Junji Ito is a manga artist that creates horror, usually focused on personal obsession, body horror and disgust. He is like the Japanese Serge Brussolo, in a way. Uzumaki (translated as Spiral) is a 20 chapter story about a small town infested by spirals, which have more and more horrifying effects as the story unfolds (heh!). Yet perhaps the most horrible thing that transpires from the manga is the typical Japanese social and cultural pressure that keeps people in their place, in their role, denying that anything could be wrong.

  I mean, in the beginning, people were leaving the town and coming back, noticing as they did how strange it was compared with the place they were coming from. Later on, the main characters see horrible things happening and still won't leave, while anyone who heard them explain what had happened - even if obvious to anyone looking - refused to accept that it was anything but rampant imagination. And, of course, they stop telling people things, because of the ultimate horror: being stigmatized in their society. That is true horror to me, that people would choose to live their lives like that. The way the town folk end up at the end seems to me like a metaphorical criticism of Japanese culture, but I may be wrong. 

  Anyway, the drawings are good, imaginative, and the manga succeeds in instilling that pervasive feeling of dread. The story gradually getting weirder and weirder, but in small increments, also manages to hold the reader on the edge of disbelief. Short, too, so no need to invest a lifetime in reading it.

  If you want to read it, Uzumaki is freely available online, on the Junji Ito site, but also on a dedicated site that looks very similar, only with an extra bonus chapter, so I would go there. If you are a fan of horror, maybe Brussolo, maybe Lovecraft or even John Saul, I think you will enjoy this a lot.

  Fungi is a short story collection, fantasy and sci-fi, mostly hinging towards horror, edited by Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I am fascinated by fungi and also a horror fan, so I expected to love the book. Well... it was OK. I enjoyed most of the stories, but to be fair, the fungal influence on most plots was either marginal, like some evil affliction evidenced by mycelium growth, or too obvious, like the pulsating life eating and/or controlling mushroom mass.

  It is possible that I bore a grudge from the very moment I started reading the book and expected it to be a novel, only to discover tales too short to get anywhere. It was great to listen to a short while walking the dog and not having to get invested too much, but other than that I was not that captivated. Stories were decent, most of them, but perhaps I was not really in the mood for a collection.

  So, bottom line is that I had expectations set way too high and thus was inevitably disappointed. Didn't learn anything more about fungi, because most of the plots were about infestations that required no understanding of the processes involved.

  The Year of the Witching is not the kind of book I would normally read, but it was probably recommended by some web site or another, pushing for a masterfully written establishment shaking stunning feminist debut story of female empowerment. And me, like an idiot, bought it. I didn't like the book, but I said I would push against my prejudice and read it to the end. The end was worse than the rest. But don't listen to me: an overwhelming number of positive reviews is there, all from women and the occasional male who is excited on how the story touches on oppression against women and other minorities. So I may be wrong.

  Alexis Henderson's writing was decent, but the story was inconsistent and I almost stopped reading the book a few times. The lead character is a girl who has been raised by a very devout and poor family (who are treated as pariahs) in a closed village of very devout people who worship the Father (their god of light) and hate the Mother (goddess of witches, dark and nature), being in the habit of burning people on pyres as an alternative to a good bath. Our hero is also the daughter of a woman the entire village remembers as a terrible sinner and most likely a witch. So how in the hell does she grow up to be socially integrated, self possessed, intelligent, articulate, well read, capable of anything, from daily tending to flocks of sheep, having public romances with the son of the Prophet and also having the time to visit the woods and read in the library?

  Oh, did I mention that the most eligible bachelor in the village likes her because she is not like the other girls and she is also of mixed color? That's my main complaint regarding the story: the lead character is impossible. I felt she was way more modern than anyone in that silly little village had the right to be and did the work of several people at the same time.

  But I was starting to have high hopes for the end. Will it be a blood bath? Will she side with the oppressed witches or with the people she loves? Will her boyfriend, her grandmother or the witches trick her into doing something completely different from what she thinks she does? Will anyone realize that you need both a father and a mother, not just siding with one parent like an asshole child during a divorce? Will there be any kind of twist? And no. The answer is no. Everybody behaves exactly as their cardboard character allows them to, unless of course the plot needs to spare someone or go into a direction that is very hard to believe it could go.

  Every single character in the book has one role and they conveniently perform it and then they just leave the stage so our heroine might shine.

  And it wasn't even one of those books masquerading as a fantasy only to discuss real social issues like oppression, or using witches as a metaphor for status defying women. I mean, it probably attempted to be one, but it was a really self contained story in a self contained universe. It is just that the book was boring, the plot full of holes and the characters unsympathetic, bland, Mary Sues or all of the above. 

  Bottom line: I can see the author crafting better stories. She is a competent writer. But this book was just bad.

  Madeira is a beautiful island and, even if we went during the summer, I understand that it is even more beautiful during spring, when flowers bloom. Yet if you want to have fun, you must avoid the tourist traps with overinflated prices and know how the island is structured.

What is Madeira

  But first things first: Madeira is a Portuguese island, even when it is clearly closer to Africa than Europe (latitude a bit under Casablanca and above Marrakesh). Like the Azores, its archipelago is an autonomous region, which means it kind of has its own local government, complete with a president, even if still part of Portugal and the European Union. Tourism is by far its greatest source of income (more than 70%) even if at the beginning of its history it provided sugar for most of the world and was also a vibrant place of commerce via ships and funded much of the Portuguese exploration and expansion era.

  As a volcanic island, it's about 800 km², but its highest elevation is 1861m. And while at a pretty southern latitude, it is surrounded by water, which gives it a distinct climate. Water evaporates around the island, then condenses on the slopes of its surface as a light mist. Rain is relatively rare, but the island has a lot of water through this system. Touristically, this has relevance as the locals have constructed kilometers of tiny cement canals to distribute the water falling down the slopes towards farmlands. Next to these there are paths that can be hiked at low slopes and under the forest shade.  Shade is important, because while the climate is mild, rarely going above 30°C, the sun is relentless, so don't forget your hats and your solar protection.

  The capital of the island is Funchal, home of a little more than a hundred thousand people. Considering the entire island population is a quarter of a million, you can see why most hotels, shops, restaurants, bars, clubs and beautiful buildings are there. This is also, I want to say, the least interesting part of the island. In about two or three days you can visit almost everything in the city proper, add one for things farther away like some gardens you can reach using cable cars and stuff like that, and you don't need more than four days. The rest of the island, though, has a lot of beautiful scenery, strange and different little villages, authentic housing, history and is generally more interesting. There is a caveat, though.

Take care

  The roads in Madeira, even if new, very well done and paid for by the European Union, with kilometers long tunnels and good asphalt, are convoluted and very steep. It would be a terrible mistake, in my opinion, to come to the island and rent a car. There are roads where you can't use the break or your car starts to tumble. They are also not very wide, meaning that you have to know the unwritten driving protocol on the island and sometimes have to stop and go in reverse in a curved road that is 45 degrees steep. Luckily, there are a lot of buses you can take, even if they have pretty short schedules (around 18:00 you must start considering taxis or Bolt). BTW, Uber doesn't work in Madeira, so you need to install Bolt, which has the usual "car sharing" service, but also integrates with local taxi cabs. Also, how could you properly enjoy the landscape if in constant fear for your life?

  Don't buy tickets for the Hop on/Hop off buses, as they come rarely (45 minutes to an hour) and their schedule ends at 18:00. The drivers also take lunch breaks, so the gap between getting off and getting back on again is two hours at that time. Local buses might look more daunting, but they are just as good and you can pay when you get in. Mind that they are also rare and you should pay attention to their arrival schedule, but there are a lot more lines.

  Also, while I have not taken the opportunity to see how it is, sea tours (like whale and dolphin watching) might not be as good as you think. Boats are not allowed to go closer than 50m from the animals and the best experience, I am told, is to get on the Zodiac boats with a lot of people for that. I don't know about you, but bobbing up and down at speed in an air filled plastic boat doesn't sound fun. Trips to the neighboring islands, which I hear are beautiful, are also three hours long, so prepare to either stay the night or spend six hours in total just going back and forth. But if you like the sea, all of these might be worth it.

  Last warning is about the tourist traps. Funchal is basically a big tourist trap, where all the prices are at least twice as expensive as for the rest of the island. But even if you go to neighboring towns, there are the visible places people go to and then there are the places where the locals go to. The problem is not so much the price as is the inauthentic experience. You don't want to spend the time and resources to go to Madeira just to get the same experience you would get in any other city in the world, including the one you left from.

The trip

  In order to get to the island, we took a charter plane as part of a touristic agency plan. There was no other direct plane from my city of Bucharest to Madeira and I suspect most travel there is being monopolized by deals between tour agencies and local hotels and airport. However, even if you don't have a lot of choice on where to stay, you don't have to follow the plan that the agency has for you when you get there, so we made our own plans.

  The hotel we were stationed at was Four View Baía (pronounced Bah-ee-ah), which was a decent building with 11 floors, an outdoor pool and a spa complete with an indoor heated pool and sauna, and a pretty good view, too, as you got to see most of Funchal and the ocean, but next to busy noisy streets as well. The most valuable quality of the hotel is that it's 16+, so no kids at meals or in the pool, no noise during the night, etc. However the service was stupidly bad, with a restaurant that offered buffet meals, but would have the cheapest food that didn't even seem local and the lowest paid workforce, if you take into consideration how unprofessional many of them were. They didn't seem local either, BTW. The air conditioner, for example, looked centrally controlled even if you could set up your desired temperature. The result of turning it on, though, was just cold air at 16°C that would never stop. So our feeling was that it was a good hotel with shitty management. Good overall quality spoiled by inattention to detail and no care for the customer experience.

  This could be explained by the Covid pandemic, though. When Covid struck, the entire island realized how dependent they were on tourism. I suppose the smaller businesses quickly collapsed, leaving just the big corporate chains with their unique mentality on cost reduction. But I may be wrong. Four Views hotels might just be bad in general.

  I had the expectation to go to Madeira and eat fish and sea food the entire duration. It was amazing to me that most places didn't serve sea food that much and if they did, it was expensive and the diversity of the offer was pretty low, even in places outside Funchal. We haven't been to many restaurants, though, so we might just have been unlucky. Also, most of the "traditional" food they have in Madeira is really bland, which is surprising considering how much spice the Portuguese were transporting through the island. My recommendation towards the food is to go to the market, buy some chili and keep it with you at all times. Mustard, too, if you can.

  We spent the first two days walking around, which has the level of difficulty of your choice depending on whether you walk around the ocean side, which is flat, or you go towards the center, which is really steep. We took the cable car to two large gardens, there were two of them, one the Botanical Garden and the other Monte Palace Tropical. We went to Monte Palace first, which was wonderful, with two small museums inside - African sculpture and Geological - and a beautiful and carefully cared for garden, tiles, Asian motifs and more. Only then we went to the botanical one, only to find that is was smaller and much less tended for. It was almost a disappointment, even if it had more types of plant life there. Personally, I thought Monte Palace Tropical garden was a lot more beautiful. Coming back we walked, which was funny as we took a 40 degree slope downwards on a street for an hour or so. Hint: cut your toenails before going to Madeira. Tried to find the street on Google Maps, but apparently not even they are adventurous enough to map it in Street View.

  Second day we took the Hop-on bus to a nearby fisherman town called Câmara de Lobos. I liked it there a lot, as it has a big street filled with bars and restaurants, where they do serve local food and the local cocktails. The Poncha (pronounced Ponsha) was originally a combination of rum agricol (traditionally made by steaming sugar cane, not like the industrial rum which is most common today outside Madeira), lemon juice and sugar rubbed lemon zest. It tastes a bit like a gimlet and you find it under the name Pescador Poncha. However, the modern variation of the cocktail (called Traditional Poncha for some reason) is a combination of orange juice, rum agricol and honey. I do believe this one is the better version, as the tastes of orange, rum and honey mix very well together without covering each other up. Anyway, any combination of sugar, citrus juice and rum is a poncha and you can find many variants on the island. Note that there are bars and then there are poncha bars. The cocktail needs to be made fresh, don't get the bottles for tourists. The English word "punch" has the same etymological roots.

  The next two days we had hired a local guide. I have to tell you that this was the best decision we made there (perhaps the second best, next to the one to not rent a car!). Not only did we skip the group tours organized by the tourist agency, but we also looked for a guide that would take only us around - there are others that do a similar thing, but with convoys of cars. We stumbled upon Go Local, run by Valdemar Andrade, who comes to your hotel in his trusty Nissan 4x4 and takes you to see Madeira in ways that only locals see it, then brings you back. I am talking various villages, some so isolated that they have rare contact with anybody, forest roads that no one knows about, restaurants and bars that give you the authentic Madeiran experience, volcanic black sand beaches, mountain top walks and so much more. Valdemar is also a very fun conversationalist, boasting immense pride in his island and knowledgeable about all aspects of Madeira, starting with history, politics, geography, flora and fauna, economy and ending with any small detail you can think of. It was great fun to visit the island from the open roof car, just the way I like it: long trips with a lot of nature, without any effort on my part :) If you decide to go, I warmly recommend him.

  The fifth day we went on a hike next to one of these artificial water gathering channels called levadas. Recommended by Val, I think it may have been the best of them all: Ribeiro Frio - Portela - Levada do Furado (PR10). We looked for another one next day and didn't find any that were as long, beautiful or conveniently placed as it - relative to our hotel, of course. Imagine an 11km hike on a more or less flat path that goes around an entire mountain, under the shade of trees, with the cool of the water in the channel making it as pleasant a temperature as possible, with almost no annoying insects and with mountain vistas that take the breath away. We got there by Bolt and we returned from the other end with a local bus.

  The last full day we went to the Blandy's wine tour, which is a Madeiran wine company tour on how the wine is made and bottled and which gives you the option to buy wine at a discount then grab it at the airport duty-free shop, which I found very convenient. The tour was nice, too, with a very pleasant guide explaining everything. Madeiran wine is a fortified wine, where strong alcohol is added to stop fermentation rather than wait until fermentation naturally reaches that level. It also has unique properties because of the preparation process, which emulates the effects of months long trips on the sea with wine barrels indirectly heated by the sun. It has a very interesting taste that I enjoyed, with intense flavors given by the wood in the barrels and reminding me a bit of Asian rice wines.

  Then we went to the old city, a place of small streets filled with restaurants, but really trappy. Then we walked the ocean side in Funchal and the nearby beach after going there by Hop-on bus - the island doesn't have a lot of beaches, which I believe is a good thing.

  There are a lot of details that I've left out, like the flight or the outdoor pool experience under the Madeiran sun and feeling the breeze, the Portuguese obsession with the sh sound (as in Poncha, Lobos, Seixal, etc.), the laws that prohibit logging or building above the 800m height, which I believe is amazing and should be perhaps implemented in some areas of my country as well or how the local (rather feudal) politics make access to the island by ferry difficult and so stealing on the island is almost non existent (where would you go with the stuff?), or the invasive species like the tobacco tree or eucalyptus which are in constant battle with the native flora and so on. Ask me if you want any specifics.

  What I loved most about Madeira was the landscape and flora. Beautiful trees and flowers, pristine mountain slopes and, in the constructed areas, a common building style that didn't grate the eye. I also had the feeling that this might change in the future. I hope Madeira stays like this, but I feel like private interests are slowly but surely eroding the local culture and legislation. While we were there, there was construction everywhere, four large cranes visible from our hotel room alone.

  More pictures

  Oh, finally, a self contained story in a single book, glorious and fun adventure, witty references and dialogue and absolutely no politics. Kings of the Wyld feels part RPG, part rock concert, part buddy comedy. Nicholas Eames has an easy yet profound way of describing things and writing characters. Best of all, I don't think the next books in the series would continue the story, just be separate stories in the same universe with some common characters. As such, one can enjoy the book as standalone and I've thoroughly enjoyed it!

  At first daunted by the size - I know 500 pages is not particularly huge, but I was in a mood for something light - I started reading it and had trouble putting it down. In the end I just had to not sleep and finish it.

  The story is about the members of an old mercenary band who have to get back together to rescue the daughter of one of them. Their journey takes them through a world split between complacent nations, monsters and old immortals, filled with creatures and fantastic beasts of every kind and finally leads to an epic battle for the soul of adventure.

  The writing style was easy to read, filled with humor, but also profound in the way characters were portrayed. The only character that was kind of fumbled was the daeva, but it ended up OK. Some criticism was raised about the story kind of pushing along like a D&D campaign, with random encounters and solutions out of nothing and it is totally valid, yet the book, while not aiming to be a comedy, never took itself seriously and therefore it felt really entertaining.

  Bottom line: for a debut novel, it's pretty great. I don't know if I will continue to read the series, but I will keep an eye on Nicholas Eames. A must read for adventure fans.

  Andy Weir does it again, managing to make science and space engineering fun and engaging. In Hail Mary the stakes are a lot higher than in The Martian, because there is more stuff to save like... the world. There are some holes in the logic of the book, but it's a fun read where basically two guys spend the entire book fixing things, researching things and trying to stay alive. In short, if you loved The Martian you will like this book.

  I know these books are not really related and in no way does the author owe me anything, but I got a little disappointed with the now predictable evolution of space story: start with something close to reality, like a manned Mars mission or a Moon colony (hey! These have been realistic for 50 years! Classics!), then immediately find a gimmick that allows you to move among stars where everything is more exciting than in boring Sol system. Bigger, brighter and with more explosions. I understand that is the demand from the public, but what I personally enjoy about Weir's stories is the focus on the character's problem solving process, then using actual science to get by. I don't care about the size of the stakes. The less realistic and immediately possible the plot, the less I feel involved.

  Bottom line: a fun read, similar to The Martian, but bigger.

  Matthew McConaughey is a well known actor that inspires different things for different people. He's attractive, but intense, easily switching from charming to violently wild. He was for a while the quintessential romantic comedy actor until he suddenly wasn't. He is active socially and spiritually, always coming with some emotional speech about some thing or another. So what would his autobiography be like?

  Well, it was good, but it felt a little too rehearsed even as it was constructed as a collection of unfiltered anecdotes from the author's life. The title, Greenlights, comes from the understanding that some things in life are opportunities for the future. They don't push you forward, but give you the green light to go, they are open doors. Each of the stories in the book represents a greenlight for McConaughey, regardless of how amazing, fantastical, horrible or dangerous they sound.

  In short, his crazy parents instilled in him the moral fortitude to choose and then stick with that choice. From a household in which all emotions were heightened - there is a story where his parents have a fight involving a broken nose and knife swinging, followed by wild sex, for example - Matthew learns to live and love wild but mind the consequences. And then, with a series of greenlight events, he gets into acting and fame.

  The way the author says it, his character was formed before he became famous. If you believe he does crazy stuff now, it's because he was always like this and he chose to do it. The wet dreams that also stand for premonitions on what he has to explore, the naked stoned bongo playing at night, the choice to not accept any rom-com scripts anymore, which led to him not working for two years until Hollywood finally managed to see him as an actor and give him other roles.

  Same thing with love. He had a lot of temporary relationships and sex until he met the woman he saw as "the one", wooed her, married her and they have been together ever since. When he won the Oscar, he lost 30% of his weight for the role. I know this doesn't a performance make, but it shows the way McConaughey makes a choice and sticks with it.

  A relevant quote: "What is success to me? Continue to ask yourself that question. How are you prosperous? What is your relevance? Your answer may change over time and that's fine but do yourself this favor – whatever your answer is, don't choose anything that would jeopardize your soul"

  Now, did I like the book? I feel conflicted about it, as it provided insights into how the man thinks and feels, but which also felt bland and processed. At no time did I feel I was really understanding the person or experience things together with him. As an autobiography it wasn't very effective, but then again the book was never meant to be that, more a statement of belief on how life gives you paths to choose from.

  Bottom line: good, inspiring work, but less personal that I would have liked.

  Prions are a fascinating subject that we know almost nothing about. They are misfolded proteins that somehow proliferate inside our bodies and kill us with 100% efficiency. The diseases produced by prions are the deadliest there are, yet we know little about how prions multiply and even how they manage to kill us.

  Prions, a Challenge for Science, Medicine and Public Health System is a 2001 summary of works on prions. What does it say? That we don't know much. Then it gets terribly technical and, as I am not a biologist, I've decided to stop reading instead of pretending I understand anything. But I did scour the Internet for newer sources of knowledge and my finding is... that we still know shit about prions!

  So, what does misfolding mean? Prions are proteins, long chain molecules that are at the border of chemistry and mechanics in such a way that the way these molecules come to rest (fold) determines both their chemical and mechanical properties. Somehow (and no one actually knows how) a protein that is manufactured by our bodies (and that we don't really know what does) gets folded in the wrong way, leading to behavior that is detrimental to the body (in ways we don't really know). There is also a mechanism that turns proper proteins to this toxic form, much like a zombie invasion at nanoscale. And we don't know how it works.

  Why does it matter? Well, diseases such as scrapie in sheep, chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle (commonly known as "mad cow disease") and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD), its variant (vCJD), Gerstmann–Sträussler–Scheinker syndrome (GSS), fatal familial insomnia (FFI), and kuru in humans are caused by prions. There is evidence that the same mechanism that destroys the nervous system in these diseases is also at fault with Alzheimer's. A biological weapon using prions, assuming it affects a large portion of a population, would kill 100% of the victims, decades after the weapon was used and without spreading the disease further.

  And why are prions so deadly? Because the immune system doesn't react to them. They are not viruses, they don't have nucleic acids, they are really tiny proteins that slowly but surely spread throughout the body and and up killing the brain of the victim (not unlike zombies, hmm).

  The leading expert in prions is Stanley B. Prusiner, the man who coined the term prion in 1982. The idea that a disease could be spread by just proteins was developed in the 1960 by people such as biophysicist John Stanley Griffith. Prusiner did a lot of work, but even so, there is little we understand about this, more than 70 years later.

  Bottom line: prions are fascinating and show us how much more we have to learn about biochemistry and disease vectors. Even if we hypothesized their existence in the '60s, we still don't know much on how they work. I welcome more research on the subject, as diseases caused by prions, even if rare, are deadly without exception.

  Lightchaser is a story about complacency, one that faults not our silly human nature but an external alien influence. The "Domain" is the place where numerous human cultures live on thousands of planets and the Lightchaser is a starship pilot that moves from planet to planet giving and collecting "collars" which give the wearer extra status and record all of their life experiences. Further down the line, the company that builds the ships, controller exclusively by AIs, will buy the collars.

  I love Peter F. Hamilton stories because they go far, they allow the reader to dream of futures so vast and amazing that our own existence seems static and impossible to explain. Lightchaser is tiny, self contained, but it breathes the same concept. The book is not the best he wrote and in fact it is a short story with a singular idea, but I enjoyed it. Certainly a fan of Hamilton's, I am going to read everything he ever wrote at one time.

  Bottom line: good hard short sci-fi story. A light (heh!) read.

  The Library of the Unwritten starts with a magical library which holds unwritten books, whether because their author has not written them yet or never got to before they died. And interesting premise, but one which made me afraid it was similar to Sorcery of Thorns. And I feel bad about it, but I did profile A. J. Hackwith before I started reading, which also filled me with apprehension (authors using their initials only make me suspicious). But the book was great! I am so glad to have been proven wrong.

  I don't want to spoil anything, but enough to say that characters like humans, muses, demons, angels, fallen angels, elder gods and literary characters who took shape in the real world are all characters in the book.

  While the story is a young adult fantasy, the writing is compelling, the characters complex and the plot quite refreshing and captivating. But I have to say I liked the characters the most: tortured souls (befitting a story which takes place in Hell most of the time) who have to resolve their issues in order to grow. All good characters are like that and inspire readers everywhere to do the same. The book also avoided getting mired in occult legislature (like defining a series of rules or a specific magic system) or pushing some gender agenda, instead focusing solely on story and characterization, which I applaud.

  Bottom line: not a masterpiece or anything, but one of the best books I've read recently and a very entertaining vacation read.

  I want humanity to spread to the cosmos, to colonize the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt or anything other than Earth in whatever order possible. Personally, I think asteroids are our best first bet, but it doesn't matter as long as I am presented with a well crafted argument and solution plan. Unfortunately, How We'll Live on Mars is not that.

  Stephen Petranek starts with the old idea that colonizing Mars will be a human endeavor that will bring glory and scientific evolution and the betterment of humanity. It well may be, but as history demonstrated no one cares about anyone else and certainly not for "the world"; they care for wealth. Until the ninth chapter, the author fails to provide any inkling on how a colony on Mars would generate wealth and even there he sees it as a port and manufacturing place for resources extracted from asteroids and nothing more.

  I was curious on how Petranek will solve some thorny issues like the chemical composition of the soil, cosmic radiation, medical emergencies and so on. Don't get me wrong, I think with 8 billion people to spare we can afford to lose as many as they are needed as long as they volunteer. I am a strong proponent of individual will and agency and so I despise people who stop progress for fear of losing a few lives. But the author provides nothing but wishful thinking and, when faced with a problem he cannot fix with a simplistic solution, he pivots to another, bigger yet unrelated, problem to which he finds even bigger solutions.

  In fact, without solving the basics, like how to get there in one piece and how to support life once we get there, chapters about terraforming Mars (in centuries!!) are completely useless.

  I like Stephen Petranek's optimism. It inspires me to want to look at space colonization more carefully, find solutions and finally do it. However, when that scrutiny is turned on the book itself, only dust remains. This book is more like a science fiction story from a guy who didn't know how to write fiction and not a realistic manual on how to achieve human expansion on Mars.

  Bottom line: I want us to get to Mars, and quick, but this book is nothing but day dreaming.

  In a world where humans have solved the issues with biological-electronic interfacing you have people, electronically enhanced people, biologically enhanced robots and robots. One of these part biological robots is thinking for itself and... that's the story in All Systems Red. Some corporate shenanigans, some shooting, some world building, but in the end I wasn't charmed by the characters, the idea or the world itself. Probably it all becomes better in the next (at least five) books written by Martha Wells in the same series, but I don't think I am going to follow through.

  Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading the book. It was fun, it was pulp, it was short, but I didn't feel that need for more when it ended.

  One of the things that turn me off from AI stories is when they act and feel and think exactly like a human. In this book in particular, this makes sense somewhat, because the main character is a mix of electronics and biological tissue, but I felt no real difference between the bio-robot and the robo-human characters. System AIs were stupid and robotic while Murderbot is watching TV shows for fun because... it has a skin?

  I can only assume that further down the line they discover it's a Robocop-like situation, that might fix this obvious issue with the story, but frankly I don't care.

  Bottom line: a short fun read that lead me nowhere, but was good while on vacation.

  I only remember about Ready Player One that it was fun and pleasant to read, with kids exploring a virtual universe of cultural references to reach the magical MacGuffin. Ready Player Two is almost none of that, instead being boring, by the numbers and most of it written as exposition. It's like Sorento tried to write a Ready Player One book. I really did not like it. What was Ernest Cline thinking?!

  The exposition writing style is the thing that annoyed me first. You know when you are reading a book and it has to explain some thing that happened in a previous book, so it takes some well placed paragraphs to talk in the past about that? Well, this book starts with a third of it written like this. A complete third of the book is just exposition! And maybe it would have been OK if it were fun exposition, but no. It basically says "remember the good fun we had in the other book and the glorious feeling of victory? Well, that all went to shit immediately".

  It then proceeds on explaining (also in past tense) how two incredibly sci-fi things just... happened: first a complete machine to brain interface that is just there and you can put it on your head and then... an interstellar starship?! Which, BTW, does nothing for the entire book. It's an impossible to believe part of the story that then has no impact on it.

  Since the Oasis is basically Meta, with a working metaverse, the author does some lazy mental gymnastics to explain how it is still a good thing and how Wade is not Zuckerberg. Only it fails completely. I mean, we are meant to believe Wade temporarily joins the dark side only to recover later, while still remaining a positive character, but he comes up as a hypocrite who has no actual control over himself or what happens. After reading the first half of the book you hope Zuckerberg is going to take over, because Wade is so much worse. And then, the antagonist and a new quest are revealed by matter-of-factly presenting another impossible technological leap.

  No. This book is a total failure. Every character (including the wonderful do-gooder Samantha, voice of conscience and princess of awesome) is unlikeable, the writing style is amateurish and feels like an accountant explains in a board meeting what has happened while the plot is full of holes and deus-ex-machinas. But worst of all, by far, is that the book is not fun at all. 

  Clive Thompson is a technology journalist and therefore perfectly position to write a book about how digital technology really affects us. Does it destroy the world? No! Instead, it makes it better. Most of the time and if used well. In Smarter Than You Think, we read about how computers take over some of our tasks, then enhance them when used cooperatively, how new ways of thinking, awareness and literacy are unlocked by technology and how education can be used to improve how we use tech which then in turn can be used to upgrade education. So this is one non fiction book that paints technology in a rosy light and looks forward to the future. We need more of these.

  A few things popped up for me while reading this book. First a quote about teachers and medics. If you reach into the past and you pluck a doctor from 20 years ago and bring them in the present, they will not function well, as they did not keep up to date with the latest discoveries and techniques developed. However, a teacher from 200 years ago can still find a job teaching children. The job hasn't fundamentally changed in centuries... until now. Reading about how good teachers have evolved to make use of digital technology is inspiring.

  Then there was the concept of pluralistic ignorance, where people choose to behave in ways they do not adhere to because they are unaware of the position of the people around them. It was sobering. The book shows how the Internet can help dispel this problem by sharing awareness. That is not the same as "spreading awareness", the governmental and social warrior mindset which requires all people to think alike, but the increase in transparency of what people really think.

  Finally there was a small bit about how pessimistic or negative views are statistically interpreted as more serious, realistic and intelligent than positive ones. Which makes writing the book a bit braver and also explains why everyone is whining all the time.

  Of course, this book was written in 2013. Many things have happened since and the toxicity of public discourse combined with the insidious techniques corporations and groups in power use to manipulate everything can sour even the most optimistic of people. However I found the book still relevant and bringing a fresh sense of hope, without feeling like someone tried to push their worldview down my throat or predict the future for me. Instead it studies the many and often unpredictable ways in which people use technology to make things better.

  I can't say it's a masterpiece, but I enjoyed reading a positive and realistic book like Smarter Than You Think. It was a welcome alternative to the gloom and doom we see directed towards us on a daily basis.

  There is a psychological theory that tries to categorize behavior and personality into three: the Child, the Parent and the Adult. I am not really a specialist (I feel that the word "psychological" is an oxymoron), but in short you get the Child, who feels things and acts on impulse and pleasure and is creative, the Parent, who respects and enforces rituals that hold society together and free individuals from trivial decisions, and the Adult, who tries to do the best to mediate between the other two states by striving towards an objective view of reality.

  The roots of Star Trek, from this point of view, are that of an Adult that sometimes leans towards Parent. The show examines our current beliefs by creating fictional situations where they are put to the test. Characters or even entire societies assume archetypal roles, child-like, parent-like, while the role of the heroic Federation crew is to mediate some sort of understanding between them. As any good sci-fi, it is meant to make people think for themselves.

  No other show makes this mission clearer than Star Trek Discovery, which failed miserably to be Star Trek because it pushed its agenda on the viewer, rather than letting them think for themselves and make their own choice. Star Trek has touched so many controversial subjects, usually without taking things too far, but occasionally doing a brilliant job to inspire introspection.

  For example the Borg, which were always "evil" in their attempt to circumvent individuality and absorb everything and everybody in their megaorganism. Yet, with characters such as Hugh and Seven of Nine, grey areas were explored, culminating, I believe, with the conflict between Seven and Janeway, when her individuality is returned to her, but then her choices to return to the Collective are rejected. I still believe that they could have done a deeper job here, but times being what they were and the show being American, they got pretty far as it is. Personally, I would make an entire show about humans and a Borg-like species only.

  Frustrated by rules and rituals (heh!), Seth McFarlane, a huge Star Trek fan, decided to stop begging people to let him do a Star Trek show and created his own, borrowing what he could from the original show and improving or changing things to escape the confines of copyright. The Orville was born, a show that is a must see for any Star Trek fan. And I have to admit that when I decided to write this post, I was planning to talk about the differences between shows such as Star Trek Next Generation (and DS9 and especially Voyager), which leans a little too much toward the Parent role, and The Orville, which does a pretty good job being an Adult. But then I've changed my mind.

  The reason why I've changed my mind is the story of Topa. If you have not watched The Orville yet, please do so because I am going to spoil it for you.

  OK, so Topa is the female child of a two males Moclan couple in a society that considers females a genetic aberration. When a female infant is born, they immediately change their sex to male and never tell the children they were born different. How apropos this subject is, a society of homosexual males forcefully trans-forming any female baby, analyzed from our current socio-political point of view. And they did a fantastic job... at the beginning.

  You see, the first part of the story is about the disagreement between one parent and the other about if they should obey the mandated custom of their home planet, even if they are on a Federation (sorry, Union) ship. You can guess which part the crew was leaning toward, yet they had to accept the decision of the people in the culture that child was born... which was to proceed with the transformation. A disappointment for our American minded future union of planets, but what an episode finale! And before that, the revelation that the most revered poet of the Moclan culture is actually a female living in secrecy and willing to reveal herself to "fight for the cause".

  The second part is when the femaleness of Topa surfaces and makes her feel she lives in the wrong body. Again a lot of politics and scandal and opinions back and forth. This time, the episode is less ambiguous and I think the writers were actually afraid to do it any other way. Or they were lazy. Because at the end they skirt the law and the agreements between species and they reveal to Topa that she was born a female and immediately revert her to a female state in the same episode. A lot of effort went into making the supportive parent look good and the reticent parent look bad.

  Finally (maybe) the episode I saw today, where the female poet, now leader of a colony of all female Moclans that are protected from their homeworld's wrath by a Union agreement, tries to coopt Topa to be part of the "resistance" and she, hero-pressured, accepts, then almost loses her life at the hands of the evil all male Moclan military. I applauded the way it exposed the hypocrisy of the female leader, using a child to further her agenda and also endangering the entire colony that she was responsible for. However, again I felt like the conflict was resolved too quickly and too swiftly towards what we would accept as agreeable: Topa escapes with her life, the entire Union rejects the Moclan way of life and even the conservative parent makes a comeback complete with a full reversal of his opinions. How is the Union going to keep itself together if they can't accept the local idiosyncrasies of member states?

  And here is where the Parent, Adult, Child analysis feels appropriate. Topa, the child who wants to do what she feels is right and damn the consequences, Klyden the parent who won't renounce his custom and beliefs regardless of who that hurts and Bortus, the other parent - with an entire interstellar Union to support him, who has to find an adult way forward in which harm is minimized.

  I feel like the first episode about Topa lifted Orville above Star Trek shows. I know, blasphemy! How can I discount the eternal greatness of Star Trek? Well, because I compare the whole thing with the Seven of Nine storyline, where the show quickly dismissed her desire to return to the Collective as childish and went full Parent Janeway on her, even working towards a Mother/Daughter dynamic between them to justify it all. The Orville episode looked at individual opinions, cultural clashes, diplomatic discourse, the feelings of everyone involved and made the brave choice to not give the audience what it hoped for. Thus, making them think about the whole thing. Now with the other two episodes, I feel like the writers succumbed to societal pressure to resolve the conflict the only way the viewers would accept. And pronto! Before they #metoo McFarlane! Or maybe that's just stupid and childish, I don't know. I just liked the first episode so much compared with the "classical" other two.

  I think the PAC (Parent-Adult-Child) model is pretty useful in dissecting these Star Trek-like situations. I find it inspiring that the Adult, which is something people supposedly should strive to achieve psychologically, cannot exist in a vacuum. Without Adults and Children, it has no direction, it's like an AI system without a value function, while the two other roles generate this direction from feeling and instinct (genetics) and experience and tradition (culture). Whenever the crew encounter an alien species and enter the inevitable conflict, they have to not only solve the problem, but also do it in a way that is objectively and morally better, while also catering to their often strong feelings about a subject. Fascinating!

  We must be aware of the attraction we people have for strong authoritative figures that "know what's best", just as we must be aware of how easy solutions that feel good in the moment may have disastrous consequences further down the line. In some way, accepting everything from Picard-like people is almost as dangerous as acting like Q all the time.

  Haven't you ever wondered what a show like Star Trek would be like if situations were actually dangerous, where tech solutions would not solve everything in minutes and the alternatives are run, negotiate, intimidate or attack? When meeting some backwater one planet civilization that sentences your people to death for stamping on a flower, instead of spending one hour to save them using some loophole in the local law system to just arm photon torpedoes and say "Choose a city. Any city. Preferably one that you won't need anymore." Or if phasers would be set on "cut through stone" whenever firing at an alien lunging towards the crew? Or using any and all technology one finds to increase the tactical advantages of your ship and navy?

  But that's the whole point! Star Trek is not about levelling up, is about finding yourself with just shitty options and still choosing the one that is most principled and logical for everyone involved. About examining one's preconceptions and reaching not a conclusion, but a point of decision where the viewer can spend some time and think. It's about good writing! Compare that with Kirk on a motorcycle and you realize what the roots of Star Trek are all about.

  I wanted to write a post about how Star Trek treats too many situations as a Parent, probably because it was created by people in the 60s and 70s, and is sometimes too eager to put characters in their place because family (yeah, The Fast and the Furious doesn't have a monopoly on that) and how The Orville is going above that. Then I realize that they are actually doing the same thing, most of the time, with Orville just freshening things up and having a little bit more courage when writing their stories. And I love it! 

  Happy Trekking!