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

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

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

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 The slightly outdated writing style might put you off, but the story is really interesting and well crafted.

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

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

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

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

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

  One Second After sounded really interesting: what happens after a massive EMP attack disrupts all electricity use in the United States. However William R. Forstchen's writing style and the things the book was focusing one really repelled me. Have you ever read one of those American airplane books where everything happens in a small U.S. town, where people all know each other and help each other through tight social networks and they are all God fearing red blooded nationalists and everything is about how the average Joe feels about things and how they fight to protect their families? Well, this is one of them.

  Bottom line: I might pick it up later, but I wanted to relax, not get aggravated, so I did not finish it.

  A feel similar to Brandon Sanderson's Skyward series, even the writing style, The Last Human is an young adult novel with some pretty intriguing ideas that stayed with me a long time after I finished reading it.

  Zack Jordan creates a complex world of millions of sentient civilizations held together by The Network, a faster than light framework that allows all of these different species to travel the universe, understand each other and be safe from one another. However, the future of civilizations that refuse to follow the rules of the Network is dire, especially the one of the most hated race of people in the known universe: the vile humans. And of course the main character is a human teenage girl who was told nothing about her species and past and has to discover it all together with the reader.

  Many of the ideas in the book were really interesting, like the legal status of species and artificial intelligences based on the "intelligence tier" and the illusion of having control over your destiny when something hundreds of times your better decides to use you. Also the common question about which is better: freedom, order or something in between. I also liked how the author presented the way different species saw the world. A bit formulaic, but fun!

  Yet the book was not perfect. While some things in it might be considered horrifying by any degree, the plot flows like most YA stories where the main character lacks both control and understanding of the situation, therefore they're considered not responsible for the bad things happening around them. This changes a bit towards the end, but not particularly so. There is also a very interesting relationship between Sarya and her "mother", which then is just left behind and crystalized in a few McGuffins and some principles that the daughter blindly follows when the story requires it. This happens with most characters, really: they are described, used, then mostly discarded.

  The ending ended threads in a satisfactory manner, but most characters remained in the discard bin, which I didn't like. I'd say that Jordan has the writing thing down, he just needs to work more. I would read more of his stuff in the future. To me The Last Human was both a positive surprise and somewhat disappointing. A decent book, though, that I will recommend.

  The Frugal Wizard is a nice little standalone story, a science fantasy that is at once a white room story (man wakes up without memory) and a non-Asian isekai (in a parallel world derived from history, fantasy or gaming). Luckily, not a Cosmere novel, either; you know how I feel about pointless "cinematic universes". I like how these "secret projects" led to more original stories, unconstrained by arbitrary rules of fitting in with anything before or after.

  In the book, a man from a far technological future of mankind, where purchasing access to your own parallel dimension is a reality yet dollars and marketing pamphlets are still a thing, wakes up in a medieval setting without knowing who he is. His character follows a classic hero's arc - a Brandon Sanderson specialty, where he first thinks he's the hero, then finds out he is not, only to become one. The setting is a bit too silly, with a rather disappointing villain that is not fleshed out more than the typical psychotic bully, but it makes up for it with a satisfying redemption plot, some playful romance and a colorful, magical and curated version of medieval England.

  I especially liked the jabs towards the popular depictions of the era, which I hear are quite inaccurate and probably the consequence of creators copying each other until it becomes culture. Fake it till you make it, I guess. But what's with the Odin hate? Everyone seems to dislike the guy lately...

  Bottom line: medium sized book with a silly, but not overly so, premise and a whiff of the early Sanderson work that I fell in love with originally.

  This is a very Brandon Sanderson novella: the willful youth, the sardonic adult hiding their inherent goodness under a veil of insults and bad puns, the logical puzzles, the world building done while telling a concise and compelling story. The only thing that I dreaded was that it was another Cosmere story, trying to square peg something interesting into this pointless joint universe. And it wasn't! Well, not that particular universe.

  Children of the Nameless is set in the extended universe of the card game Magic: The Gathering. The novella was released for free on the website of Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of Magic, through an arrangement that allowed Brandon increased creative control of the story. It is set on the plane of Innistrad several years after the events of Eldritch Moon. It introduces the original characters Tacenda Verlasen and Davriel Cane and follows their story as they seek to uncover the mystery of Tacenda's entire village being taken by geists. Meanwhile, the story is no longer available on the website, or maybe I didn't know how to find it.

  Anyway, back to the story. It was a bit on the childish side, although it featured some gruesome scenes as well. Overall it made me very interested in the characters and maybe the world. There is a "Magic: the Gathering" collection of books on Goodreads and it contains 75 works. This particular magical literary universe was not on my radar before. I doubt I will delve into it any time soon, but it's intriguing.

  Bottom line: fun, short, intense. I liked it!

  The longest of the Bobiverse series books, almost as long as the first three combined - which makes it its own self-contained trilogy, Heaven's River was... drawn out to the point of being boring. Humor and some intense scenes made it interesting, but not only did it spend a lot of attention on trivialities, it also set up some reveals that were both predictable and also rather inconsequential.

  I am not complaining that much. I still liked the book, but the things Dennis E. Taylor flags as important are weird as only someone living in the North American utopia can think of. And yes, I know he is Canadian and he is nice and a computer programmer and a sci-fi references obsessed geek, so basically a perfect human being, yet I can't take seriously the perils of financial ruination of the Bobs or the obsessions over whether the Prime Directive should be followed, enforced, and then enforced over other people, which is self-contradicting! And a lot of talking about emotional and emotion related philosophical issues and how to accommodate them and not hurt people, when everybody else behaves like self-interested psychopaths.

  Anyway, as a slight departure from the original flow of the books in the series, this is mostly about the attempts to rescue the hardware storage of one of the Bobs from an alien superstructure where aliens seem to be living an idyllic life in a pre-steam technology civilization and not a jump from Bob to Bob ad nauseam.

  The do the mission in the most time consuming and pointless way imaginable. And then there is the issue of the "civil war" which is spoiled directly in the book description, but which in the ends falls flat as a very random and implausible evolution of the situation. One thing that I found truly original and fascinating is the idea of a quantum soul. But reading the entire book just for that is hardly worth it.

  I am going to probably continue to read the series, but I would have to remember it when the fifth book comes out, which has a pretty heavy description, so I do have hope. Overall this was a below average Bob adventure. I need it to be better.

  Finally a book with an actual ending! I think the Bobiverse series was supposed to be a trilogy, then Dennis E. Taylor continued to write more stuff in the same universe, because I just started a fourth book which has as many pages as the previous three books combined. So if you feel you want to stop somewhere, All These Worlds is where the story actually ends. More exciting than previous books, but also with an underwhelming resolution.

  I mean, humanity is in dire straits. Not only did they stupidly almost killed themselves off, but now a very advanced civilization is threatening them with extinction all over again. It must be hard getting out of that one! No, it's actually very easy, barely an inconvenience! Also having the power to alter solar systems but still getting snagged in moralistic, political and even legal squabbles felt underwhelming.

  Did I mention it was underwhelming? I need the whelming! Whelm me, Taylor!

  Bottom line: if you've read the first two books, for sure you will need to read this one. But don't expect too much. More content, but less resolution.

  The Bobiverse series doesn't have actual books, it has volumes. It's a single story, or rather history, that just goes on and on without any type of marker or closure between books. For We Are Many is therefore just like the first book, but lacking the surprise factor. Just as physical and temporal scales are largely ignored, Dennis E. Taylor often exaggerates the technical ones, placing more complexity on creating life like androids than planetary system harvesters or colony ships for thousands of people. I still like the series, but it's getting blander.

  We are Legion reads as a blend of Andy Weir and Adrian Tchaikovsky: the geekiness is there, the science, the optimism, the humor, the glossing over the complicated stuff :) I liked the first book and I am going to read the others, too. It's like Dennis E. Taylor is their replicant son!

  If anything, the issue is that there are almost no stakes (yet!). The story is about a guy who is translated into an AI then given control of the first von Neumann probe sent from Earth. Then Earth destroys itself, so all that's left is Bob and his many replicas, spreading over the universe.

  Reading the book you kind of feel the power of the Fermi paradox: intelligent technological species that may have been started billions of years in the past had all the time in the world to get to us. So where are they? Of course, the biggest technical challenges of space expansion: energy and propulsion, are hand waved away with some gimmicks that makes stuff work. However, the book is geeky and fun enough to enjoy also while reading to some dry descriptions of how automated probes dismantle Kuiper belts to replicate themselves.

  Bottom line: light, geeky, fun.

  I didn't feel entertained by the first book, as it was mostly setup, but there were quite a few ideas that hinted at great things to come, so I felt that the potential for greatness was there. And indeed, The Fall of Hyperion explodes into a myriad of interwoven themes: artificial intelligence, politics, religion, poetry, the evils of the technological world, the wonder of stars, the search for and/or manufacture of God, time travel, interstellar travel, speciation, reverence for nature and the human spirit, philosophy.

  And yet, my feeling was that somewhere between the potential of the first book and this second book reveal there lies the potential for a far better story than what I've got. The Fall of Hyperion felt an old man's story, full of fear of the future, unrealistic expectations from humans, an unhealthy dependency on religion, the myth of the human spirit and last century references. Even worse, the characters were hard to sympathize with, at least for me. I didn't feel their motivations, nor did I understand the instantaneous switch from acquaintances to friends one would give their life for. The blending of vague philosophical musings and poetic references, plus a less vague description of the world which felt quite outdated didn't help.

  That's why it took me so long to finish this. To be honest, sometimes I would just fall asleep with the book in my headphones and didn't quite go back as far as a point that I would fully recognize, so basically I skipped parts of it.

  The first book felt like something someone would have written in the '70s and then thought about it and reedited it and so until its publication in 1989. The second book feels like it was written in the '60s! It's not just that I didn't understand parts of it, it's that having not understood them, I didn't feel the need to.

  And there are two books - just as large - left in the "cantos"! However, since most of the story arcs of the characters in the Hyperion books have ended, including for the planet itself, and having seen that the other books happen elsewhere (Endymion) and the third book was written six years after the second, I assume that it's basically another duology in the same universe. As such I don't feel compelled to read the last two books. Maybe they are better, but I want something else for a while.

  Bottom line: It's a very complex book, one that I am sure took a long time to consider, write and perfect. I just didn't care about it one bit.

  Having seen the French animation film Mars Express, a combination of Asimov's robot stories and Blade Runner, which I enjoyed very much, I tried to find something else written or directed by the same people and so I found Lastman, an animation series with two seasons so far and a third to be released sometimes in the next years. And I loved it!

  Imagine the emotional drive and mystical mystery of Fullmetal Alchemist, but combined with the satirical view on society and monster of the week feel of Jojo's Bizarre Adventures and you get Lastman, only with the irreverent French touch enhancing the experience. Yet, while those shows were quite content to keep the same feel and story throughout their run, Lastman's plot evolves, the characters change, time passes in a meaningful way.

  The moment the second season, quite different from the first and perhaps even better, ended, I immediately went to read the comics. Used to the Japanese manga, I expected to find the comics being the exact same story and drawn characters as in the series, with all I would have to do would be to find where the anime ended and continue the story. Yet, as soon as I found them, the Lastman comics were very different from the anime! At least at first glance, maybe there will be some overlap in the middle or something, but I was surprised - pleasantly so - because now I have an entire new story with new characters to enjoy.

  So the story is about a lone boxer who stumbles upon a mystical mystery and has to take care of an orphaned girl, while supernatural monsters are hunting them down. There are also some fight tournaments, criminal city kingpins, magical drugs and a decadent and hypocritical society. A lot of characters, all of them having their own motivations, growth and occasional foray into the other side (villainous allies and heroic fuckups). And there is a lot of profanity, violence, humor and satire.

  Bottom line: I absolutely loved the series. Was one of the better highlights of my life in the last months.

  P.S. I am sure the idea of a powerful fighter protecting a girl named Siri from otherworldly magical monsters is just as new to you as it is to me.

  What a strange book Hyperion is. You can immediately feel that this is supposed to mean more than what is on the surface. People say it's written in the style of The Canterbury Tales, hence the "cantos", I guess, as well as the feel of a "magnus opus" of Dan Simmons'. The universe is very well thought out, with just the most limited technical descriptions, so it doesn't feel too dated. If anything, it is the mindset of the characters that betray how long this book has been in work for. Published in 1989, I am sure it was started a long time before.

  To me, of course, not being a reader of Chaucer or John Keats, this reminded me of fantasy more than middle English poetry or science fiction. It's a quest of a group of people, a fellowship if you will, towards a far place where a terrible dragon/wizard resides. During the travels, they share their stories, making us understand the world through their eyes and also explaining their motivations and skillset. This still was a lot of exposition for an ever shrinking part of the book where the ending was supposed to be... however the ending is not there. The book ends before the group reaches their destination. Quite frustrating!

  So many readers I respect loved Hyperion. I've read only The Song of Kali from Dan Simmons before and now with this book it's pretty clear to me that he is a great writer. He just isn't entertaining to me. Probably I should just forget any such expectations and instead try to understand, on a cerebral level, why his work is brilliant, forget about feeling good about it.

  OK, maybe I am a bit mean to the guy. I am going to read the whole series and then fully judge the series. It will be very subjective, though, disregarding the smart literary references or the poetic verses in it or whatever else that is part of the book and I will never understand or care about. So far in the book , I just read several stories that just set up what's going to happen next - hopefully - and got a feel of this brave new world of the future that Simmons saw.

Definition

The Chicken Gambit starts from the Elephant gambit 3. exd5 e4 variation (which is the most common) which is called the Paulsen Countergambit in Lichess, Chess.com and other databases. Considering the Elephant is a gambit for Black, why would a Black move lead to a countergambit?

Now the best move and most played is 4. Qe2, pinning the pawn and threatening to take it. We defend it with the knight (4... Nf6 best and most common move) to which White replies by renewing the attack on the pawn (5. d3  again best and most common). Now, the best move and most played is 5... Qxd5, but the Chicken requires you to check with the dark squared bishop first: 5... Bb4+, which is the second best move.

White's reply is usually 6. d3 and here we continue with the most common and best move again: 6... O-O. This is the Chicken Gambit, starting from an eval of +1.6, which is mostly due to starting with the Elephant Gambit. Black is now threatening to take the knight, while White threatens to take the bishop. Which side will swerve and which will continue on?

There are two moves that White plays here: dxe4, about two times out of three and the best move, and cxb4, about one time out of three, which is a blunder taking the evaluation from +1.6 to -1.0. That's what we hope will happen, but even with dxe4 on the board, there are some nice tricks to employ to burst the balloon of your overconfident opponent.

Opponent blunders: cxb4

While pretty obviously bad, our opponent might choose to help us by taking away from the center and allowing us to open up the e-file with tempo, probably from the misguided idea that a bishop is better than a knight or that c3 needs to be freed for the other knight. First of all, that's not any knight they're giving away, it's the king's knight, which so many openings and gambits are trying to lure away from the defense of the king. Second of all, that leads to double doubled pawns, while dxe4 undoubles pawns. In the Lichess Masters database there are only two games that reach the gambit's position and both of them take on e4.

However, if this happens, the path is clear: take the knight, attacking the queen, queen is forced to take the pawn and then Nxd5 and NOT Re8. There is a small but relevant difference, as we plan to release and centralize the other knight and attack as soon as possible with the two knights.

The four most common moves from this position are really bad, while the best move, 9. b5, is almost never played!

Here is the study chapter for this variation demonstrating why each move is terrible:

Opponent plays dxe4 like a champ

To 7. dxe4 we reply with 7...Be7. This is the third best move and leads to a +2.0 evaluation (yes, for the opponent). The situation may look dire: we moved the bishop to b4, then retreated it all back to e7. We lost not one, but two center pawns while White has a strong center. The only thing we have to show for ourselves is a safer king and a slight edge in development. Almost every move, except the very dumb ones, maintain the White advantage. Stockfish is frothing at the mouth and recommending to move the bishop again to c5 or d6.

However, we are playing against people - hopefully - and the only piece that can be easily developed for White is the dark squared bishop. d2 takes another development square from the knight, e3 blunders a pawn, f4 doesn't attack anything relevant. The only other option is g5 and our own move to e7 validates it: we wanted to stop a possible pin to the queen and defend the knight on f6. It must be important! That's why the most played move here is Bg5. The best move is Qc2 and pretty much refutes the Chicken Gambit, but it's quite unintuitive. It is followed by Bf4, Nbd2 and even g3, these three moves leading to pretty much the same eval +1.7. Bg5 is the same, but allows us to play 8... Nxe4! to which there is only one move that is not a blunder, again, and doesn't lead to equality.

The move is 9. Bxe7. We take with the queen, White renews the threat on the pinned knight with their own knight 10. Nbd2 to which the safest move would be 10... Re8, but we defend with the bishop 10... Bf5 setting up another trap! The most played move by White in that position is long castle which loses immediately to ... can you spot it?

What's the winning move? Scroll down to find out!

It's 11... Nxf3! Can you see it? Why does it win? Scroll down to find out!

Oh no, my queen! It's undefended! If White takes it, 12... Nxa2# is mate! Oh, no my knight! It's undefended! if White takes it, 12... Qa3# is mate! And otherwise, it's a queen and rook fork! -4.0 evaluation. Black is winning! And the best move for White is a shameful Qc4 which does nothing except accept defeat.

More on that in the study chapter about dxe4:

Refutation

Unfortunately, this is not an undefeatable gambit. It can be refuted - which I believe makes a gambit even more fun! - by the move 8. Qc2. It takes the queen away from the dangerous e-file as well as the g4-d1 diagonal, while still defending the central e4 pawn and renewing the threat of Bg5. It also liberates the light square bishop. The best move Black can hope for is c6, trying to break the center. Re8 or h6 are also suggested.

But wait, you will say, what if I play c6 or Re8, won't White do the same thing: Bg5, followed by us taking e4 with the knight? Well, no, because in this case, White doesn't need to bother with Bg5. Bd3, Be3 and Be2 are all available, since they don't block the queen from defending the e4 pawn or are blocked by the queen on e2. One might say that the entire gambit is trying to punish that initial Qe2 move. If the queen moves, it becomes something else entirely.

I can hear you thinking back there: we must be able to do something. How about 8... Bg4, threatening to double pawns when taking the knight? A simple Be2 fixes the issue. Moreover, prepares short castle. You might try 9... Re8, hoping for a 10. Bg5, but O-O just ends your hopes and shatters your dreams.

Well what about 8... Bc5 9. Bd3 Ng4 10. O-O ? The knight and the bishop are attacking the king side, Black has more wins in that variation. This works! Well, yeah, for people rated 1900 who probably lost on time or something. The evaluation is +3 and the best moves for Black are f5 or f6.

More in the Refutation chapter of the Lichess study. If you feel you have a fun option coming up after Qc2, let me know. I will name that variation after you!

Other lines

While that may sound like the title of a horror movie, you can get a Reverse Chicken Gambit from the Russian Game: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. d4 exd4 4. e5 Qe7 5. Bd3 d6 6. Bb5+ c6 7. O-O

As you see, the "trick" is to move the bishop twice to get the same position. You don't need to do that, of course, you can try to gain a tempo and use it for something else, like in the Reverse Chicken: Highly Cruciferous variation. Fork or die!

You might find that to get into the particular position in which you unleash the Chicken is not that easy. Even if best SF moves, many people play something else. Maybe not Qe2. Maybe not d3. People are weird...

See some of this in the Lichess study: The Chicken Gambit

Conclusion

While I called it the Chicken, because of the themes and also as an homage to Vampire Chicken, it is hardly a gambit. The Elephant Gambit opening gives up a pawn and then we risk a strategic retreat of the bishop to entice White to go into funny territory, but most of the moves related to the Chicken are best engine moves. Giving up the central pawns for almost no compensation may not appear wise and other lines of the Elephant might be feel more fun, but this is the beginning of a new branch of chess theory in the area. 

Using the William Graif scale for gambits:

• relatively unknown - ✔️
• hard to decline - ✖️
• using natural moves for both sides - ✔️
• good win condition scenarios - ✔️
• high reward possibilities - ✔️
• low risk - ✖️

We get a 4 out of 6.

Let me know if you use it and good luck!

  Mugen no Juunin: Immortal, or Blade of the Immortal, may confuse some people because it's one of many adaptions to the screen of the same story. There have been anime before, live action adaptions and so on. The one I am talking about is the 2019 one, that was released on Amazon Prime.

  Part Twilight Samurai, part Ninja Scroll, this is a story of a lot of characters on various sides, fighting each other for their own reasons, while the Shogunate is happy to influence the issue or downright force it, since it sees all swordsmen and by extension all people who choose to better themselves against all cultural pressure and outside any organization, as threats.

  The film focuses more on the character's motivation and the politics that lead to the situation they are caught in and less on the fight scenes. It's not like you don't get fight scenes, but many of the fights are bypassed when they don't actually further the story. At 24 episodes of 20 minutes each, it's long enough without swordplay porn inflating its duration, so I appreciated that.

  Now, the main character is Manji, the Immortal, a man who cannot die and regenerates any wound due to a curse, but in truth that's a detail that doesn't affect the story too much. One could easily do something similar with a guy who is just that good that every hit on him is superficial. There are some episodes and some characters dedicated to his particular affliction, but if you remove them, you still get a solid era storyline.

  The animation is really good, as well as the Japanese voice acting - I really like Tsuda Kenjirou's voice, and if I have to find one issue with the series, it's that there are too many characters. I understand why the same people who vote isekai anime every year as 10/10 would not be able to understand (or maybe even abide) such a complex story. And I say abide because it is sort of subversive, as well. It's not hard to understand how modern Japan got the way it did after such cleansings of independent thought.

Bottom line: a very good anime which I wholeheartedly recommend.