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.

  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!

  I have no idea why I put Darius The Great Is Not Okay on my reading list. It's a short introspective book about a young Iranian-American boy going for the first time in Iran to meet his mother's family. It's coming of age, deals with clinical depression and it's pretty sweet. But that's about it.

  The guy is a Trekkie - The Next Generation no less - and peppers the book with references, so that was fun, but I guess if you are not most of them will fall flat. Funny enough, just before that I was reading a book about a Jewish girl, but I swear I chose the books at random.

  Anyway, I did enjoy the Persian culture references, which I think it's the best part. Darius himself is a rather dull character: young boy who believes people think badly of him and that he's not enough and then magically grows into a person because he gets some support and understanding from the Iranian part of his family and finally makes a friend. And no, there is no magic, this is a straight book, mostly autobiographical.

  Adib Khorram's writing is good, but almost like reporting. I didn't really feel as things flowed in a literary sense. I did enjoy it, but I can't recommend it, unless you're into this kind of stuff.

Intro

I am sure you have heard of Universal Basic Income (UBI), the idea that every citizen should receive a monthly payment, regardless of any employment, effort or role in society. For obvious reasons, it has its detractors, but also it represents a simple and equitable way of providing to even the poorest of us.

I don't want to get into UBI itself, there are a lot of smarter people debating it, but the discussions about it flare up every time new developments in automation happen. If people are replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots, then it's easier to imagine a post scarcity civilization where machines do the work and humans enjoy the rewards. Human nature, though, makes this hard to conceive.

But what if ubiquitous AI and robots logically lead to the same ultimate outcome regardless?

The shareholder market

In today's Western capitalism it's common to invest in shares or other financial instruments which abstract participation in wealth creation. Instead of creating your own business, working for one or partnering with someone for one, you just buy a piece of an existing business and you get to own a part of its future profits, if any. What does this sound like to you? There is a non-human entity - the business - that does the work and you - the human - enjoy the rewards.

Now imagine you have an AI that you run from home. You install it on your computer and you give it access, configure some skills, give it some money, then tell it to make more of it. You will own its future profits, if any. It's exactly the same thing.

With smart machines, what we now call "passive income" is the only type of income we will get to have.

AI capital

Running the hypothetical AI to generate profits makes you a shareholder in the AI. As long as you own a computing device and have the resources to run a truly intelligent AI on it, you don't have to work anymore.

You don't need to run the AI yourself, you can buy shares from the company that does run it, or you can split the ownership between multiple people. It then gets complicated when any of those people may be themselves artificial. It leads to an interconnected network of people and machines, ownership, control and work that has only one purpose: reduce human effort and maximize returns.

This is just UBI with a different name. Instead of society assigning everyone a piece of the pie, some other entity does it, an AI, a company, a corporation, a group, a relative, another machine, and so on. To me this is the logical, almost inevitable, outcome. Have you ever heard the proverb "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." ? Now imagine its corporate version: "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give a man a share of a fishing business, and it feeds him for a lifetime."

And yes, some people will have more and some people will have a lot less, but when the entire thing dwarfs human scale and understanding, it will not matter that much.

The end

I've written a lot more on this until I decided to delete it. But you can take this idea further for yourself. In a sense, eternal heaven feels almost inevitable, but at the same time there is nothing for people to do in it anymore - it's also hell. You will get tired of games, cyclical fashion and never ending sexual orgies soon enough. Disease, aging and maybe even death will lose all meaning. We will get worlds of our own where we can do anything we choose.

The funniest thing of all this is that the same mechanisms that make some people want to take control from you, own you, grab everything for themselves are the ones that will slow this process down. Maybe before we all get there, some asshole is going to blow it all up out of spite or incompetence. There will be people who will not get to control any resource generating machine and have no say in what happens. Their suffering will stain our legacy forever, give us another round of strong feeling, meaning and direction, but ultimately it will slightly slow down the final result.

Just like we toil today in thankless workplaces just to make ends meet, then get home to some animal that is ecstatic to see us and will make us smile and give us a sense of meaning, I think machines will take that role, leaving us the only remaining option: being the pet.

  I can't say anything really bad about The World That We Knew. The writing is very good, the characters interesting, but I couldn't find the will to continue reading the book. I may be retrying later, when the zeitgeist is different.

  One problem with the book is that is another story about Jews being oppressed by the evil German Nazis, and at this time I found difficult to separate that idea from the things happening right now. Rather than try to avoid resolving that internal conflict, I've decided to postpone.

  A rather more relevant problem is that... other than the presence of a golem, the story is hardly fantasy, at least up to the point where I stopped reading. One could just as well not make it fantasy and just write a regular historical fiction set in WWII.

  Bottom line: slight chance to try again much later.

  What a delightful dark Icelandic folklore inspired fantasy! If you liked the Arcane animated series, Shadows of the Short Days feels just like that. Young revolutionary young women who go too far, mad knowledge obsessed geeks who go too far, fascist governments with crazy magical steampunk SS corps going too far, and dark and depressing, as any good Nordic writing has to be. The writing of Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson is good, the world building really detailed, I loved it!

  One thing I didn't like was the info dump at the beginning of the book, a bit like the Irulan presentation in the beginning of Lynch's Dune film, which made me think it was also mandated from up high so that the book doesn't put off the normies. It introduces some sort of space colonization story that doesn't really fit with the rest of the book, for starters.

  Another thing that was hard to swallow were the characters. They were very well written, but all of them were selfish delusional assholes. Hard to truly root for any of them.

  But the story was amazing and I lapped it up. An alternate world Reykjavík where magic of two types is real, magical creatures are real and the human government oppresses everything not human, especially the halflings. One of the protagonists is one such halfling, a young woman determined to start a revolution for equality and freedom and ready to walk over corpses to achieve her goal. The second is a student of magic, expelled by the unimaginative authorities of the university, and willing to do anything to understand and tap into the source of magic. They attract the attention of the sadistic government magicians who will, of course, also do anything to achieve their goals.

  Needless to say, things don't really go great for anybody involved. In a world where you can drink or take drugs to alter your magical abilities, not even these sure way solutions to relax and chill the hell down can work.

  Bottom line: it was a very exciting book to read and I intend to continue the series, although not right now. It was actually taxing to live through it and the ending was quite satisfactory. Honestly, this doesn't need a continuation, even if I am glad there is one.

  I couldn't even get through the beginning. If you like the servant girl who becomes magically amazing while caught in some kind of love triangle trope, you're in luck: it's a pentagon! I however, don't like this kind of stuff and I really didn't like the writing style either.

  Bottom line: I DNFed Power of Five, by Alex Lidell. Couldn't find a website or wiki entry for her, either, which I assume means it was probably a good decision.

  The beginning of Gideon the Ninth is very exciting: a world of necromancers locked in apparent eternal decay, served by undead skeletons that just barely maintain the status quo. Powerful magicians living in crumbling crypts and eating slop. I honestly thought it was some subtle jibe regarding AI.

  However, this quickly turns into a completely different genre: an escape room/whodunnit that also reveals the scale of the "universe" is incredibly small. Something cataclysmic happened to people, if these are even people, and no one seems to be aware of it, locked in ridiculous feudal relationships in a tiny empire. What's going on?!

  Unfortunately, Tamsyn Muir doesn't really explain that at all, instead focusing on the sister-like rivalry between the main protagonists, with the obligatory lesbian romance undertones that are thankfully not explored, since it would have meant nothing in this particular story context.

  Bottom line: a really intriguing start, leading to an unexplainably shallow world with a plot that was frankly ridiculous in any setting. I liked the characters quite a lot, but the story was absurd. I liked reading it, but I will not continue the series and I can't recommend it.

  I was quite surprised that this fantasy story, heavily influenced by Chinese folklore, is actually not written by a Chinese author. While the structure is predictable, with vibes of Harry Potter, the premise and execution, as well as the context, are extremely intriguing and exciting. I intend to read the rest of the books!

  In Unsouled, a fertile valley is populated by various clans which live in a feudal equilibrium, where they are not at war, but they are eternal enemies. Families inside each clan vie against each other as well, trying to gain status within the clan. Magic is a thing and for every child a test is performed to determine what kind of soul they possess: Enforcers, Strikers, Rulers and Forgers, which will then determine their role in society. Extremely rarely, the test fails, relegating the tested to the status of Unsouled. Obviously, the main character is such a one.

  Will Wight does a wonderful job in creating the characters, their motivations, building the world and then expanding it to a ridiculous degree. I was immediately curious on what will happen and wanted to continue to read the series, which is what I intend to do. In this first book, the temporary stigma of being an Unsouled is being partially overcome, but without solving the underlying problem of having no training or usable skills. Also, really heavy stakes increase the motivation for the character to grow.

  If I were to criticize something, it's the cunning that the character demonstrates, which seems to belong solely to him. The rest of the people, including masters of magic and figures of authority, seem to be complete idiots most of the time, which diminishes the accomplishments of the hero. Overall, though, a really refreshing book.

  Will Jordan is the real name of Critical Drinker, a famous critic on YouTube that I enjoy watching, although not always agree with. So when I heard he was an author, too, I've decided to read his first book, Redemption, the first in a series of spy action novels starring Ryan Drake. Let's get into it, shall we?

  Well, nothing to say, really. It's a completely average spy action thing, the kind of novel you buy in an airport to read during the flight and never think about it again. Ryan Drake is an aging, almost retired CIA agent, he's recruited to save a mysterious woman from a Russian prison in order to solve a much bigger problem. Obviously, the woman is also incredibly competent, attractive and quick to become a love interest. Weird rivalries, old conflicts, twists and double crosses and international travel while targeted by everybody, they all feature in this classically conceived story.

  I can't say anything about the style of writing either. The beginning is filled with superfluous adjectives and adverbs, like every first book, but then the author finds his pace and starts writing like a human being, but nothing spectacular.

  The major criticism that I have is that the stakes, presented at the start and very real and exciting, have almost no impact on the rest of the book. The most interesting part of the story is relegated to a MacGuffin, only to focus on the very ordinary actions and emotions of the various characters. Also, while the book explains why some things that should have been impossible end up happening anyway, this gives away a lot of the final twists if you just bother to think it through. The overly optimistic ending has some internal contradictions that I won't go into because it would spoil the plot.

  It was easy to read and mildly entertaining. I am sure that Jordan will have done better in the next eight books in the series, but as it is, this first one doesn't motivate me to read them. Was briefly tempted to try out his latest book, Dark Harvest, which is a zombie action thriller, but when I started reading the reviews, seems to be kind of the same thing: cold war era stuff, gulf war era stuff, soldiers and action, romance between soldiers and doctors and a zombie virus related to the Dyatlov Pass, mostly as an afterthought.

  Bottom line: the author has his three act plot structure down, but then he has to write something that is actually exciting and original, which seems more difficult for him. This book in particular is his first, so forgive any amateurisms, but even if it were phenomenal, the story remains a classic spy thriller that ultimately means nothing.

  You know when you are trying to finish a book and you don't really enjoy it, but you feel you own it to the author to at least finish it before you review it? That's what Station Eternity was to me. And because of that feeling, I stopped reading anything for a few months. Which is a lot. Finally, I've decided it wasn't worth it and DNFed it.

  The premise is intriguing: a human apparently cursed to cause murders to happen around her and then be the one to solve the murder. Like an involuntary Jane Marple. So she just has to get away from people on an alien space station, home to all kinds of weird and interesting species. So what happens when a shuttle full of humans is approaching the station?

  The execution was terrible, for me at least. It's not that Mur Lafferty's style is bad, it's just that she focuses on ideas and details that I find absolutely uninteresting. There are some other books that gave me a similar vibe, where things happen in space during some major crisis, but the focus is not on the science or the conflict, but on the romantic interests and random feelings of the characters. This is not quite like as bad, but it's close.

  Bottom line:  I couldn't hate the book, but I couldn't like it either, so I just decided to read other stuff.

  P.S. I am a fan (although not a frequent consumer) of Escape Pod, Pseudopod and PodCastle, with which the author is/was affiliated. If that connection would have been relevant, I would have praised the book more, but obviously, that's not the case. Those podcasts are cool, though, and completely free!