Published by: Penguin Books, 1981

Maybe it's the fact that my continued ill-health has made me sharply aware of my own mortality, but the realization that there are lots of books out there that I've been meaning to read and I've only got a limited amount of time available if I'm ever going to get round to reading them has meant that over the last few months I've been acquiring a considerable number of works that I've had on my "I really must read that" list for many years. And The Mind's I was right at the top of that list. Thank you once again to World Of Books for enabling me to get hold of a copy with just a few mouse clicks.

The fact that Daniel Dennett passed away last month might also have had something to do with my decision to tackle this particular volume. It's an anthology of writing about the nature of consciousness and the big question of whether or not an artificial intelligence (i.e. a computer) might ever experience consciousness as I—and, presumably you, too—do. Can humans build a machine that can truly be said to think? And how could we prove that we had actually managed it? Is that even possible? What is consciousness, anyway? How does it happen?

Alan Turing's legendary paper from 1950 Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he first proposed the "Imitation Game" that we now know as the Turing Test is included, and so is John Searle's famous 1980 essay Minds, Brains, and Programs where he sets out the "Chinese Room" refutation of the idea that a computer will ever possess true consciousness. The book's worth reading just for those two chapters alone.

But aside from Turing and Searle, and as well as Dennett and Hofstadter's own erudite contributions and those of D. E. Harding, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Nagel, and Raymond Smullyan amongst others, there are also fine selections from writers such as Jean Luis Borges, Rudy Rucker, and Stanislaw Lem. The result is a rich and dense wander through the philosophical and scientific thinking about AI as it stood at the end of the 1970s and an examination of what the consequences of that thinking might be. Some of the predictions are remarkably prescient, but other articles consider concepts that seem to be as far away in the future now as they did more than forty years ago when the book was first published. The situation has been like that for considerably longer; when Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke created the character of HAL for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey back in the 1960s, an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) of the sort that HAL is portrayed as being was thought to be "thirty years away" (indeed, the fictional HAL relates in the film how he was first commissioned in 1992; in the subsequent book, Clarke must have thought that this was too optimistic and pushed the date back five years to 1997). When The Mind's I was published in 1981, AGI was still thought of as being thirty years away. And that seems to be the case even today, although these days the incredible range of tasks which computers can achieve without it (or genuine consciousness) would no doubt have boggled the minds of the authors back then.

There are no strong conclusions one way or the other that artificial consciousnesses might ever be possible, but for this particular conscious entity at least, the discussion is a fascinating and thought-provoking one. I'd not read Christopher Cherniak's short story The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution before, but that tale in particular is going to stay with me for a long time...

Published by: Simon and Schuster, 2012

I'm back to one of my favourite reading topics: cosmology. Professor Krauss is a theoretical physicist who taught at Arizona State University and was co-author of a paper in 1995 which proposed that most of the energy in the Universe resided in its so-called "empty" space (this was well before the idea of dark energy gained widespread acceptance as the best explanation of why everything we actually see happening out there happens the way it does). He also wrote The Physics of Star Trek the same year, which was what first brought his work to my attention, because of course it was.

In its simplest terms, this book is Professor Krauss's explanation of how the Big Bang happened. He sets out the observational evidence for it that had been discovered up to 2012 when the book was published, the basics of relativity and quantum physics that underpin our understanding of how the Universe behaves, and the theories that explain how the science of the latter accounts for the reality of the former.

And he does it very well. The book contains the most cogent explanation of why observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) surprised the world of physics by how shockingly uniform it was and the subsequent work by Alan Guth and others to develop the theory of cosmic inflation that at present is the only credible explanation of how the CMB could have ended up as smooth as it is. In the process, we get the idea of the Multiverse: an unending series of universes, each potentially different in its own way, each seemingly undetectable and separate from any of its predecessors, and each being spawned out of effectively nothing in empty space, which is the most plausible explanation we have for the anthropic principle (the Universe we live in is one that allows for life to exist and observe it; why should that be so?)

He also explains that we live at a special time in the development of our Universe where we can still see enough of it to figure out how it all started and how it will end up. Trillions of years in the future, the expansion of the Universe caused by dark energy will have taken everything apart from our own "local group" of galaxies not just out of observable range, but far beyond the ability of science to deduce that it even exists.

The book is also a refutation of the idea that a creator was necessary for all of everything to spring into existence. As Einstein famously observed, given the laws of nature that we have a creator wouldn't have had much choice in the matter because when quantum physics gets involved, "nothing" turns out to be an extremely unstable state indeed for existence to be in. It's fascinating stuff.

Published by: Pan, 2016

Last year I read a number of books written by Steven Johnson (when I find a writer I like, I tend to binge) and I eventually concluded that he's at his best when he's drawing together narrative threads from history in unexpected and entertaining ways. He does this particularly well here in Wonderland, and it's rather fitting that a book about the way humans love novelty and their need for life to contain pleasant surprises is itself full of just such surprises.

For example, I wasn't aware that the process of recording a musical performance has been known as "cutting" since at least the twelfth century (and probably much earlier than that). I did not expect the tale of a "Mechanical Museum" which opened in London in the early nineteenth century that was run by a Swiss inventor by the name of John-Joseph Merlin to suddenly reveal itself to be a life-changing experience for an eight-year-old boy called Charles Babbage...

Johnson's thesis—and he does a grand job of making it a convincing one—is that technological and conceptual innovation might well drive human civilization forwards, but in order for that innovation to happen, first and foremost someone has to be bunking off from what they were supposed to be getting on with. King Charles II of England tried to suppress the sale and public drinking of coffee, claiming that coffee houses encouraged the worthy to "mis-spend much of their time which might and probably would be employed in and about their lawful calling and affairs" but, as Johnson points out, that particular sort of bunking off powered the industrial revolution and one of those coffee houses eventually became Lloyd's of London. Humans like to play. We like to enjoy ourselves. Before agriculture had been invented, and quite possibly even before written language existed, humans were making music (and the flutes that they were playing, made out of the bones of birds and animals, were tuned to the same scales of notes that Western musicians use today).

It's a fascinating book and I think you'll find that it's worth reading just to discover the existence of the wonderfully named Book of Ingenious Devices.

Published by: Blink, 2018

I've read a large number of rock star "autobiographies" over the years. I've used inverted commas there because an awful lot of them are not the result of the book's purported author sitting at his or her computer and feverishly typing away; instead, the star employs someone known as a ghostwriter who spends a few hours with them, records a few stories and biographical details and then sets about turning the results into a book with an authorial voice that you can half-convince yourself is the star's own. This often happens without the person who actually did all the heavy lifting getting any credit at all, but the ghostwriter in question here is the current deputy editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, Mark Rudd (Mr Daltrey was completely open about this in several interviews he participated in to promote the book when it came out). And to be fair, Rudd does a fair job in capturing Daltrey's voice and putting together a tale that will keep the reader turning the pages. This wasn't much of an ask: any band with a history like that of The Who is going to have a veritable goldmine of stories of superstardom and excess, and this proves to be the case.

Because let's remember who Daltrey was in a band with. It's rather refreshing to read a rock star's account of things where they do not end up in a spiral of drugs and self-delusion, but seeing what it did to his colleagues (some far more than others) must have been a powerful lesson in restraint and self-control. Many years ago I saw legendary rocker Joe Walsh do a small spoken-word-with-a-few-songs gig at Bristol's Bierkeller pub (don't bother looking for it, it's not there any more) and I will never forget one thing Joe said: "The most terrifying experience of my life was when Keith Moon decided he liked me." Although Daltrey clearly loved Moon, the man comes across as a monster; in the end, Daltrey would make sure that he was booked into a different hotel on tour after too many occasions when he was dragged out of bed at four in the morning and arrested, together with the rest of the band and their entourage, because the drummer had decided to do something involving poor (non-existent) impulse control that had resulted in widespread property damage.

Daltrey had a very different background to the rest of the band, coming from Shepherd's Bush, a suburb in West London. He was expelled from school at the age of fifteen following an incident with an air gun (the headmaster who threw him out is the book's titular character) and the way Daltrey tells it, he could quite easily have found himself drifting into a life of crime from that point. How many other rockers could say that at one point in their careers they'd borrowed money from legendary London gangsters the Kray Twins, for example? But fortunately for Mr Daltrey (and for the world of rock in general) music exerted a much more powerful attraction. Too poor to afford to buy a guitar, he started out with a home-made affair. When that folded in two, he built another. But the stars by no means aligned when he met Pete Townshend; he was thrown out of the band early on, although the rest of the band soon recognised their mistake. One of the book's predominant features is the chronicle of squabbles which continued for decades, and it doesn't always get the balance right between setting the record straight and settling old scores.

The book's not a particularly dense affair. It's breezily written and runs to 337 pages of fairly well-spaced text. I read the whole thing in a few hours, but it's an enjoyable read. And it's nowhere near as depressing or miserable as some of the books written by Daltrey's contemporaries.

Published by: Gollancz, 1965

Dune is one of those classic works of science fiction that I keep coming back to and re-reading every few years. Each time I do, I notice new things about the story that I'd previously missed. This is the first time that I've read the book since reading Lesley Blanch's The Sabres Of Paradise last year, and Blanch's influence on the work is obvious. Herbert's book is peppered with pronouncements, descriptions and phrases that are lifted from Blanch's account of the Imam Shamyl's campaign against the Russian occupation of 19th-Century Dagestan (the literal Padishah Emperor that Shamyl was fighting was Tsar Nicholas I and now I can't think of the planet Caitain, the home of Emperor Shaddam IV as anything other than St Petersburg).

The novel of Dune is set in a far future where smart machines are banned and humanity, which has spread across the galaxy and colonised thousands of worlds, is effectively being run by a military-industrial complex which Herbert christened the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles or CHOAM for short. Everyday life doesn't get much of a look-in in the text (which instead focuses on the actions of elite members of some of the most powerful factions), but it would seem that most people could look forward to little more than a life of serfdom as pyons, stuck on their native planets. The Emperor's Sardaukar shock troops enforce order, right up to and including planetary extermination of populations which step out of line. All religious activity has been consolidated under the banner of the Orange Catholic Bible. It's a clever device which Herbert uses to show that the end goal of religion is not spiritual development but social control and protection of the interests of those running things. It's a business. Mergers are a great way to consolidate your market and increase your power, and Herbert was way ahead of his time in seeing where the American approach of megachurches and poilitical meddling was going. While his novel doesn't really show much of the Church's role as a political entity, chapters often begin with pithy, "historical" quotes which share the thoughts of various characters from the book and Herbert uses these to warn of how religion's quest for control comes at the expense of "individuality" (a thinly veiled metaphor for personal freedom).

The cost of all this is more than just planets full of oppressed masses. There is also technological and spiritual stagnation to contend with. The system of order that Herbert describes has been in place across the populated Universe for more than ten thousand years. Aside from the Bene Gesserit's breeding programme, which intends to bring about a singular Übermensch, human development has stalled. Things need to change, and Herbert seems to be suggesting that stirring things up with a lot of slaughter and conflict is how it advances. He wouldn't be the last to suggest this, either (think of how the human avatars of The Shadows justify their action in Joe Straczynski's television series Babylon 5, for example).

Enter Paul Atreides. He has been raised from birth as a killing machine, born to rule; couple this with a magnetic personality (his charisma and his uncanny ability to sway anyone he considers useful to his cause with a few well-chosen words even before he considers using the irresistible "voice" which his Bene Gesserit mother has taught him are described admiringly by other characters several times) and even without the eventual revelation of his prescient superpowers as the famed Kwizatch Haderach it's obvious to me reading the book now that he's no awkward teenager suddenly discovering that he's secretly the saviour of the Universe; he's a monster.

While Paul spends the middle section of the book (which is titled "Muad'dib") railing against the jihad that he forsees will sweep across the Universe leaving billions of dead in its wake (and notice how the J-word is curiously, completely absent from part two of Villeneuve's recent film adaptation of the book) there is a point in the narrative where he realises that it's going to happen anyway simply because of who he is and what he's already done. Villeneuve makes this explicit at the end of his second movie, where Paul literally tells the Fremen to have at it, and off they go.

Because by the third section of the book, titled "The Prophet" Paul has completely embraced his monstrous nature. His focus has changed from stopping the slaughter to assuming ultimate power over the Universe by deposing the Emperor and marrying his daughter. Who could possibly stop him? After all, he's the Chosen One, isn't he?

"Beware charismatic leaders," Herbert is telling us. Particularly when they start using the tools of religious rhetoric to get what they want. Putting the Chosen One in a position of power tends not to work out so well for the rest of us. Suddenly, a book that is nearly sixty years old seems more relevant than ever.

Published by: Harper Collins, 2017

First of all, I have a confession to make: I have only ever seen Iron Maiden in concert with Paul Di'Anno singing. I have only ever seen Mr Dickinson on stage when he went by the name of Bruce Bruce and was in a somewhat less successful band called Samson. I'm familiar with Bruce's body of work, of course; how could I not be? Maiden have spent more that forty years at the top of the pantheon of rock, and few bands have had the tenacity (or shared a harder work ethic) to stay there for as long as Maiden have.

I'd class What Does This Button Do? as a professional autobiography. It's an account of Bruce's working life and not much else. You will learn next to nothing about his personal life or his politics. As he explains at the end of the book, this was a conscious decision on his part, and it works very much in the book's favour. After describing his days at boarding school in Oundle (which were as unpleasant as most school days were, back in the days when bullying and corporal punishment were the norm) and a six-month spell in the Territorial Army, he moves on to his days at London's Queen Mary College, where he got a degree in history (this is not your average drug-addled rocker's ghost-written account of an unruly life by any means. Watch any interview with him and you'll soon realise that Mr Dickinson is a very bright chap by anybody's standards, even if he proved to be somewhat clueless about Brexit) he moves rapidly on to how he discovered his uncanny "banshee wail" singing abilities and joined a number of bands before ending up in Samson. He explains who was responsible for him being credited as Bruce Bruce in that band before relating how, at the Reading Rock Festival after Samson had played their set, he was headhunted by Iron Maiden's manager to be Paul Di'Anno's replacement and the rest, as they say, is history.

Except that side of his career is only part of the story. Bruce is not the only rock star who leveraged a love of flying into a second career as an airline pilot (Steve Morse, of Dixie Dregs and Deep Purple fame is another) but when you can fly your band as they tour the world on Boeing airliners that have had your band's mascot and logo painted on it not just once but several times, you know you're at the top of your game. So there are some interesting accounts of his career with the airline Astraeus and a number of "challenging" flights he made as a result. Oh, and there's also the slight matter of how he helped to develop a brand of bottled beer that has sold by the millions and the film what he wrote, too. (That film gave Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Christina Chong her first ever screen role, by the way.)

This is a book by a writer who gets enthusiastic about things, and that enthusiasm shines through all the way through. Tales of music, flying, beer, and even fighting (and beating) head and mouth cancer are all told with obvious relish. Describing his life as memorable simply doesn't do it justice. Bruce has had a wild ride, and he has a writer's skill at bringing us along with him.

Published by: Square Peg, 2012

I've always been interested in the processes involved in learning, and as a child, I found myself wondering first, why it should be that I found some subjects really difficult and others relatively easy to pick up, and secondly, why my classmates didn't have the same experiences. There was clearly something more complex than just finding some things "boring", which seemed to be sufficient explanation for my classmates at the time. Books have never been boring for me, as I'm sure you've figured out by now. I read Carl Sagan's Pulitzer Prize-winning essay on the evolution of human intelligence, The Dragons of Eden when I was still a teenager and as a result that interest in learning became a fascination, one which shaped my entire professional career. I spent more than forty years in all three of the public, private and educational sectors working in Learning and Development (L&D) and studied aspects of educational psychology for my master's degree. There, I read works like Vygotsky's "Mind In Society" from cover to cover rather than just the chapters we'd been set and when I discovered David Jonassen's work on constructivism I read as much of it as I could get my hands on, utterly engrossed (a phenomenon which I later learned had been named Flow by its discoverer, Mihaly Csikszentmihályi.) I find psychology in general and neuroscience in particular of great interest, and I have shelves full of books which I've read on the subject. So I feel that I'm perhaps a little better qualified than average to review this book. And, sadly, to pick holes in it.

Because let's face it: when the first thing you're confronted with when you're reading a book that is ostensibly about how we learn is a page bearing a notice warning the reader that no warranty is given with respect to the accuracy of the information presented and a including a disclaimer that the strategies which are outlined may not work for everybody, it's difficult to avoid shifting one's critical eye towards skepticism (if not outright cynicism).

However, I don't think that the author has much to worry about being on the receiving end of accusations of misrepresentation, because the book is remarkably thin on content when it comes to descriptions of specific treatment strategies or indeed the reasoning behind their development. Given that the book seems to have been written primarily as a prospectus for the schools which Ms Arrowsmith-Young has founded across Canada and the United States, I'm assuming that worries about giving away trade secrets are likely to make you somewhat reticent about explaining just how you brought about the sometimes radical transformations of people's lives that are described in it. The book is also one third autobiography (there are a lot of entirely unnecessary family photos, for example) and as a result the final third—the part that I was most interested in, the neuroscience—gets particularly short shrift. There's not enough information for an interested reader to understand exactly how Ms Arrowsmith-Young mitigated her own learning disabilities, let alone those of her students. This lack of detail becomes increasingly annoying as the book goes on, to the point where many of the later case histories are nothing more than quick "before" and "after" sketches and how the student got from one to the other might as well have been by magic.

The examplar in the field of writing about neurological case histories is the late Dr Oliver Sacks, who was able to combine a superbly empathic bond with his patients with brilliant scholarship and an uncanny gift for intuiting (and conveying to the reader) what was at the heart of each patient's personal experience. Like Ms Arrowsmith-Young, Sacks was greatly inspired by the work of the renowned Russian psychologist Aleksandr Luria (and amongst other things, Dr Sacks wrote a chapter about Luria in the Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology). It's a fairly safe bet to assume that this book is aimed at the sort of reader who is familiar with Dr Sacks's work, such as "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" or "Awakenings" and they will probably have also seen the film of the same name (with Robin Williams perfectly capturing much of Dr Sacks's personality and Robert De Niro ably portraying his patient, Leonard L). That's why I got myself this copy, after all. This book tries hard to follow in the good Doctor's footsteps, but it falters, not just because it ought to have been three distinct and separate books, but also because the writing just feels off a lot of the time. Why? Well for one thing, there's a figure on page 119 that shows the locations of eleven of the Brodmann areas of the brain and ten of them are labelled with their appropriate numbers but Brodmann area 6, the Frontal Eye Field, is labelled instead as "FEF" and WHAT KIND OF MONSTER DOES THIS? There are odd language choices, too; on two occasions, characters in the book experience a moment of enlightenment (and I chose that particular word carefully) and each time the author describes this as "It was as if a light had gone off in their head" (my emphasis). Sudden revelations are usually described in terms of a light bulb coming on, are they not—to the point that the description of the light bulb emoji (yes, there is one) contextualizes it with regard to learning, after all. Another character, we are told, would create "flow sheets" to map out the work she needed to do, leaving me wondering whether this described a flowchart or a spreadsheet.

The author also has a habit of referring to symptoms and behaviours using her own names for things rather than standard terminology (it took me a few seconds to figure out that when we're are told about "kinesthetic perception" this refers to proprioception but rather longer to twig that the "kinesthetic speech" she was discussing was actually dysarthria). This hobbles the book's usefulness almost as much as its omission of how the author actually achieves her results—although it should be pointed out that she has achieved some striking successes.

If only the book had stuck with the approach it adopts in chapter twenty-two, "The Impact of Learning Disabilities". This is the only point at which it comes close to capturing the empathy and passion which Oliver Sacks brought to his works and it should have been the opening chapter. Sadly, the book is too unfocused and takes much too long to get round to it that when the author finally issues the call to action for improving the ways in which schools screen pupils for learning disabilities (or more often, fail to do so entirely) it's much too late for it to be of any use.

Oh, and a top tip for writers: never use your book to call out the shortcomings of any of the agency people you got to transcribe your dictated notes, even if you've identified that they might be exactly the sort of person who ought to be attending the establishment that you're plugging. Not cool.

Published by: Hutchinson, 2006

I found myself blindsided by this book of memoirs because the chatty, light conversational tone it adopts from the first page, combined with what I thought I already knew about Alan Alda (star of the long-running and consistently excellent television series M*A*S*H, master of improvisational comedy, gifted screenwriter, famous film star father) had not prepared me for an account of his upbringing and adult life that is frequently harrowing. The incident that provided him with the title of the book is just the first example, and it left me with my mouth hanging open in shock. The account of his mother's struggle with mental illness is a difficult read at times. But his account of this, together with tales of his own close shaves with death (the most recent of which happened while he was filming a science programme at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile, miles from the nearest hospital) are all recounted in a matter-of-fact way ("I looked down, and I was on fire") that just makes it impossible to put the book down. Throughout, Mr Alda shows a rare gift for storytelling that grabs the reader and does not let go.

The book is also full of love and Alda's gentle humour pervades every page. At one point he provides a list of all the famous actresses that he got to kiss in front of a camera whilst doing his job, and it is a long and most impressive list!

There's not as much about M*A*S*H as I'd expected, although it's clear that the camaraderie of the cast was entirely genuine. Alda is more focused on ensuring that his own craft equalled that of his colleagues. Throughout the book, he is open and honest about both his efforts to become as good at his profession as he could possibly be and his doubts that he was capable of reaching that goal. The journey that he goes on in order to achieve the exacting standards which he sets for for himself is the central theme of the book, and the experiences which act as milestones on that journey are recounted in a way which lets them be as revelatory for us as they clearly were for him.

This film-star autobiography is very definitely a cut above the rest.

Published by: 1984 Publishing, 2023

I had a suspicion that this book would be a bit of a curate's egg as soon as I read that clumsy, over-punctuated title. I read the first three of Frank Herbert's novels in the space of two weeks in the summer of 1975. I'd bought them in Norwich while we were on holiday, and I was just the right age to be captivated by them. When the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune was published in 1981, I dutifully queued up at Forbidden Planet in London and met Mr Herbert in person. He signed my hardback first edition. Even before David Lynch's troubled adaptation of Dune came out, I'd been to the "The Costumes of Dune" exhibition at Universal Studios in Los Angeles and marvelled at the amazing stillsuit designed and built by Mark Siegel and Bob Bryan from an original concept by Bob Ringwood. Even then, months before the release of the film, it was clear that Universal viewed their property as the rightful successor to Star Wars (seemingly without realising that George Lucas had ripped off many of the books' themes and settings for his own work) but also that, with the director of Eraserhead at the helm, the studio was most likely going to get something else; something very different and for me much more interesting. I turned out to be right; even if what we got was neither a proper David Lynch film nor a faithful treatment of the book, I was obsessed with it. I've watched it many times over the years on each new format that came on the market and my Chapman Stick page on this very site has a screen capture showing Sir Patrick Stewart (cast as Gurney Halleck) with his "baliset" in a scene from the DVD. In one of the film's many cut scenes, Gurney actually played it, and the music used was composed and played by the Stick's inventor himself, the late Emmett Chapman.

So yes, I'm comfortably familiar with the source books and also more than a little cognizant of Herbert's own influences. I was disappointed that this aspect of Dune gets particularly short shrift; Frank Herbert's interest in the ecology of the dunes around Florence, in Oregon (a township more famous these days for its notorious attempt to blow up a dead whale that was stranded on the beach there back in 1970) gets a couple of sentences. There's no mention of the planetary geologist Dr Farouk el-Baz in the book at all, despite the character of Liet Kynes in the first book being an obvious homage to him (at the time Herbert was writing the novel, el-Baz was working on the Apollo space program where Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts respectfully called him "King" in reference to the then-current ruler of Egypt). Dune is unfairly cast as an example of the notorious fictional trope of the "White Messiah" and while Evry asserts that this is not the case of the source material (rather, Herbert was deeply interested in the phenomena of charismatic dictators and the seemingly inexplicable willingness of people to commit atrocities in their name; Paul sees this in Dune, rails against it, but to a degree does it anyway before finding an alternative path, too late, in Dune Messiah) he doesn't really work at proving his point.

A more serious omission is that of the work of Lesley Blanch, whose 1960 book The Sabres of Paradise was used by Herbert as the source of Fremen culture on Arrakis. Portions of Blanch's work were lifted in their entirety and used in Herbert's novel without attribution. Read the book, and amongst many other important elements of Dune's plot you'll soon see who the original Padishah Emperor was and why he was so powerful, understand the murderous origins of kanly, discover why sietches are so important, and find out why the Fremen use the Chakobsa language and believe that "to kill with the tip of the blade lacked artistry." If you're going to examine Fremen culture and their attitude to the occupying forces of both the Harkonnens and the Atreides in the films as well as the book, you need to have read the book; it's essential to fully understanding where Herbert's novel came from.

And despite the wealth of interview material that Evry has amassed for this book (he talked to everybody he could, up to and including the film's director himself, which was a genuine coup), quite frankly it's not very well written. Most of the text reads like it belongs in the "In Popular Media" sections of Wikipedia articles (I found myself wondering why it was that important to list all the episodes of Chuck which have references to the film in them, for example). The definitive book about the first film adaptation of Dune to make it as far as a theatrical release remains as yet unpublished.

Hopefully that won't be the case for very much longer.

Published by: Bloomsbury, 1996

It's taken me quite a while to read this monumental work from cover to cover. Not because it's a hard read; it isn't at all. It's just that it contains 1,060 densely packed pages of autobiography, reportage, and criticism of a genre that I now realise I know next to nothing about. Picking up a copy of this epic has become a first step of a quest to do something about that.

Robert Gottlieb (1931–2023) was Editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and the New Yorker, so saying that he knew what he was doing in compiling this collection of writing is a gross understatement. His explanatory notes (which are often devoted to explaining the catty squabbles between different factions of jazz's many followers, cliques which had strange names such as the "moldy figs" and the "boppers") are just as entertaining as the articles they introduce. I doubt that many people could have pulled off a project like this as successfully and comprehensively as he did; he gathered an astonishing range of texts, the earliest dating back to 1919 and the latest to 1995, the year of the book's initial publication in the USA.

And what a selection of writers there is. From Cab Calloway to Philip Larkin (back in the days when he was jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph); from Art Blakey to Jean-Paul Sartre; from Jelly Roll Morton to Humphrey Lyttelton, and from Charles Mingus to Dudley Moore. And if you're reeling from the ridiculous cultural reach demonstrated by that brief pick of writers, just wait until you read what they wrote. There isn't a single misfire from start to finish. You're in for a treat.

Published by: Zoop / Fussbudget Productions, 2023

With a prologue relating the tale of how hot-dog salesman and sometime new-age guru George Adamski allegedly had encounters with all manner of extraterrestrial beings and was taken for quick trips to a distinctly verdant version of the planet Venus back in the 1950s (which was well before we discovered that anyone standing unprotected on its surface would be crushed, fried, and melted by sulphuric acid, although not necessarily in that order), a central plot that involves a presidential candidate apparently being abducted by aliens, and enough nods and references to famous UFO cases and notable figures in the field to sink a battleship, you won't be at all surprised to learn that I really, really enjoyed the original comics of Saucer Country and its sequel, Saucer State. They couldn't have been more in my wheelhouse if I'd somehow been able to personally commission Paul and Ryan to create them.

So I was more than a little bit gutted when Saucer State was rather ignominiously cancelled before its final issue was released. In days of yore, when such things happened all you could do was shrug and try to imagine what might have been.

But now there's this thing called crowdfunding, and when Paul Cornell announced on his email newsletter that he and Ryan had set up a project to finish things properly and bring out a definitive book of the whole thing using the Zoop platform, I signed up for it on the spot, because of course I did. I even paid a little bit extra, so that I could have my name listed on the inside back cover of the book because things like that make me inordinately happy for no particular reason.

The completed book arrived this week, and it's a delight. Despite the bonkers plot, the story turns out to make complete sense—at least it does if you're familiar with the sort of material which graces the pages of the Fortean Times every month. There are some lovely nods to the wilder fringes of Forteana and conspiracy theorists will have fun spotting all manner of references to real-world shenanigans; there's even a Republican presidential candidate who is every bit as self-obsessed (and orange) as the version we've been saddled with. And without spoiling anything I can definitely say that the long-awaited finale delivers the goods in style. Reading this took me to my happy place and no abductions were necessary in achieving that objective. And yes, my name's on the inside back cover. I checked.

Published by: Bloomsbury, 2023

This collection of short fiction by one of the UK's greatest creative writers is a mind-bending demonstration of the depth and range of his interests. Yes, the novella What We Can Know About Thunderman is a relentless examination of a fictionalised version of the industry where Mr Moore first made a name for himself, the comics industry. But there are also works which, amongst many other entertaining things, show a deep understanding of cosmology and quantum physics, a love of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the Beat Poets, and of course a fascination with the mysterious world of Forteana, whose themes and tropes have cropped up frequently in his work over the past six (!) decades (I was reading his Curt Vile strips in UK music newspaper Sounds when I was a teenager, and they were a strong influence on my own early scribblings as a wannabe comics artist; I'm very sure that I wouldn't have ended up drawing stuff for Motörhead if it hadn't been for Mr. Moore's example).

To say more would spoil things. Just let an intellect whose erudition and macabre sense of humour are both completely off the scale take you by the hand and lead you down some deliciously dark and unexpected paths...

Published by: Harper Collins, 2023

Last month my brother Dave and I went to see Rush's vocalist, bass and keyboard player Geddy Lee talk about his new book at the Barbican Hall in London. The ticket price included a copy of the book in hardback and since then I've been enthusiastically reading about his life and upbringing. And because it's Geddy we're talking about here, I've also been listening to him read the audiobook as well (which comes with a couple of tracks that were outtakes from his 2000 solo album, My Favourite Headache). I already have many of the books that were written by Rush's drummer; the late Neil Peart (or Pratt, to his band mates) was responsible for almost all of the band's lyrics and he was a gifted writer of prose, too. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to discover that Geddy is as well.

Geddy's parents were Polish Jews who first met in Auschwitz. Geddy was named Gershon after his maternal grandfather who was murdered in the Holocaust. Many of Geddy's aunts and uncles were also murdered by the Nazis and his father's experience in the camps was such that he died of heart failure at the shockingly early age of 45, when Geddy was just twelve years old. The early parts of the book make for sombre reading, sometimes brutally so. But they also reveal just how determined the young Jewish boy from Toronto was, once he decided that the life he wanted to lead was one spent making rock music together with his friend from school, a blonde kid called Aleksandar...

Even though they rapidly gained a reputation as one of the genre's more cerebral bands, Rush embraced the hedonism of the rock and roll life just as enthusiastically as their peers. There are plenty of tales of excess, trashed hotel rooms, and run-ins with law enforcement as well as the consumption of large quantities of acid, dope and coke, but I soon picked up on the fact that the band weren't the sort of guys who would test things to destruction. Geddy and his bandmates were smart enough to see where that road led and chose a different path. That was, perhaps, a major factor in their longevity as a functioning creative powerhouse. Rush retain their well-deserved reputation as musicians who were a profound influence on other musicians, your humble scribe very much included.

The book helped me to understand much of the band's antics on and off stage. For example I finally get why Geddy wore a t-shirt that just said Blah Blah Blah for most of the Snakes and Arrows tour.

There is so much joy in this book. Even with the profound sadness that pervaded much of the band's later history and the event which led to its eventual conclusion, this book contains love and laughter in truly prodigious amounts. I've read some rock and roll autobiographies that left me absolutely certain that I'd never, ever want to hang out with the personalities involved. Some are perfunctory accounts that are so miserable they leave you wishing you could slap the person who wrote the book around the head a few times until they realised just what a privileged and glorious life they were leading. But very few leave the reader feeling that they'd been a part of the fun while it was happening. My Effin' Life does exactly that. It's the sort of book that will make you wish you'd been fortunate enough to count the band as your friends and—even better—it gives you a pretty good idea of what things would have been like if they were.

Required reading for any rock aficionado.

Published by: Orbit, 2015

Despite the hardback copy of this running to some 466 pages, I burned through the whole thing in three sessions. I was thoroughly gripped by the tale of the people on board a generation starship as it journeys to the eponymous moon of a planet in the Tau Ceti system and what happens after they get there. The rest of this review is going to address specific things that happen in the book, so there are going to be SPOILERS ahead. If you don't want to know what happens, you should stop reading now.

Still with me? Good.

The book is first and foremost a metaphorical punch in the face to the gung-ho, "We have the technology to colonise Mars right now" attitudes exhibited by Elon Musk and his ilk. Robinson is clearly very angry about the lackadaisical approach they have to terraforming's practicalities and how they ignore the fact that anyone embarking on such a project would not only be placing their own lives at risk, they would also be doing the same with the lives of any descendants that they choose to have. That punch in the face comes in the novel's closing pages, but it is (in my opinion) one that is very well deserved.

Because the book chronicles multiple tragedies. There's the tragedy of all the people who die during the course of the events that the book recounts; those that die on the surface of Pandora when it becomes evident that there is some form of life there which is inimical to human existence; those that die in the conflicts between factions of the starship's crew as they try to decide on which alternative plan of action to take as a result; and those that die from the accidents and stresses of the voyage itself. However for me the fundamental tragedy of the book is that of its narrator, the artificial intelligence that operates the ship and its systems. Oddly, the ship is never referred to as anything other than "the ship" or just "Ship" but the AI is addressed as "Pauline" at several points as the plot unfolds. By the end of the book, the AI has become its most quirky, funny, and engaging character (and this is saying a lot, because Robinson has a rare skill at writing believable characters). The AI's examination of metaphor and narrative in deciding how to fulfil the task that one of the other principal characters has set it is full of deep insight and occasional despair at just how weird human cognition and discourse really are. There is infinite promise in its intelligence, but at the end of the book it is irretrievably lost and none of the characters who worked with it seem to have even considered the idea that measures should have been taken to preserve it somehow. There's not even a "Oops. My bad."

Robinson's solution to the Fermi Paradox is a bleak one: interstellar travel doesn't work. Terraforming takes too long to be viable. An ecology will only thrive on the planet where it originated, and any attempt to transplant it elsewhere will fail, because there are simply too many variables involved, and potential settlers may not discover the important ones until it's too late. The book's central message has much in common with Robinson's other work, particularly The Ministry for the Future, which I read last year. There are no aliens roaming the cosmos, because they're either dead or they've figured out that the only way for a species to stand any chance of long-term survival is to stay at home and take better care of the planet where it originated. Anything else is at best a distraction, at worst a catastrophe that is waiting to happen.

Published by: Fourth Estate, 2010

At first I thought that the vivid imagery that Hilary Mantel's prose was conjuring up in my head was because of my familiarity with the landscape in which it is set. Many of the events which take place in the first few pages of her autobiography occur in locations around Norfolk; my parents lived in High Kelling for many years and the book's opening scene records Dame Hilary's feelings as she moves out of Owl Cottage in Reepham, a genteel and quaintly compact market town where my sister and her family have lived for more than a decade. But it didn't take me long to realise that it was the quality of her writing which was working its magic, not my sense of place. Oh, to be able to write like that.

The book is in two main sections. The first covers Dame Hilary's early years growing up in a Catholic household in the north of England. The sectarian aspects seem odd (possibly because religion never really "took" with me; given the childhood I had, the oft-repeated line of "suffer the little children" had very different connotations and I decided that I wanted nothing to do with any deity, real or otherwise, who was cool with letting stuff like that happen to me, or anyone else). The excerpts from Catholic prayers underline the strangeness—and the glorification of suffering, which is, let's face it, profoundly twisted—but at the same time they show how she assembled the bones of her writing. For me, the most profound of all the insights she grants the reader in the entire book comes from her comment about an "excellent" semicolon in a line from The Litany for a Good Death (the title given to a prayer which begs for its subject to be allowed to die in such a way as to preserve the good grace of the Church, and isn't that a perfect example of just how warped the religious mindset can get?) It allows her to reveal how deeply her convent education and exposure to this sort of liturgical text affected her; "People ask me how I learned to write," she tells us. "That's how."

The second, larger section of the book is an account of her adult life, viewed through the lens of her battle with the disease endometriosis. It's a sad and occasionally grim history of suffering which had its roots in the lack of public access to helpful medical information back then, but which was exacerbated by the chauvinism, incompetence, and a general lack of empathy exhibited by many of the people who were working in the health service in those days. As the book progresses, we begin to see how the ghosts that its title refers to (and the book contains a menagerie of them) might have sprung into being. We are also given glimpses into the development of several of Dame Hilary's works, particularly A Place of Greater Safety, her novel about the French Revolution.

There are omissions and elisions to the story; Dame Hilary was not one for the "Tell all" celebrity autobiography by any stretch of the imagination. But all the way through the book, her carefully developed knack for observation and her mastery of language are wielded in shrewd characterizations of the people she meets (and each of these is accomplished in just a couple of perfectly judged sentences). Her writing is enough of a revelation in itself. Each new encounter had me saying to myself, "Oh, I know this person."

She was one hell of a writer.