Ogres is another standalone novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It can be simply summarized as "capitalist Spartacus". In a world of genetic masters and meek servants, a hero emerges. The point of this is not another YA story about rebellion, but a pretext to dissect the social and economic mechanisms that power our civilization. Spoiler alert: it's not good.

  The biggest problem with this novella is that it's written in second person, which felt rather annoying. You that, you this... maybe it was a writing experiment, but I did not enjoy it. But other than that it was a short "what if" story that hit a lot closer to home than one might think. In a very science fiction way, it may have predicted a near future that is coming our way. Shudder!

  The classic rebellion plot is simple: describe a world with demonstrable injustice, raise the hero among the people, have them win at the end. The trick is to make the world building just close enough to reality to be relatable, but far enough so you don't start thinking too much about the similarities. The point would be an emotional catharsis, not a philosophical awakening. Well, by those terms, Ogres is an extremely transgressive story.

  But enough of that, because I don't want to spoil it. I liked the story, I liked the reason for writing it, the plot was masterfully crafterd, I did not enjoy the second person writing style, but still totally worth reading.

  And Put Away Childish Things has been published in both standalone and part of an anthology of three novellas published as one book. In the story, Adrian Tchaikovsky plays around with Narnia tropes, but sneakily focuses on the internal struggles of the protagonist, thus dissecting our own psychology when getting held captive by stories.

  What if the children books your grandmother wrote were actually about a real place? And what if that place was not as childish and wonderful as described? And what if it would give meaning to your empty life anyway? These are the questions in the story.

  While not perfect, I liked this novella. It's easier to fall in love with a story when it's short and the exploration of this one has not overstayed its welcome, nor did it meander into side quests or redundant characters. Fun! 

  While I enjoyed the Adrian Tchaikovsky novels and series I've read, I think I like this kind of novellas the most. In Elder Race we get a deconstruction of royalty asking help from the powerful wizard against a demonic threat trope. But in fact, this is one of the human diaspora colonies and there is no magic, only science and people who have forgotten it, yet the focus is on the internal perspectives of the characters and how they look at the same event from completely different places.

  I was a little surprised to see that this is part of a series. It felt standalone and, if anything, it should have been considered part of the general universe of the forgotten human colonies (Children of Time) rather than a separate Elder Race series. Anyway, I don't think that it required a continuation. As it is, we see the wizard who is actually an observer from the second wave of human expansion being beseeched by the local princess (of a culture regressed from the first wave) against evil magical forces encroaching on the human settlements. The princess has to prove herself in front of her family and the scientist has his own demons while he is battling clinical depression. Being completely alone on the planet and waking up every couple of centuries certainly doesn't help.

  The things lost in translation between the princess and the scientist is what makes this book shine and to feel different from just another fantasy story told from a modern scientific perspective. It examines the deeper interaction between people, transcending the pure science fiction angle. Now I am reading another novella from the guy and it's similar, but deconstructing Narnia type tropes. While I enjoy following longer narratives, I feel that this kind of short explorations of ideas is where sci-fi really stands out. Good stuff!

  Let me tell you a story. The main character is a little boy, poor, abused, low in status. Maybe it's a girl or an office worker or a prostitute or a grizzled cop maybe a princess, it doesn't really matter. At some point or another, their situation changes dramatically. Depending on the genre, they may discover wonderous new worlds, or that they are secretly heirs of some kingdom, or descend into terror and madness. Sometimes they just struggle to survive or chase some McGuffin.

  No matter what happens in the end, the thrill of the story is highest during this stage, where the outcome is uncertain, the status quo has been obliterated and our hero realizes the world is not like they thought it was. Now, you need an outcome to finish the story, but in truth people care about that part only in the interest of closure. You want to know how it ends so you can start something else, perhaps.

  You may have recognized here the classic three act structure in writing, yet this post is not about writing, but about the part of this scenario that is often overlooked. Our character lived in a stable environment that they perceived as "reality". The second act deals with destroying that stability, while the third restores it, albeit in a different state than when the story started. However, from the standpoint of the hero, the original state is no longer real, supplanted by the new one which became the new "reality".

  In order for fiction to work, that reality has to be significantly more positive or negative in order to get that emotional reaction from the consumer, but in real (?) life, these jumps are smaller and less dramatic and they happen constantly. People may get to a point where they reflect on their youth and conclude that they didn't know what was true, while now they do and kind of regret it. The world seems not as good, free, beautiful, hopeful. People may feel they understand the ugly mechanisms underlying "reality", the unchanging, uncaring, Universe 25 rat rules. It's the grumpy old man cliché.

  But if you dig even deeper, the feeling one gets when reaching this apparent stage of enlightenment is the opposite of real. It just feels fake, pointless, mindless. It's that feeling described in The Matrix: You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. When change comes, upending everything, that's when you feel the most real, while desperately clinging to the belief that it is most definitely cannot be.

  It's an amygdala response, a ripple in the fabric of patterns that brains are designed to detect and construct. It's flight or fight. Your whole animal being is poised to answer a perceived threat. That is why, without external pressure, everything tends to settle into something ritualistic and stagnant societally, resistant to change. Yet, we are also designed to avoid boredom, almost above all else. Therein lies the conflict: it doesn't feel real unless it's challenging, threatening. Rational understanding of the way cogs turn in the machine doesn't make a dent in this.

  So here's my point: what if we trust our gut, so to speak, and define reality as the thing that makes us feel real? Objective reality is all good and well when we're doing science and engineering and perhaps economics, but it makes us miserable when applied to our own lives. I am not saying to go to the extreme and reject what's right under your nose - I have the unfortunate opportunity to know people who do that and it is not pretty, but to see what's there and reject its power over us. Yes, the world is shit, but my life isn't. Objective reality is grey and drab, but I will focus on the dream instead. That kind of thing.

  Does it sound like I am selling you one of those self-help inspirational leaflets? I hope it's not that. I am just saying that Calhoun's mice might have thrived if they only imagined a world outside their universe. Totally not there, but worth it. This is not one of those YA concepts where the emotional youths rebel against the establishment, it's an yes, and... kind of idea, while we improvise our path through life. It's La vita è bella, not Sucker Punch and I hope you understand the difference.

  I am writing this while I struggle with my own feelings of unreality about real life. My intellectual brain is trying desperately to make sense of things, while my emotional side is trying to filter out the explanations that don't feel good. Needless to say, that is not working well, and it makes me get that ugly sensation that I've been living in a bubble which once burst exposed "the real world", which is mean and pointless, perhaps inescapable. But what if I choose to accept the world as it is, while at the same time reject that it deserves the crown of "real" or maybe "enough"? What if repeated exposure to events doesn't lead to learning and adaptation, but to an illusory truth efect? We need that fantastical element, that baseless hope, the dreaming, to complete our perception in generating true reality.

  In fact, I have been hearing this a lot more often - which will become ironic after I finish the phrase, but bear with me: once people are exposed to physical face to face experiences they realize the anxiety, outrage and fear they have been constantly feeling was a repeated exposure effect from media. They then conclude that those feelings were not "real". I argue that they could be more real than what could be (somehow?!) objectively determined. I believe we hold more than one reality, depending on the different contexts in our lives, and the importance we assign to each is something that belongs to us. Han Solo shot first, there are four lights, Santa brings presents on Christmas and there is such a thing as work/life balance. All of these things are real because they feel real.

  After writing all this, I see reality as the ground. You can't deny it's there - you're standing on it, but it's your choice what you imagine built on it. That may be the only true choice, the direction of your dreams.

  I thought I would try something else. Since I liked Blood Song, the first book in the Raven's Shadow series, I went with another Anthony Ryan book, but from another series (Covenant of Steel). This allows me to understand the writer more and pick and choose which series I want to continue with.

  And the verdict is that I liked the main character in The Pariah more, but I liked the story less. Still a good book which I recommend, but the writing patterns that were merely surprising in Blood Song veered towards annoying when also used in a completely different series. And by that I mean the foreshadowing of things to come - which are slight spoilers most of the time - and the obsession with fate or prophecy, both reducing the agency of the main character tremendously. Add to that the levelling up of the character from uneducated to scribe in a merely four years, while also working in a mine, and it gets old fast.

  The story revolves around this kid who is part of a band of outlaws. He is fiercely loyal to the band leader, infatuated with the leader's girl and, other than happily killing for his guy, a pretty smart and decent human being. Yeah, don't overthink it. Stuff happens and he embarks on a journey of adventures in a medieval world with just the right amount of occult and magic to make it not feel like simple historical fiction.

  I was saying that I liked the character best in this book because he is a little more gray than the absolute moral powerhouse that was the lead in Raven's Shadow. Just slightly so, as most of the book we still get the principled moral choice every damn time, but enough to make him feel more real. Other than that: incredibly beautiful women who don't seem to need any sex, medieval battles and politics, heroes and villains, lots of mud and horses and running and planning and the promise of another epic saga of unbridled heroism.

  Bottom line: Good book, interesting setting, good characters, but a story formula that only feels fresh the first time you consume it. It would have benefited from less fate determinism and more moral gray areas. Even the character admits, in situations of very consequential choices, that he didn't have real options because of who he is. Feels like Ryan should listen more to that complaint from his own character!

  Finally, a great fantasy book! A traditional hero that comes from hardship and overcomes through skill and good reasoning, plus a dash of magic that doesn't overwhelm the overall story. Job well done, Mr. Anthony Ryan!

  The only complaint I have is that Blood Song is long, yet still just a slice of the overall story. People already are accustomed to endless magical worlds extending dozens of books, but sometimes it's just nice to have a standalone once in a while, you know. Yet, at least for this story, I get it. The author was a full time researcher and has a degree in Medieval History. There is much attention to detail in the world building and the way society works, the kingdoms, the characters, so to just waste it all on just one book would have been insane.

  So, on to the story: in a country where "the Faith" is all powerful to the forceful exclusion of any other religion, of which there are many, a young boy whose mother just died is left by his father in the service of "the Order". Well, Ryan is nothing if not a poet... Anyway, it's basically a dad sending his grieving son to military school, only also in the service of the Faith and in an adapt or die kind of situation. What a dick, right? Our protagonist thinks so, too, but he is dutiful, intelligent and hard working, so he eventually gets to shine.

  I love this kind of characters: surviving through action and thought, rather than luck, overcoming hardships and thus evolving as a person, rather than just increasing in power level or whatever. Also, no one tries to deconstruct anything or pander to any kind of audience. Vaelin Al Sorna is a classical male hero, well written and well balanced.

  Now, that's just the beginning, because a combination of adventures, foreshadowing and even prophecies let us know in no uncertain terms that he will have a sad but greatly consequential life. And even if he gets through a lot in this book, there are five novels in total and at least as many novellas set in this world.

  Yet, the characters are compelling, the subjects mature, the story captivating and the writing delightful without being too pompous or complicated. This was a near perfect book for me and I expect I will be reading the rest of the series, too, sooner or later.

  Penric's Demon is the first book in the World of the Five Gods series, which spans four novels and eleven novellas, and it's a novella itself - although the same Wiki page saying this has a list of 19 stories, make of this what you will.

  Short, entertaining and with a main character that I immediately liked, there is no reason to not read this book, I think.

  You see, in this fantasy world, Lois McMaster Bujold describes five gods of which one is "The Bastard", responsible with demons and stuff. In fact, there are four "main" gods that each get a season associated with them and The Bastard is responsible for all things out of wack, or out of season, so to speak.

  So in this world there is the possibility to get possessed by a demon which is like a non physical entity that inhabits you, grows with you and also gives you power. A very interesting idea, in which the demon is actually shaped by the people it "rides". It's not so much parasitism as symbiosis.

  Penric is a nice young man going to his wedding, only to accidentally get a demon. Only the demon is not that bad and Penric has not been trained/brainwashed into the religion of the Bastard so that he would not know how to interact with his new companion. It's more of a setup book, as it doesn't span many events, just a short introduction into a world that will become much larger in time.

  I don't know if I am going to try the entire series any time soon, but I might. I really enjoyed Penric's Demon.

  The Rook starts intriguingly with an amnesiac woman with strange powers who receives information in the form of letters from herself written before she lost her memory. And I've read that part, which was decently written, until I realized that I knew the story. They made a TV show out of it, which I did not enjoy.

  You see, from the great start it veers rapidly into a "secret paranormal government organization" thing, which is one of the most boring fantasy genres ever. But it's worse, since the woman is an agent of this organization and she has to hide that she lost her memory. So we're inside the organization in all of its pompous bureaucratic splendor instead of the more appealing side of the genre where the protagonist is trying to evade them without knowing too much of the group.

  Therefore, I stopped reading. I can't comment on the quality of the book or on Daniel O'Malley's writing after only a chapter, so I will leave it at that.

  Spellslinger is a typical fantasy hero journey story, well written and pretty fun. I liked and disliked in equal measure how Sebastien de Castell was edging the typical YA clueless but full of heart hero, alternating between making him incredibly smart and lucky and really dumb and miserable. But in the end it boiled down to the same formula.

  The plot reminded me of a book I've read recently: Unsouled by Will Wight. There is a country where magical power determines social hierarchy and our hero is one smart and crafty guy who, for some reason, can't magic. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much alike these two books are. I won't compare them beat by beat here, as that would mean spoilers, but they contain really similar ideas.

  And while the hero eventually learns some really soul crushing things, it feels weird to have a hero that pulls through every hardship, protects his friends, sacrifices for the motherland and so on, only to be put down by exposition. It was fun stuff and if you're looking for an entertaining light YA fantasy series, you could do a lot worse than with Spellslinger.

  I won't continue the series, but I liked the book and the world.

  Embers of War is a light little space adventure that feels both strangely anachronistic and written by a woman - even if Gareth L. Powell is very much male. Dog/machine spaceships with their own emotions and personality, human and alien factions bumbling around in the universe like they own the place and the hint of something greater waiting to pounce, but the focus is mostly on the emotions of the various characters, most of them women, and their perspective on life, duty, responsibility and ultimately the fate of the universe. This either makes Powell a great writer that can inhabit the characters he creates or a very weird dude. Even the conflicts seem to be more about personal drama and psychological implications than actual important stakes.

  Anyway, the story revolves around a spaceship that was involved in something horrific and decided to resign her commission and, in order to atone, join an organization that specializes in space rescues. You see, in this future, the ships are run by hybrid organic and machine brains, with the organic part derived from dogs and humans, so they are kind of like persons who can do that. That in itself was a bit hard to swallow, especially in a book written in 2018. It really felt like something that has probably been written a long time ago and just now published.

  Another thing that pulled me out of the story was the first person perspective. I don't have an issue with that, normally, but in this case every chapter was written from the perspective of a different character and all of them in the first person. If I wasn't paying attention which chapter I started, I felt like something was really off, since the inner monologue of most characters - the main ones - all sounded the same, but happened to different people, which was jarring.

Final nail in the coffin, the focus was painfully exclusive on the humans, even if the ship had a little engineering alien that had its own little chapters, the other characters never spared it a thought. And all of the inner thoughts of this guy were "work, fix, sleep in my nest, that's what I do!". A little Dobby, but in space, while the humans were whining about how much they care about the crew and had completely forgotten he existed.

  That being said, it wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't great either. The ideas in it are intriguing, but by this point they feel a bit derivative. I am almost convinced that the following books in the series will find a different, better voice and the story will unfold in a more interesting way, but after reading this one book I am not motivated to continue reading the series.

  The Lemon is another DNF for me, but this time it wasn't because the book was bad. It was just too focused when I wanted to be entertained. It explores the world of famous people and the others who want to leech off of them, only the book starts with the death of the single character that I gave a damn about. Good writing, not what I needed now.

  S.E. Boyd writes (or rather write, since it's a virtual author manufactured by three Irish journalists) really well and it made me want to like the book, but after a while of just trying and failing to connect and care, I've decided to abandon the book.

  A famously iconic person dies, which makes friends, acquaintances and perfects strangers scramble to fight for the void. There are a lot of characters and sometimes it's hard to keep track of them unless you're paying attention. And most of them are really unpleasant or uninteresting. The only interesting guy in the book seems to be - intentionally so - the dead one, and no one of the vultures picking on the corpse of his fame realizes who he was, what he inspired in people and why he was so respected and liked. A book about hungry greedy blind people.

  Bottom line: reading this book probably requires some passing interest in the psychology of fame obsessed assholes, which I didn't have. But the Goodreads rating this has is much lower than what it deserves.

A few days ago I saw several bugs introduced by a well meaning dev who wanted to heed the UIEvent.which deprecation announcement and use the .key property instead. But even if .which is deprecated - that's actually untrue for every browser out there at the moment - the implementation of replacement properties is not fully supported.

First, there is the complication of the effect of the Shift key on the .key property. If you press Shift+3, then .which will be '3' and .key will be '#' and, for Shift-A, 'a' and 'A'. And that happens on a standard United States keyboard layout. For other layouts it's different. There is the concept of a Dead key, which you press on some keyboards to get a character with the press of another key, like adding an accent. In that case the .key property reads 'Dead'!

Second, the .key property is not always there. For example the Edge (and probably Chrome) code to autofill fields is simulating typing (with isTrusted true) without specifying a key. This may not even be a bug, considering that Autofill is not supposed to depend on a specific keyboard.

Then there is a .code property that is supposed to show the physical key that was pressed on the keyboard, but it's only fully implemented in Edge and Safari. And you don't get '1', but 'Digit1' and 'KeyA' instead of 'a' and even stuff like 'Comma'.

And there are other obsolete, deprecated or never fully implemented properties on events: charCode, keyCode, keyIdentifier and so on.

So be careful on how you handle key events. It's a mess.

  One of the things that I can observe nowadays as a 50 year old man is how spam has changed the world, but mostly the people. You see, when the Internet started it was just a random connection between people and sites and any part of that could be abused. It was customary to enter some site or another and be bombarded with flashing ads with shrill grotesque colors. Popup ads came later to great mis-effect. Email was just as unsafe, people having to publish their emails in strange obfuscated ways so that they are not scraped into spam lists. Spam was everywhere and people were not prepared.

  But people learn, so even lacking any real technical or legislative support against spam, the smart kids would train their own brains to detect and ignore spam. An almost The City and the City situation, if you will, where strident portions of your online experience were just automatically scrubbed from perception through training. It's the reason why I find it so hard to see big colorful buttons with icons on them, because my brain is looking for the useful link that says "Download" in text.

  Spam evolved as well, though. Today we are just as spammed as ever, but in more civilized and studied ways. The purpose, after all, is not to curb your enjoyment, but to make you spend your money or your attention. It's just that the latter are much more important for just about everybody but you than the quality of your experience. Emails send you legit subscription content that you can (maybe and with great effort) unsubscribe from. Sites pop up small joyous messages that nudge you to buy something only when you do an action like scroll the page or move to a section of the site. Legitimate looking alerts warn you about the danger you are in and how you could be helped by just spending a bit of money.

  So that leads me to today, when even the visual language of the internet has changed. Every action has to show a little reaction, a shading, a rotation, a spark, party poppers, shining stars, animated people and animals emoting to your every gesture. And it only gets worse from there.

  And I am asking myself: how do these sites survive? Surely people open them and their brain shouts SPAM!!! in panic and they close the site, right? Well, no. Apparently, people raised on this stuff got addicted to it. A "normal" site with text and images and links feels bland and uninspiring to them. They NEED the feedback and continuous stimulation. My youth spent in the wild early Internet has created imune responses that just fire up regularly today for things that younger generations feel its completely normal.

  I am not here to argue who is right and why, but just to note how this online experience - like any other experience - changes us without our conscious awareness, in directions that takes a lot of time and self reflection to even perceive. To paraphrase Trainspotting: We are colonised by spam. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy thing to be colonised by. No. What does that make us?

  The Witch and the Tsar started intriguing, with Baba Yaga being the protagonist of the story, but within one chapter it became obvious it was some kind of weird misandrist fantasy instead of a well rounded story. I won't read this.

  The Loop has almost everything that is good about young adult books, but also all of the bad.

  Ben Oliver starts with a somewhat silly idea, derivative from The Matrix, where people can be used as batteries, describes an endless prison of death row inmates that get to delay their sentence every now and then by accepting being guinea pigs for an extension of their life and controlled by a combination of heartless psychopaths and undefeatable technology. So far so good.

  Then he presents cardboard shallow characters that are inconsistent, dimwitted and bland and asks us to care about anything that happens to them. And of course this crap is part of a trilogy! He leaves literal (Chekov's?) weapons lying around and people too dumb to remember they were there to begin with. Ugh!

  As for the author, the only contact for a Ben Oliver I could find was a twitter account that has since been closed.

  When you dump every cliché of YA novels, then refuse to follow up with any of reason, adventure or empathetic characters, all you have is a flashy Apple TV like story, with a lot of form and no substance. I tried and tried to finish it reading it, but I gave up halfway. DNF this thing!