Published by: Princeton University Press, 2005

This tiny little book, which reproduces an essay which Professor Franklin originally wrote for the Raritan Quarterly Review back in 1986, punches well above its weight and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 27 weeks. Which is rather surprising for a work whose aims are to determine and then define how bullshitting differs from lying, and explain why we should be wary of bullshit artists.

It succeeds magnificently.

And that explains why Professor Franklin's work has been getting lots of citations recently as people begin to realise that the current mania for using Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT is having unintended consequences—because the things are nothing more than bullshit machines. Like most of our current crop of politicians, they have no regard for the truth; but their aim is to make you think that what they're telling you is not just credible, but authoritative. And this is why we need to start teaching critical thinking skills in schools again, because bad things happen when a nation is gullible enough to believe anything that it is told by the media.

Published by: Tor, 2023

Well, this is an odd one. I had to check the publication dates of the last three Murderbot books because the story being told in Fugitive Telemetry is out of order; chronologically, it takes place before the events of Network Effect. This rather threw me, but with the seventh book in the series, things are back up-to-date. System Collapse picks things up a few days after the end of Network Effect with Murderbot and the gang still stuck in the system where most of that book took place. Needless to say, things soon start to go wrong again, and Murderbot finds itself having to help sort things out.

Except that this time around Murderbot is not operating at its best and it knows it. Although it tries very hard to dodge the issue as soon as things start deteriorating, we can see that it's suffering from the Murderbot version of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And the Murderbot version involves not just denial, but having hallucinatory flashbacks of an extremely unpleasant nature. This makes Murderbot even less happy than usual, of course.

The action plays fast and furious, and the plot took some interesting turns which I did not see coming at all. It's all very enjoyable stuff even if there's a sense that only mild peril is actually involved for the main characters. Apart from Murderbot, obviously, who keeps making a habit of getting shot and whose deadpan description of projectiles falling out of its clothes when it gets back up and starts moving around again never fails to make me wince; no wonder it has PTSD.

But I've finished the book and now I'm not very happy, because that's all of the Murderbot books that there are at the moment. I believe that Ms Wells will be writing at least three more books in the series, and I know that Apple TV are making a TV series which is being produced by (and will be starring) Alexander Skarsgård, but that's in the future, and I want them now, please.

Published by: Tor, 2021

Yes, I read this entire book in the two hours since I last updated this web page. Many of the Murderbot novels are little more than novellas (the Internet tells me that the word count of this one is just over 67,000 words, and frankly it felt like it was quite a bit less than that) and I find them lamentably brief because by the time you've got into the plot (and I really got into the plot) and are savouring every little nuance of Murderbot's wonderfully jaundiced view of things, it's all over.

This one is more of a police procedural, and is triggered by a murder that Murderbot was not responsible for, which it finds both extremely inconvenient and also annoying. Unusually for me, I rapidly identified who was responsible, not that this was a problem, but still...

Fortunately I have book #7 in the series right here, so on we go.

Published by: Tor, 2020

Yes, I'm back in the comfortable and reassuring company of Murderbot and its friends. This one's fun; it starts by setting up an adventure that you think is going to be the focus of the book, and then it turns out to be nothing of the sort. Going into more detail than that would take us well into spoiler territory, so I shall say no more.

Except to tell you that the writing is first-rate, thrill-a-minute stuff and I absolutely bloody love this series.

Published by: Penguin Books, 1981

This is a collection of some of the most popular editions of Martin Gardner's legendary "Mathematical Games" column which was published in Scientific American magazine from 1956 until 1981. The context of each article is half the fun, of course. The book takes in a bewildering variety of observations from chess boards (naturally) to planetary orbits and palindromes and finds something in each of them to challenge the reader's mathematical and reasoning abilities. This is the sort of book which expects the reader to do some work.

There are occasional nuggets of information that I didn't know, such as the fact that the mathematician and logician George Boole's eldest daughter Mary married Charles Hinton, author of many early scientific romances, the coiner of the word "tesseract," and whom we encountered last year when I reviewed P. D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum. Each chapter also contains an addendum in which Gardner relates additional items of information (and, sometimes, more elegant solutions to the problems he had set) which were subsequently supplied in letters he received from Scientific American's readers.

When I was younger, I would have felt compelled to find a pencil and paper (and probably a calculator as well) and try to figure out each of the problems which Gardner sets in the course of each chapter. I was relieved to discover that this is no longer the case, and I could just read the book and marvel at the mathematical delights which Gardner's column always contained.

Published by: Paraview Pocket Books, 2005

As its subtitle explains, this is the story of Paul Bennewitz, national security, and the creation of a modern UFO myth. "National" here means the United States of America, and the cast of characters includes representatives from not just the National Security Agency (NSA) but also the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). And yes, the book is a detailed account of what happened to the same Paul Bennewitz who features in Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men, reviewed at #22 below. Many of the other characters from Mark's book appear here, particularly William Moore and Richard Doty, but also John Lear, Linda Moulton Howe, Jamie Shandera and many, many other names you'll be familiar with if you've followed the shenanigans central to the field of UFOlogy for any length of time. There's even a mention of Carl Allen, who is so curiously missing from the pages of Mirage Men (as I observed when I reviewed that book, below). And Ivan Sanderson's name crops up too (see Invisible Residents, reviewed at #23 below).

UFOlogy has never held with the idea of Occam's Razor. It has a deplorable tendency to feed on itself and as you'll quickly realise as you read Project Beta, the subset of the field which is the most active on the Internet thrives on documents and paper trails, regardless of how authentic they might be (or even how plausible, for that matter). In Project Beta, Greg Bishop reveals where most of the truly outrageous documents came from and (spoiler alert) it wasn't from black operations tasked with looking after any visiting extraterrestrials.

Bennewitz was clearly an odd bird from the start. Although well-educated by American standards (he had a master's degree in physics and ran a successful company making components for the military) he seems to have been completely lacking in common sense or critical thinking skills. As a civilian contractor living and working in close proximity to Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico (it's adjacent to the town of Albuquerque) he would have had to pass basic security checks and—one would tend to assume—understand why they were necessary. What escapes me is why, when he started seeing strange lights flying around in the skies above the base, Bennewitz not only decided that these were alien craft (rather than, say, prototypes of Earthly military hardware being tested under field conditions, which would seem a more prosaic explanation to most people, including me) but he also decided to go out and buy some way-above-prosumer grade surveillance technology and train it on them. To cap it all, why did he not realise that the worst thing he could possibly do at that point would be to tell his handlers at the base that he had done so? But yes, that's exactly what he did.

So far, so unfortunate. But the story leaps to an entirely different level of crazy when his handlers (particularly the aforementioned Mr Doty) took the ludicrous decision to respond to Bennewitz's reports with "UFOs? Yeah, they must be!" instead of the more sensible "No, they're not UFOs, they're ours; so keep quiet about them, okay?" Maybe this seemed like a good idea at the time. AFOSI perhaps saw Bennewitz as a way of testing the base's security coverage (which was clearly full of holes) without attracting the attention of their adversaries. If that was so, it misfired spectacularly. And how were they to convince poor Mr Bennewitz that aliens were involved? Why, by making shit up, of course! The perfect excuse to indulge fantasies of being James Bond with a whole roster of government agencies picking up the tab! Bring in a genuine, honest-to-goodness Special Forces team to act as a bunch of extras? No problem! (Yes, they really did that.)

And so the book becomes the story of the mirage man known as the Falcon, of the notorious Aquarius and Majestic-Twelve hoaxes, and of how at least one US government agency was apparently totally cool with the process of turning a family man successfully running his own business into a chain-smoking, incoherent, paranoid wreck. Many of the documents involved in that process are reproduced in the book for our perusal, from Bennewitz's own summation of his research (written of course, with the CAPS LOCK key engaged from start to finish) to transcripts of the "evidence" which he and Bill Moore were supplied with (which were presumably created in large part if not their entirety by Doty and his associates). The thing that strikes me the strongest about them all is not that they are plausible (they really aren't) but that none of the authors involved in writing the papers Bishop has collated appears to have been more than semi-literate. They read more like a child's idea of what a real military intelligence document would be like, and they are all riddled with spelling mistakes and other errors of grammar. It's all rather infantile, quite frankly. But once again if you're at all familiar with the field of UFOlogy you'll know that this is one of its most obvious recurring tropes.

Poor Mr Bennewitz was eventually committed; fortunately he was able to recover and left UFOlogy altogether, although it is abundantly clear that Richard Doty desperately wanted to keep his hooks in him. Luckily for Mr Bennewitz, his family were well aware of Doty's untrustworthy nature and kept him away.

Paul Bennewitz died in 2005. Richard Doty is now a lawyer.

Published by: Bloomsbury, 2005

My interest in the movie business remains strong even though the more I read about it, the more I realise how sordid and unpleasant much of the enterprise seems to be. This is to be expected; any business which has budgets the size that many motion picture productions do is going to attract people with personalities that fall outside those you're likely to encounter in more mundane walks of life. Biskind is never better than when he's describing the extreme characters who inhabit Hollywood and its environs; here we encounter some of the best and worst of film's dramatis personae from the gifted to the pathological and the book's title of Gods and Monsters is particularly well-chosen.

The book is a selection of articles Biskind wrote over the course of some thirty years or so for a variety of publications. They don't just address the larger-than-life stories of some silver screen legends, but also delve into the behind-the-scenes politics of the business, both internal and external. When it comes to engaging with the rest of the world, Biskind shows us just how isolated and self-absorbed Hollywood actually is and how vulnerable the people at the interface of movies and reality often discover—to their cost—they have been left. However big the monsters are which swim in Hollywood's waters, there are much larger, more dangerous, and even less scrupulous ones lurking in the deeps beyond. You will find some extremely dark tales being told in these pages. You'll also find a truly egregious number of typos, but whatever...

But even the gods don't seem to have things their way all the time. When the author turns his lens toward such luminaries as Martin Scorsese and Robert Redford, their glamour evaporates and they are revealed as flawed human beings, capable of being just as self-destructive (or at least fallible) as the rest of us mere mortals. All the same, don't you wish you could have been part of the fun, back when it was fun? I certainly do. And I suspect I always will.

Published by: Faber and Faber, 2004

While I have been fascinated by cinema since I was a little kid, it was only when I watched Bob Godfrey's wonderfully anarchic television series The Do-It-Yourself Film Animation Show in the early 1970s that I became interested in finding out how the sausage was made and while I would have loved to get my hands on an 8mm film camera back then and make cartoons of my own, back then such things were completely out of my reach. As a result, even when I started earning an income of my own and could even have afforded such luxuries as a 16mm camera, I didn't harbour any ambitions of ever being able to work in the medium.

That changed once I joined BT's Distance Learning Unit in the 1980s. I was sent on a week-long crash course in video production at Sony almost as soon as I arrived in Bletchley Park, and I discovered to my delight that (a) it was incredibly good fun and (b) it was also something I didn't entirely suck at (the instructor didn't believe me when I told him that I'd no previous experience of any of the many roles we were being taught how to perform).

Affordable video technology arrived on the scene at much the same time and I became an enthusiastic cameraman and director whenever I got the opportunity. Since then, I've built up a bit of a library of books about the sausage-making side of directing and the last time I ended up in the British Lions shop in Thornbury, I found a copy of this book, which was written by Alexander Mackendrick (a writer and director who was responsible for such films as Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers, and The Sweet Smell of Success) and which has an introduction by Martin Scorsese, so I grabbed it immediately.

It's a densely technical work about the process of film-making from writing a script to editing, and it's written by a man who was not only extremely good at his job but also well aware of how the other people whose names appear in the end credits of a film contribute to the end result. As such, it's not the sort of book that the average reader is going to become engrossed in, whether they're a cinephile or not. Reading breakdowns of particular scenes from films which pull them apart to discover how the viewer's attention is controlled and the plot is driven forward so that the objectives of the story are served is not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

But I loved it.

Published by: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996

When I reviewed Mirage Men below I said that there are many "tells" that any writer specialising in esoteric literature exhibits when he or she is discussing something they don't understand and have resorted to trying to pull the wool over my eyes (or, as the common vernacular has it, "bullshitting".) A "tell" is an expression taken from the game of poker, where close observation of a player's body language can reveal when they're bluffing.

In the field of UFOlogy the most obvious of these tells—and it's one which I've mentioned in my reviews here before when I discussed books written by such pseudoscience luminaries as Bruce Cathie, Pyotr Ouspenskii, as well as Madame Helena Petrova Blavatsky and her ilk—can be seen when the author's pet thesis runs up against accepted scientific knowledge which says that their ideas won't work. That's the point at which the author can either go back to the drawing board and start again, taking this into account; or they can decide that their view of reality is more accurate than anything determined by experiment where the results were published afterwards in peer-reviewed journals. In UFOlogy, writers can almost always be relied upon to take the second option. Reality has become an inconvenience, so the author simply rejects it out of hand.

For all the armchair theorists' claims that the scientific consensus just isn't "intellectually satisfying" enough for them, observation suggests that their real motives in rejecting it are ignorance or laziness; even if they are capable of understanding what the real science means, in most cases they just can't be bothered to put the work in to do so. And so by the time he gets to chapter five, Mr Cramp has already rejected the findings of the Michelson-Morley Experiment (1887) as well as dismissing Lorentz Contraction (1889), Special Relativity and rest frames (1905), and General Relativity (1915) out of hand. Once he's dispensed with scientific consensus, he is then free to conflate electrostatic propulsion, magnetism, and gravity into a single force with properties which mostly stem from his imagination, so that's exactly what he does. We're thus presented with a rambling, amorphous mess of meaningless technobabble.

As Andrew May says in the introduction to his book Pseudoscience and science fiction,

"Pseudoscience is "false science", not because its assertions are false (although they often are), but because they are arrived at by a non-scientific method.

Real science can be thought of as a four-step process:

1. Pose a question
2. Formulate a hypothesis to answer that question
3. Analyse the hypothesis to determine its testable consequences
4. Carry out the tests, and accept/modify/reject the hypothesis accordingly

Pseudoscience is only really concerned with the first two of these steps. It is all about making hypotheses, not putting them to the test. In fact, pseudoscientific hypotheses are often constructed so as to be untestable—and hence incapable of disproof."

This is exactly Mr Cramp's approach, and by chapter five every page contains one ridiculous hypothesis after another. Sure, there are scientific-looking diagrams, but none of those make any sense, either. Cramp goes on (and on) to use his "theory" to explain what killed Thomas Mantell, why flying saucers switch off car engines, and crop circles. Oh, and he also cites as corroborative evidence not only the preachings of the original saucer contactee and hot-dog salesman, George Adamski, but also the photographs taken by other people who had copied Adamski's original pictures of his alleged Venusian scout ship (which was identified by Joel Carpenter in 2012 as the top section of a portable pressurised-gas lantern sold by the Sears department store).

That's too many tells for me. This book is utter garbage.

Published by: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2005

The 2005 publication date is a bit misleading, because at that point Ivan Terence Sanderson (1911–1973) had been dead for more than forty years. Sanderson was an interesting character; his father was killed by a rhinoceros when Ivan was just fourteen. Ivan's great Uncle William was the creator of a blend of whisky named VAT69, which became the basis of the Sanderson's Whisky empire (now owned by Diageo) and you can still buy a bottle of it to this day. Ivan was educated at Eton, studied as a zoologist at Cambridge, and served alongside Ian Fleming and Jon Pertwee (yes, really) in the British Navy's Naval Intelligence Division (NID) during the Second World War.

Until I read this book, I knew him primarily as the man responsible for coining the term cryptozoology but he was also the unfortunate "expert" who was completely bamboozled by the great Florida Giant Penguin Hoax, pronouncing confidently that the mysterious tracks which were found on a beach at Clearwater on Florida's west coast in the 1940s couldn't possibly have been faked (I lived across the bay from Clearwater for a time in the 90s and believe me, it's not exactly penguin territory). Long after Sanderson's death, the surviving hoaxer responsible for the footprints came forward and admitted what he'd done (and as news stories at the time revealed, not only did Tony Signorini still have the cast iron feet that he and his friend Al Williams had used to create the tracks, but the newspapers still remembered Sanderson's assessment of the case as being genuine). From the outset, then, I was tempted to question Sanderson's credulity, if not outright gullibility.

The original edition of Sanderson's book on USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects) is long out of print, but it was republished in 2005 by the Adventures Unlimited Press, a company which specialises in publishing exactly the sort of wild and unsubstantiated tales which Mark Pilkington describes in his book Mirage Men, which I reviewed immediately below. And if you've read Mirage Men and are familiar with the military's propensity to spread disinformation about UFOs, Sanderson's wartime military intelligence background (and his work in New York in the later years of World War Two for British Security Co-ordination along with his former NID colleague Ian Fleming as well as Roald Dahl) ought to have you raising your eyebrows at this point; it certainly got me raising mine.

Adventures Unlimited Press is run by a rather interesting character by the name of David Hatcher Childress, and Adventures Unlimited has published many of his works, which are advertised over several pages at the back of the book. These take as their subject matter such delights as Crystal Skulls and the mythical "flying machines" called vimanas that were allegedly used by the gods of ancient India. These were popularised by Desmond Leslie back in the 1950s in the classic work of the genre, Flying Saucers Have Landed, which Leslie wrote with the grand-daddy of all the flying saucer contactees, George Adamski. Other authors in the imprint's stable include one Harold T. Wilkins; I've read his book Flying Saucers On The Attack! and classing Harold's work as disinformation gives it far more credit than it deserves; I can safely say that he was very much an adherent of the "just make shit up" school of UFOlogy. At this point I'd therefore abandoned any hope that I was about to read a critical or level-headed assessment of the phenomenon under discussion.

Sanderson certainly starts things off with a bang. He recounts a UFO sighting which was allegedly made by one Dr Rubens J Vilela during the U.S. Navy's "Operation Deep Freeze" exercise in the Antarctic in the winter of 1960-61. Sanderson citses as his reference an article written by Ed Hyde garishly titled "UFOs—at 450 Fathoms!" in Man's Illustrated Magazine (which you may not be entirely surprised to know is not usually regarded as a reputable scientific journal). Hyde's wild version of events was published in March 1966. Sanderson's retelling of what happened refers to a strange object which

"suddenly came roaring up out of the sea through no less than 37 feet of ice, and went on up into the sky like a vast silvery bullet."

There's a dramatic artist's rendition of the thing emerging from the ice in the book. It's an impressive witness statement, to be sure; it's also completely falsified. And I feel confident in making that assertion, because that's exactly the way that Dr Vilela himself described it in 2007. Vilela explains that what he actually saw was what he described as a "horizontal meteor" although it would appear that he might just have seen someone firing off a distress flare. Not quite so dramatic, to be sure.

The very next reference that Sanderson throws at us is taken from a book about living under the sea called Hydrospace (which Kirkus Reviews doesn't seem to have been much impressed with when it was published in 1964). Hydrospace was written by an authority on aviation, a prolific science fiction author called Martin Caidin, who went on to write a series of rather more successful novels about a former astronaut who is transformed into a cyborg (CYBernetic ORGanism) after the crash of his experimental aircraft and who uses his superhuman abilities to fight crime for the government. You may be familiar with the exploits of this particular fictitious secret agent, because he was called Colonel Steve Austin... You may be spotting a trend here. The truth is taking second place to having a good story. And even before the first chapter has started, there's a clear signifier that this book won't be particularly fussed about the authenticity of its claims because the photograph on the frontispiece of the book is of a reproduction, owned by the author, of one of the Quimbaya artefacts beloved of the ancient aliens crowd since the days of Erich Von Daniken. Sanderson devotes a whole chapter to recounting his efforts to convince his acquaintances in the aviation industry that it's a model aircraft, and he doesn't do a good job of it.

Many of the stories and sightings recounted in the rest of the book are taken from the pages of Ray Palmer's legendary pulp magazine Fate, which you might remember also brought us Richard Shaver's wild tales of the Deros, an underground race of de-evolved humans who are responsible for all the bad stuff that happens in the world, and much of the rest of Sanderson's book relies on sources that have even less credibility than poor Mr Shaver ever did.

And like many of his contemporaries in the UFOlogical field as it was back in the 1970s, Sanderson's tone can best be described as smugly hectoring. He gives classes of phenomena nicknames. People who insist on scientific rigour in their approach to the field are dismissed as "stuffed shirts." He knows that the book is telling it like it is, so why should he have to bother to waste time or effort building a watertight case? (See what I did there?) He's not a data sort of chap and as he cheerfully admits, "I simply cannot read seed catalogs for fun or even enlightenment." Instead, he spends whole chapters regurgitating press clipping after press clipping, most of which appear to have been gleaned from earlier books by other UFOlogists rather than anything he's unearthed by original research. Indeed, the first time he mentions having investigated a case personally doesn't crop up until page 67. And this is a shame, because it's when he writes from his own experience that the book really comes alive.

Instead, his reluctance to search for corroborating evidence leads him to repeat silly tales such as that of the purportedly mysterious loss of several crew members of the sailing vessel Ellen Austin when they tried to recover a schooner found abandoned and adrift in the North Atlantic in the 1850s. The source of this story, and its subsequent evolution from fact into fantasy, has since been tracked down, as has the origin of Silvio Scherli's haunting account of the deaths of the entire crew of a mystery ship called the Ourang Medan (it turned out to be Mr Scherli himself). The evidence which Sanderson cites turns out to be fiction with depressing predictability. To give one more example, I can find absolutely no evidence that the physicist called John Carstiou mentioned in Chapter 11 ever existed, let alone that he had a paper on a second form of gravity published by the National Academy of Sciences; was Sanderson pranked by the US Office of Naval Research? I'm tempted to regard this as a case of an American military organisation putting one over on the former member of a rival, British organisation and this would probably be true even if I hadn't just finished reading Mystery Men...

Despite my mounting disappointment, I kept reading in the hope that I'd eventually come across an observation that was original or thought provoking. Needless to say, I finished the book without that happening. Everything eventually collapses in a messy tangle involving (but not at all limited to) bigfoot, poltergeists, panpsychism, and appendices. Add this one to the "bunk" pile.

Published by: Constable, 2010

Mark Pilkington is a British writer and regular contributor to one of my favourite magazines, the Fortean Times. He's also the founder of Strange Attractor Press. Mirage Men is his examination of the state of UFOlogy as it stood at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The field was not a healthy one back then (and it's only gotten worse since). It was, not to put too fine a point on things, consuming itself. I've been interested in UFOs since I first read Adamski and Leslie's classic work Flying Saucers Have Landed when I was a very small boy, but the more I read on the subject, the more sceptical I became. Aside from the work of one or two writers like Jacques Vallée who view the phenemenon as deception by person or persons unknown, most of the work being published after 1990 or so has been sensationalist garbage, and almost all of it follows what's known as the ETH, or Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, that the things which are responsible for sightings are nuts-and-bolts spacecraft piloted by aliens in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colours. These craft seem to crash an a regular basis, too—which seems an odd habit for technology that is as vastly superior as it's made out to be.

Proponents of the ETH include a tiny but vociferous few who discovered that promoting it loudly in the media can generate large amounts of income for relatively little effort. Their stories—all hearsay, or misinterpreted FLIR footage—get reported on the more credulous news channels with no critical assessment whatsoever. They have as much plausibility as the AI-generated images of cat/snake hybrids that were doing the rounds a few months ago, and the number of people who are taken in by such things is a depressing reminder that the average person can be shockingly gullible. But it's safe to say that gullibility is the watchword of the modern UFOlogist.

Any hope of a rational assessment of these ever-more outlandish claims has been steadily fading since the wave of alien abduction witnesses (also known as "experiencers") first rolled in at the tail end of the 1980s. There are multiple "tells" I know of for assessing whether a writer is trying to pull the wool over my eyes but I'll just give one example here: Lonnie Zamora's infamous 1964 encounter with an alleged landed spacecraft in Socorro, New Mexico was actually a case of a policeman being punked by the students of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology because he'd made himself deeply unpopular there in his previous job as a campus security guard. If the case is used to support the ETH, I know whoever wrote the book is just parroting the standard "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens" line. To Mark Pilkington's credit, the version of events he relates in the notes at the end of this book is that Zamora was indeed the victim of a student prank.

The idea of UFOs as nothing more than empty hoaxes tends to get UFO enthusiasts upset (if not downright angry) but if you apply Occam's Razor to the subject, you'll be hard-pressed to come up with any other explanation that's even remotely plausible. The question then becomes why such hoaxes might be perpetrated and that's what Mirage Men is about. It's a fascinating tale. As Mark Pilkington concludes, the real UFOs are "imaginary weapons for psychological wars." The problem is that the hoaxers have lost control of the hoax. Today, UFOs are less about preserving the secrecy of national security assets and more about YouTube views, convention appearances, and tie-in books.

Framed by his experiences at a UFO convention in the United States and a subsequent road trip across New Mexico to interview key players and take in some of the field's most well-known landmarks, Mark unravels the CIA and NSA's historic (and contemporary) roles in spreading UFO disinformation. In the process he relates how an alleged member of the United States' Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), a distinctly shady character called Richard Doty and his chums drove at least one innocent man completely out of his mind by feeding him bullshit about aliens. The most shocking thing in the entire book for me is the fact that nobody seems to have ever been called to account for this. Doty and the author meet several times in the book, and even though Pilkington claims to like the man, it's difficult to regard him as anything other than a devious fabuilst, a chancer of the first degree. I'd be more likely to trust a Tory MP than I would to trust anything Doty says.

I must admit I was surprised to make it to the end of the book without encountering a single mention of Carl Meredith Allen, a.k.a. "Carlos Allende", who was the quintessential mystery man responsible for many of the field's most enduring legends and who is worthy of a book all to himself. It seems like an odd omission, particularly as Allen was an associate of William Moore, who is mentioned many times.

Before you consider believing anything at all that's been happening in the UFO field recently, you would do well to read this book. If you're already a believer, it will be one of the most depressing things that you will ever read.

Published by: Penguin, 1993

From the outset I should point out that I'm not a big fan of philosophy. I'm not sure that I'd go as far as Neil deGrasse Tyson does and reject it completely, but my childhood impression of it being a domain which was almost exclusively inhabited by old white guys in beards spending their days telling each other that they're obviously asking the wrong questions has proved remarkably difficult to shake. Although introspection—thinking about stuff—is an important part of the scientific method, it's the scientists rather than the philosophers for whom all that thinking leads to experiments being designed, theories either falsified or supported, and conjectures being either proved or discarded. Philosophy is simply content to ask questions; coming up with the answers is evidently somebody else's problem.

Professor Dennett (who died recently, but who was indeed an old white guy with a beard) was a little more attuned to the value of experimental verification than most other philosophers seem to be, and he clearly had a keen mind. But I'm afraid this book does nothing to allay my suspicion that the idea of proof is alien to the field. Perhaps it's because finding the answer would put the philosophers out of a job permanently? This might explain why this book contains infuriating passages such as:

"Am I claiming to have proven that bats could not have these mental states? Well, no, but also I can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us." (p. 448)

There are also passages which reek of misunderstanding (if not outright misrepresentation), such as

"When we learn that the only difference between gold and silver is the number of subatomic particles in their atoms, we may feel cheated or angry—those physicists have explained something away: The gold-ness is gone from gold; they've left out the very silveriness of silver that we appreciate. And when they explain the way reflection and absorption of electromagnetic radiation accounts for colors and color vision, they seem to neglect the very thing that matters most. (...) Leaving something out is not a feature of failed explanations, but of successful explanations." (p. 454)

The book begins promisingly enough, even if Dennett's dismissal of the "we're all just brains in vats" simulation argument by the time we've got to page 7 feels superficial and less than convincing. In the opening chapters, Dennett examines how answers to the questions that have kept philosophers going through the centuries have changed over the years: where is our consciousness located? Who is the "me" who is writing these words, and how did I come up with them? Is consciousness limited to humans, or do all primates have it, too? Or is everything conscious to one degree or another? Next, Dennett demonstrates that consciousness is fallible. It gets things wrong in intriguing ways which suggest that how we make sense of the world is somehow off. For example, our sense-making seems to occur retrospectively; the mind is capable of re-ordering events. We might think that we're paying attention to what's going on around us in great detail, but this is an illusion. Experienced time does not necessarily play out the same way as objective time does.

Our brains do a tremendous amount of work in interpreting what we see. Dennett describes several experiments you can conduct at home with nothing more than a pack of playing cards to show just how limited our perception of fine details and colours in our visual field actually is. Our brains make us think that what we see is much more accurate and finely-detailed than it really is. But our brains are also very good at not noticing things; they literally stop paying attention every time we change the point on which our eyes are focused (a movement known as a saccade). As Dennett explains, clever experiments with eye tracking and computer displays have revealed that we are still able to see something during a saccade if it moves in the same direction and at the same speed as our eyes—and therefore our attentional focus—are moving. And yet because of the way the eye is built we all have blind spots in our vision; our brains ignore these holes so efficiently that we don't notice them. Dennett takes great pains to explain that this doesn't mean that our vision system is filling in details and somehow "papering over the cracks" but instead that it is simply not seeing the hole that is demonstrably there—and while this reveals an interesting feature of our awareness, doesn't it also contradict the point made above about the way our brains "enhance" what we see? If you find the tension between these different aspects of human vision interesting, you're going to be amazed by the classic experiment which demonstrated reliably that we can fail to spot seemingly outrageous changes that happen right in front of us. Reality is not what we think it is. But how does this further Dennett's argument? I'm not sure I know.

Dennett then sets about demolishing the idea that the mind has a "Cartesian Theatre" which posits an imaginary homunculus sitting inside our heads, monitoring all our sensory inputs and who is, essentially, the "me" we think we're referring to when we attempt to describe our experience of being conscious. Instead, Dennett argues, our minds are in constant pandemonium. The central thesis of the book is his "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness which proposes that impulses, thoughts and sensory impressions are in constant (and unconscious) competition with each other and those that win out are eventually promoted sufficiently for them to be put in control of our actions, which is how we become aware of them. You may be surprised to discover that it's not the other way around; we reverse-engineer this process in order to rationalise what we just did and convince ourselves that we meant to do it all along, even though that's really not how it happened. Since this book was first published back in 1991, some neuroscience researchers have come to much the same conclusions. It's all fascinating stuff, and also somewhat alarming.

Unfortunately the book then falls apart as Dennett gets into the weeds of what it means to be conscious and considers how we perceive the world. He starts out by denying the existence of qualia but has no alternative explanation of perception handy; no process of generating the experience of being—which eventually leads him to make the ludicrous assertion quoted above from page 454. There are many more differences between gold and silver than just their atomic weight; why should the number of subatomic particles they contain be the only characteristic which Dennett feels he is not able to dismiss as a subjective observation? Surely our knowledge of this property of theirs was acquired in exactly the same way as every other property they have? Qualia must be enmeshed in our entire experience of reality; how could they not be? But his objection to them, that they imply that our observations of macroscopic objects somehow changes their physical properties, seems to be a classic case of a straw man argument. And yes, I know the quantum world is different, but that's not the issue here. Dennett admits that readers of early drafts of the book accused him of "pulling a fast one" in this part of his argument, and I readily agreed with them. There's a lot of sleight of hand going on over what we can objectively know and what is only subjective and the plausibility of Dennett's argument evaporates.

Ultimately, Consciousness Explained didn't really teach me anything new about how the mind works, and it did nothing to change my opinion of philosophy as a whole; rather, it further confirmed it. I suspect Neil deGrasse Tyson would say the same thing.

Published by: Bloomsbury, 1999

I've been meaning to read this one for a long time and when I happened upon a second-hand copy in the Lions charity shop in Thornbury recently I grabbed it immediately (together a copy of Biskind's Gods and Monsters, which was sitting next to it on the shelf).

As the title suggests, this is a book that examines the history of what became known as the "New Hollywood": the generation of actors, directors, and producers who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. The cast of characters includes George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. It also includes movers and shakers like Warren Beatty, Dennis Hopper, Ellen Burstyn and Jack Nicholson. But this is not a glossy hagiography of movie greats. Instead, Biskind's examination of the film business is stark and unrelenting and pretty much everybody that he writes about has flaws which come under the magnifying glass. Indeed, more than one of the people encountered in the book could justifiably be described as monstrous.

When I read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential last year, I commented that the book had permanently removed any ambitions I could ever have in wanting to be a chef. This book will do the same thing for anyone harbouring a secret desire to break in to the movie business. Biskind interviewed a lot of the great and good who were working in Hollywood back then, and the thing that stuck me most strongly about the results of those interviews is how ephemeral and transitory personal relationships seemed to be for pretty much everyone concerned. The idea of sacrificing marriages, family ties, and friendships to serve ambition just seems to have been the order of the day. And with the rise of the blockbuster, starting with Spielberg's Jaws in 1975, how Tinseltown managed its affairs changed both metaphorically and literally. People who had never had money before suddenly had more of the stuff than they were equipped to handle. Regimes changed; dynasties fell; and when the industry discovered hard drugs, any constraints on ego flew out of the window and rampant excess became the order of the day. The talents of more than one young prodigy who might otherwise have gone on to make masterpieces were frittered away and promising careers crashed and burned. If you somehow managed to survive that, megalomania and self-destructive streaks a mile wide were waiting to strike (the book recounts a depressing number of cases where this happened). The amount of backstabbing and conflicting stories on show here makes for grim reading. Some of the rivalries discussed are the stuff of legend; after all, even the most sensible and level-headed of artistes, showered with plaudits though they might be, are only ever one bad film away from potential oblivion.

The money also changed the way studio management approached the idea of film. Anyone with truly independent ideas was eventually forced out as the accountants moved in and began to insist on focus groups, careful analysis of potential demographics, obsessing in endless meetings over how a movie might "play" from region to region. And as a study in just how bad cocaine can be at encouraging people to make really bad decisions, this book is hard to beat.

It's a thoroughly gripping read.

Published by: Tor, 2018

...and as I got up early this morning I've already finished book 4 of the series. Exit Strategy brings the tale of Murderbot's dealings with evil corporation GrayCris to a very satisfying conclusion while leaving enough matters unresolved for there to be plenty of room for further character development and sequels (and I already have the next three books in the series in my "to read" pile; it's a safe bet that I will be tackling the next book almost immediately). I had to smile when I read the blurb on the back of this book, as it turns out I was not the first person to see the similarities between Murderbot and Marvin the Paranoid Android.

The plot didn't exactly go as I'd expected. Murderbot's cognitive tweaks and improvements lead it (and me) to believe it's capable of rather more than it can actually handle, and it takes a bit of a hit. This results in it being incapacitated at the climax of the action in a way that reminded me of the first book, except that this time what happens is much more satisfying from the perspective of the narrative.

The author builds the tension and the stakes even more effectively than Rogue Protocol and it's easy to understand Murderbot's anxiety about whether or not it and its friends will manage to emerge unscathed as the action unfolds. A friend once described the original series of Star Trek as "competence porn" in that Kirk and his colleagues would almost always resolve a threatening situation by being not just very good at their jobs but also much brighter and smarter than the foe that they were dealing with each week. Murderbot has a similar vibe to this, but its impostor syndrome and related insecurities mean that it must work much harder to come out on top and as a result its triumphs are all the more satisfying.

Published by: Tor, 2018

Yes, I'm on a serious Murderbot binge. The books are so short that it's easy (and oh-so-tempting) to blast right through each one in a single session, and that is exactly what I have been doing. Each book I've read so far builds on the ones that have gone before, so once again this feels like a single act in a larger story rather than a self-contained novel. Not that I'm complaining. Well, not much, anyway; I'm having too much fun.

This book gives more of a glimpse of the dystopian aspects of the wider setting of the story; there's an encounter early on with a bunch of characters who have sold themselves into slavery, as they travel to a planet where the humans will be working under a twenty-year contract for one of the many conglomerates who appear to be running the Universe. Murderbot realises what a bad idea this is immediately, but refrains from pointing the matter out to the unfortunate people, who are either in denial about the truth of their situation or simply too stupid (or desperate) to think about what they are letting themselves in for. This is the only point in the story so far where Murderbot manages to succeed in its intention to not get involved, although it clearly views their plight as being morally wrong and observes that at least when it got damaged its employers would foot the bill for its repair; the slaves will have to pay for any medical expenses that they incur.

Murderbot is still investigating its own history and continues to unearth evidence of other nefarious deeds committed by the company which was responsible for the initiating incident which happened before the start of the first book. In doing so, it realises that the bunch of innocent humans in the location it's exploring are in mortal peril and ends up taking responsibility for saving them. In the process of doing this, discoveries relevant to its past are made and a big piece of the puzzle has dropped into place by the end of the book. Murderbot is also beginning to realise that its capabilities have changed significantly; it describes recoding its own mind to pass more effectively as a human being several times, and then notes that it's able to perform cognitive tasks which used to be beyond its ability. These improvements aren't big enough to start it up a singularity-type exponential curve, but all the same I get the feeling that the modifications made by ART in the last book were rather more drastic than they appeared at the time. Murderbot is beginning to transcend its original design and this will (I hope) have a pay off later on. It's also apparent that Ms Wells has now got everything in place for the end game and all the plot threads she has introduced over the first three books can be woven back together. This is obviously what's going to happen in the next book in the series so I guess I'd better start reading that one, then. On it.

Published by: Tor, 2018

I clearly enjoyed the first Murderbot tale enough to pick up the second one as my bath time reading later the same day, and I burned through the whole story before the water had gone cold. Again, the book is a thin affair, and to be honest it feels more like the second act of a larger work rather than the self-contained book which I was presented with (I picked up the first four volumes of the series as a box set, which helps things make a lot more sense). Nevertheless I think it's safe to say at this point that I have become another enthusiastic member of Team Murderbot.

The second volume is tightly plotted and I got a much stronger sense of both Murderbot's personality and of the characters that it meets as the plot progresses. There are also a couple of nice payoffs from the first book, particularly one involving Murderbot's opinion of "pleasure units", a.k.a. "sexbots". Murderbot's interactions with the ship it has hitched a lift from at the beginning of the story (and there's a hint and a half) made me realise that my initial comparisons with the Terminator and James Bond were way off the mark. Arnie's unstoppable killing machine never suffered from anxiety or depression. No, Murderbot reminds me now of Douglas Adams's wonderful and morose creation Marvin the Paranoid Android in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At one point Murderbot tells us with evident pride that it has got very good at sighing, and by the end of the book I got the distinct impression that the principal learning point that the character was taking away from events wasn't that it shouldn't always expect things to go horribly wrong (as Marvin does) but instead that it hadn't anticipated things to go south anywhere near badly enough. Although it's never described in such terms in the text, it seems clear to me that Murderbot suffers from PTSD, and by the end of the book it's easy to understand why that should be so.

As the second act in a larger tale, Artificial Condition ticks all the right boxes. The writing is more streamlined, the stakes are higher, the story opens out, new characters are introduced, and the protagonist's back story is revealed in more detail. I won't go into spoiler territory here, but will simply say that the back story was the most satisfying aspect of the book for me. Murderbot is endearing in the way it continuously beats itself up for not being a competent enough protagonist, but there are hints that the lack of confidence that it has in its ability to make its way in the Universe is beginning to be displaced by moral outrage at the injustices that it has discovered. It will be very interesting to see what happens next.

Published by: Tor, 2017

Yes, this is the first Murderbot story. Many of my friends have been enthusing about the series for years, and when someone else I know started to rave about it earlier this month I decided that it was well past time for me to find out what all the fuss was about. The first thing I'll say is that All Systems Red is a very short book. The hardback is a very thin affair, even after the publisher decided to bulk things out by including a couple of chapters from the sequel at the back. In fact at some 44,000 words it's barely larger than a novella and I read the whole thing in an afternoon. But I can see why people are so taken with the series.

The tale is told to us by Murderbot itself. It's a corporate secunit (security unit) who is essentially a half-clone, half robot badass who would much rather be left in peace so that it could watch its favourite soap operas all day but everyone else's expectations of it involve playing a role more akin to that of bodyguard and management enforcer. With cybernetic enhancements which call to mind the Terminator mashed up with Steve Austin and James Bond and a little bit of Neo from The Matrix thrown in for good measure, Murderbot's existence is a violently precarious one. Its name is a personal invention; to the rest of the Universe, it doesn't count as a person. Instead it's just an item of corporate inventory and Murderbot makes it abundantly clear that not only does it expect to be treated as such, that is in fact exactly how it views itself. The author does, too; the book only ever describes Murderbot as an "it", never as a he or she. Murderbot views the whole gender thing with amused disdain, and has no time for it.

Understandably, this all gives it a somewhat cynical outlook on life. But when its latest assignment on a strange planet goes catastrophically off the rails, Murderbot realises with horror that the humans under its protection are actually beginning to relate to it as a person. Being regarded as something more than an item of expedition equipment makes Murderbot extremely uncomfortable. And that, of course, is where the story really catches light.

The story's not perfect; much of the denouement takes place "off screen" and that meant I was left feeling rather dissociated from the action, but Murderbot's narrative voice is a delight and the tale is refreshingly free of many of the genre's more predictable tropes so I'm going to reserve judgment for the moment. This might also have something to do with the fact that I already have the next six books in the series lined up right here, too. I strongly suspect that you'll be seeing my reviews of the rest of the series here in the not-too-distant future...

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.)

Bruce didn't bother with a ghostwriter. He wrote this book himself, in longhand, on paper. 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 it includes 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.