Reviews and Comments

A wonderful collection of stories by an author who does not produce many stories. But the ones he does write are finely crafted and raise questions about people and their reactions to situations that, but for the way the universe was created, could really exist outside the author's imagination.

• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate": a tale of a merchant who encounters an alchemist who works magic with a gate that can bring one to the past or the present. Via a series of stories in the story, the nature of the gate is shown and the effect it has on the people who use it to travel to the past or the future and reveals the nature of time travel where the past and future are fixed by the choices already or yet to be made.

• "Exhalation": an exhilarating story about an unusual world where air itself drives the workings of a form of life. When unusual events occur, the protagonist is driven to examine his inner self and learns a universal truth; that entropy will be the cause of the death. Yet even then, he holds a faint hope that others will learn from his experiences.

• "What's Expected of Us": a short short story about a little 'toy' that reveals the truth about free will.

• "The Lifecycle of Software Objects": a thoughtful story about the nature of relationships, responsibility and growing up for a group of software objects that, for all practical purposes, are intelligent. Being 'born' by being expressed as instances of an initial software genetic model, they grow up under the watchful eye of people bought in to train them and get them ready to be sold as relationship objects by their company. But times change: companies goes bankrupt, and even the virtual world the software objects inhabit becomes obsolete. But some owners still keep them running, training, educating and keeping them company. Then comes an offer that may be the lifeline to keep them running for longer, but it comes with a price that all children that become adults have to do: making their own decisions.

• "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny": a tale set in Victorian times about a man who decides that mechanization is the key to raising a healthy child and proceeds to make a mechanized nanny for his son. The idea does not take off, but then the son, now an adult, attempts it again on another child. But he abandons the idea when the child does not apparently prosper, and gives him away to a home. But it is only when the home attempts to communicate with the child and raise him that is it revealed that the automatic nanny has succeeded, just not in the way its inventor expected.

• "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling": a story about a new invention that will allow people who keep a video log to search through it quickly to find the required segment. The story is told from the viewpoint of a journalist concerned that such quick recall would lead to conflicts when people's memory and actual footage of events differ, which happens when the journalist searches for a recording of a previous argument with his daughter and is shocked to learn what actually happened. The story also interleaves another story of a young nomad who learns to read and write from a missionary, and also learns a lesson about the difference between the truth as told by writing and the truth as told by the elders of his clan.

• "The Great Silence": a look at the paradox of why there appears to be no other intelligent life in the universe, from the viewpoint of a species that shares the Earth with us, and it generally thought to be quite intelligent, if only we could realize it.

• "Omphalos": a fascinating story about an alternative Earth where a moment of creation of all living creatures has been found and accepted by scientists. Tracing the sale of stolen artefacts of the moment of creation from a museum leads one scientist on a journey that will end with the discovery that while god did create man, man may not be special to god. And now the scientist and the world will have to deal with the outcome.

• "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom": a different take on the idea of 'multiple worlds' via quantum physics. Here, devices called Prisms cause a quantum 'split' in the universe when each Prism is first turned on, with both sides communicating with each other via the Prisms. As time passes, deviations built up between the universes (different weather, different people, different actions by people, different outcomes of accidents, etc.) and some people try to take advantage of it, like selling Prisms to people who loved ones have died but still survive in the alternate universe. But the Prisms also change people, making some feel inadequate when their other self appears to do much better. All of that is considered in a story with a cast that revolves around a person who starts off being selfish and, via interactions with people and their Prisms, resolves to be a much better person.

An interesting set of stories in the issue by Michael Libling, Matthew Hughes, Gregor Hartmann and Marie Vibbert.

• “How I Came to Write Fantasy” by Michael Libling: an interesting story that starts off as a conversation between two waiters that later turns fantastic as one is revealed to be an immortal looking for his true love through the ages, while the other has a revealing gift (or curse). It is only towards the end that the reason they got together is shown, but with a twist involving the women they love.

• “Rejoice, My Brothers and Sisters” by Benjamin Rosenbaum: in a strange future, a man enters a closed-off area, hoping to document the lives of its inhabitants. But things goes wrong: his contact with the outside is cut-off and his interactions with the people in the area reveal how closed off it is, and their struggle to get out into another different kind of world.

• “The Joy in Wounding” by Charlotte Ashley: a tale of three sisters chasing after a floating house, which is the former home of one of the sisters who was forced to marry a god. As the house settled over a farmhouse, numerous violent events caused by the house would take place that would change their lives as well as the lives of the farmer, whose own marriage to an unusual person would be one of the sources of violence.

• “A Geas of the Purple School” by Matthew Hughes: next in the series of tales of a wizard's henchmen, this one has him and his partner investigating the murder of the messenger for the daughter of the Duke of the city. As they dig further, they discover that the diary of the daughter may prove to be the key behind the whole matter, if they are brave enough to open it and face the consequences of exposure to the magic in the diary.

• “Evergreen” by M. Rickert: a variation of the usual tale of ghosts seen around Christmastime, this one has a woman who sees ghosts of people from her past and learning to find joy in the present despite the miseries of her life.

• “A Hand at the Service of Darkness” by Gregor Hartmann: on a frontier world, a police officer is assigned a job with a Secret Service agent she does not like. They are to look for and take out a revolutionary who has committed a terrorist act. Going into the heart of a lawless place would need all her skills, but it is only with the target in sight does her loyalties to her world kick in, and she would have to make decisions that could change her life.

• “Bird Thou Never Wert” by James Morrow: the story of a writers' meeting where people read and criticize manuscripts among themselves. But at this meeting, a magician makes a writing offer one cannot refuse, for the offer would make a writer write like a genius. But the price of the gift of genius would have to be paid in blood and in other old fashion ways, like when humanity is offered a gift from the gods.

• “It Never Snows in Snowtown” by Rebecca Zahabi: a story that starts off as a paid journey through a snowing town turns chilling when strange graffiti appears warning about the snow and the young child-like tour guide begins to exhibit un-childlike behaviour, and we learn that the young may have to pay a price for the town to remain as it is: forever snowing.

• “Knit Three, Save Four” by Marie Vibbert: an unusual story of a stowaway on a spaceship that turns out to be in danger of running out of air as a space station refuses to let it dock due to hull integrity issues. But it will turn out that a hobby by the stowaway might be a way to hold the ship together; that and lots of cable.

• “The Vicious World of Birds” by Andy Stewart: an uncomfortable family gathering during the holidays would turn into an unusual one when an unusual bird starts attacking the family. The story also includes the thoughts of one member, who compares his family members to various kinds of birds.

• “Shucked” by Sam J. Miller: a story of a young man and woman who are approached by another man who asks for the company of the man for an hour. When the man returns, the woman gradually starts to notice small changes in his behaviour. But it is only later that she comes to a startling conclusion that something unusual has happened to the man. But does the conclusion hold?

An okay issue of Interzone, with the more interesting stories by Joanna Berry, David Tallerman and Tim Chawaga.

• "The Kindest God is Light" by Joanna Berry: a story of alien contact about to be completed by 'scanning' the thoughts of a poet, in order to have a complete mental map of mankind's emotional makeup. But trouble looms when the scan does not complete, which is attributed to the poet's depression. But as time passes, the poet suspects a different source, and it would require the help of another alien being to make the poet see this.

• "She and I and We" by Timothy Mudie: a time travel story about a future self who travels back in time to save herself. But it is only towards the end do we really learn who she is trying to save herself from and the importance of being saved by the right person.

• "Dent-de-lion" by Natalia Theodoridou: on an alien planet, an explorer is searching for an alien plant with possible live saving properties. But what he finds is an improbable hybrid that would lead him on a search for the original source of the plant and the possible reason for it to be there.

• "Parasite Art" by David Tallerman: an artist's desire to produce excellent art leads him to a planet where a parasitic life form can be found that provide dreams that can be turned into art. But is the price of becoming tied to the parasite worth it to produce art that you may not care about?

• "The Duchess of Drinke Street" by Tim Chawaga: in a floating city, the owner of a small cupcake shop desperately needs a good review from a food blogger to drive up her business. But what she gets instead of a lesson in producing a kind of food that matches the place, rather than in producing good food.

• "Dream of the High Mountain" by Daniel Bennett: a story about living in a community in a future where life is slowly ending on the Earth as the seas continue to rise. A story that I did not find interesting.

A nice, brief book from one of the people involved in the initial creation and subsequent development of Unix and the programming environment that grew up around it. A somewhat technical book, it covers the early history of the development of Unix itself and also the development and growth of the huge set of tools and programs that grew out of what Unix was able to provide as an operating system.

Chapter one looks at the history of the author's education, as well as the history of Bell Labs before and after he joins it. It also introduces the large and varied cast of people he would work with while at the lab, many of whom will be familiar to those who have an interest in Computer Engineering. He also briefly covers the management style at Bell Labs, which helped to foster the attitude of having a long term view at the Labs; an attitude that probably helped to give rise to Unix.

Chapter two looks at how Unix came about. Multics was originally proposed as a system that could be used by a large group of people at the same time, to be developed by several companies. Unfortunately, it proved to be too ambitious, and Bell Labs decided to pull out of the project. This left the people working on Multics at Bell Labs looking for other things to do. Finding a little used computer, a DEC PDP-7, it was put to use to solve problems and, in the process, Unix was born when the programs were found to be generally useful. One of the main people who would create Unix in a matter of weeks was Ken Thompson, whose biography is provided in this chapter.

Chapter three looks at the first 'official' version of Unix. After the programs and operating system Ken Thompson created proved to be quite useful, an effort was made to convince upper management, who was not interested in creating an operating system after the failed Multics effort, to support Unix. In the end, the usefulness of Unix would win them over, and the group set up Unix on PDP-11 for the purpose of helping Bell Labs produce documents required for patent applications. The chapter also gives an entertaining look at the room used to store the Unix machine and some of the 'fun' they had. A biography of Dennis Ritchie is also provided.

Chapter four skips to the Sixth Edition of Unix produced, which was the first version introduced to the outside world. By then, Unix have proven to provide something unique and interesting to the subject of operating systems: it was portable (able to run on several kinds of processors), a generic file system (unique for its time), a set of language independent system calls, a shell for executing programs and a concept called 'pipes' that would lead to a unique and generic way to chain the input and output of programs. The C programming language would also play a major role in Unix. A biography of Doug McIlroy is provided at the end.

Chapter five looks at Seventh Edition Unix and the huge flowering of work that now grew out of what Unix enabled. This included the Bourne shell, Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler), the Make system (to manage and build programs from a set of separate files), Troff for typesetting, equation editors, Sed and Awk for text processing, UUCP for copying files from one Unix to another Unix system, and so on.

Chapter six covers other applications and work enabled by Unix. What came before was work done to enable researchers to do their work. Having proven its capability, Unix was now used in the commercial market. One of the first was by AT&T itself, using a Unix front-end machine to manage a disparate group of mainframe computers. Source code control systems was also another application that rose out of the commercial use of Unix. SCCS was the first, but it would enable others like RCS, CVS, Subversion and, currently, Git. The Unix source code was also being licensed to other corporations and universities and out of this would arise various Unix user groups who would band together to support each other and also books that would document and annotate the Unix source code.

Chapter seven is a brief chapter covering the various efforts to commercialize Unix in strange ways, especially over the trademark (TM) and wording of Unix by AT&T.

Chapter eight gives a brief look at the descendants of Unix, which have started to multiply. Systems from BSD to Linux and Plan 9 are covered, but it is not an exhaustive list.

Chapter nine looks at the legacy of Unix, from the various operating systems that arisen from it, to how Bell Labs is now a shadow of its former self, to the recognition the Unix system has given to its designers.

An interesting and entertaining book that looks at a simple question: can be build a dragon? The question is hypothetical, of course, but the book goes through the steps, looking at what we know about biology, to see what would it take to make a dragon, give it dragon features (like the ability to fly and breathe out fire) and, maybe, control it. In doing this, the reader is given an overview of the fields of biology, evolution and genetics. In the end, it may not be possible to build a dragon, but the journey towards creating one as set out in this book is an entertaining one.

Chapter One looks at the kinds of dragons found in mythologies around the world to then decide what kind of dragon to make, namely a flying, fire-breathing dragon. Its temperament and the possible, disastrous effects such a dragon would have on the dragon-making team are also briefly covered.

Chapter Two looks are how to make a dragon fly. Starting with some basic physics (weight versus flight), it goes on to consider which organism might make the best model for a flying dragon, from gliding reptiles and mammals, prehistoric pterosaurs, bats and birds. Various options from feathers to skin flaps are also considered, as well as the genetics of making flight surfaces. Finally, a light-hearted look at how to house a flying dragon are looked at.

Chapter Three covers how to make a dragon breath fire, from how a dragon would generate the fuel needed to breathe fire, to igniting the fire, to making sure the fire doesn't burn up the dragon. A few 'cheats' are also thrown in, like letting the dragon expel chemicals that can burn (like from the bombardier beetle) are also considered.

Chapter Four looks at the brain of the dragon, from how to make one to how intelligent to make the dragon. It goes into some detail on what is currently known about how each part of a brain works and how it affects intelligence, based on research that has been done on brains and on studies on various people who have unusual brains that either have too much or not enough of certain parts of the brain.

Chapter five looks at features that could be added to a dragon, from giving it multiple heads and horns, how to colour it to whether it should be able to shock enemies with electricity. What kind of vision and brain to give a dragon is also considered, as well as a built-in navigation system or even the ability to swim. Whether a dragon should have two or four legs as well as wings is considered, and the ability to spit poison. The ability to also 'shut down' the dragon is also discussed, important in case it gets out of control.

Chapter six looks at how to evolve a dragon. Starting for a particular animal (bird, reptile and so on), genetic changes need to be introduced in order to finally produce a dragon. These changes might be via hybrids or by genetic engineering (introducing or removing genes) possibly by using CRISPR. Cloning is also looked at as a way to 'quickly' produce more dragons, rather than waiting for sexual reproduction.

Chapter seven looks at other creatures that could be produced once we have a dragon. Examples include the unicorn, the flying horse (Pegasus), griffins (and hippogriffs) and merpeople.

An interesting introduction to the elements: from the idea of elements as an ideal form of a material, to the realization that much of the world is made up of many elements. The discovery of several elements, how they become organized and their importance to society and civilization are also covered in this brief book.

Chapter one gives a brief introduction in the history of elements. While Aristotle's idea of four 'elements' is probably well known, the chapter shows it that the elements at the time were considered 'ideal' forms for objects in the work and were made up of mixtures of the elements in different proportions. Metallurgy would introduce a few variations to the idea of such 'elements' before the modern idea of chemical elements would take shape.

Chapter two looks at the role Antoine Laurent Lavoisier would have on the definition of elements. It would surround the discovery and nature of Oxygen. Air was at the time considered an element, but it has become recognized that different 'kinds' of air existed, with differed on whether the air could support life, keep fire alight, be 'bad' for health and so on. Originally, the idea of phlogiston would be used, a supposed substance given off when fire burned. But Lavoisier and others would challenge that idea with an element, oxygen, that aided combustion and would be vital to life. The rest of the chapter would cover the role of oxygen in life, and how it is constantly consumed and created on Earth.

Chapter three looks at the role Gold would play in civilizations. Coveted by many, its very inertness and reluctance to interact with other materials (unlike other metals) would make it precious as a store of value. The desire for gold would lead to advances in metallurgy to extract and purify it.

Chapter four looks at the various ways the now numerous elements are organized. Chemistry would show that the various elements combined in fixed amounts, leading to the idea of organizing them based on their chemical relationships and also their weights relative to hydrogen, the lightest element known. By making and proving (or disproving) assumptions on how atoms are organized, we would eventually get the picture of an atom as one containing a nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons surrounded by a cloud of electrons. Mendeleyev would then become one of the first to organize the elements into a proper table and use it to predict the properties of elements that haven't been discovered.

Chapter five looks at the synthesis of new elements. Radioactivity was discovered and found to be able to transmute elements, changing them into new elements one proton or neutron at a time. But the discovery that some heavy atoms can split into two smaller ones with the release of energy would bring about the atomic age and the nuclear bomb and, later, the ability to fuse smaller atoms together to release even more energy via thermonuclear reactions. It would also lead to a race to create ever heavier elements.

Chapter six looks at isotopes, atoms that have the same number of protons but different number of neutrons. Among the isotopes looked at included Carbon-14 and various isotopes of Uranium and other heavy elements for dating rocks and organisms, and other isotopes that can be used to determine ancient climates via the ratio of isotopes and in medicine by using short-lived radioisotopes that can be detected by medical equipment.

Chapter seven would look at a few elements that have become important to modern civilization: silicon, for producing transistors which, in their billions, are the hearts of computer chips, palladium, which act as a catalyst for many chemical processes and had a role in the infamous 'cold fusion' controversy, the 'rare earths' which drive much of the LCD and related lighting industries and the Nobel gas argon, which plays a role in lamps and in transporting other gases, since it does not take part in reactions and so does not contaminate chemical reactions.

An excellent and hilarious book about the state of actual AI technology in the world (as opposed to the AIs you may see in popular media) and why they can do weird things. As it turns out, the weirdness can be due to the data used to train the AI, in how the AI processes the data and in how we tell the AI to solve a problem for us. You will get a good understanding of how AIs actually work and what they can (and can't) do, and also how AIs can actually help humans do their jobs (or entertain us with hilarious failures).

Chapter one looks at what kinds of AI are featured here. While the public may have some ideas about AI from the popular media, the kinds of AIs looked at here are actual ones in use, which means machine based systems that accept data, apply machine learning algorithms to it, and produce an output. A brief look at how such AI are trained using data and what happens as it gradually learns what kind out output is 'acceptable' is shown. While humans may initially specify what to produce based on the provided input, such AIs may learn and process the data in unexpected ways, leading to weird and unexpected output.

Chapter two looks at what AI systems are now doing. From running a cockroach farm, providing personalized product recommendation to writing news reports and searching scientific datasets, AIs has its uses. The flip side is AI being used to produce things like deepfakes (swapping people's heads or making people appear to do things they didn't). In general, AIs are currently better at very specific tasks (like handing the initial customer support request) and not very good at more general tasks (like creating cooking recipes or riding a bike). One reason is that such general tasks usually require some kind of long term memory to remember what has been done (like when creating long-form essays) but current AIs systems lack this memory capacity. Also, some general tasks create situations that AIs may never encounter in their input training data (like driving safely upon seeing unexpected obstacles).

Chapter three looks at how AIs actually learn by looking at the various types of AI systems: Neural Networks, Markov Chains, Random Forests, Evolutionary Algorithms and Generative Adversarial Networks. Examples of such AIs are given, like the autocorrect system used in smartphones, and their advantage and disadvantages in handling input data, processing it and producing the expected (or unexpected) output.

Chapter four looks at why AIs don't appear to work despite them trying to produce acceptable output. There may several reasons for this: the problem the AI is being asked to solve may be too broad (like making cat pictures after being trained on pictures of people). Or the amount of data provided to the AI may be too little for the task required. The input data may also be too 'messy', full of information not actually required by the task or containing mistakes that confuse the AI.

Chapter five shows how AI complete their task; only it's not the task the designers expected. There are several reasons for this. One is that the AI does the task, only not in the expected way. For example, moving a robot backwards because it was told not activate its bumper sensors (which are located at the front). AIs also usually learn in a simulated environment (to speed up learning), which may lead AIs to exploit 'glitches' in its simulated environment to solve a problem (like 'gaining' energy to jump high by making multiple tiny steps first). Other times, AI solve problems in unexpected ways because the expected learning behaviour is too hard. Like growing a long leg to fall from point A to point B instead of learning to walk (the expected behaviour) as walking is hard.

Chapter six covers more examples of AIs completing tasks in unexpected ways. The main reason for this is that AIs work in a simulated environment, and the solutions it comes up with may only work there. Examples include making optical lenses that are very thick, exploiting mathematical rounding errors or even bugs in the simulation. Such solutions will, of course, not work in the real world.

Chapter seven looks at 'shortcuts' that AIs may take to get the solution. This is usually due to unexpected features found in the training data the AIs may fixate on. For example, an AI trained to recognize a certain type of fish based on images was found to be focusing on fingers in the images instead because in the training data, fingers were always present holding the fish to be recognized. Biases (sometimes hidden) in the input data can also cause the AI to provide biased solutions; for example, recommending hiring only men because in the input data, men were the ones usually hired. Since how the AI comes to a decision is not usually examined, such biased decisions may instead become the norm based on the premise that 'the machine made the recommendation and the machine cannot be biased', not recognizing that bias in the input data maybe the cause of the problem.

Chapter eight considers whether the AI works like the human brain and in general, it is not. AIs have problems remembering things in the long term. For example, passages written by AI tend to meander from topic to topic, generating output that, taken as a whole, is inconsistent. AIs are also prone to 'adversarial attacks' due to it tending to put too much weigh on certain inputs. Examples including modifying an image to mislead an AI recognition program to think a submarine is a bonnet. Or gradually modifying an image of a dog into that of skiers, yet leaving the AI to think it is still looking at a picture of a dog.

Chapter nine looks at the problem of distinguishing between an AI and a person doing a job. This is partially due to hyped up articles that proclaim that AI will be doing certain jobs instead of human (for example, driving). The author provides several ways to probe whether certain output has been produced by an AI or, possibly, a human pretending to be an AI.

Chapter ten looks at the future and shows that the current way forward is a world where both AIs and humans have decision-making jobs to do. AIs can be trained on data, but it is up to humans to determine whether the results are valid and to modify or update the input data to let the AI do a better job. For now, the future is one where both AIs and humans coexists.