Reviews and Comments

The fifth book in the Secret Coders, series, this one continues their battle against the evil Professor One-Zero who plans to use the controlling potion he's manufactured to control the town, and it's up to the coders to stop him with the help of some programming.

The book makes a digression into the history of Professor Bee, showing where he came from and how his arrival here lead to the creation of his school, via interactions with some famous computer scientists that originally created the Logo programming language.

The book ends with instructions from Professor Bee to return to his home and obtain an item that may be the only way to ultimately stop Professor One-Zero.

As with the rest of the books in the series, the reader is asked to accomplish simple coding tasks before proceeding, and is then shown what the pieces of code do. Drawing with multiple loops as well as a command to draw circles (up to now, coding could only be done with straight lines) are introduced.

The next book in the series is the concluding one and promises to be an interesting showdown.

An average issue, with interesting stories by Stephen Case, Thomas Ha and M. J. Pettit.

• "Every Seed Is a Prayer (And Your World Is a Seed)" by Stephen Case: in the future, an AI is assigned the task of greening the world by using algorithms to replant the trees and to monitor them using drones. But as time passes, the AI begins to make choices and introduce technology that its makers and users barely understand, or what its final objective would be.

• "Window Boy" by Thomas Ha: in the future most people live in sheltered houses, safe from the horrors of the outside world, except for some. The child of a family in such a home somehow becomes friends with one such outside person, who comes to his window. But the view of the outside is 'filtered' and it needs, some willpower for the child to reduce the filters to reveal just what is actually now found outside.

• "Light Speed Is Not a Speed" by Andy Dudak: a meandering story about the life of a storyteller in a world undergoing revolutions.

• "Who Can Have the Moon" by Congyun 'Muming' Gu, translated by Tian Huang: the story of a girl who grows up loving art but is forced by circumstance to work on more mundane artwork. But the future would appear brighter when she starts to gain an appreciate audience for her work.

• "Empathetic Ear" by M. J. Pettit: an overworked academic reluctantly takes part in a study where an earpiece gives her 'advice' to improve her empathy with students. But it becomes too much when it starts to take over her thinking, leading her to wonder which are her thoughts and which are those being fed to her.

• "Gel Pen Notes from Generation Ship Y" by Marisca Pichette: a spaceship is on a long journey to a new world, with only one generation of apparently immortal colonist. But death still happens, by accident or otherwise, and life appears deary to the people waiting for the journey to end. But an unexpected event would give new hope to the colonists.

• "Resistant" by Koji A. Dae: It's a future where nanobots connect the brain of people to the network. But some people are unable to take part due to rejection. One such person goes to a clinic that may offer hope of another kind of implant that may not be approved by other people.

An average issue with interesting stories by Gregor Hartmann, Matthew Hughes, R.S. Benedict and with an especially interesting story about a musical faun by Jerome Stueart.

• "The Unbearable Lightness of Bullets" by Gregor Hartmann: a detective enlists the help of a patrol officer to solve the mystery of the murder of a currency trader that appears to have been too successful.

• "The Plot Against Fantucco’s Armor" by Matthew Hughes: what starts out for the servant as an innocent task to get the design for trouser buckles for his magical master turns into a detective story as the servant finds himself caught up in a conspiracy over who would eventually replace the ruler of a city and is tasked with getting to the bottom of the plot. But as it turns out, the actual target of the plot may not be the ruler after all.

• "At Your Dream’s Edge" by S. Qiouyi Lu: a story about a Nightmare app that does what it says: summons a nightmare to scare you. The user of the app in this story uses it to prepare for an unpleasant meeting with relatives, but in the end, you wonder whether the meeting is really worse than the nightmares faced.

• " All of Me" by R.S. Benedict: an unusual and interesting story that plays with the idea of the mermaid that becomes human. Only this is an unusual 'mermaid' who undergoes radical surgery to appear like a Hollywood starlet and proceeds to use her unusual skills to do more than one thing at a time (actress, writer, 'nature lover', paparazi target, etc.). But when she tires of being human, she plans to go out with a bang.

• "Miscellaneous Notes from the Time an Alien Came to Band Camp Disguised As My Alto Sax" by Tina Connolly: that is what happens in the story. Wrapped around the story of an alien disguised as a sax is a woman who longs to be appreciated by another member of the band, which might lead to another version of sax.

• "The Mark of Cain" by John Kessel: a disjointed story that Kessel originally wrote years ago but put aside that he now picks up that looks at the life of a writer who may have done some bad things in the past. In between are analysis of the character's action.

• "Playscape" by Diana Peterfreund: a story tinged with horror about a mother with a child who knows a neighbour. When the neighbour's child just disappears while playing on a playscape at a park, opinions ranging from murder to child neglect are thrown at the neighbour. But as the mother lets her child play on the very same playscape, you start to wonder if there might be some truth to the neighbour's version of events.

• "The Free Orcs of Cascadia" by Margaret Killjoy: a strange story about a journalist who looks into unusual musical subcultures. In this case, the musical subculture is 'orc music' which somehow develops into an actual orc culture. The journalist gets the chance to interview an orc musician who created an uproar when he kills another orc musician on stage and goes into hiding. The interview would reveal just what kind of orc culture has developed. Think of it as a LARP (live action role playing) game, but played with real seriousness.

• "Dear Sir or Madam" by Paul Park: a letter written to the reader by the protagonist who can fabricate realities. But the story wasn't gripping enough for me to really understand the purpose of the story.

• "Postlude to the Afternoon of a Faun" by Jerome Stueart: a fascinating fantasy story about a faun who loses his clarinet to a religiously righteous person. Many years later, the clarinet returns to him via a student who wants to learn to play it. He yearns to be reunited with the magic of his clarinet, but also to be able to teach the student to play jazz with it. It is only with the help of his fairy friends and some improvised jazz music that he may finally achieve his objectives.

• "Bella and the Blessed Stone" by Nick Dichario: a story of strange coincidences involving a stone from the sky (a meteorite) that saves an abused child from being killed by her father. As the story of the miracle spreads, it would take another strange coincidence to end the story.

• "Contagion’s Eve at the House Noctambulous" by Rich Larson: a story of a future involving a group of families with advanced biological technology that are living in a world after a contagion has wiped most of the rest of humanity. But even in this future, sibling rivalry rears it head, and it would come to a climax on a day when the families 'celebrate' their freedom from the rest of humanity.

An interesting comic that looks at the history of music, and the rise of copyright and licensing. Starting with the beginnings of music notation, the comic proceeds to show how early on, composers and musicians freely borrowed from each other to create new compositions. But even then, some spoke out about the dangers of creating 'new music' and attempted to 'freeze' how music should be performed.

The invention of the printing press and the formalization of music notation would change matters by creating a market for composers to release compositions. But it would also raise the question of what constitutes original work: it is around now that the law steps in, giving authors and composers a legal right over their compositions. But with the history of composers borrowing and altering previous music to create new ones, questions over how much 'copying' of music began to arise.

The technology to record and replay music would change the landscape, for now people have the ability to record new ways of creating music from the same composition. Thus arose the idea of copyright over a particular recording. As music became more popular and commercialized, copyright would become a contentious topic, for while it allowed composers and musicians to make a living from creating and playing music, it also allowed the rights holder to restrict how the music or composition could be used.

The creation of radio would introduce new possibilities and problems. For now, a recording that previously would only be heard by a person who bought the record, could now be broadcast to a vast audience, and the idea of licensing music to be heard was introduced. This would complicate copyright matters, for now the question became whether you needed to license snippets of music. Numerous lawsuits would rise over the question of music sampling. And that is where matters now stand.

Interleaved among the numerous questions raised over the copyright of compositions and licensing of music is the history and connections between the various forms of music, from jazz, soul, rock and roll to rap, as well as historically important musicians who developed the various art forms.

A better than average issue with three good stories by Val Nolan, Maria Haskins and Nicholas Kaufmann and an emotional tale by Shauna O'Meara.

• "Cyberstar" by Val Nolan: an interesting story that starts with the narrator's eyes being gouged out (ewwww), followed by the events that lead up to it and the events following it. He's now part of a cultish group on an asteroid, whose leader plans to immortalize himself and his followers by becoming a part of 'god'. But things don't turn out as planned when the narrator turns out to have altered the immortalization scheme.

• "And You Shall Sing to Me a Deeper Song" by Maria Haskins: a fascinating story about a singer who, when fitted with augmentations, gets the ability to 'hear' and to 'alter' the behaviour of robots, usually destroying them. The story is set in the aftermath of a war against the robots where the singer has escaped from a detention centre and ended up in a farming community hoping to live their lives away from the central military authority. But when soldiers attack and capture children from the camp, the singer sets out to rescue them, revealing the ability that let her escape in the first place and showing how powerful her singing can be.

• "Coriander for the Hidden" by Nicholas Kaufmann: a nice retelling of some of the events from the Old Testament, from the viewpoint of an angel who looks after the flowers in the Garden of Eden. When this angel gets assigned the task to kill the firstborn of Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus, the angel is initially reluctant to kill innocent children. But then the angel gets an idea on how to save the children while fulfilling his duty to the On-High. It is left as an exercise to the reader to ponder whether the result was the On-High's plan for him, or whether he actually modified the plan.

• "Everything Rising, Everything Starting Again" by Sarah Brooks: a meandering story set in a time when people are mysteriously transforming into butterflies. People try to go about their lives normally, hoping not to see the signs that their loved ones or themselves are about to change form.

• "'Scapes Made Diamond" by Shauna O'Meara: an emotional story about two people called back to comfort an alien creature who is dying. The alien has the ability to share thoughts, making it valuable to the company that keeps it locked up. But its ability is harvested brutally by the company. As the dying creature replays their past history, including the instances of forbidden love between them, it gradually reveals the reason why it called them back and what they have to sacrifice to help it protect the future of its species.

A special memorial issue celebrating the recently departed Gardner Dozois, this issue contains some interesting stories, including a memorable one by Gardner Dozois and others by Greg Egan, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Zhao Haihong, Kofi Nyameye and Allen M. Steele.

• "The Peacemaker" by Gardner Dozois: a thoughtful and disturbing tale set in a future where the seas have risen relentlessly and fast. On a farm run by a cultist religious leader, a boy who saw the seas start to rise is shown preparing for a task throughout the story. This task is apparently deeply contentious and opposed by the wider community. Yet, with the world apparently going to end and a desire to return to the 'old ways', the boy has agreed to the task and believes, up to the end of the story, that it is the way to make peace with the rising seas.

• "Instantiation" by Greg Egan: an interesting tale about a group of software entities who are apparently sentient and are hiding their existence in the servers of a company who serves up virtual reality games. When the entities learn that the company is to shut down, they have to migrate to other servers to survive. This can only be done in a discreet way by hacking the virtual reality system of a guest in a game, so they can upload themselves. But as they perform the task, they learn why the guest is playing the game and raises questions about whether, in a future where our personalities can simulated by computer systems, companies 'own' such personalities.

• "Tourists" by Rammel Chan: an alien tourist on Earth apparently meets another tourist. But the rules laid out say that they should stay away from each other to prevent incidents. But as she is introduced to a group of fellow alien tourist who have apparently broken the rules, the tourist learns the reason why she has been lured into the group and why her translation technology is the reason she does not learn the truth until it may be too late.

• "Eighteen Songs" by Michael Swanwick: a fantasy-like tale of meetings between boys and girls and others on a musical night where bodies can get switched.

• "How I Found Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers" by Lawrence Watt-Evans: an entertaining sequel to his early story, "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers", this one has a Private Investigator who is tasked by a person to find the source of an unusual object. The source turns out to have dropped off the object via Harry's All-Night Hamburgers. And now the PI is obsessed with finding the object.

• "Terrible Trudy on the Lam" by Eileen Gunn: a tale of a tapir who leaves a zoo, does a comedy routine on stage to make a living and then starts hanging out with a Private Investigator to finally escape from the zoo. Apparently based on a true story but with fantasy elements.

• "January March" by Tom Purdom: in a future where robots and AI have taken over most of the work, humanity mainly parties and travels. This tale concerns a troop who is taking part in a competitive parade and hopes to take the top prize with an audacious manoeuvre during the parade.

• "The Starry Sky over the Southern Isle" by Zhao Haihong: in a future where smog is covering the earth and people compete to stay inside clean environmental towns, an astronomer has to consider divorce from his family to give them a better chance to enter the towns. But in the midst of contemplating his future in a time when people can no longer see the stars, his daughter shows him how his family still loves him.

• "Transport" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: the mysterious disappearance of a boy on a space cruise liner leads to a discovery about the secret history of the ship itself, which was involved in the transportation of children fleeing a conflict, only those children never made it safely to their destination.

• "Isla Tiburón" by Alex Irvine: a group of soldiers is tasked with finding apparent terrorists who have bombed a water facility. Only the soldiers may have got trigger-happy upon meeting a group of natives, who may have been the bombers, and end up paying a price of their actions.

• "The Lights Go out, One by One" by Kofi Nyameye: on a desperate mission to save humanity in a distant solar system, a life-changing discovery is made. But now the crew have to decide whether to continue with the mission, possibly saving humanity or not, in light of the discovery.

• "Mr. Death Goes to the Beach" by Jack Dann: a young boy has a talk on a beach with an unusual man. The outcome of the conversation would change the boy's life.

• "The Lost Testament" by Allen M. Steele: set on a world where humans live on an isolated island set aside by the world's alien inhabitants, the story tells a tale of a mysterious artefact, an attempt to steal it and what it actually tells about how the humans actually came to be on that world.

An interesting tale of immediate survival in the face of catastrophic climate change. Compared to his previous stories, there isn't as much 'hard science' involved here, but surviving the changes would involve making tough decisions about how they can prepare and save themselves from the oncoming global crises.

The story starts with the discovery of a black hole that is passing through the solar system. Initially worried about the possibility of huge tides induced by the black hole, a group of people decide to ride it out in the ocean with their self-sustaining vessel. As the danger passes with little incident, the group realize that the orbital changes induced by the passing black hole would cause the global climate to become even more extreme.

The second part deals with the immediate aftermath. The summer temperature has shot up and the group, along with some refugees who have decided to join them, are making a desperate journey towards Antarctica. But as conditions worsen in the rest of the world, one member of the group decides to head back to try to persuade his family to join him on the desperate journey.

By the end of the story, the immediate crisis is over. But the journey in a new world with more extreme weather conditions is not over, and their survival still hangs in the balance.

An above average issue. An interesting mix of SF (Lavie Tidhar), Fantasy (Kelly Barnhill, Matthew Hughes) and Horror (Pip Coen, Rebecca Campbell) with a standout story by David Gullen.

• "The Abundance" by Andy Dudak: the story of a soldier who eliminates inhabited enemy planets by inducing changes in the world's environment. The soldier wants to forget his past and has taken refuge on a world in order to study it. But he is interrupted when a group of fellow soldiers find him and are intent on making him remember his past.

• "Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters" by Kelly Barnhill: an entertaining story about a king with many daughters, all of who decide to improve the kingdom by introducing progressive policies like fair taxation, schools for children, freely available designs for comfortable shoes and clothes, which gets the barons, generals and guilds to grumble to the king about his 'wicked' daughters. But the king loves his daughters. And so the barons decide to take matters into their own hands and force the daughters into marriage and lock them up in their castles. But the king and his daughters would prove to be much wilier than expected and turn the tables, although it would need a final intervention by giants to come to a proper conclusion.

• "Breath" by Bruce McAllister: a short-short involving genetically engineering aquatic beings and the desire for a couple for something in their lives.

• "New Atlantis" by Lavie Tidhar: set in a future where a global catastrophe has occurred on the earth, the story tells of a journey a woman makes to see what can be seen in an underground storage that may hold the memory of the earth when humanity was at its technological peak. The story is full of danger from ants, marauding monsters (both organic and metallic) but also wonder built around the remains of civilization. But one unexpected gift would occur when she accesses the storage to see what it can tell about the past.

• "The Moss Kings" by David Gullen: an interesting fantasy tale set in a medieval time and place where fairy creatures known as the Moss Kings and their plant-like retinue have the run of the land and demand tributes and sacrifices from the people living there. In the story, one observant apprentice receives a message from the Moss Kings about the next tribute to be delivered and becomes part of the ceremony set up to present the tribute. The ceremony is not without conflict but in the end, it is all about gathering information on the Moss Kings so that one day, the humans can free of their rule.

• "How to Kiss a Hojacki" by Debbie Urbanski: an uncomfortable story of a time when some people believe they are turning on other 'kinds' of people. In one family, the mother claims she is now a Hojacki, with her skin turning blue and refusing or unable to talk. But her husband still claims to love her, although his way of 'loving' her is via physical love that, in the tale, turns coercive. In the background are stories of a world coming to terms with other people also becoming Hojackis and other kinds of people, along with an uncertain and potentially violent election taking place in a charge atmosphere over whether the Hojacki are still considered people.

• "Second Skin" by Pip Coen: an interesting story about a farmer who takes in a girl who does not talk as an apprentice. As time passes, and she picks up farming and other skills, including the ability to sew, the farmer notices strange animal behaviour happening around her. Then, when she gets involved in some violence, a sudden change occurs to her and the people around her, and it is only be re-analysing his memories of her does the farmer slowly come to a horrifying conclusion that she may have used her sewing and other abilities as a way to get herself accepted by her family.

• "Sternutative Sortilege" by Matthew Hughes: a light fantasy tale about a thief who is captured and sold to a group of priests who see a use for him: as a device for telling the future in an unusual way related to his facial feature. But the thief plans to escape and discovers that some magical items and idols are not to be trifled with.

• "The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest" by Rebecca Campbell: a tale that starts off with the birth of a child and the mother who loves him. But in a twist to the usual post-partum depression, the mother begins to hear voices, finds her child in unexpected places and see shapes and people out of the corner of her sight. The question becomes whether they are real, or is she seeing another shape out to get her child.

• "Apocalypse Considered Through a Helix of Semi-Precious Foods and Recipes" by Tobias S. Buckell: a series of vignettes about the various ways people survive the apocalypse, each one involving an item of food.

An interesting collection of recent short explainers originally published by The Economist to provide quick facts, figures and explanations on some aspects of the world, some of which may appear contradictory.

The book is divided into several sections, each of which contains explainers for some of the questions raised. The sections range from the very generic questions about the world to more specialized topics like food, economics (of course), science, technology, sports, words and holidays.

I have read quite a number of the explainers when they were originally published by The Economist, so much of the material in the book is already familiar to me. Even so, there are some explainers that I missed that explain some aspects of the world in a new light.

All the explainers are brief, at most only a few pages, with some occasional graphs. But they fulfil the aim of the book, which is to explain some interesting and unusual aspects of why some things in the world are the way they are now.