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This book follows Mahit, sent as ambassador from the small space station Lsel to a large empire, in order to investigate what happened to her predecessor and to try to prevent the Teixcalaanli Empire from inevitably absorbing that home station.

As you might expect, it's a story about empires (being terrible), but what I like about this book is that it gets at reasons why empires can be dangerously appealing apart from just raw power. Mahit simultaneously wants to protect her homeland but also wishes to be part of larger Teixcalaanli culture that is eating her own. But also, no matter how much poetry she's memorized, she will never truly be a part of this culture.

The reader quickly learns that Lsel secretly has machines that implant the memories of their predecessors, and has sent Mahit off with one of these devices. The extra internal perspective of Yskander commenting or just providing emotional memory on Mahit's experiences adds a fun additional layer to all of the events.

I love the politics; I love the writing; I love the characters. Highly recommended.

An entertaining book about the adventures of a man who ends up in England in a pocket universe with no memory of why he is there, with only the remains of a Frugal Wizard's Handbook to guide him.

As he gradually regains his memory, he gets involved in a quest to save the region from gangsters and an invasion, and learns more about himself and the world. Along the way, he makes some friends, shows off his powers (enhanced by technology from his own time) and discovers the truth about himself as his memory fully returns. But it is what he does from then on that will determine the future of the world he has landed in. And the world itself it not without some interesting features not found in our world.

The book contains interesting 'dramatic' illustrations and excerpts from the Handbook to guide the reader. It also an alternate quest in the marginalia involving a small wizard who also enters a pocket universe, only to alter it in unexpected ways.

An interesting story about the relationship between an introvert boy and a cat that can talk, and their adventures in saving books. And while saving the books, he (and the reader) will get a better appreciation about the power of books to affect the world.

At the start, the boy's grandfather, who owns a small bookshop, has passed away, leaving the boy feeling isolated and alone. The boy may have to close the bookshop, his comfort space, to stay with his relatives. But then a talking cat shows up, asking for his help to save books. Together, they journey to three labyrinths, where books are being imprisoned, mutilated and sold as commodities. Using his knowledge and love about books, the boy works to free the books and to convince the people in the labyrinth to love books for what they are, not for what the person can do to the books.

During the adventures, the boy gradually begins to open up and develops a friendship with a school classmate, who is concerned about him not showing up in school. The classmate, unexpectedly, then joins in his adventures.

But there is one more labyrinth, which the boy has to enter on his own. For it contains a formidable opponent with a strong opinion about books. And it would need all the boy's love, and thoughts, about books to change the opponent's opinion about the power of books and what books can do.

In the end, the adventures will convince the boy to open up to the world and to keep the bookshop open; for there will always be a need for books. As for the cat, it will move on to other adventures.

An average issue with some interesting stories by Tia Tashiro, Fiona Moore, Gary Kloster and Bam Bruin

• "Missing Helen" by Tia Tashiro: an interesting story about a man who divorces his wife and then decides to marry her younger clone. The rest of the story tells the story of why the woman allowed a clone of herself to be made and what happens when she decides to meet her clone and the effects it has on them and the man.

• "The Walled Garden" by Fiona Moore: after the collapse of civilisation, a community find that they are running out of plastic sheets used to keep their gardens warm. One person comes up with an idea on how to grow food despite the colder conditions, but it would need her former security robot, now turned helper, to show her an extra step that would help with the gardening.

• "Welcome to Kearney" by Gary Kloster: an artificial being in the form of an otter appears at a reservation that preserves the past. The solitary keeper of the reservation repairs it, and learns it considers itself sentient. While trying to learn more about its past, he finds it avoiding him, but it is only when a scavenging robot tries to reclaim it does he learn why the sentient being ran away, and why it can't stay with him.

• "Serpent Carriers" by K.A. Teryna, translated by Alex Shvartsman: starting off as tales told around a campfire, the stories would turn out to involve one person at the fire, who left a fungal farm where she was a captive, only now possibly made a captive of another form of farm involving Words that may be woven into DNA.

• "Bits and Pieces on This Floor" by Eric Del Carlo: on a world about to be abandoned, one person goes in search of a related person, to discover that one skill had been passed on by their relative.

• "A Land Called Folly" by Amal Singh: a boy journeys to other worlds that involves teleportation that the boy feels turns you into a different person. But when the time comes for him to return home, he learns that teleportation might not change the person.

• "Hunter Harvester" by Bam Bruin: on an alien world, some colonist harvest alien 'lettuce' for nourishment. The lettuce fields are occasionally protected by aliens. But it is only when they retrieve the latest harvest, which includes an especially large lettuce, do they realise what they are harvesting.

You may get the impression from the title of the book that this is going to be one of those usual books that has Apple as the center of the early computer universe and yet another story about how the singular genius of Steve Jobs (and maybe Steve Wozniak gets a mention) single handedly created the personal computer industry. You would be 100% wrong. This book is about looking at the birth and early growth of the personal computer market from a different lens, one that doesn't center it around the humble beginnings by some boy tech genius (or geniuses) who self started with nothing more than coffee money in their pocket but saw the foregone conclusion that computers would be everywhere and took a chance. It instead explores the societal, cultural, and financial mileau around which many of these upstarts were growing out of. It explores how the personal computer's supposed inevitability was very much not that. It was a lot of trial and error and effort by lots of people and organizations to capitalize on the socioeconomic anxieties of the time with this new technological savior made ever more practical and real as the technology became more powerful.

Why the title then? First, it's not meant to be an encyclopedia but exploring a through line of a multi-decade birth of an industry. The Apple II's sweet spot was right in the middle of it was a pretty stable platform from 1977 to 1987. In the middle of that period it was the platform with the largest installed software base because of it. Because of some of its technological advances in the early part of the error it was also the early trail blazer in the microcomputer living up more to the vision of what it could be being presented by the industry. So it allowed an insight into the industry and its changes in a unique way. The book is actually only partly about the Apple II. The other part is on the burgeoning software industry of that era as well covering major facets of the industry from the business side (VisiCalc) to home software (Print Shop) to games (Snooper Troopers).

As someone who bought into the bootstrapped hero myth of the early computer industry put out by MSM and pop culture I have long since soured on the notion. Having an exploration of the counter-narrative was refreshing. It was in some places overwrought in how it pointed out privilege points of many of these early computer pioneer's history, many being straight white men who just so happened to have unusual access to very expensive and hard to come by computer resources, but it was a handful of places of style issues not issues with the overall point. The same can be true in their popping the "I'm just doing this to change the world" narrative we are constantly fed with pointing out how this was substantially about making a lot of money as well. It's good to recognize their greenwashing away of the profit motive for what it was but again it was done in some points in a bit heavy handed way. These instances are pretty few and far between though so doesn't detract from the book over all and, again, it is a bit of a stylistic issue not a fallacy of the underlying point.

As someone who has read countless books and articles on computer history much of the history was not new to me at all, neither was the stripping away of the mythology around the titans covered in the book. What I enjoyed even more than the book presenting the counter-narrative in a way approachable to people with more casual interest in the topic was the exploration of the history of programs I never explored before. I never knew about the history of The Print Shop or Snooper Troopers. I never even heard of the latter even. As someone that not only likes history but has had a career in software development and entrepreneurship I love reading project development history and company origin stories, especially when it is a more grounded exploration of it.

Brandon Sanderson is one of my favourite authors, so I didn't even bother reading the back of the book before starting this novel. There I was, on the first page, stunned that I was reading an amnesia story. Red flags were going off; this is one of my most hated tropes. Several hours later, I'm here expressing my disbelief that I actually enjoyed an amnesia story. Apparently this is considered the 'White Room' story style: where the narrator has to figure out who they are along with the reader. Keeping the reader in the dark is the critical difference, and what a difference it is!

In order to avoid spoilers, I'll simply expresss how well done the amnesia story element was. It drove character growth in a meaningful capacity while also avoiding irritating resolution mechanisms. All the downsides of the trope were avoided, and the fragments of the titular Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England guidebook was a clever way to introduce worldbuilding to both narrator and reader. The first-person POV was critical in pulling this off. I liked the main character's personality, as a blend of sarcasm and self-deprecation that was both funny and gave us an underdog we could root for.

Perhaps it was the title of the novel that made me assume everything would be tongue-in-cheek, but the accuracy of the historical fiction in this novel surprised me. It's lucky that I had dived into realistic Arthurian legends recently! The Celtic and Anglo-Saxon culture is really well-represented, and I further appreciate the main character calling out that just because he's from the future, doesn't mean the people of the past are dumber. I loved the representation as culture shock; something that's difficult to write because it requires us to recognition things we didn't realize existed.

The story skips a lot of Sanderson traits though: there's no magic system, it's not set in the Cosmere, and it's not even building up a trilogy! Despite all that, this is a tremendously enjoyable one-shot. It's imaginative, unique, realistic yet funny, and defies easy categorization as I tag it as fantasy, science-fiction, and historical fiction all at once.

Highly Recommended.