Reviews and Comments

After finishing the show (which has been renewed for a second season!) I thought I'd go back and check out the original to recall exactly what changes they made for the screen.

There weren't many — the show is pretty darn close to the novella. I guess having such tight clean source material means there isn't as much you need to cut. A lot of it was pretty streamlined — a couple of characters were merged, human thoughts and feelings get more screen time, making it more of an ensemble piece, and the addition of Leebeebee to make Murderbot more visually scary for us.

There's less detail to the tech/interface/hacking/hub system interactions. I don't think I've ever seen a hacking scene I really liked which both felt genuine and was visually interesting. (If you're wondering, the two best onscreen hacks are: 1. Trinity's use of nmap and the SSH1 CRC32 exploit in Matrix Reloaded, which is realistic but visually mundane and only appears on screen for a few moments, making it more of an easter egg than anything else, and 2. Hugh Jackman assembling a hacking cube from an ancient server in Swordfish, none of which has any relationship to reality, but which is very flashy on screen and includes Hugh Jackman.

The biggest thing which felt different to me was the absence of Murderbot's ubiquitous use of micro drones and remote cameras as extensions of its sensorium. In the novella, I really felt like Murderbot was deeply connected to the feed and that looking through a remote camera or accessing a database was was as natural for it as reaching out a hand or looking in a particular direction is for us. There were definitely nods to this — it wasn't exactly forgotten — but it was considerably less ubiquitous and visceral than in the novella.

And I think this contributed to making it more of an ensemble piece. In the novellas, the reader doesn't have any senses: we're not watching or listening. We are reading an account composed by someone whose sensorium & perception are comprehensible but alien to us — like reading a cuttlefish talk about light polarization and how it's using chromatophores. And in fact I think that this is one of the deep strengths of the series. Murderbot is a killing machine with guns in its arms who experiences the world through drones & feeds and minimal fear of pain or death. But also, it's an autistic nerd treated as less than a person in a corporate dystopia and just wants to be left alone to watch its shows, just like the reader.

Anyway, this novella continues to delight. If you enjoyed the show and like to read, check it out. The books are very short and easy to get into, which makes it very easy to start and equally disappointing when you run out.

Another Old Man's War book? And it's not even my birthday!

I enjoyed the incredible world-building of The Tainted Cup and I was vaguely worried that the sequel would mostly want to roll around in the world as described rather than giving us more. My concerns could not have been more misplaced. A Drop of Corruption effortlessly recaptures the creativity of the first novel and manages to advance all three of (what I think of as) the main threads while seamlessly pulling off another mystery which is candidly more creative than most of Doyle's work.

The key elements I see progressing here are (1) our macro understanding of the world: this bioengineered Roman-æsthetic empire, how it works, how it got this way, and what surrounds it; (2) the relationship between Dolabra (Holmes) and Kol (Watson); and (3) Dolabra's schemes, larger identity, and role within the empire. Beautifully, A Drop of Corruption lets us explore all three!

The story locates us on the edge of the empire where an independent polity is negotiating its accession into the empire, with all the legal and logistical complexity that entails. We see this outside region — Yarrowdale, which has something of a high fantasy vibe — through the lens of an imperial perspective, allowing Bennet to articulate nuances about the world through the juxtaposition of the two societies. This locality is also home to a major imperial bioengineering lab, working with the dangerous but valuable biology of the Kaiju around which the entire empire is organized. This naturally creates the opportunity to learn more about this apparently-secretive imperial branch layered as the investigation demands more access to their secrets and projects.

The crime/plot/mystery they're sent to unravel is delightfully centered on this power triangle between the empire, Yarrowdale, and the imperial bioengineering corps, and gives us an adversary very precisely tuned to be an interesting challenge for Dolabra, while creating exciting set-pieces for us to enjoy along the way. I think the pacing was perfect and the payoff was satisfying. Overall, another excellent installment which leaves me eager for the next one.

This novel is a caper and a part of a system of capers, pay attention to it! Several Harkaway-standard larger-than-life characters are off to the races, neck deep in a bizarre espionage adventure with roots in second world war mad science and the pursuit of truth.

Fundamentally, apart from anything else, this is a fun novel, and it's having fun with itself too. It has Guy-Ritchie-movie energy, classic British gangster swagger, and chaotic spy-movie thrills. Everyone in here is an utterly wild caricature of a British archetype. The sect of engineer-monks dedicated to finding the divine in craft is absolutely joyful. There's a lot to love and I had a great time.

I can't help reading echoes of the same themes which eventually became Gnomon. The arch-villain has echoes of the character who becomes Gnomon themself. The themes of legitimate and illegitimate state power & surveillance vs the autonomy of the individual and the capacity to resist. The tension around the implications of comprehensive knowledge, truth, and transparency — how much is too much?

But (mild spoilers for the operating principle of the MacGuffin beyond this point), I'd like to rant about the theory behind the doomsday they're trying to prevent. It's a classic quantum quantum quantum problem, much like the last third of Anathem, which I otherwise quite enjoyed.

Human consciousness is not, I repeat is not, a consequence of quantum effects. Faffing around with quantum stuff does not impact consciousness unless you also create classical real physical phenomena. Humans fundamentally don't have free will except perhaps randomly at the margins. You cannot "freeze" all the randomness out of the world by observing it too hard. All that observation stuff isn't attached to the consciousness of the observer, though sci-com has done a very bad job at explaining this. Quantum superpositions don't collapse because the "observer" is human or conscious. They collapse because a physical phenomenon would have a different outcome depending on which state the system is in*. The "observer" is any physical system; that's what collapses the wave. Human awareness is irrelevant.

Likewise, you cannot collapse the whole universe into static determinism by observing it too hard. You cannot observe that much! The physical realities of the universe limit how much of what can be observed! A machine which did this sort of super-observing would be much larger than the universe, because it would need to mechanically observe every electron and photon, and then every particle making up the machine would need to be observed by another machine, and so on and so on. The best machine that exists for observing/determining the universe is the universe itself, which is already as causally-bound to itself as it can be. Any attempts to pin down uncertainty and randomness in one place allow a commensurate amount of other stuff to be unobserved. The whole thesis of the uncertainty principle is that there exist very real physical limits on what can be observed and known.

None of which makes the silly speculative premise in the middle of a book full of impossible fictions any less fun or reasonable in the context of the novel. There's really nothing wrong with using pseudoscience in science fiction. And this is a fun thought experiment, for sure. I just… these misapprehensions are so common that it's frustrating to see them even in fiction. Because I worry about just reinforcing this misinformation, even though there's no reason to take this bit of fiction more literally than any of the other fictitious elements of the novel. Rant over.

*Though this is an idea which is almost impossible to truly internalize, so, for ethical reasons, I recommend acting as though you have free will and moral responsibility for your own actions, but pushing society to treat destructive behaviors as systems problems rather than personal moral failings.

I think that Gnomon is the sort of book that critics tend to call a "tour de force" or a "modern masterpiece". This is the sort of novel which writes a great number of cheques with dangling hints and foreshadowing and mysterious themes. It is, I suppose, a puzzle box. But unlike most of the deeply frustrating puzzle boxes I have read and watches, Gnomon pays every one of those threads off with excellent execution and satisfying resolution. It is not being opaque and mysterious just to keep you hanging — this is a thought-out piece which fits together like satisfying sculpture which casts different silhouettes from perpendicular angles of observation. As I'm fond of saying: Harkaway thinks he's being soo clever; frustratingly, he is absolutely right and might even be cleverer than all that.

The premise/trailer. Set in a near-future Britain ruled by a benevolent computer system which sees everything; is governed by continuous, randomized, small-group citizen-democracy; and nudges people towards being their best selves: a principled & well-respected detective is assigned to investigate the death of a suspect in custody. That suspect, a pro-privacy luddite* refusenic of the panoptic destruction of privacy was being "interviewed" using an invasive (but generally safe and benign) brain-scanning/mind reading tool. As our detective plays back the mind-reading recording of the interview, she discovers much more inside the suspect's mind than should be possible, and is (naturally) forced to question the foundations on which her society is built while a mysterious semi-adversary stalks her investigation which is dogged by more coincidences than should be possible.

Gnomon densely interwoven piece of speculative fiction which brushes against but doesn't quite touch the genre markers of sci-fi, but absolutely fires on all cylinders of noir. A complex structure in the text reflects the text's relationship with the reader and interrogates the value and impact of art & literature, and the way we evaluate & disambiguate coincidence and ambiguity in our world mediated through imperfect senses and minds. The small cast of characters are excellently-written, inhabiting their own interconnected worlds with different & distinct flavors, voices and personalities — they'll stick with you long after you've finished the text.

This is a great book which I could read over and over; it's definitely in the running for my desert island choice. I absolutely recommend it to anyone who enjoys Great Literature™, great sci-fi (even if this is only sci-fi-adjacent), well-executed mysteries, hopeful dystopian political fiction (though this is not hopepunk), or gorgeous world-building. Gnomon has a lot to recommend it! Despite its length & density, it is incredibly readable and difficult to put down except for moments where you read an absolutely bizarre paragraph, say "What?" out loud, and then have to sit & think for a minute before continuing.

Please read Gnomon so that I have more people to talk to about it.

• Positive, reverential.

When I was considering Gnomon as my next read, my mind was on the structure: a robust and intricate edifice of different things assembled together into a single whole. But now, back in it, I am remembering how large and bombastic the characters in the recollections/interview are. I'm listening to an audio edition right now, but even reading text I could hear their very distinct voices leaping off the page (screen).

It's also deeply satisfying to re-read a book which has a puzzle-box aspect to it and see the well-laid pieces. On subsequent readings, it almost feels like the author has left bright neon signposts towards the natural conclusion. But that's how a good mystery works: convoluted in prospect and obvious in retrospect.

This is the sort of self-important overly-complicated too-clever-by-half book I want to hate and write off or throw back into the author's (presumably) smug overly-clever face. But I don't! It's good actually! All the complicated Pro Literature Moves actually work! The multi-layer meta-textual self-referential multi-narrative doesn't feel like a show-off when I'm reading it; it feels like a great book with interesting things to say and room to make me think. I hate how good it is but I love it.

I have read the Imperial Radch books over and over. Sure, they have themes of personhood, colonialism, power, and identity — among many others. But the most consistent, central, fundamental message of these book is that no matter how bad things are, you should make sure to have a solid meal and a good night's sleep. No situation is so bad that it can't be made worse by adding hunger and exhaustion. And regardless of how dire your straits, wouldn't you rather they be dire while you're well fed and rested? And I think that's a valuable message to bring to this moment of all moments.

This horror-movie-themed action-adventure novel jumps from scene to chaotic scene with reckless abandon. Notionally focusing on the victims of cinematic violent crime, we see a blending of the hockey-mask-and-a-chainsaw æsthetic and the ideologies of serial killers & school shooters up against a dangerously genre-savvy protagonist whose agency whipsaws her from situation to terrifying situation as she strives always to be a good "final girl", staying safely ahead of horror-movie slashers who could be lurking in any shadow or behind any door.

Unfortunately, the pulpy cortisol stress-fest action and snappy protagonist inner monologue are held back by jittery jumps between different paranoiac visions of who the BBEG villain might be. I understand that the heroine has to be off-balance and always-guessing or else she'd use speed, surprise, and violence of action to rapidly resolve the story. But the quick flipping between suspects she knows with absolute certainty are behind everything makes character motivations hard to follow, and leaves the protagonist feeling like an unreliable narrator who might just be more of a danger to those around her than the real villain, whoever that may be. I was hoping for more of a fantasy of agency and capability, but this story left me constantly thinking that the protagonist might be overdoing things and jumping at shadows (which she was), and that (combined with the chaos & confusion) served to leave this much less satisfying than I'd hoped.

Unquestionably the most exciting and fun of the Spin novels, and also the least straightforward. I didn't understand this book the first time I read it, I didn't understand it on subsequent re-reads, and I don't understand it now. If you do, please let me know?

It's about… possibility? Chaos theory & fragmentation? unity & disunity of self & identity? who you are always rests on a knife's edge? love as both you and the person you love change? colonialism, industrial extraction, & empire? and also AI-assisted space pirates in a weird FTL rift-space. It's definitely also about scifi space pirates.

I feel like Moriarty is trying to say a lot of things in this book, and I wish I knew what they were? I feel like she's very shy about saying it, and sees the need to keep our attention with all the swashbuckling space piracy?

Excellent book, love reading it every time. Maybe one day I'll figure it out. Not today though.