I have to say, although I found it hard to get started, I really enjoyed this book. It explores two quite different intelligent alien species, and their interactions with humans. One species (the Ilmataran) is much less advanced than us, the other (the Sholen) somewhat more so. Together with the setting of the story – in a liquid-water ocean below the mile-thick ice layer on a moon around a gas giant – the book sets out to explore the interactions between them. They are the characters, really, rather than the human participants, with the interactions between them driving the plot forward.
Of course, as with all good fiction, it’s all just a veneer over humanity and our predilections:
“While war for love is inspiring in legends and epic poems, we must be governed by cynical pragmatism.”
Or even:
“Well, yeah, but the Russian Navy didn’t order you to hide out in the ocean of Ilmatar waging war on a bunch of aliens.” Josef didn’t answer. “They did?” “Was given contingency plans,” said Josef at last.
At times the book was a little sparsely written – it tended towards the short, declarative, sentence. But this was in keeping with the characters (the different species) being presented, and as the plot developed, the whole thing was very successfully driven forward by this.
Overall, an interesting and well put together interaction between these different elements.
This book is a scream of rage at modern Western society. McGarvey manages to do this while acknowledging that the same society contains the seeds of the solution. He also sees very clearly the processes that create the problems.
Darren McGarvey was brought up on one of the most challenging estates outside Glasgow in the 1990s. Except that “brought up” is an exaggeration – better to say he survived an often personally dangerous childhood with an alcoholic and depressive mother, a father he fell out with, bullying an everyday fact of life, addiction to drugs, alcohol and fast food an everpresent reality. Behind this all, he contends, are the brutal battering from the stresses of extreme poverty.
He’s fairly unflinching in his views of the world – judging all by the standards he came to recognise as reality, from the highest to the low:
“People who are convicted of crimes very rarely think the law has been applied fairly to them. This is as true of serial killers as it is of petty thieves. Most people find it hard to accept even the most banal forms of legal responsibility. Think how indignant drivers get when they receive legitimate parking tickets or speeding fines. Everyone always has a good reason as to why they are the exception to a rule they are being subjected to and it’s very rare that a person holds their hands up and accepts culpability. Most people believe their circumstances are unique and that the rules shouldn’t apply.”
He holds no truck with the press, and their relentless middle-class approach to the world:
“On the day women were legally obliged to provide proof of their rape to claim benefit designed to ease the burden of in-work poverty on their children, the national news was dominated by a family who felt hard done by because they were fined £60 for taking their daughter to Florida. I’m not saying both parties do not have the right to feel equally aggrieved at their respective circumstances, but surely one deserves more prominence than the other in the public mind?”
or:
“Being underclass is to sit, day after day, and scroll through a news feed full of Guardian articles that are confirming things you knew were the case 20 years prior. ‘Study finds children living in dysfunction can’t learn’, ‘Experts say sugar is addictive’ or, my personal favourite, ‘Survey discovers the arts is dominated by middle class people’.”
His tough mindedness and his honesty are sometimes challenging, but I think he would say he doesn’t care – he’s trying to get a message across, and he does what he needs to do in order to ensure it sticks. Each chapter is part of a thread, telling a story to deliver his message. It certainly changed my views on what the lived experience is like today in Britain for many people:
“Much like the school curriculum, where your value is derived not only from your ability to think and reason but also from your willingness to submit to a process, the conversation about decision-making in your own community follows a similar pattern. You must engage within the parameters set by the people who are really in charge.”
I also came away better informed on the complexities and difficulties that lie behind the simplistic phrases and glib generalisations of those in the “poverty industry”, who often tacitly need the problems to continue to justify their roles and funding. However, McGarvey isn’t afraid also to challenge those in poverty themselves, encouraging them to take personal responsibility – if only because actually there are no “quick wins” coming from politicians or the third sector.
The slightly sketchy crew of a marginally run-down spacecraft find the floating wreckage of a 500-year old vessel, floating in trans-Neptunian space. It seems to be one of the Goldilocks ships, sent out from Old Earth to likely-looking planetary systems at sub-light speeds, to found new colonies as Old Earth crumbled behind them. Upon further investigation, the ship appears to contain some strange alien technology – as well as one remaining crew member, frozen in suspended animation for 500 years. So, they take on board the tech and the frozen crew member, and investigate both…. what could possibly go wrong??
I loved the style of writing from Tim Pratt – funny and interesting characters, imaginatively conceived, and a neat space-opera setting. Best for me was the witty dialogue between the characters. Hugely entertaining! I’d not come across his writing before, but I will definitely be hunting out more in the near future.
This book describes in some detail some of the paths of Dzogchen meditation, one of the traditional variants of Buddhist meditation. I’m an “intermediate” meditator: I’ve been meditating for several years, and have been on one silent retreat, but I’ve definitely still got a long way to go in my practice. In that quest, to improve my practice, I found the book definitely did help. It has a number of practical exercises with a clear progression, and the discussion – in the form of lots of question and answer sessions with the authors.
For me, the path was not complete, though. The initial stages were clear and well guided, but after that the way forward was more or less left as an exercise for the reader. I also found the use of the original Tibetan words for many of the terms to be of mixed value: it was sometimes hard to hold them all in your head, especially as they are used precisely because there are no directly equivalent terms in English, so you are having to hold a whole subtle set of meanings in your head, not just a direct translation.
Ultimately, though, no book about a subject that is so difficult to describe in concrete terms is going to solve your problems for you. It can be a guide book on your journey, and in that regard I found Roaring Silence to be useful, with a lot of the Q&A-style discussion in particular gave you metaphor and allusions which helped in my understanding.
This is a charming collection of real-life conversations between two people about what matters most in their life. Each chapter is a few pages long, distilling down a 45 minute conversation to its essence. All are stories of love, from the joy of newfound love to the happiness of a long life together, with the utter desolation of loss in the mix as well. Beautiful, and true.
Entertaining tour of some of the weird and wacky cults out there, laid out in the form of one of those “write your own adventure” books from my youth. By answering a series of questions, you will find the cult most “appropriate” for you – or that’s the joke. Each cult is described in a page or so, which clearly barely does justice to some of the odd-ball beliefs out there, but it’s enough to whet your appetite for further study, should you so choose.
Of course what you’ll likely end up doing is playing with your answers to see where they lead, to find the kind of cult that would suit a rifle-toting believer in satan and his ways who also likes heavy rock music, or whatever takes your fancy. And of course you could always do what I ended up doing, which is reading it all from the beginning.
All in all, a well-written series of brief accounts of the stranger fringes of our world, well worth making a present of to someone you know – so long as you get to play along as well.
This book is a clear and entertaining account of the long history of the attempts to provr four colour theorem – that any map on can be coloured with at most four colour, such that no countries with a common border have the same colour. Although there are lots of interesting characters and asides, this is not a book for the mathematically faint of heart: in order to understand the approach that finally proved the conjecture, Robin Wilson takes you pretty far into the dense woods. If you enjoy following along, and are prepared (as I was) to skim over the more complex parts, you will still come away with a good appreciation of how it happened. You will also perhaps understand why many mathematicians at the time were skeptical about the proof: it needed over 1000 hours of computer time to complete the proof, and the approach is too complex to check by hand. Does that count as a “proof”? Nowadays, when computers are routinely used by mathematicians to check their own work, people would have fewer doubts, but in the 1970s, many felt this to be a real issue.
Very intriguing idea, clearly thought through, with great examples
I loved the core idea here – that actually we don’t know our true motives for many of the things we do, and that our brains are in fact set up so that this ignorance is reinforced. There are some great examples, small and large, of habits (at one end) and entire economic or social institutions at the other end, that illustrated these points. A!though the authors seemed concerned that readers would find some of the examples hard to swallow and too hard to believe, I found them all entire too credible. So perhaps for me the book’s only failing was in not being hard hitting enough, rather than going too far. Overall though an excellent read, with many Kindle highlights created.
I was so looking forward to this, because, well, Neal Stephenson! And I loved the first half, being technology and space and clever people doing hard things to handle an epic crisis, until suddenly politics intrudes, and nearly ruins the whole thing. I mean I know this stuff exists, and does in practice rule the world (and every large firm I’ve ever worked in), but I wasn’t looking for that out of this book. Plus, I’m not sure NS is the right author to write it convincingly. Not enough layers to it, I felt. Anyway, then we skip forward along the timeline, and I liked that last third a bit more again, but this time I felt again NS was trying to write from an interesting sociological PoV, but didn’t quite convince me with the characters. So I liked it – a lot in many parts – but from NS, I was a little sad that it wasn’t AWESOME.
Is this a good book? I struggled mightily with this question for more or less the whole book.
Yes, it’s extremely well written, with Daniel Dennett’s usual clarity of expression and vivid explanatory style. It’s stuffed with great examples and interesting concepts – indeed, that’s the point of the whole book, to show us a bunch of thinking tools, and to offer some worked examples of them in practice.
On the other hand, I spent much of the book frustrated with it. With the pacing, perhaps, required by demonstrating a whole bunch of tools before getting to the meat of the matter. With ultimately the fairly light treatment of many interesting topics – as each was really only used as a worked example of the intuition pumps being enumerated, rather than as a primary subject. With the (for me) fairly well-trodden ground being covered.
So in the end it depends what you’re after. If you want a survey of the field, and a bunch of entertaining glimpses, and an introduction to a broad range of tools for thinking about this field and many others, then this is a good book. That’s what it sets out to be, and by those lights it does it well. If you are after a substantial meal exploring a few topics in depth, rather than a tasting menu covering many items (tasty and well presented though they may be), then you may feel somewhat like I did.
In the end, I give it four stars: by the lights of what it sets out to do, it achieves it well, and the journey – even for me – was on the whole an enjoyable one.
