Halcyon Years by by Alastair Reynolds (2025)

The book struggles with structural mismatches. Reynolds folds a hard-boiled noir detective story into a large-scale space-opera setting, but the elements clash. The noir props—paper files, land-line phones, cars, firearms, physical beatings, arson, low-tech murders—sit awkwardly beside robots, interstellar ark ships, and higher technologies. The mystery reveals its clues too late, which blunts the investigation. The pacing drags in places and the finale feels overloaded.

The book's strengths keep it afloat. The resurrected Yuri Gagarin as a hard-boiled detective is bizarre but effective. The characters are well drawn. The high-tech background holds together. The setting has scale and ambition.

Entertaining but unsatisfying. 3/5 stars.

StarGods: Star Carrier 9 by Ian Douglas (2020)

The book has minor flaws. Many characters ascend into "the Singularity," and political squabbles dominate much of the drama, action, and combat. Long-term security and the demands of perpetual vigilance are largely unresolved. The Enlightenment-era spirit of exploration is overshadowed by a seduction of utopic cyberspace.

Despite these issues, the novel succeeds as a conclusion. The storylines resolve convincingly within the universe Douglas built over the series. The characters remain engaging, and the scale of the narrative delivers the expected spectacle. 5/5 stars.

Contact by Joshua T Calvert (2025)

The book opens well. The setting is imaginative, and the mystery promises intrigue. The android characters have personality and humor, giving the story early momentum.

Then it collapses. As the mystery unravels, the plot turns chaotic. Sudden "alien magic" contrivances pile up until the ending negates everything that came before. The story depends on a chain of deus ex machina twists that feel careless and unearned.

A strong start wasted by a disastrous finish. 1/5 stars. Avoid this one.

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (2025)

This book collapses under its own thesis. The author ignores centuries of progress in life expectancy, public health, infrastructure, medicine, and standards of living. Instead, he romanticizes a mythical pre-industrial past, lamenting our supposed surrender to "the machine." His vision of history erases violence, starvation, disease, and labor exploitation. The result is a nostalgic fantasy built on false premises.

The critique of modern digital life—social media, online services, and passive entertainment—has some merit, but it rests on exaggeration. The author dismisses personal choice and human adaptability, assuming we are helpless before technology and the enshittifcation of social services.

The argument is shallow, moralizing, and historically blind. 1/5 stars.

A kiss before dying by Ira Levin (1953)

During his promotional tour for his first-ever novel (after 50 movies), Woody Allen commented that this book is the best book he ever read.  Intrigued, I grabbed it and added it to my reading list.  The writing is, indeed, fantastic.  The book pulled me in right away. The main character, Bud Corliss, plans his path to a millionaire's wealth through charm and cold calculation. He courts women, spins lies, and kills without a flinch.

The author builds the story through three sisters' viewpoints, one per section. The story slowly reveals Bud's well-planned grift. All of the characters, especially the three sisters, feel real and complex; Bud's steady narcissism is extremely unsettling in quiet ways. I was deeply immersed in his calculated risks and plans.

The book examines ambition without limits: how one person's polish erodes trust and safety, a reminder of everyday deceptions. This book is one of my top five reads this year. It's worth your time for Levin's clean tension. 5/5 Stars.

Bright Light: Star Carrier 8 by Ian Douglas (2018)

I enjoyed this penultimate book despite all the annoyances. The expansion of the magical system feels arbitrary and contrivances for the plot. The repeated use of time travel and time dilation produces convenient but extremely inconsistent results. The world-building creates the largest gap. Earth and the Sol system remain the focus of every advanced species despite an earlier claim that the Sh'daar empire spans millions of species and quadrillions of people. The  trans-universal and post-singularity powers amplifies the mismatch. The setting becomes Sol-centric in a way that conflicts with the series' own premises.

However, the strengths hold the volume together. The characters maintain momentum. The plot lines converge. The sense of awe remains intact. The action keeps the story moving. The writing sustains a great pace. The result is a workable space opera that I found entertaining. 3/5 stars.

Complicity by Ian M Banks (1994)

I look through Iain Banks's non-Culture novels because I enjoy his prose. For me, this psychological thriller was somewhat of a disappointment because of its stark torture, rape, and murder scenes. Cameron Colley, hard-boiled, flawed journalist narrator, is extremely well-portrayed. Flashbacks and plot twists in the story probe societal rot: corruption festers in the UK media, politics, and greed of the 1980s. Second-person killer sequences blur guilt lines. Banks indicts the reader's complicity in systemic sins, forcing confrontation with vigilante justice ethics. Banks' prose is very good, but the violence is overwhelming. This one is not recommended. 2/5 stars.

Rewiring Democracy by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders (2015)

I usually enjoy Bruce Schneier's books because they are clear, well-structured, and full of practical insight. Rewiring Democracy is no exception. The authors argue that artificial intelligence is not a radical break from existing technologies but rather a natural extension of them. They make the case that AI, if applied carefully, can improve democratic processes instead of threatening them.

The book explains how large language models, chatbots, and other machine learning tools could expand public participation, make legislation more transparent, and help citizens understand policy. I found the authors' steady optimism and lack of alarmism refreshing. They stay grounded in facts and resist the sensationalism that often surrounds discussions of AI and politics.

However, the book is dense. The detailed descriptions of the "dance of legislation" and the mechanics of bureaucracy can be tedious for readers uninterested in political procedure. Still, those sections show how the authors think AI could fit into real-world governance rather than just theory.

Even when the topic veers into areas I find dull, the book remains valuable for showing how broad the applications of AI have become. It highlights both the potential and the practical challenges of integrating intelligent systems into democratic life. 4/5 Stars.

Dark Mind by Ian Douglas (2017)

This seventh book in the series pulls the story line up from its prior slump. Space opera tropes, including vast fleets clashing through interstellar regions of our galaxy blazed with fresh fire. I savored the new, inscrutable aliens tugging strings from the shadows, exposing layers of star gods and elder manipulators that mirrored L Ron Hubbard and Scientology's wild cosmology with Thetans plotting, Xenu, and the ancient "incidents."

The main character steered the human fight, making monumental decisions with bad data.  I enjoyed the gritty characters as they sidestepped plot twists with razor wit. Fleet clashes thrummed; close combat boarding raids checked the space opera box.

Alien tech pulverized humanity's defenses; I did not like the repetitive eleventh-hour saves because they were over-used. But the author made it all work.  What if galaxy architects juggle us as pawns? The reader grapples with free will trapped in scripted destinies, a cosmic horror twist. Douglas revived the saga for me. 5/5 Stars

A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre (2014)

I enjoy Ben Macintyre's books. His mix of rigorous research and narrative skill is on full display in this one. The story is about Kim Philby, the infamous British intelligence officer who spied for the Soviet Union for decades as he rose to senior ranks within MI6 while betraying his friends and country.

What sets this book apart is Macintyre's meticulous use of original sources and his skepticism toward the self-serving revisionist memoirs of those involved.  Rather than recycling familiar spy lore, he reconstructs a credible picture of how an entire generation of British and American intelligence leaders was incompetent.  They were deceived, not just by Philby, but by their own class loyalties and misplaced trust.

The most damning revelation is that Philby's final escape to Moscow was not a clever, daring flight but a deliberate act of protection by members of Britain's upper-class intelligence elite. The result is a portrait not only of treachery but of institutional rot: privilege shielding privilege while national security collapsed for political expediency.

Macintyre also highlights the profound cost of these failures. The intelligence compromises Philby enabled during the early Cold War were not abstract; they led to thousands of real deaths and strategic disasters. His betrayal reverberated across continents, exposing just how fragile Western intelligence networks truly were and how inept the Soviet Union was at economic prosperity for their people.

I have an interest in systems thinking and failure analysis so I found this book especially compelling for its anatomy of organizational blindness. Macintyre dissects how personal loyalty, arrogance, and class solidarity overrode logic and evidence. These conditions allow catastrophic breaches to persist.

The book is a gripping narrative of espionage, friendship, and institutional failure, told with clarity and restraint. 4/5 Stars.