end goal finding McGuffiny McGuffinFace, the details boring and not interesting to me. At all! And when things get tough, you have a Deus ex Machina person stepping in and solving the problem. And every character is a hipster! This book, the first of a trilogy, sucks!

  I felt personally betrayed when reading something so antithetical to my interests, yet written in the familiar Gibsonesque punk style. I had planned a deep dive in Gibson's work and now I am terrified that I am going to reread the books I loved as a child and find them just as pretentious and empty, with characters that believe themselves much cooler than they actually are. Was Henry Dorset Case just another self absorbed hipster and I failed to notice it because the cyberpunk was cool and I was a kid?

  Bottom line: I did not like it.

  Children of Time spans several thousand years from the points of view of three main actors: the people on an ark ship, the ambitious scientist who wants to create new life and that of the new life. Adrian Tchaikovsky writes adequately the story of the intersection of interests of these parties while reminding me of some of my favorite books like Accelerando and Blindsight, with a pinch of Xenogenesis, but the book is not nearly as good as either of them. Pretty damn good, though!

  It might have something to do with my very high expectations from people reading the book and praising the hell out of it. The book is good, but not THAT good. Then there are the technical aspects which sometimes were so wrong as to take me out of the story. These are minor points, though.

  The main issue with the story is that you have a very personal point of view for the humans and something akin to a David Attenborough documentary for the lifeforms. The contrast is jarring. The scope of the book, though, and the ideas explored are very interesting and the story is very science fictions, in the sense that it asks that essential "what if?" question and asks it well. The answer is just a little dry, that is all. Also, under that pretext, the book is actually taking a hard look at our own history, future prospects and examines the nature of humanity. Just the stuff I like.

  As proof that I did like the book, despite my usual old man grumbling, is that I have put the other two books in the series in my to read list.

  At 60% of reading The Ninth Metal, the work Miskatonic was slided into the story. Then some vague visions of interdimensional doors and huge eyes and tentacles solidified the intention to have this as a "Lovecraftian novel". And it may well be, perhaps the entire series will be more, but as it stands, simply hinting at cosmic horror is not Lovecraftian and having less than 5% of your story be anything than random hicks in Minnesota doing whatever they usually do almost doesn't make it sci-fi.

  Now, Benjamin Percy's writing isn't terrible and slow paced stories that evolve slowly to give characters room to grow are not bad. I just felt that this book was a story of hardship in a family defined by local metal exploitation that a comic book writer felt the need to make superheroey and then (why not) Lovecraftian for a better selling position.

  But there were other things that made me dislike reading the book. One of them is the endless back and forth between present and flashbacks. This sucks in movie form, in a book format it's even worse. You have to mentally switch context from whatever you were enjoying (or trying to) to something else while the author is answering questions that you never asked. Second thing is the characterization. Most people were terrible clichés, most notably Wade. Not only does he just randomly die, no one, including his loving wife, even mentions him again. The bad boy who grew a solitary and strong-silent sense of morality, the ambitious woman regretting not having children and finding one to save, the innocent requiring saving, the psychopathic villain, the angry henchman, the waiting woman (complete with a worthless and disposable male companion while doing so), the annoying story of a vague but global catastrophe but focusing solely on a small American town and so on.

  Bottom line: I kind of liked the idea of the story, but I would have seen it compacted in the first three to five chapters of a single book. While tired of the "coasty" types of stories we are inundated with from cinema and TV, I didn't really want to fall into the other terrible formula: the small American town, truckers, miners and waitresses doing cowboy politics.

  We all know Frank Herbert for his science fiction work, mainly Dune, but before he became famous by publishing that, he wrote may short stories and novels. This collection published in 2013 holds four of the pre-Dune novels he never got to publish. I found the stories very Herbert, kind of dated and, except the first one's premise, non-sci-fi. Yet they show how the ideas that went through Herbert's brain evolved in time.

  The novels in the collection are: High-Opp, Angel's Fall, A Game of Authors and A Thorn in the Bush.

  High-Opp

  It shows the irreverent cynicism that the author had towards governments and social systems, but with a yet unpolished writing style. The story shows how a brilliant man, stuck in the middle of the social hierarchy of a communist-like government is betrayed and then manipulated by various groups. As the strong '50s male archetype he manages to outsmart and outfight everybody.

  Angel's Fall

  This is an interesting story about a damaged air vehicle floating on a river while enemies are trying to catch and destroy it. It's not sci-fi, as the air vehicle in question is a floatplane and the enemies are Amazon native tribes. But if you thought I was talking about the jungle part of The Green Brain, I would understand, as it's basically the same story without the sci-fi elements!

  A Game of Authors

  A weird story about an American journalist travelling to Mexico for a story, while being manipulated and attacked by various interested parties. It felt really dated and not well thought through. The characters were a joke, particularly the female ones. It was supposed to be a "brave resourceful man" story, but it felt like a "clueless American still doesn't believe people would try to kill him" thing.

  A Thorn in the Bush

  This felt like the least Herbert story of them all, even if it did focus on the internal drive and motivation of people. It's the story of an old madame who, having moved to Mexico and become respectable, tries to boss everybody based on her own past traumas and present delusions. Strange to have a female main character in a Herbert novel. It was not bad, but it was the farthest from sci-fi you will ever read.

---

With this I have ended reading everything Herbert wrote and I could find. From them all, Dune is of course on top of it all, but also Destination: Void (not the series, but the original book), Hellstrom's Hive, The White Plague and perhaps surprisingly Soul Catcher. There are lot of other good stories, but I loved these ones. Phew! It's over! :) It was nice, but a little tiring.

I am here to show you how to install whatever UCI compatible external engine you want and run it directly into the lichess.org web site. The feature is still in alpha state (that means they guarantee nothing and have a lot more work on it), but it works pretty well.

The main advantage of the Lichess design for external engines is that you configure one machine with the engines and the application running them, but you can access them from any device logged in to Lichess with the same account.

Long story short

Here are the steps you have to follow:

• Go to fitztrev's lichess-tauri (Lichess Local Engine) GitHub project, to Releases
• Download the newest version of the app (at the moment of writing version 0.0.8) for your operating system
• Run the installer and run the application
• Log in to Lichess
• DO NOT click on the Install Stockfish 16 button
• Download the version of Stockfish (or any other UCI-compatible engine) that works best on your machine
• Only then click on the Or add your own engine → button
• Choose a descriptive title for the engine
• Click on the Select button in the Binary section
• Select the binary file for your preferred engine
• Now you can go to lichess.org and select whatever engine you configured in the Analysis/Study hamburger menu on the right side (bottom)

Short story long

Here are the steps you have to follow, with pretty pictures and extra information. Also a video at the end.

Go to the Releases of the Lichess Local Engine GitHub project

Go to this link: Releases.

Click on the title of the latest version (which should be on top).

Download the newest version of the app for your operating system

For this example, if you are on Windows, you should select the Lichess.Local.Engine_0.0.5_x64-setup.exe. 

Run the installer and run the application

Next, next, next:

Login to Lichess

In order for this to work, the application needs access to the Lichess API, which functions with OAuth2 to authorize you. All you have to do is click on Log in with Lichess and follow the instructions.

DO NOT click on the Install Stockfish 16 button

Now you should be in the Add a chess engine section. While you can just click on Install Stockfish 16 and not care about things, choosing the engine that works best for your machine will save you a lot of time and resources. Besides, if you are reading this and installing Lichess External Engine, then you probably already have some chess GUI and some engines that you've installed before.

That is why I recommend you just add those or download them and then add them.

Download the version of Stockfish (or any other UCI-compatible engine) that works best on your machine

For example, the Stockfish engine download site shows this:

For me, the best verison is the AVX2 version while the one embedded with Lichess External Engine is probably the most compatible one. Note that there are specific binaries for particular CPU architectures. Just choose the best one for you.

Click on the Or add your own engine → button and set up your engine

The only important part for now is the title, so choose one that is telling you exactly what you've got. For example Stockfish 16 AVX2, because as new engine versions come up, you will perhaps have more versions of the same brand. The architecture is also relevant, as you may forget in a year or so which one was best for your machine.

Now click on Select and choose the binary file for your preferred engine.

Go to Lichess

You can use this external engine in the Analysis page or in a Study, where the same analysis control is being used, but I recommend you use it in Study because whenever you change the analysis engine the page refreshes, which in Analysis is deleting the moves you've made so far. BTW, shameless plug: if you had installed the LiChess Tools browser extension, then the PGN of the moves remains stored in the textarea under the board in the Analysis page and you can just reload it, no harm done.

The choice for engine is in the options menu of the Analysis, which can be opened with the hamburger menu button on the bottom of the move list.

  

So under the ENGINE MANAGER section you can select which engine you prefer.

Possible issues

You are now ready to do analysis with the new engines. However, since it is in alpha, there are some issues that have not been resolved and you might find them annoying.

1. the engine doesn't know when to stop for some engines
   • this works fine with Stockfish, but not with Rybka 4.1, for example. 
   • let say you open an analysis page, import a game, start analysing, then stop. You would expect the engine to stop, too, but it doesn't. Closing the window doesn't help, because it's the Lichess External Engine application that runs it and it doesn't yet have a Cancel Analysis button.
   • the same applies to selecting other moves in the Lichess move list. The engine keeps analysing the previous move and it fails to connect to refresh the current move.
   • the solution is to close and restart Lichess External Engine, then enable analysis.
2. the page gets refreshed whenever you change the engine
   • I am sure they are going to change this in the future, but at the moment this means it's better to use Studies, as they persist the moves in the list. Or LiChess Tools, of course, which has a feature to remember the last PGN in the import box.
3. there are some people complaining that only the main moves (moves in the mainline) are getting analysed, otherwise the engine freezes
   • this was not my experience. Yet, in some cases, when the position had a cloud cache, I had to press the + sign (that runs the local analysis anyway) twice. It may be my setup, since I am also running LiChess Tools, but it wasn't that annoying. Just press multiple times if you see it doesn't work.
4. when going deeper on cloud evaluations, there is no visible feedback
   • this affects me directly, because the engine is running, the page shows nothing and LiChess Tools is trying to go deeper all the time. But the engine is working in the background, doing who knows what.
5. the server is sometimes unavailable
   • 503 errors from the server. I am sure they are working on features and it will happen a lot. However the client code doesn't handle that very gracefully.
   • LiChess Tools has an option for that, ignoring the 503 and trying to reconnect the engine. However, use it sparingly, as you normally should not need it and more likely you have not started Local Lichess Engine.
     
6. Lichess gets the evaluation for common positions from the cloud, not from your engine
   • you can fix this in LiChess Tools in several ways, but the recommended one is to use Ignore cloud data for evaluation
     

Conclusion

I am sure that all of these issues will be resolved in time. I am so happy to see this feature, as the normal JavaScript Stockfish engine is extremely slow compared to the version run natively on my machine. Of course, there might still be the case that you want to continue the analysis on dedicated tools, but so far I am so in love with Lichess that I want to do everything there and share stuff with others.

In order for the developers to solve these issues, feedback is VERY important, so don't be shy and leave comments of all the issues you encounter and all the features you want to see and all improvements you can think of.

I leave you with an older video from US Chess: John's How-To's: Using Engines on Lichess

[youtube:k4aXwk_VQVw]