Reviews and Comments

A fascinating detective story involving Isolde Wilby, a police captain with the ability to cast hexes, during her line of work at the Office of Ensorcelled Investigations. During an unrelated investigation, she stumbles upon an unusual magical item: a doll's arm. But she is then forced to release it to a very highly paid lawyer, which makes her curious. Her investigations into the purpose of the arm, and how it might be related to a dispute between a union and a company over high-classed watches, who lead her to discover a form of slavery. And it would need all her wits to finish the investigation.

A short story about a man who has relationship troubles and, following an influencer, burns an evil sign on to his palm to improve his life. But things start to go wrong when the sign doesn't do what he wants, but instead causes havoc to himself and to those around him, and especially to the girl who dumped him.

An entertaining book set in the 1890s Singapore. Miss Cassidy arrives to become a companion for Sarah Jane Bendemeer, whose family has recently suffered the loss of her mother and siblings. Miss Cassidy is slowly revealed to be more than just an English Lady in an Asian Country, when she investigates and learns the cause of the tragedy: a local spirit, the Pontianak, who has come to haunt the family.

Just who Miss Cassidy is really is not yet fully revealed, but enough is shown that she can converse with local spirits and even goddesses to learn just what must be done to remove the threat to the Bendemeer family.

But that is only half of the book. The other half concerns the family of Mr Kay Wing Tong, who hires her to become an English tutor to his family. Mr Kay himself develops a curious conversational relation with Miss Cassidy. And it is in this role as a tutor that Miss Cassidy is finally revealed as who she is, as yet another local spirit haunts the Kay family, and it would need all of her power and quick thinking to help save the day.

The people in the story show an acceptance for spirits that may or may not affect their lives in Singapore. The book itself is a delightful mix of Western and Asian culture and mythology as goddesses and spirits from several pantheons, Western, Indian, Southeast Asia and Eastern Asia, mix together to test their wills and strengths against each other.

A short story prequel to "Legends & Lattes" involving Viv the Orc and a few other characters, who are on the hunt for a robber who has stolen some plans. With some detective work, Viv discovers the robber's hideout but has a change of mind when she discovers why the robber was hiding there; for like the robber, Viv is also looking for a way out of their current way of life. The story ends, as expected, with Viv discovering what she would like to do next, leading to the beginning of the book, "Legends & Lattes".

An average issue, with interesting stories by Alice Towey, Timothy Mudie and David McGillveray.

• "The Time Capsule" by Alice Towey: a girl discovers a space probe that fell from space, which is a time capsule from an earlier time with more technology than current times. But now, she has to keep its information from falling into the wrong hands before she has time to make use of the knowledge to make the current world a better place.

• "The Sort" by Thomas Ha: a father and his son, who appear to have an unusual way to communicate, travel through a town. But this is no ordinary town, set in a future where genetic manipulation have created that can delight people or bring out their hatred.

• "Molum, Molum, Molum the Scourge" by Rich Larson: in the future, an enhanced gladiator who is down and out is told of a store of drugs needed to quench the needs of his enhancements. As it turns out, he would need to do one final gladiatorial fight to get it.

• "Something Crossing Over, Something Coming Back" by Timothy Mudie: during a conflict between two countries, a scientist is sent to spy on the enemy by teleporting his consciousness into another person's body. During his spy mission, he has to act like the other person to fool others, including his wife. As the mission ends, he thinks over what he has done to affect the other person's life.

• "Canyon Dance" by Rajeev Prasad: in the future, man has colonized several worlds. To do so, they had to radically modify their body chemistries to cope with living in space and on other worlds. But one person still fights against his alcoholism, for he believes the fight is a part of his life. But he may have to reconsider when a move to another world may fail if he lets alcohol take over his life again.

• "The Deformed Saint and the Poison Wind" by David McGillveray: a space courier is ambushed by an enemy and has to escape to a planet. There, she discovers a native race of crab-like people that treats her as disabled due to her lack of limbs. She eventually discovers that the conflict she is a part of may have poisoned the natives with radiation sickness, but she may have a way to cure them.

• "Where My Love Still Lives" by Emily Taylor: in a future where 'builders' have taken over the surface of the Earth, what remains of humanity lives underground. Some people risk their lives to go to the surface in gliders to get food that can't be grown undergrown. The story follows one woman who returns to a cavern where her former lover lives. There, they return to an unavoidable topic: their love and his hope that she stops risking her life for food.

• "Three Circuits of the Monoceros Ring" by Marisca Pichette: a series of transcripts, some received corrupted, between three people travelling to distant parts of the universe, yet still hoping to meet again.

A light-hearted and entertaining book on the adventures of 11-year-old Oliver. After seeing a presentation by Dr. Howard, an astrophysicist, Oliver decides that is what he wants to be when he grows up. In the meantime, he plans to bother Dr. Howard with questions about astrophysics and write down the answers in a book when he will then present to his fellow students. This is that book, along with various shenanigans that Oliver gets into while writing the book.

The book lightly covers topics about modern astrophysics like the big bang, black holes, the sun and planets, the size of the universe, the end of the universe and the nature of time. Aimed at young readers, it is quite light on details but filled with enough unusual facts about the universe that readers can trot out for dinner conversations. Comics related to the topics also fill the pages and help to add humorous asides to the chapters.

A book that could help to keep young readers entertained, while also making them curious about the surrounding universe. A short list of websites and books are provided at the end for those who want to know more.

An entertaining and thoughtful book about the end of the world as we know it and a robot who wanders through it and comes out at the end with, perhaps, a way to remake the world to be better. The story is full of SFF and literary allusions to writers and situations, especially Asimov's positronic robot stories, as well as other writers like Kafka, Orwell, Borges and Dante.

Charles is a robot valet and, as the story begin, murders his master. He suspects a malfunction and leaves the mansion to return to a central service for decommissioning. During the journey, we see the world through his eyes, and it is a world that has decayed and gone to waste, with no humans to be seen, but lots of robots, all waiting for confirming instructions from humans that never come.

His journey is in vain, for other robots are waiting before him to be examined. Now things take a turn for the unexpected when he meets up with an unusual 'robot' known as the Wonk, who adds unexpected tasks and trigger a re-interpretation of tasks in Uncharles' (formerly Charles) decision-making process.

The Wonk is attempting to find out what happened to the world. And together, they will make a journey through a wasteland landscape to find answers: first in an underground farm that is trying to recreate the mindless workplace of the past, then in a Library Archive that doesn't really archive, and so on. As the journey progresses, Uncharles begins to see loopholes and new ways to reinterpret his instructions, all the while trying to figure out his place in the now desolate world, which no longer needs his skills as a valet.

Their journey would end when they end up in the only place left with authority. But the answers they get there would not be the ones they expect, and the only way to survive is to challenge authority and come up with their own way to remake the world.

The story is full of social commentary about how we live and how robots are treated, if we had intelligent but not sentient robots. The question of robot sentience is asked many times in the story, but the answer may depend on how you interpret the ending of the story.

An interesting novel set over several human generations on a world where a colony of humans has become dependent on an intelligent plant to provide them with the required nutrients. In return, the humans 'serve' the plant by protecting it from other predators and helping it to spread when required. An unusual novel presenting a plant as a form of intelligence, possibly superior to man.

The plant's intelligence isn't evident at the start when the colony begins. But the biologist in the colony begins to suspect that the plants on the newly colonized planet, Pax, are intelligent when one plant tries to kill them while another 'protects' them. The way herbivores behave also give a clue as to whom is the dominant species on the planet. As the colony slowly grow under the plant's protection, conflict breaks out over whether to move the colony to yet another plant that may have attempted to 'bribe' them with gifts and the offer of more protection.

Partway through the book, the point of view shifts from the humans to the plant, which can now communicate with the humans with more than just scents and tasty fruit. The plant can see using numerous light sensitive cells and write messages with dye-sensitive ones. The plant also talks with other plants through the language of chemistry. The plant and humans now coexists, although tensions remain over who dominates and whether domination or mutual coexistence is the more desired outcome.

For the book is also about the colony trying to find a new way of life after the conflicts that have affect Earth and cause the colonist to flee to a new planet. This would be challenged when yet another alien species is discovered on the planet and the colonists and plant have to decide how to deal with them: with cooperation or with conflict.

By the end of the book, a new balance has been achieved by aliens, humans and plant: but who knows how long it can last and how it may handle any new crisis in the future.

A fascinating book about the various way computers and coding have changed the world. Some essays are on the history of coding and others are on famous code hacks. Some essays touch on ethics, social justice, discrimination and cheats that coding has enabled. And, of course, one essay is one that infamous comment found in the Commentary on UNIX: "You are not expected to understand this."

What follows is a summary of each essay in the book.

1. The First Line of Code: a look at what may be the first lines of code written in history to control weaving looms using punch cards.

2. Monte Carlo Algorithms: Random Numbers in Computing from the H-Bomb to Today: on the history of Monte Carlo Algorithms, whose statistics and random numbers are used in many fields to estimate the future behaviours of systems in many fields.

3. Jean Sammet and the Code That Runs the World: on programmer Jean Sammet who (with Grace Hopper), pulled together early attempts at programming languages to come up with COBOL.

4. Spacewar: Collaborative Coding and the Rise of Gaming Culture: on the history of Spacewar, the first graphical computer game, and the culture (and joy) of hacking computers that came up around it.

5. BASIC and the Illusion of Coding Empowerment: on how BASIC enabled interactive programming for students on time-shared systems. But early on, this was only for entitled students, mainly the better-off white males in the US.

6. The First Email: The Code That Connected Us Online: the ability to send messages from one user to another on the same computer system was so in demand that the need to be able to send messages from one system to another was developed and became the email that we know today.

7. The Police Beat Algorithm: The Code That Launched Computational Policing and Modern Racial Profiling: the search for a technological solution to policing at a time when racial riots were rife would lead to the surveillance systems in use today.

8. "Apollo 11, Do Bailout": on the capabilities of the computer on the Apollo Lunar Lander that enabled the moon landing.

9. The Most Famous Comment in Unix History: "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": this comment, and others in source code, show the personalities and abilities of the people who wrote the code, and left such comments in the code as guidelines (or for fun) for future programmers.

10. The Accidental Felon: on the history of the Morris worm, the self-replicating code that bought down many systems in the early days of the Internet.

11. Internet Relay Chat: From Fish-Slap to LOL: on the propagation of the culture of leaving 'actions' as words on the early internet relay chat into today's social media, leading to postings of LOLs and other kinds of interactive reactions, as well as emojis.

12. Hyperlink: The Idea That Led to Another, and Another, and Another: the history of hyperlinks, which lead people from one document to another, ad infinitum.

13. JPEG: The Unsung Hero in the Digital Revolution: how JPEG works to compress digital images and how this would lead to the fingerprinting of images to individual digital cameras.

14. The Viral Internet Image You've Never Seen: refers to the notorious single pixel image file that appears (hidden) on webpages and emails to track who is fetching the information.

15. The Pop-Up Ad: The Code That Made the Internet Worse: written by the person who wrote the first pop-up ad, it talks about taking responsiblity for what you do with technology.

16. Wear This Code, Go to Jail: starting with the Perl code for the RSA algorithm printed on a shirt, it goes on to shows the problems with trying to do export controls or to restrict software.

17. Needles in the World's Biggest Haystack: The Algorithm That Ranked the Internet: on the ranking algorithm that lauched Google.

18. A Failure to Interoperate: The Lost Mars Climate Orbiter: the Mars probe was lost due to conversion bug between metric and imperial measurements. But the article points to the bigger problem of the decline in interoperability of current day software and applications due to business decisions (to restrict competition).

19. The Code That Launched a Million Cat Videos: viral videos of cats reacting to the iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner helped to make it popular. But the software for the Roomba at the time, that controlled its somewhat random behaviour, also helped to make it beloved for the idiosyncratic way of cleaning a room.

20. Nakamoto's Prophecy: Bitcoin and the Revolution in Trust: on the development of bitcoin and the blockchain behind it that may yet revolutionize the way people trust one another and do business without a central authority.

21. The Curse of the Awesome Button: the development of Facebook's 'Like' button started off as a way to provide feedback on the social network. But it then became a way to track users as they moved from site to site.

22. The Bug No One Was Responsible For-Until Everyone Was: Heartbleed (a buffer overflow error in OpenSSH) was a programming error, but it showed the effects of using a popular piece of code but not providing proper support to the developers of the code.

23. The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: How Digital Systems Can Be Used to Cheat: how software became a way to cheat and get around regulations.

24. The Code That Brought a Language Online: the development of software to allow users to enter text in Bangla after a terror attack in Bangladesh would have repercussions for blogging and freedom of expression in the country afterwards.

25. Telegram: The Platform That Became "the Internet" in Iran: Telegram enabled users in Iran to communicate and to broadcast messages in channels until it became Iranian's view of the Internet, for a while.

26. Encoding Gender: the issues around storing information on gender, when most databases are set up to only accept two binary gender values.