Category Archives: Book Review – Fiction

The Novel Cure

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This is a unique way to share a reading list. Essentially, this book “prescribes” other books for a range of moods and perplexities. I haven’t read it but it would be fun to go through and see how many I have read, how many are on my list of too-many-books-to-read-before-I-die (I am middle aged but not yet terminal that I know of), and how many I do not think would be worth reading as I budget the hours of earthly reading time remaining to me.

The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You

The Novel Cure is a reminder of that power. To create this apothecary, the authors have trawled two thousand years of literature for novels that effectively promote happiness, health, and sanity, written by brilliant minds who knew what it meant to be human and wrote their life lessons into their fiction. Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you’ve been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life. Nervous about throwing a dinner party? Ali Smith’s There but for The will convince you that yours could never go that wrong. Whatever your condition, the prescription is simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals and in nice long chunks until you finish. Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will offer solace, showing that you’re not the first to experience these emotions. The Novel Cure is also peppered with useful lists and sidebars recommending the best novels to read when you’re stuck in traffic or can’t fall asleep, the most important novels to read during every decade of life, and many more.

let’s talk about It, kids, cell phones, etc.

I suppose this is my Halloween post. I had never read Stephen King’s novel It, I suppose because I saw snippets of the bad mini-series on TV in the 1990s and was turned off by it. But like literally everything I have read by King, I went into it not knowing what to expect and ended up thoroughly enjoying it. Sure, there are a few nasty gross parts. And what’s really disturbing about the novel is that it depicts violence against children. That is going to turn a lot of people off. But violence is never gratuitous in King’s books, there is always some moral order to his universe. And the monster in It is a supremely evil being with no redeeming features, and we know it is supremely evil with no redeeming features because it kills children. But the monster is not really the focus of the book. Like any King novel, and I’m thinking particularly of The Stand, he spends an enormous amount of time developing his characters and their back stories individually so we really get to know what they are thinking and feeling and how they got that way. Then he puts them together in various combinations and in various situations, and then he puts them all together and we get to see what they are thinking and feeling and how they react to each other. Maybe this is why most of the movies and series about his books suck, because movies and TV are not the right medium to tell the types of stories he tells. Anyway, I was a fan of The Stand, and It is even more interesting in some ways because we get to see the same characters, separately and together, as adults and children, and facing similar wacky situations separately and together as adults and children. So factor all this out mathematically and you can see how to get 1000+ pages of Stephen King!

A quick tangent: It has some lengthy passages describing the sewer and drainage systems of the town, which are intertwined and not supposed to be. And they have to be pumped out, which does in fact happen quite a bit in low-lying coastal areas. Since this is relevant to my particular profession, it’s just interesting to me that King had an understanding and interest in this at the time.

Anyway, one thing that surprises me is how different the kids in the story seem from my own kids today, and from my own childhood memories in the 1980s. The story, at least the part where the characters are children, takes place in the 1950s. Some kids in the story are pretty bad, with extremely violent bullying taking place. And some of the adults are pretty bad too. A few of them are brutalizing their own children, but they uniformly blame their own children when they are hurt by the bullies, and their kids are not honest with them as a result. They are also almost uniformly racist and antisemitic. All of which makes for a pretty complex and entertaining story, but was it really like this?

This all made me think a little bit about the idea of “free range kids” and whether I am being over-protective. The kids in the story were definitely free range kids, and they were at risk of death and injury a lot – from bullies, from cars, falling out of trees, drowning, etc. Sure, there is a fictional sewer monster stalking them in the story, but a few kids were going to die violently in this town monster or no monster. So Jonathan Haidt may tell me I am overprotective of my own children, but keeping them safe and healthy is my number one priority as a parent.

I’ve had an interesting experience over the last few years of simultaneously raising two children who are in elementary school and middle school, and also interacting with college students in their early 20s (I just turned 50 if anybody wants to know.) And one thing that strikes me is kids seem a bit kinder and gentler overall than they were even during my own childhood. Perhaps kids have become more “anxious” and lost their edge to survive in the wild as Jonathan Haidt claims (and demonstrates with hard evidence, which I don’t deny), but as a society we seem to have become less tolerant of the bullying in school children and the various forms of sexual coercion and assault that can go on around college age, not to mention outright racist and antisemitic behavior. As Haidt and others are demonstrating, there is some trend of bullying shifting from physical/in-person to online/electronic, and this seems to be disproportionately affecting girls, which I have observed with my own eyes in my children’s classes. Interestingly, I have not observed anything resembling the type of male playground bullying I experienced at times as a kid, although I have observed plenty of rough play leading to bumps and bruises and a little bit of blood here and there. Ironically, the one broken bone our family experienced occurred on one of the padded rubber playground surfaces Jonathan Haidt makes fun of in the interview I link to above. He says kids “can’t get hurt” on these surfaces. Well, they can if they fall just right in sort of a freakish upside-down way. I don’t blame myself or the playground designer, and I certainly won’t stop my kids from going back to that same playground.

The playground bullying I experienced as a kid was nothing on the order of what is depicted in It or Lord of the Flies (which Stephen King cites as an influence). But it must have been real. I am thinking of a few other books – particularly the Great Brain series I enjoyed reading in my own childhood, in which kids attempted to beat up other kids for being Mormons, and at least in the stories the Mormon protagonists learned how to “whip” the other kids soundly enough to be left alone. Charles Bukowksi’s Ham on Rye also comes to mind, in which there is some very disturbing violent assault behavior between school-age boys. And like It, adults are aware of it and choose to do nothing, or even partake in one disturbing case. I tend to think all these authors may have drawn on personal experience.

I’ll close here with a few facts and figures. Along with the rise of teenage depression and suicidal thoughts, particularly in girls, which Haidt and others have pointed out, there is a global rise in mortality specifically among teenagers and young adults, which bucks an overall trend of falling mortality among people of all ages. People at this age don’t die of disease (sure, a few do, but statistically I’m just saying this is a healthy age). They are dying of “injury, violence, suicide, road traffic accidents and substance abuse”. So these are the figurative evil clowns in the sewer stalking our children as they come of age.

Happy Halloween 2025! Watch out for evil sewer clowns, but seriously, watch out for reckless drivers and don’t be one yourself.

Charlie Stross on renewable energy

I always enjoy Charlie Stross‘s take on things. He’s a fiction writer, sure, but he seems to have his finger on the pulse of politics and technology, and from an international perspective. He says he is writing more escape fiction now because his past near-future dystopian writings have come true, and that is too depressing to write any more. I still love the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes series though. Anyway, his ideas below are consistent with some recent thoughts I’ve expressed that market incentives have actually shifted to favor renewable energy and electrification, but in the U.S. at least a massive onslaught of oil and gas industry propaganda is successfully keeping us from realizing what we are missing…

Renewables have definitively won: last year it became cheaper to buy and add new photovoltaic panels to the grid in India than it was to mine coal from existing mines to burn in existing power stations. China, with its pivot to electric vehicles, is decarbonizing fast enough to have already passed its net zero goals for 2030: we have probably already passed peak demand for oil. PV panels are not only dirt cheap by the recent standards of 2015: they’re still getting cheaper and they can be rolled out everywhere…

The oil and coal industries have tens of trillions of dollars of assets stranded underground, in the shape of fossil fuel deposits that are slightly too expensive to exploit commercially at this time. The historic bet was that these assets could be dug up and burned later, given that demand appeared to be a permanent feature of our industrial landscape. But demand is now falling, and sooner or late their owners are going to have to write off those assets because they’ve been overtaken by renewables.

Politics and propaganda can’t buck economic forces forever (because economic forces are ultimately, eventually constrained by our real physical universe). The question is how long these trends can take to play out. Charlie says he doesn’t expect to see it, and this is sad to me. I am one decade younger, and that makes my odds only a little bit better. Unlike Charlie, I am not an extremely talented writer making a gift of the contents of my brain to the entire world. Lately it has been making me sad when I learn that the author of a book or series I have enjoyed is dead. I find myself looking up what age they died and what they died from, and wondering what is going to come for me and when. Sad, I know. Such is the existential dread of late middle age.

don’t ruin Tolkien for me, assholes

I read the Lord of the Rings in approximately middle school (the late 1980s), and I am rereading it with my son now. It’s wonderful. Now, I think it is amazing that there are people called “Tolkien scholars”, and I am a fan of scholarship in general. But really, let’s not ruin Tolkien by overthinking it like this:

The Lord of the Rings seems immersed in racism (the superiority of the fair and noble elves, the inferiority of the brutish, mongrel orcs), colonialism and imperialism (the return of the king means the restoration of empire), and deeply retrograde sexism (with a core cast of characters that is overwhelmingly male). There is also a generalized suspicion of democracy, cities, modernization, progress, cultural relativism, and materialism in favor of monarchism, agrarianism, stasis, fantasies of good versus evil, and a traditionalism that at times borders on religious fundamentalism (Tolkien himself was a pre–Vatican II Catholic). The Lord of the Rings is a series obsessed with ruins, bloodlines, the divine right of aristocrats, and a sense of history as a tragic, endless fall from grace.

I don’t take it this way, actually. The world of the Lord of the Rings is a simpler world where there is a clear dichotomy between pure good and pure evil. I think this is what Tolkien wanted to explore – essentially the “why do bad things happen to good people” problem. The answer to this question was clear in Middle Earth – because there are evil supernatural beings out there who are the source of all bad things, there is a constant push and pull between good and evil, and sometimes evil gets the upper hand. (There is a supreme being or god in the Tolkien universe, who seems to have intentionally created good and evil, and there is some mystery as to why. Tolkien was religious and probably wanted to wrestle with this question in his own way.) Orcs and trolls are just evil minions created by these evil supernatural beings. It is their nature to be evil and they are not deserving of our sympathy. I think he was well aware that this sharp dividing line does not exist in our real world. In fact, among all the “races” he invented, it is the humans alone who seem ambiguous in terms of being capable of both good and evil. So this sounds like our real world. And at the end of the Lord of the Rings, and especially if you read the Silmarillion, Tolkien transitions from the fantasy world back to our real world.

Maybe I’ll get into the “fair” elves and comical Scottish dwarves at some point, because although I like the movies I don’t think the way these “races” are portrayed are true to the books, or at best they are just one possible interpretation.

The Tangerine Shitgibbon

Charlie Stross has a vivid imagination. Take the genocidal American police state in the last three novels of his Merchant Princes series. I don’t want to ruin the plot for you – let’s just say that in the last three (written in 2017-2021) of the nine-novel series the U.S. is an authoritarian state run by a genocidal maniac and using advanced surveillance technology based on cell phone tracking and facial recognition. You have to commit to reading thousands of pages to get to this point, but I highly recommend it. But it’s just fiction, right?

Now here is Stross’s blog post from April 7, 2025.

The same face recognition and IMSI tracking tech that allowed the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to track down a few thousand January 6 rioters is now better-developed, and when the generative AI bubble collapses (as seems to be already happening) there is going to be a lot of surplus data center capacity that the emergent dictatorship can deploy for crunching on that data set to identify protesters. There won’t be many trials (except possibly a handful of show trials and executions as red meat for the base if they run true to form for a dictatorship): the rule of law in the United States is already being undermined as rapidly as happened in the Third Reich, and rather than overloading the prison system they’ll just dig mass graves. (If you’re really lucky the response will be more restrained—but those marchers won’t be getting any social security checks or medicare, will be blacklisted by employers with government contracts, harassed by the police,and so on.) …

One final note: on April 20th (entirely coincidentally, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth) a point Department of Defense and Homeland Security report is due to recommend whether the 1807 Insurrection Act can be invoked, allowing the use of the Army and National Guard to crack down on “insurrectionists”, whoever they may be—effectively a declaration of martial law…Upshot: I think I was wrong as little as a week ago. The USA may very well be moving into a pre-revolutionary crisis within the next month, with an authoritarian administration seizing emergency powers and preparing to execute an increasingly violent crackdown on the public.

If you are a US citizen or resident you should be very cautious about what you say in the comments on this blog entry.

Well, if he is right I don’t need to get myself in trouble on his blog, I am probably already in plenty of trouble right here on this one so why not dig the hole a bit deeper right now?

Imaginatively paranoid or prescient, time will tell. The technological tools of tyranny have been here since the Russian czar/Nazis/Stalin/Stasi/J. Edgar Hoover started using file cabinets at least, and probably back to the Inquisition or earlier. We are seeing the surveillance take a sinister turn though with the tracking and scoring of people in Xinjiang, Palestine, Libya, and Syria recently. Why would we think the New Management in the U.S. would not be tracking and scoring people? This is basically just marketing technology, and was probably invented here. You can build a statistical model of every American and give score them based on how many dollars you think they are likely to spend on whatever widget you are selling. Then you can target the top 20%, 50%, or 80% with ads. Or, you can use the same logic and the same technology and start dropping bombs on these individuals and their extended families. So the technology has existed, although it seems to be getting more sinister and more accessible all the time. It is our liberal democratic institutions that are supposed to prevent the tools from being used for tyranny.

what’s new with “charter cities”?

The original idea advanced by Paul Romer has morphed into some weird unregulated cryptocurrency biotech thing in Honduras.

Prospera, if you haven’t come across it before, is a libertarian mini-state which is funded by crypto investors and tech oligarchs including Thiel and DOGE recruiter Marc Andreessen. Operating outside of Honduran law and run by a small council of venture capitalists and crypto libertarians who set their own laws and regulations, Prospera is under threat from the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, who wants to strip it of its special legal status…

Prospera is just one of a number of crypto-based, parallel institution states-within-states that tech oligarchs are trying to establish around the world. With Trump having embraced crypto libertarians as his ticket back to power, we should expect him to defend and advance their interests, not least because of their potential, as in the case of Prospera, to be the tip of the imperial spear in the developing world.

Biotech experiments off the coast of a central American country? What if they made a theme park with genetically-engineered dinosaurs? Somebody should really develop a book and movie franchise on this original idea! (Yes, once upon a time there was a book called Jurassic Park, and it was original.)

There is a William Gibson reference in this article to Freeside, a private city on a space station in Neuromancer.

And yours truly once attempted a not-very-good novella after attending a lecture by Paul Romer on his charter cities concept in Singapore, which embodies some aspects of the concept to begin with.

here come the agents

Who knows what combination of reality and sales pitch this really represents, but OpenAI is pushing the idea of AI agents, which I recently mused could be a big thing in 2025.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the technology world by surprise on Thursday with the release of Operator, his company’s first AI agent that can act autonomously on the web…

“This idea of delegating your ‘proof of personhood’ to an agent and letting it act on your behalf is actually super important,” he [not Altman, a different guy talking here] said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Instead of only allowing people you think are human [on your website], you will also allow AI agents that represent a real human…

World’s ID technology could also be used to license AI agents to act on your behalf, Sada said. In a recent blog post, the project notes that its proof of human tools will not only distinguish humans from bots, as they do today, but could help people control a network of AI agents online.

So there you have it. Humans are already interacting with AI agents. But soon, we will be able to authorize AI agents to interact with other AI agents on our behalf. But we will need good AI agents to try to protect us from bad AI agents and bad people doing bad things with AI agents. How will the average person be able to tell if their AI agent is good enough to protect us from AI agents controlled by much richer and powerful people, corporations, and government agencies? For that matter, my mind goes back to Charlie Stross’s Accelerando. I didn’t find it to be a particularly easy or entertaining read, but in that book AIs are able to incorporate themselves, which gives them most of the rights of people, which enables them to legally act in their own interest. Where is all this going to be even a year from now compared to today?

“Evolution, Morpheus. Evolution! Like The Dinosaur. Look Out That Window. You’ve Had Your Time. The Future Is OUR World, Morpheus. The Future Is OUR Time.”

“I’m Agent Johnson. This is Special Agent Johnson. No relation.”

science fiction (and fantasy-adjacent?) roundup

This is a roundup of science fiction (and possibly some fantasy – how did that sneak in?) I’ve read (or increasingly, listened to someone else read) in 2024 so far. I’ll go from what I least enjoyed to what I most enjoyed.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer – grand space opera. I really tried and just couldn’t get into the plot or characters after 100 pages or so. When I was younger I never gave up on a book. When a reader gets to middle age though, we begin to accept our mortality and occasionally set aside a book in favor of finding another one that is more worth our dwindling time on earth. This, for me, was one of those.

The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson – Also didn’t finish. I got this through the Libby app, and it was auto-returned before I could finish it, and there would be a very long wait to get back to it. It reminds me of Ralph Nader’s book Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us – it’s really informative non-fiction in fictional form, and that can sometimes be entertaining, but this just wasn’t for me. I doubt I’ll get back to it.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. More space opera with some Han Solo-esque swashbuckling space pirates. Entertaining enough, but if it is part of a series I somewhat doubt I will come back to it.

A Master of Djinn by Djeli Clark. Basically the superhero genre, which is not my favorite, only with genies and set in an alternate steampunk version of Victorian Egypt, which made it a bit more novel. Nothing cerebral here, light and fun.

Good Omens and American Gods by Neil Gaiman. These are two different books I am lumping together. These are not bad, something like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson for grownups. Completely readable.

Olympos by Dan Simmons – I might have talked about this before because I started the two-book series in 2023 and finished in 2024. Because Dan Simmons books are very long. But the man has a wild imagination and I do like Dan Simmons.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. A “fairy tale for grownups”, literally involving fairies. Short – a novella, or a novelette? I thoroughly enjoyed this one and it left me wanting more. Not necessarily wanting Neil Gaiman’s other books, which aren’t bad but this was a cut above.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. I resisted reading this for a long time because I love Ender’s Game and didn’t want to ruin it with a mediocre sequel. But this is an equally good book even though it is very different. It reminded me a bit more of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep series (which I love) than of Ender’s Game (which I also love, but reminds me, at least on the surface, of a Heinlein book, most obviously Starship Troopers). I recently learned from Wikipedia that the “Ender-verse” is much larger than I had imagined. I am tempted to read more, but once again hesitant to cheapen my memory of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead with sequels that might not be as good. Both of those books won many awards, while the rest of the series has not to my knowledge.

R.I.P., Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge died on March 20, 2024. I am not sure it is necessary for a person to have a “favorite author”, and I might not give the same answer every day, but if pressed I might come up with Vernor Vinge. I stumbled first across his essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era around the same time I stumbled across Bill Joy’s Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us and Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. At some point I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. These four works really expanded my imagination about the range of possibilities for the future of our species and civilization, and I recommend them to others.

These works also got me interested in science fiction not just as a form of entertainment, which it certainly is, but as a way to further expand my imagination. Some science fiction is painful to read, but the best science fiction expands your imagination painlessly as you are being entertained, and Vinge was just a fantastic storyteller, maybe even the best ever. I love Rainbow’s End as much for being a great novel as for opening my eyes to what augmented reality could mean as it begins to take hold. A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are two of my absolute favorite books, and Children of the Sky is also wonderful for everyone who loves A Fire Upon the Deep. Rest in peace, Vernor Vinge.

stuff I’ve read in 2023

This is just a grab bag. I’ve read two reasonably entertaining novels set in near futures where climate change is ravaging the world. Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock was the more entertaining of the two. Stephenson is a good storyteller and his books are easy to read. But obviously, read Snow Crash first if you never have.

I’m about half way through Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Like all Robinson’s books I have read so far, this one is less entertaining but he does a good job of world building. I feel like he is trying too hard to educate me though – sometimes if I want to be educated I will go read a non-fiction book, and if I want to be entertained I will turn to fiction. Books that lie somewhere in between can be irritating.

I’ve enjoyed two mystery/action series this year. The Jack Reacher series is great escape fiction about your basic middle aged white male hero type who is good with guns and fighting, and fighting with guns. I hate violence in real life but it is hard to write entertaining stories with zero violence, so there. I don’t think I ever want to see the movie because I enjoy the book character too much. I’ve also been enjoying the Bernie Gunther series. This one is is bit dark and morally complex as it deals with a detective/policeman hero type who happens to be an involuntary reluctant Nazi. But seriously, it is good and recommended.

Speaking of dark and morally complex, I read a couple books by Octavia Butler – Kindred and Parable of the Sower. She subjects her characters to niceties like murder, rape, and slavery, and I guess you get to find out what they are made of when they respond to these situations. She is a good character developer and storyteller though and worth a read, as long as you are not already depressed going into it.

I read Dan Simmons’ Ilium and Olympos series, which is about Greek Gods, transhumans, Greek Gods who may be transhumans, robots, Shakespeare, Proust, and robots who like Shakespeare and Proust. This is pretty crazy stuff and you have to really like Dan Simmons to like it. I am liking but not loving it. I guess I would read the Hyperion series first, if you have not read any Dan Simmons.

Actually what prompted this post was a post by Charlie Stross (contains spoilers) about his Laundry Files and New Management Series. I gobbled up the new one that came out this year, Season of Skulls, because I gobble up all his stuff as soon as I can. It’s exciting to hear Charlie mention in this post that he has plans to wrap up the Laundry Files series with two more books “because his publisher insists”. (Could George R.R. Martin sign on with this particular publisher?) If you haven’t read any of these, I would go all the way back to the beginning of the Laundry Files, and enjoy!