Reviews and Comments

An interesting anthology on the theme of emotional bonds between people (the 'Entanglements'). That bond would run through the stories, showing the various ways people will engage with those closest to them. I especially enjoyed those by Nancy Kress, Nick Wolven, Mary Robinette Kowal, James Patrick Kelly, Suzanne Palmer and Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu).

• "Invisible People" by Nancy Kress: a family who adopted a girl is visited by the FBI, who reveals that the girl (and others) were secretly genetically altered before being adopted. An investigation by the family would reveal just what kind of effects the alteration would have, and they have to decide whether to let it be, or try to reverse it.

• "Echo the Echo" by Rich Larson: a man visits his grandmother, hoping to convince her to wear a cap that would record her every though. But she resists because she doesn't want to become an 'echo' of herself to her descendents. As the story progresses, it reveals that we all eventually become echoes of ourselves, and it becomes a matter of which echoes we want to become.

• "Sparklybits" by Nick Wolven: in an unusual household where several women have become co-opted mothers, a child has become obsessed with communicating with a software AI known as Sparklybits to, in the various mothers' opinions, the detriment of his future studies. But it would require the child's home bound mother to come up with a solution to the problem.

• "A Little Wisdom" by Mary Robinette Kowal: a museum curator is on her way to supervise the opening of a new exhibition. Then, mother nature intervenes and the museum becomes a temporary refuge, leading her to dispense her knowledge to distract others. And she also picks up some wisdom from the emergency.

• "Your Boyfriend Experience" by James Patrick Kelly: in a future where 'playbots' were widely used privately, a woman is asked to go on a 'date' with a new playbot created by her boyfriend. During the date, conflicts with others, who frown or enjoy playbots, along with a temporary playbot malfunction, would lead her to realize the real reason for the date, and whether she should continue not only to data the playbot, but her own boyfriend.

• "Mediation" by Cadwell Turnbull: a researcher throws all her energy into her research as a way to cope with the death of her husband, leading her to neglect her children. In the end, it would require some mediation from software, as well as a talk with her dead husband (embodied in software), to help her resolve the situation.

• "The Nation of the Sick" by Sam J. Miller: a series of unrelated events would lead a man, who has created software that can be used to model the future, to not give up on his 'dead-beat' brother. A decision which, in hindsight, might not be so unrelated after all.

• "Don't Mind Me" by Suzanne Palmer: in a future where devices can be attached to children to block out memories of 'undesirable language', one kid becomes part of a group of students who have found a way to hack the devices, so they can learn properly. Things come to a head when the group's secret is discovered and the kid has to negotiate with his parents to get a proper education.

• "The Monogamy Hormone" by Annalee Newitz: a woman who wants a serious relationship can't decide between her two lovers. One of her friends gives her a set of pills that would strengthen her bond with one of them (monogamy). But events turn out differently and leads her to make another decision about her relationships.

• "The Monk of Lingyin Temple" by Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu): a man goes to a high-tech temple on a mission. As the story progresses, we learn about the man's tortured past, the reason why he is there, and how the temple's technology that enables people to feel another person's emotional pain would help him to deal with the past

A better than average last issue of this magazine to be edited by C.C. Finlay. It features interesting stories by Robert Reed, Jonathan L. Howard, John Kessel, Lavie Tidhar and James Morrow. "N-raptured" by Justin C. Key, however, may be too US-centric a story to be enjoyed by those who are not familiar with racism and the use of racial words in the US against African-Americans.

• "Integral Nothings" by Robert Reed: enigmatic aliens are altering the world, making it a better place. But appearances can be deceiving, when the unknown plan the aliens have for the world may not be for the good of mankind.

• "The Diamond Family Glitters" by H. Pueyo: an unusual family gathers, preparing for the death of an elderly relative. But this is a family of unusual abilities, all of which stem from the dying relative, and there are fears their abilities will vanish when she dies.

• "Interludes with the Gunwright" by Jonathan L. Howard: a light fantasy involving a veteran soldier who goes in search of a person who makes good weapons. The soldier would have reasons to see the weapon maker many times over the years as her fortunes rise and fall, and their relationship blossoms.

• "The Dark Ride" by John Kessel: an interesting and unusual spin on the assassination of US President William McKinley in 1901 which would involve the assassin taking a carnival ride to the moon, which turns out to more real than expected. This would lead the assassin to live two lives that merge at the end, leaving the reader to decide which one was the real life he had.

• "A Little Knife Music" by Jenn Reese: in a society where skills are determined by the ability to listen to 'their inner music', a girl learns to be an assassin at a school after her first kill. But an assignment to kill a fellow student at the school, who turns out to be royalty, would cause her to consider just what her abilities should be used for.

• "N-raptured" by Justin C. Key: a story about a future where a kind of 'rapture' has occurred in the USA, causing people who say a racist word to get marks on their heads. If they get three marks, they turn into rats. The story is about a man who already has one mark, working for an analyst who works with the 'marked' to make them more acceptable to society. Unfortunately, the story is rather US-centric and readers from an international audience (like me) who don't have good knowledge of the racial tensions in the USA or the use of racist words may not get much out of the story.

• "Hard!" by Van Aaron Hughes: a humorous tale about the sport of curling and the consequences of discovering that aliens also consider it a sport worth playing.

• "Litter Witch" by Susan Palwick: the story of a girl who is constantly mocked by her peers. For comfort, she collects litter from the wood during her walks and considers herself a witch. One day, she runs off with her collection of litter and, ending up by a lake, finds the collection of litter forming itself into a house for her. There's she lives for any years: until a nearby incident causes her to become the temporary guardian of a girl. That would lead her to the next stage of her transformation into a witch.

• "Wild Geese" by Lavie Tidhar: a tale set in Mongolia that, at first, appears to be a tale about chasing birds. Until events, and future technology gradually introduced into the tale, up-end expectations, and it turns into an expedition on the hunt for a not-yet inhabited city. The transition from one expectation of the story to another is gradual and surprising.

• "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 51: The Great Fish" by James Morrow: playing on the tale of Jonah and the Whale, this one has its protagonist being swallowed by a literal giant fish. Inside, they discover other inhabitants from other times as they work to find a way to get them all home.

• "The Piper" by Karen Joy Fowler: a fairy tale-like story told from the point of view of a peasant. The King of a country calls his countrymen to go to war on his behalf to protect their way of life. But on the march, questions being to asked about the true purpose of the war and whose way of life is being protected.

An introductory book that gives a look at topology: what it is, what is can be used for, and some work being done in topology. The first chapter goes in gently by looking at Euler's formula for polygons and showing how it applies to polygons in general. Later chapters rapidly become very mathematical and probably requires some level of mathematical education to appreciate properly, even if you have to skim through some mathematical relationships to get at the heart of topology.

Chapter One gives an introduction to the study of topology, which is concerned with the relationship of shapes, connections and relative positions of objects. It then introduces Euler's formula, which relates the number of vertices (V), edges (E) and faces (F) of objects into a mathematical formula and shows that for standard, three-dimensional shapes, V - E + F = 2 always holds. The chapter then goes on to give a readable proof for why this equation is true of such shapes. Then, using the formula, it demonstrates why there can are only five Platonic solids in three dimensions.

Chapter Two looks at surfaces in general. Starting from a square plane, its edges are then deformed and glued together in certain procedures to give rise to shapes like a torus. It also shows how the value found by applying Euler's formula changes for different kind of surfaces. However, Euler's formula is not sufficient, as the introduction of one-sided surfaces (the Möbius strip and Klein bottle) show. This leads to the Classification Theorem, which is used to classify two-sided and one-sided surfaces. Complex numbers are then briefly introduced, leading to Riemann Surfaces, used to represent surfaces in higher dimensions.

Chapter Three looks at Continuous Functions and the issues with coming up with a definition for them that is mathematically rigorous. This chapter is probably 'heavy going' for non-mathematicians, but gives an idea of why some 'common sense' definitions may not be rigorous enough for the needs of mathematicians.

Chapter Four continues the mathematical theme by looking at defining metrics and distances between functions, leading on to sets and subsets and connectivity. All of which would come to bear on more advanced topics on topology.

Chapter Five builds on the previous two chapters by covering different kinds of topology. From geometric topology introduced in Chapter One, other kinds of topology are introduced here: differential topology (dealing with curves), the 'hairy ball theorem' which deals with vectors on topological surfaces, and so on.

Chapter Six looks at the topic of knots (and unknots), showing how topology deals with how to define whether a loop is a knot and what kind of knot it is.

An interesting and entertaining story involving a travelling monk who goes around collecting stories and records for their temple. In this story, he gets a ride on a mammoth to get over a mountain pass. But it goes awry when tigers attack them, forcing them to hide in a shelter on the mountain.

The tigers turn out to be magical tigers who can transform into human form and talk. When they discover the monk is recording stories, they ask the monk to tell them the human version of a story involving another magical tiger and a scholar (before they will probably get eaten).

As the story progress, the tigers interject and present their own version of events in the story. While this very entertain back-and-forth of storytelling is going on, the monk and the mammoth rider also have to think of a way to avoid getting eaten. Things would come to a head at the end when conflicting versions of the way the story ends are presented: violence would ensure, but with some good fortune, the monk gets rescued and now has another story to add to the temple archives.

As with the previous tale, this is a story within a story, but told in an entertaining way. The magical and fantastical elements are more prominent in the form of magical tigers but also with the introduction of mammoths and their riders, which were instrumental for the North defeating the Empire of the South in the previous tale.

An interesting story, as told to a travelling monk collecting narratives for an archive at their temple, of a young woman from the North that is 'presented' as a bride to the Emperor of the South. It is there that the storyteller, named Rabbit, gets involved with the foreign empresses who strangely excels in games of chance and strategy.

When the foreign Empress gives birth to an heir, she is summarily exiled to a palace far to the west to live out her days. It is here that the monk later meets Rabbit, now the maid to the Empresses, who tells the monk the story (via objects recorded by the monk) of how the Empresses was part of a scheme for the North to conquer the South. But Rabbit herself would turn out to have an unplanned part in the plot.

Told as a story within a story, the fantasy elements remain mainly in the background but are still important by providing some context to the environment the story is set in. Still an interesting start to a series of stories involving the recording monk.

This is an educational and illustrated introduction to the insects of the world. After a brief and general introduction to insects, the book then goes through the various orders of insects. It starts with the earliest insects, the Bristletails and Silverfish, and then proceeds through the rest of the insects, more or less in the order they start to appear on the tree of life on Earth: mayflies, dragonflies and damselflies, cockroaches and termites, mantids, earwigs, crickets and grasshoppers, stick and leaf insects, lice, true bugs, hoppers and cicadas, beetles, fleas, flies, moths and butterflies and finally, the wasps, ants and bees. Other orders of insects are also covered in the book that are not mentioned here.

The book is illustrated with plenty of photos of insects taken in the field, letting the reader see how the insect might appear in real life. Some insects are, of course, very good at camouflage and this is shown in some photos where the reader is challenged to find the insect in the photo. Sadly, this reader was not able to successfully find all the insects in such images, which is a disappointment.

Other than that, the book is a good way to learn about the enormous world of different kinds of insects that can be found all over the world.