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

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

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

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

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

The Power started strong and then it fizzled. The idea is intriguing: what if women would suddenly get a power that would change the balance between sexes? Men have muscles, women have the power of electricity at their fingertips. The whole book is about the effect this would have on society and, as it was highly recommended by Margaret Atwood, I've decided to read it.

Unfortunately, Naomi Alderman is not going places with the idea. It takes a special kind of person to write a book about how the fate of the world would unfold, but not be able to describe even one meaningful relationship between men and women. And with that gaping absence comes a scenario that is pretty difficult to swallow. Having the power of electric eels, women in Saudi Arabia, Iran, African countries and most of all, dark Moldova, where the entire south of the country is just about caging, selling and using women, gang up together to overthrow the rule of man. Forget about simple and cheap solutions against electricity, forget about how no amount of electrical power could rival guns, tanks, gas or bombs, forget even about the terribly naïve view of a neighboring country (I am Romanian), but what about the fathers, husbands, sons of all those women?

In this book, once women get a taste of power, they immediately turn into electric monkeys, changing their culture, their beliefs and their entire identity in one fell swoop. They stay together in huge mobs, create countries for themselves and even consider killing all men except the ones they keep for breeding. There is little mention of families, men or any significant human response to such a policy. I couldn't help thinking of the Battlestar Galactica quote: "Slaves dream not of freedom, but of becoming masters".

You will probably think of another similar story, The Handmaid's Tale, but there is subtlety in that book. Women are not oppressed by men directly, but also by their fellow women who bought into the idea. The religious fervor touches all aspects of society, including family, commerce, politics. In The Power, it's like men exist for no other reason than to rape, beat and abuse women. The only good guys in the story believe women really should rule the world and that their time was long in coming.

So to summarize it all: this is a lazy book, filled with personal ideas about the world that bear little resemblance to reality, therefore difficult to follow with any interest. The writing is professional, but the characters are cardboard, single drive creatures, and rarely sympathetic. What would have been the most important part of the book: the relationships between men and women or inside families, is either absent, naïve or focused on power games. It has more in common with Planet of the Apes than to The Handmaid's Tale.

Update: And of course they made this into a series. I will try to watch it and see if it improves the story, but the first few minutes feel just as lazy and wishful thinking driven.

In Pieces is a nice read. It made me understand things about people and women in particular that I had no chance of knowing because, let's face it, all people lie about themselves and films lie about everything. Sally Field is both very honest (I mean the effort is palpable) and narrating her own version of the story of her life. Can you trust it? Can she trust it? Before you ask how did she remember what she did as a young woman when she wrote the book at 71, learn that she obsessively kept daily journals about her life. She kept reviews to her films, random pictures of her on the filming set or with her family, letters and so on. Funny enough, she never read the reviews until much later. I think that was wise. If this post were printed, she probably would keep it, too.

The book starts with Field's childhood, described as a continuation of the lives of her mother and grandmother, goes through her personal and work life until she is about 40, when she wins the Cannes Palme d'Or and the Oscar Academy award (her first) in the same year. I feel like she thought that was the peak of her life and the next twenty plus years (and a new marriage and a new son) are described in mere paragraphs. However the ending is very emotional as she tells the story of coming to terms with her emotional issues, going to a psychologist for the first time and finally talking frankly with her mom - at the age of 63! It's never too late - and ending with her mother's death.

I loved the way she explained how the different pieces of her soul worked, hence the name of the book. I usually say what I mean and even if I am plagued by many personalities of my own, when I am duplicitous I usually planned and made a huge effort to do it. It must be the same for most other men, I think, because in our discussions we often decry the seamless way in which women can become someone else entirely, hide and basically cheat when interacting with others. A 2015 study on 2000 people showed that women lie about two times more than men, but an overwhelming majority of lies were told in order to make someone feel better, to avoid trouble, or to make life simpler. However, in Field's bio I have finally understood that sometimes this is not voluntary, it is a defense mechanism, it is something you learn from childhood when you have to be the nice little girl and fit in and still face cruel reality. A person can be open and social while at the same time being shy and introverted. It's not somebody being duplicitous, it's someone exposing the part of themselves that they feel will fit in. Of course, that's her take on it, but I dug it.

Bottom line, I think it was a lovely and informative book, even if it described child sexual abuse, matter of factly sexual harassment in the film studios, dysfunctional relationships with men that needed sexy stooge caregivers, not partners, and psychological dissociation in order to survive through it all (and act brilliantly). This is the second actor autobiography I read, after Peter Coyote's (which I highly recommend), and I loved both of them. Perhaps this is a genre that appeals to me because actors are taught to connect to their emotions and to become different people while staying aware of their true core, and so their autobiographies are more detailed, more personal. I will read more of these.

The Ballad of Black Tom is yet another book inspired by Lovecraft and featuring racially abused people of color. But unlike Lovecraft Country, this is not funny or adventurous, it is just painful. LaValle creates a complex character, a black man who respects his musically talented father, but neither did he inherit his old man's gift, nor can he abide by the man's strict moral code. In a world where magic exists at the fringes of human perception, he dabbles with things he should not and suffers for it. Stricken by grief, he becomes Black Tom.

I thought the story started kind of slow, then went a bit too fast, then ended too abruptly. Victor LaValle made me fall in love with the character, only to finish the standalone book on a vague note. After reading several stories that I was hoping were not sagas or trilogies or whatever (and they were) I finally get to one that I wanted to continue and it doesn't.

Bottom line: good book, but the main character was better. He deserves more than this.

Wool Omnibus is the first novel in the Silo series, by Hugh Howey, and comprised of several short sequential stories that are connected to each other. It's a post apocalyptic book, where people are cooped up in a "silo" to survive a world that has become so toxic that only minutes outsides dissolves an air tight suit and then kills you. But what is really true?

For almost all shorts, the lead character is a female mechanic who is both a great problem solver with high technical skills and a woman, so the perfect character for the age. I found that she was a compelling character and so I could read the book in a day. There isn't much else to say outside what I already described. It's easy to read, easy to empathize, easy to forget right after. In truth, the most interesting of the short stories was the first, because of its twist. The rest is a classic hero's journey, complete with egomaniacal villains and Romeo and Juliet like romances.

Personally I enjoyed the book, but I don't feel so engaged as to continue reading the series. It's typical Young Adult, even if the young adult is 34 and a competent mechanic. The tale came close to a sympathetic villain, which is one of the main things in great storytelling, but in the end it settled with the classic rule abiding tyrant that has to be overthrown by empathetic heroes. Average pulp, I guess.

I didn't like Bird Box. Josh Malerman seems to be a good writer, but the way he chose a cliché as the main character just in order to skirt the explanation of what happened and avoid any actual attempts of problem solving annoyed the hell out of me.

Imagine a world that is suddenly invaded by something, nobody knows what, but just one glimpse of it would make anyone (including animals) intensely suicidal. The main character is a young woman, left pregnant by some guy she randomly met, who has to deal with this new situation. Whenever the character gets too close to actually thinking about a solution or talking to someone who could find one, she gets all emotional because... children. This is such an ugly and demeaning trope.

The action is not that intense either. Imagine some people worrying day and night because they can't open their eyes. Yes, you can't drive! The horror! In several years covered by the out of sequence chapters no one actually attempts to function as a blind person would. The author just dismisses the possibility that true life without eyes makes sense. Everyone is stumbling (blindly) and relying on their hearing by shouting "is anyone there? go away!". Unless this is a metaphor for US foreign policy stupidity, these ideas fell on deaf ears with me. Deaf, get it?

Anyway, there is a Netflix movie made after this book, I have no idea why. It is could be better than the book, but that isn't a high standard.

I thought The Psychopath Test was not extraordinarily well written, but I enjoyed it. Imagine Jon Ronson, a tiny overanxious journalist and writer, going around the world to discover who are these psychos, what are they and who made or declared them thus. At times he has to make a connection with people who have violently killed or tortured others and I feel like only Woody Allen would make these scenes justice. A movie adaptation has been announced in 2015, with Scarlett Johanson in the main role and written directed by someone I don't know. What role would that be, though? There are no lead female characters in the book, although there is a woman who was caught in a bomb blast and then had to defend she even existed to a bunch of asses.

Anyway, what threw me off a little was the article/blog style of writing (called gonzo). It's not bad, I just wasn't expecting it. It feels like Ronson wrote several articles, with some overlaps, then glued them together to paint a larger picture. The result is an image of various widths and with some holes in it rather than a smooth picture. It does feel more personal, though, and perhaps this is what it should have been all about: the journey of a writer, hence journalism.

The book is not large and it is easy to read. In it we learn how psychopaths behave, why they are different from the rest of us, who created the rules used to spot them and, coming full circle, wonder if any of it is real. I think it was informative, but there are probably a lot more things to be said on the subject. As a personal journey to discover the meaning of psychopathy, it's a good book.

Lovecraft Country is a collection of short stories that are all linked, with the last bringing them together. It's a very fresh and original take, shining a light on racism in America in the 1960s, but also bringing in bits of the Lovecraftian fantastic. And to Matt Ruff's credit, he does both very well, considering the abysmal record of people trying to adapt Lovecraft and also that he is a white New-Yorker.

The heroes of the book are a family of Negroes (their word for it) and while magic and curses and monsters and parallel dimensions are present, the only horrific elements of the story is how they are treated by the white population. Yet they stay positive and resilient and survive. Each short story focuses on one of the family members, sometimes two, but only in the end they all play a part. I found the character of Caleb Braithwaite compelling, too, a roguish and charming magician, very similar to Jack Nicholson's devil character from The Witches of Eastwick.

I recommend the book and I feel like I want Ruff to write more in this universe.

After I've read Barry's The Great Influenza I had resigned myself to never read a book as well researched, as interesting and as viscerally informative, so when I started reading Pandemic, by Sonia Shah I had low expectations. And the book blew me away!

While I did notice some factual errors along the way, stuff that was either insufficiently researched or used for dramatic purposes, Pandemic was amazingly good. And terribly disgusting. If Barry took the high road of celebrating the heroes in the fight against pathogens, Shah writes so that every chapter destroyed more and more of my fate in humanity. By the end of the book I was rooting for a disease that just comes and kills us all to spare us the embarrassment of being human.

I mean, the investigation starts with cholera and the undignified way in which it makes you involuntarily squirt every liquid you have until you look and feel like a desiccated corpse and if you don't die the chances are people will confuse you with a corpse and bury you alive. But then it got to the horrid conditions that existed before the 20th century even in New York, a place where the population density exceeded that of modern Tokyo five times and people would wallow in their own excrement thrown in the streets and infesting their water supply. Then it described an epidemic of cholera in such a hellish place; can't get any more disgusting, right?

But wait, then there is a chapter on corruption and how financial interests caused the death of thousands just so some people can build a bank corporation like JPMorgan Chase, the biggest US bank today, built on literally feeding shit to people until they died. Diseases not allowed to come into the public eye for the sake of tourism and all that crap. Can it get worse? Yes, because once the disease is there, the blame game is on. The cause of the disease is not germs, the blame is not on a corrupt medical or political system, the fault lies solely on dirty immigrants, gays, minorities and if all else fails, the aid workers that are trying to help, but probably brought the contagion themselves on some sinister agenda.

And then we get to the point where we learn our brilliant present is based just on the ignorance or indifference to present dangers or current super bug pandemics. After all the horror the book presents, the end result is but a whimper, business as usual, ineffective uninformed lethargic reactions to attacks that started decades ago and were completely ignored (pooh-poohed, to use Shah's expression, alarmingly suggestive of choleric excrement). The science is way better, the attitudes remain pre 19th century.

I feel like The Great Influenza, Pandemic and I Contain Multitudes are three books that need to be read together, like a pack. Followed or perhaps preceded by Sapiens. I know, these are all books I've recently read and there are probably hundreds more that could join a list based on topic, but to me all of these stories clicked like puzzle pieces and opened my eyes to a complete picture.

In conclusion, I highly recommend reading Pandemic. It's good for the people in the medical field, it's good for people that couldn't care less (they will after reading it), it's a must read.

I started to read the book in French, so as to remember the language from my high school years, but then got lazy and after a chapter read it in my native Romanian. The literal translation would be In the Forests of Siberia, but for some reason it was translated as The Consolations of the Forest in English. Either title is misleading, as the forests are not really relevant to the story and the whole thing is a personal journal of a French misanthrope who decided to spend six months alone on the shores of lake Baikal.

I am unfamiliar with the work of Sylvain Tesson, he is a journalist and a traveler and I couldn't compare this with other things he wrote, but judging by Goodreads' description of him, this must be his most famous book. Did I like it? I didn't dislike it. In itself is a daily journal and has very little literary value other than the metaphors Tesson uses to express his feelings. Some land true, some simply don't work. There are no detailed descriptions of the landscape either. The author does not paint with his words, he mostly whines. If there are people around, he will insult their nation and their presence in his thoughts, while being civil and hospitable to them; if there are no people around, he will complain about the nature of society, humanity, religion or state. Left alone for a while, though, he will start to be more positive, inspired by nature, but also by the books he devours and then annoyingly feels compelled to quote from.

Some of his emotions ring true, it makes the read compelling and generates thoughts of how the reader would feel or act in the author's stead. Some descriptions sound exactly like what most people, alone in the (proximity of the) woods would produce if their only company were liters of vodka. What I am trying to say is that the book is a journal written by an egotist, therefore describing only him. The beautiful lake, the woods, people, dogs, the wild bears or anything else are just props so we can all bask in his personality... which is pretty shitty. Just as a small example: in four months of journal he mentions his need of random women coming into his hut twice. He mentions he has a girlfriend once. After getting dumped via SMS he whines continuously about how he lost the love of his life which now has no meaning and only his two dogs (received as pups when he got there) helped him through it. After the six months pass, he just leaves the dogs there, proclaiming his love for them.

So, an informative book about how a random French writer asshole felt while living alone in the cold Russian wilderness, but little else. Apparently there is a 2016 movie made after the book. You might want to try that.

I've always had the nagging feeling that someone who writes well could do wonders with the Lovecraft "mythos". A lot have tried and most have failed miserably, because Lovecraft was weird and his horror feelings came from being really intolerant of almost anything, but I am still trying to read things inspired by the man in hope I would find something very good.

Unfortunately, Shoggoths in Bloom is one of the shortest stories in this collection of short stories by Elizabeth Bear, is only loosely based on Lovecraft's ideas and is not horror. In fact, none of the stories in the book were horror and some weren't even fantastical, but verged on personal or perhaps historical fantasy. The quality was inconsistent, with some shorts being nice and others a nightmare to finish. Funny thing is one of the stories I liked, Tideline, I had listened to before on the Escape Pod web site.

Bottom line, Bear seems to be an accomplished writer and her writing is good, but I wouldn't recommend this collection, from the standpoint of quality, but also because it uses a Lovecraft concept to sell something completely different.

In 2015 I was so happy to hear that Cory and Lori Cole, game designers for the Sierra Entertainment company, were doing games again, using Kickstarter to fund their work. Particularly I was happy that they were doing something very similar to Quest for Glory, which was one of my very favorite game series ever. Well, the game was finally released in the summer of 2018 and I just had to play it. Short conclusion: I had a lot of fun, but not everything was perfect.

The game is an adventure role playing game called Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption and it's about a small time thief who meets a mysterious bearded figure right after he successfully breaks into a house and steals, as per contract, a "lucky coin". The man gives him the opportunity to stop thieving and instead enroll into Hero University as a Rogue, rogues being a kind of politically correct thieves, taking from the rich and giving to the poor and all that. You spend the next 40-50 hours playing this kid in the strange university and finally getting to be a hero.

You have to understand that I was playing the Quest for Glory games, set in the same universe as Hero-U, when I was a kid. My love for the series does not reflect only the quality of the games, the humor, the nights without Internet where I had to figure out by myself how to solve a puzzle so that I could brag to my friends who were doing the same at the time, but the entire experience of discovery and wonder that was childhood. My memories of the Sierra games are no doubt a lot better than the games themselves and any attempt of doing something similar was doomed to harsh criticism. So, did the Coles destroy my childhood?

Nope. Hero U was full of puns and entertainment and rekindled the emotions I had playing QfG. I recommend it! But it won't get away from criticism, so here it is.

Update: I've finished the game again, going for the "epic" achievement called Perfect Prowler, which requires you don't kill anything. I recommend this as the start game because, if you think about it a bit, it's the easier way to finish the game. To not kill anything you need to sneak past enemies, meaning maxing your stealth. To defeat your enemies (which is also NOT the rogue way as taught at the university) you need to have all sorts of defenses, combat skills, magical weapons or runes, etc. By focusing on stealth you actually focus on the story, even if sometimes it is annoying to try to get past flying skulls for ten minutes, saving and reloading repeatedly, until your stealth is high enough. Some hints for people doing this:

1. Sleeping powder is your friend, as it instantly makes an enemy unresponsive and does not alert other enemies that are standing right next to them
2. Sleeping powder works on zombies, for some reason
3. Demolishing a wall with a Big Boom while guards are sleeping next to it does not hurt said guards, even better, they magically disappear letting you plunder the entire room
4. If someone else kills your enemy, you didn't kill anything :)
5. The achievement says you have to not kill things, you can attack them at your leisure as long as you flee or use some other methods to escape

Anyway, the second run made me even more respectful towards the creators of the game, as they thought of so many contingencies to allow you to not get stuck whatever style of play you have. And this on a game that had so many production issues. Congratulations, Transolar!

And now for the original analysis:

What is great about the game is that it makes you want to achieve as much as possible in a rather subtle way. It doesn't show you X points out of Y the way old Sierra games did, but it always hints of the possibility of doing more if you only "apply yourself". Yes, it feels very much like a school. And I liked it. What's wrong with me?

I liked the design of the game, although I wish there was a way to just open a door you often go through, rather than click on the door and then choose Open from the list of possible and useless options like Listen on the door or Look at the door. I liked that you had a lot of actions for the objects in the game, which made it costly to just explore every possible option, but also satisfying to find one that works in your favor.

And the game is big! A lot of decisions, a lot of characters and areas to explore, a lot of quests and a lot of puns. Although, in truth, even if I loved the QfG series for their puns, in Hero-U it feels like they tried a little bit too much. In fact, I will write a lot about what I didn't like, but those are general things that are easy to point out. The beautiful part is in the small details that are much harder to describe (and not spoil).

The biggest issue I had with the game was the time limits. The story takes the hero through a semester of 50 days at the university and he has to do as much as possible in that time. This was good. It makes for a challenge, it forces you to manage the time you have to choose one or the other of several options. You can't just train fighting skills for weeks and then start killing critters. However, each day has several other time limits, mainly breakfast/class, supper and sleep. You may be in the depths of the most difficult dungeon, took you hours to get there, if it's supper time, your "hero" will instantly find his way back so he can grab some grub. You don't have the option to skip meals or a night's sleep, which would have been great as an experience and very little effort in development, as he already has "tired", "hungry", "injured" and other states that influence his skills.

This takes me to the general issue of linearity of story. The best QfG games were wonderful because you had so many options of what you could do: you could explore, do optional side quests that had little or nothing to do with the main story, solve puzzles in a multitude of ways (since in those games you got to choose your class). Hero-U feels very linear to me: a lot of timed quests with areas that only open up after specific events that have nothing to do with you, the items you get at the store change to reflect the point in time you are in, a choice of girls and boys to flirt with, but really only one will easily respond to your attempts at romance, the only possible ending with variations so small as to make them irrelevant and so on. And many a time it is terribly frustrating to easily find a hidden door or secret passage, but be unable to do anything with it until "it's time". You carry these big bombs with you, but when you get to a blocked door you can't just demolish it. I already mentioned the many options you have to interact with random objects in the game, but the vast majority of them are useless and inconsistent. QfG had some of these issues, too, though.

An interesting concept are the elective classes, which are so easy to miss it's ridiculous. Do not miss the chance (as I did) to do science, magic or healing. It reminds me of QfG games you played as a fighter and then started them again as a mage or thief. The point is to take all your tests (and since you get the results a few days later) you need to know your stuff (i.e. read the text of the lectures and understand what the teachers are saying). Unfortunately, the classes don't do much to actually help you. Science gives you a lot of traps and explosives, healing gives you a lot of potions and pills and magic gives you sense magic and some runes. You can easily finish the game without any of them and it is always annoying to have to run from the end of your classes (at 14:00) and reach the elective classroom on another floor, having to dodge Terk and also considering that you might want to do work in the lock room, practice room, library, recreation room and reception, all in one hour (you have to get to the class by 15:00). And the elective eats two hours of your time, just in time for (the mandatory) dinner.

And then there is the plot itself. I had a hard time getting immersed in a story where young people learn at a university teachers know is infested with dangerous creatures that students fight, but do nothing to either stop or optimize the process. Instead, everybody knows about the secret passages, the areas, but pretend they do not. Students never party up to do a quest together. There are other classes in the university, not only Rogues learn there, but you never meet them. Each particular rogue student has a very personal reason to be in the university, which makes me feel it's amazing that the class has seven students; in other years there must have been a maximum of two. You get free food from all over the world, but you have to buy your own school supplies. There are two antagonists that really have absolutely no power over you, no back story, and you couldn't care less that they exist. Few of the characters in the game are sympathetic or even have believable motivations.

Bottom line: I remembered what it was like when I was a child playing these games and enjoyed a few days of great fun. I felt like the story could have had more work done so that we care about the characters more and have more ways to play the game. The limits often felt very artificial and interrupted me from being immersed in the fantastic world. It felt like a Quest for Glory game, but not the best ones.

It is worth remembering that this game is the first since the 1990s when the creators were working in Sierra Games. They overcame a lot of new hurdles and learned a lot to make Hero-U. The next installments or other games will surely go more smoothly both in terms of story and playability. I have a lot of trust in them.

Some notes:

• There is a Hero-U Student Handbook in PDF form.
• Time is very important. It pays to save, explore an area, reload and go directly where you need to go.
• Stealth is useful. There is an epic achievement to finish the game without killing anything. That feels a bit extreme, but it also shows that items and combat skills may be less relevant than expected.
• Exams are important: save and pass the exams so you can get elective classes. I felt like every part of the story was excessively linear except elective classes which you can even miss completely because you get no help with them from the teachers or the game mechanism.
• Some doors towards the end cannot be opened and are reserved for future installments of the series.
• You can lose a lot of time in the catacombs for no good reason. Don't be ashamed to create and use a map of the rooms.

I leave you with a gameplay video:

[youtube:i_4CHnKCJ40]

Skyward is Brandon Sanderson at his best... and worse. Yes, his best characters have always been young rebellious loud mouths with a penchant for over the top lines and punny jokes. And yes, this is a young adult novel with a classically clichéd plot. I feel guilty for liking it so much, but hey, it apparently works! Personally I feel it's a shame Sanderson spends a year writing a book and I finish it in two days, but at least he's not George R. R. Martin!

The whole idea revolves around this society of humans, driven underground by an alien force. They live on a planet surrounded by a sphere of debris few can get through and attacked periodically by alien fighter planes and bombers that the humans must repel in order to survive. And here is this heroic little girl who dreams of becoming a pilot fighter despite her father being universally despised for being a coward and leaving the field of battle. Determined to clear her and her father's name, she enrolls in a school for cadet fighters and discovers she has what it takes to protect her friends and save humankind.

Sounds familiar? It should, every story lately seems to be about the same character. Is it an interesting and engaging character? Yes. Is the world weird and familiar enough to be enjoyed? Yes. If this is all you need, you will love the book. And of course, it's the first book in a series. I need a little more, though, and I feel that the twists were terribly predictable and there were holes everywhere in the world building. If you only focus on the characters, as the author did, you enjoy the book. But as soon as you try to imagine yourself there, things start to make little sense and whatever you would do, it would not be what the characters in the book do. Plus... that fighter! Deus Ex Machina much?

Bottom line: lovely book to read in a few days and feel you are a reader, but the story is as standard as they come and the only nice thing about it is that Sanderson wrote it.

Intro

Visual Studio has a very interesting feature called Rule Sets. You basically create a file where you declare which warnings from analyzers will be ignored, displayed as info, warning or error. With the built in code analysis, but also with the help of a plethora of extensions and NuGet packages, this can be a very powerful tool. I am using VS2017 Professional for this post.

Create a rule set

Let's start with creating a new project (a .NET Framework console app) called Rulesets, which will create the standard Program.cs file and a solution for the project. Next, right click the solution in Solution Explorer and go to Add → New Item, go to the General category and select Code Analysis Rule Set. Name it whatever you want to name it, I will call it default.ruleset, then save it.



At this point you should be in a rule set editor, showing you a list of rules grouped by code analyzer id. Press F4 or go to the little wrench icon so that the Properties window is open, then give your ruleset a name (Default Rule Set) and save the file (ctrl-S).



You can create as many of these files and they will be saved in the Solution Items or as a file in a project (I recommend the former) and associate them to any number of projects. Let's assign the new rule set to our project: Go to the solution properties, select Common Properties → Code Analysis Settings, then select as many projects as you want in the list in the right. Then click on the little dropdown arrow an you should be prompted with a list of possible rules, including Default Rule Set. Select it.



Obviously, you can just choose a Microsoft included rule set instead, but those do not take into account your own extensions/packages.

Note: in order to start an incremental process, let's say starting with the minimum recommended settings from Microsoft and then adding stuff to it, use the Include element in a .ruleset file. The files coming by default with Visual Studio can be found at %ProgramFiles(x86)%/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Professional/Team Tools/Static Analysis Tools/Rule Sets. Example:

<Include Path="minimumrecommendedrules.ruleset" Action="Default" />

From the Visual Studio GUI you can click on the folder icon in the rule set editor top bar to include other sets and the wrench icon to open the settings.

This helps a lot with having small variations between your projects. For example a tests project might have different settings. Or the data access layer project might have auto generated files that don't respect your coding standards. You can just create a new ruleset that includes the default, then disables some of the rules, like mandatory class documentation.

Note that the rule set editor is not perfect. It will only show the rules as defined in the current file, ignoring the included sets. That is why if the default for a rule is None and you set it to Warning in your base set which you then include in another set where you set it back to None, it will not be saved correctly. Some manual checks are required to ensure correctness.

A list of analyzers

Now, I've noticed a list of possible extensions for Visual Studio that use this system. Here is a list of the ones I thought were good enough, free and useful.
Visual Studio extensions:

• Microsoft Code Analysis 2017 - Live code analysis rules and code fixes addressing API design, performance, security, and best practices for C# and Visual Basic.
• Security Code Scan - Detects various security vulnerability patterns: SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), XML eXternal Entity Injection (XXE), etc.
• MetricsAnalyzer - analyzer extension to check if you code follow metrics rules
• Moq.Analyzers - Visual Studio extension that helps to write unit tests using Moq mocking library by highlighting typical errors and suggesting quick fixes
• Code Cracker for C# - analyzer library for C# that uses Roslyn to produce refactorings, code analysis, and other niceties
• Visual Studio Intellicode - this is interesting in the sense that it uses AI to improve your code and intellisense
• Roslynator 2017 - A collection of 500+ analyzers, refactorings and fixes for C#, powered by Roslyn.
• SonarLint for Visual Studio 2017 - Roslyn based static code analysis: Find and instantly fix nasty bugs and code smells in C#, VB.Net, C, C++ and JS.
• clean-code-net - Set of C# Roslyn analyzers to improve code correctness
• CommentCop - Analyzes (mostly) xml comments and provides code fixes. Uses Roslyn C# code analyser.

NuGet packages:

• StyleCop.Analyzers - there is also a StyleCop extension, but weirdly it does not use the Rule Set system and you just run it manually and gives you warnings that you can control only through the extension configuration
• Public API Analyzer - An analyzer for packages with public APIs.
• UnityEngineAnalyzer - Roslyn Analyzer for Unity3D
• AsyncAwaitAnalyzer - A set of Roslyn Diagnostic Analyzers and Code Fixes for Async/Await Programming in C#.
• ef-perf-analyzer - EntityFramework Performance Analyzer
• Asyncify-CSharp - an analyzer and codefix that allows you to quickly update your code to use the Task Asynchronous Programming model.

The packages above are NuGets you install in your project. Just check out the list from NuGet: NuGet packages containing Analyzer. Many extensions also have a NuGet counterpart. It's your choice if you want to not bloat your Visual Studio and choose to install analyzers on a per project basis. There is one advantage more in using project packages: the analysis will pop up at build time and you can thus enforce not being able to compile without following the rules in the set.

Curating your rule sets

So you've learned how to choose a rule set for your projects, how to create your own, but what do you use them for? My suggestion is to work on a complete rule set (or sets) for your entire company and then you can just enforce a coding style without having to manually code review everything.

If you are like me, then you probably installed everything in that list above and then tried it on your project... and you got tens of thousands of warnings and errors. How do you curate a rule set without having to go through every single message? I see several ways of doing this.

The perfect project

Some people/companies have a flagship technical project that they are very proud of. It uses all the latest technologies, it is perfectly written, thoroughly code reviewed by all the members of the team. It can do no wrong. If you have such a project, just enable all possible rules, then disable all that make suggestions for change. In the end you will have a rule set enforcing your coding style, for better or worse.

Start from scratch

The other solution is to start with a new project, then review every message until you get none. Then start coding. An iterative process, for sure, one you will never finish, but it will be good enough after a while and it will also engage your team in technical discussions on how to improve their code, which can't possibly hurt.

Add analyzers one by one

Start with a rule set where all rules are disabled, then start reviewing them one by one, as you either chose to disable them or refactor your code. This solution may be the worse, because it gives excuses to just stop the process midway, but it might be the only one available. Anyway, try to install extensions and packages one by one, too.

Start from the coding standards

Perhaps you have a document describing the coding standards in your team. You might start from it, then look for the rules that enforce it. I think that this will only make you see how woefully inadequate your coding standards are, but it might work.

Other notes

I've had the situation where I created derived rulesets from the default one (using Include) and somehow they ended up with an absolute path for the default ruleset file. It might be an issue with how the editor saves the file.

By default, rules in the ruleset editor are grouped by analyzer ID, but multiple analyzers might manage the same rules, so always manage rules individually, else you will see that enabling or disabling an entire group will change other groups as well and you won't know where you started from.

The ruleset editor is not perfect. One very annoying issue is with ruleset inheritance (doesn't load the parent rules). One example is that you want to have a general ruleset that does NOT include an analyzer (let's say the XUnit one) and then you want something inheriting the base ruleset to DO include the XUnit analyzer. While you can do it by hand, the ruleset editor will not allow you to make these changes, as the original ruleset will have every XUnit rule disabled, but the editor for the unit test one will not know this. There are two solutions for this:

1. Have a very inclusive basic rule set, then remove rules from the others. This is not perfect, as there could be circular needs (one set has one rule and not the other, while the other has them the other way around)
2. Have a lot of basic rule sets, split on topic. Then manage every rule set that you need as just includes. This works in every situation, but requires you edit the used rulesets by hand. In the case above you could have a special DoNotUseXunitAnalyzers.ruleset, for example.
3. A third solution that I do not recommend is to never include anything, instead just copy paste the content of the basic ruleset in every inheriting one. While this works and allows the editor and whatever engine behind to work well, it would be a nightmare to maintain.

Conclusion

I've discussed how to define and control static code analysis in your Visual Studio projects. If nothing of what is available is up to your standards, Roslyn now allows making your own code analyzers in a very simple way. Using code analyzers (and refactorings) can improve productivity, engage the team in technical analysis of standards, enforce some coding standards and help you find hard to detect errors in your code.

Hope it helps.