What do you do if you want to make an anime that would be successful not only in Japan, but everywhere Netflix is watched? You take a bit of every successful anime and mix it all together. This is how you get the kingdom of Cremona, set somewhere in a nondescript time that has 1960's cars and cellphones and a nondescript place that looks like Europe, where experiments with the bones of god like creatures leads to superpowerful beings that are super crazy fast and shout Nipponisms with every opportunity: win and lose (in life, but seen as a game), protecting (someone, something, anything) just so your life makes some sense, "I will kill you with my own hands" and so on and so on, but also super smart detectives that figure things out, all for the sake of energetic, smart, cute and ultimately pointless much younger girls. But wait, there is more: there are crazy psychopaths that kill people and are super smart. There are arrogant evil people that have a lot of power, but are ultimately crazy, and which act as if everything and everybody is beneath them. And of course, all the fighting is done with magical swords and henchmen die quicker and with less talk than bosses, who are not particularly strong, but they just yap and yap and yap.

The anger that you see expressed in my review is related not so much to the mediocrity of the anime, but to the potential that it had. The animation is well done, the sets are good, the story is... ahem... workable. And yet they press every button that was ever pressed and add absolutely nothing new. B: The Beginning even has the gall to believe it will spawn sequels, so whatever else they had in mind they left it for later. I would say that's typical DragonBall Z, but that should apply to Saiyans not anime shows! You don't leave the good part for the end of the battle! You don't level up your writing only when you see that everybody is bored already.

Bottom line: the writing was the biggest flaw of this series: unimaginative and inconsistent, with tiresome dialogues and brutal switches of emotional context that made even the most motivated viewer break stride. The rest was always just good enough, with no evidence of any effort for reaching greatness. As mediocre as it can possibly be.

I found Being a Dog a bit misleading, as it is not so much about dogs as it is about smell in general. However, as a book about smell it's a concise and very interesting book. Alexandra Horowitz has a steady professional writing style and the information in the book is being related as anecdotes from her very thorough research.

From the very start the book acknowledges that dogs are not visual and auditory like humans are; instead their main sensory organ is their nose. As the author explores the world of smells, we understand more about us, dogs and how we sense the world in general. I liked many sections of Being a Dog, but I found the first part as most interesting. Mainly because it is about dogs :) There we find that the structure of the nose of dogs is as much responsible for their great sense of smell as is the immense number of sensory cells and dedicated brain neurons. Horowitz explains that dogs do not pass the so called "mirror test", but that is because they are not visual. If the experiment is constructed so that the mirror is olfactory, then they easily pass the test. It also tells us where the smelly glands on the dog are, including its paws. And indeed, I smelled my dog's paw and it was concentrated and nice. If you have a dog, smell their paws now!

That doesn't mean that the part about human smell was not captivating. I found myself smell things on the subway - that is a good thing - just because I felt inspired by what the author described. In conclusion, I recommend the book. It's a light read and it is the kind of work that makes us aware of a part of the world that is both near and ignored.

Unfortunately, being typical is not a good thing. All characters in A.I.C.O. Incarnation are manga clichés and the few interesting sci-fi ideas are obliterated by the lack of courage in showing body horror and the obvious gaps in logic. The most promising, yet underdelivered concept is that of consciousness and identity. What would happen if brains and bodies were swapped, changed, mingled, etc. This could have been great if each episode explored some way the "malignant matter" affected biology and consciousness, but in truth, less than half of an episode really approaches the idea.

In short, the story follows a group of "Divers" who go into a biological infested area in order to stop said infestation and save people. They have to battle amorphous blob like monsters and government officials and mad scientists to get to their goal. Obviously they are all young and rash and falling in love and trying to protect people and making honor bound promises and so on. It was so by the book that it became nauseating. I think a heavily cut video edit of the first and last two episodes would more than cover the entire series.

It is good that Netflix is paying for more anime adaptations, but this one is not that worthwhile. Still 29 to go, though :) Here is a trailer, if you are still interested:

[youtube:CCfYQnOLHV0]

Literally translating to "The town where only I am missing", Boku dake ga Inai Machi presents (what else?) a manga artist with no life or future who finds out he can transfer his consciousness in the past, fixing things that went wrong. Of course, the worse thing that ever happened to him was living through a killer's series of murders of some of his school classmates. Another traumatic experience makes him, now 29 years old, transfer his consciousness in the past, during his childhood years, and determined to find and stop the killer.

Now, this might not seem particularly captivating, only the solution for saving the children is not to investigate clues or stake out locations or alert adults, but using the tools a mere child has: making friends, being around the lonely people the killer seems to target. This has an impact on the man's life, but also on that of the people around. In the end, it's a call to end self alienation by connecting and doing good things to people close to you. The title is a metaphor to the impact a person has on their environment. What if you never were? Would things change? The English title - Erased - is the one licensed for the US market and has little to do with the plot.

The anime is nicely drawn, if not spectacular, the Japanisms are pretty common, the story is sort of predictable, so the only true positive thing about the show is the mood and moral. I can't recommend it to everybody, but I personally enjoyed it. It has just 12 episodes and so it's like 4 hours in total. Here is a trailer:

[youtube:75MF3Sap1J0]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

White Sands is a collection of essays that try hard to come together as a coherent book. Some are short travel anecdotes, examining places that are either too touristic to be anything or too artistic to be objective and needing a critical analysis from a cultured person like Geoff Dyer. I liked these the most, since they were both teaching something about places I probably will never visit and also showing the sarcastic internal thoughts of the author, complete with interesting references and in depth research. Well written, too.

Two chapters try to explore not just short visits to distant places, but places Dyer lived in, like Los Angeles. These are so packed with references and quotes and longer than the others and I almost didn't finish the book, short as it is. One chapter is about a mild brain stroke he had, almost robbing him of the thing he identifies with most: his brain. It is weirdly distant, like it happens to another person, as probably during those times he was either in complete shock or some kind of denial. I couldn't believe that neither he nor his wife recognized the medical signs of a stroke and chose to go for a coffee and a croissant before going to the hospital. Then again, he was probably listening to jazz while reading artsy books when I was watching Dr. House.

Bottom line: I recommended the book to a friend while reading the first chapters. I found it fresh, funny and intellectual in the same time. I wouldn't recommend the book now that I have finished it. As I was saying, it is hardly a book and more a collection of various things Geoff Dyer wrote during his life, different in style, scope and how much they interested me. It is not by any means a bad book, and probably people that enjoy a different sort of art and culture will love it, it just wasn't for me, in the end. Since the chapters are unrelated, one can take whatever part of it they enjoy most and discard the rest, though.