Into the Fire by Gregg Hurwitz (2020)

In this fifth Orphan X novel, we find our hero attempting something almost as difficult as his previous missions: retirement. After years of pursuing personal redemption by rescuing one random victim at a time from powerful, evil criminals, Evan wants to become something resembling a normal person, with fewer secrets, fewer layers of tradecraft, and perhaps enough emotional openness to sustain actual relationships. Fate (plot contrivance), naturally, has other plans. What begins as a final, relatively simple mission expands in complexity and layers into a multi-book war against a large, distributed criminal empire, transforming Evan's hoped-for exit into another reluctant journey into the high-stakes world he is trying to escape.

I particularly enjoyed the novel's structure: early in the story, Evan is severely injured and progressively deprived of the advantages that normally make him so formidable. Rather than simply overpowering his enemies, Hurwitz makes those progressively higher-level close-combat encounters compelling because Evan's expertise remains intact even as his resources collapse; each successful up-leveling victory therefore feels constructed rather than inevitable. At the "boss level" of the book, Evan must improvise increasingly ingenious MacGyver-style solutions while operating under near-deadly physical constraints. I also enjoyed the emerging side stories and deliberately unresolved mysteries that foreshadow a larger architecture still developing across future books.

For me, the greatest pleasure remains Hurwitz's ability to sustain relentless action without reducing Evan to a formula. The characters remain sharply differentiated, the dialogue is consistently entertaining, and the escalating complications feel like genuine extensions of Evan's increasingly tangled life rather than arbitrary obstacles. Hurwitz keeps finding new ways to put Orphan X in situations for which even Orphan X is insufficiently prepared.

5/5 Stars

Disquiet godds, Sun eater book 6 by Christopher Ruocchio (2024)

I continue to enjoy the Sun Eater series because Ruocchio combines elegant prose, literary and historical allusions, expansive world-building, and long-form revelations with an engrossing story. I am increasingly disappointed, however, by the series’ movement away from science fiction toward high fantasy: Watchers, Titans, lesser gods, and greater gods now occupy an expanding role, while the underlying metaphysics increasingly resembles an arbitrary magic system. Ruocchio is no longer using fun frontier cosmology and physics, such as ten-dimensional reality with multiple time dimensions.  He has replaced them  with fantasy conventions. This shift away from science and my love of Golden Age science fiction are eroding the fun as the series progresses.

Nearly two centuries after Ashes of Man, Hadrian lives in exile on Jadd with his daughter Cassandra when the Emperor recalls him to service. HAPSIS, the emperor's secret ancient god "Watcher" investigation department, has located a Watcher, a being worshipped as a god by the evil Cielcin, and Hadrian receives an almost impossible assignment: kill the watcher.

I am still invested in Hadrian’s story. I enjoy watching his character evolve as centuries of experience, accumulated power, guilt, and loss reshape him, while Cassandra introduces a new dimension to a protagonist who has spent most of the series isolated by circumstance. The revelations continue to reframe earlier events, and the stakes now extend beyond interstellar war into the nature of reality itself. Hadrian increasingly resembles a fantasy hero leveling up, acquiring powers sufficient to confront progressively more consequential enemies and quests. I would prefer more scientific constraint and less arbitrary metaphysics, but Ruocchio’s prose, character arcs, historical texture, foreshadowing, and world-building keep me engrossed. I continue to enjoy the Sun Eater series, even as its increasingly fantastic direction moves it further from the science fiction I love most.

4/5 Stars

The Simplicity Advantage: Crafting Software That Lasts

Personally, I always strive for simplicity and elegance in software. AI makes that preference more important because both humans and models have a well-understood cognitive bias toward adding rather than subtracting.

• People systematically overlook subtractive solutions 

• Models have an identical bias and sycophancy makes it worse.

• The models know it:  Claude Opus will always overengineer with extra files, unnecessary abstractions and unrequested flexibility

The danger is not necessarily one bad generation. It is an accumulation.

• 623 million changes found cross-file reuse down 35% and refactoring down 70% from 2022.

• Copy / paste (copy-pasta) rose 41%, duplication 81%, and two-week churn 15%.

• AI adoption is associated with a 7.2% decline in delivery stability

• "AI slop is a tragedy of the commons" -  generation is cheap; review and maintenance are expensive.

• “AI-Generated Code Smells” increase bloat and coupling; not even detailed prompting could prevent it!

• There may be hope!  These new LLM chatterbots are amplifiers.  Some LLM-generated code is simpler than human reference code in every tested language except Python.  a generation can be simple while a thousand additions make it complex.

Everyone should add subtraction into the development loop.

The technical co-founder of OpenAI and co-creator of chatgpt says that:

• unchecked assumptions, 

• sycophancy, 

• overcomplicated APIs, bloated abstractions, and 

• dead code

. . . are the most-offensive recurring problems in AI-generated code. He goes on to say:

Coding agents also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines.

And Kaparthy is not the only one who recognizes this problem. And newer, simpler approaches are not better because human judges add their own "always add complexity" bias when the models are trained.

Therefore before asking AI what to add, we must always ask the model what to delete! Do you remember your college curriculum on Software Design?

• Software Design - Complexity is the central design problem!
• No Silver Bullet - Accidental vs Essential complexity
• Simple made easy - Simplicity is deceptively difficult!

And finally, as I keep repeating in these posts, when you are trying to defend your code from vulnerabilities, exploits, etc:

There is no attack surface as good as no attack surface.

Less code means fewer vulnerabilities.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (2026)

I enjoyed Nnedi Okorafor’s imaginative, multifaceted story despite the terrible science. The strongest elements are the slice-of-life immersion in a Nigerian immigrant family in Chicago. I enjoyed the unapologetic, self-absorbed autobiographical detail, family tensions, and passionate, emotional candor. Okorafor portrays the corruption, misogyny, terror, and violent crime in Nigeria without sugar coating the reality and  human consequences; I found the cultural specificity and family drama far more compelling than the terrible science in its science fiction.

The story follows a disabled Nigerian American woman whose sudden success as an author transforms her life, with unexpected fame, money, and complications.  The story also tries to break the literary wall, where the story she writes interacts with reality, but those parts are quite terrible.

For me, the plot and science remain secondary to the emotional and autobiographical core. I was most engaged by the family relationships, competing loyalties, and passionate reactions of characters navigating cultures and circumstances that resist easy resolution.

3/5 Stars

Furious Gulf by Gregory Benford (1994)

I found the fifth volume of the Galactic Center series less depressing than its predecessors, although Benford continues to subject his characters to extraordinary suffering and helplessness. Physics is the real spectacle: regions surrounding a black hole contain stable, separate space-time realities insulated from the tidal forces of our comparatively flat universe. Benford piles on so many PhD-thesis-level revelations that I sometimes lost sight of the characters beneath the cosmology. The book recalls Stephen Baxter at his most ambitious, particularly in its fascination with exotic physics and civilizations operating across incomprehensible scales.

The story follows the surviving humans as they struggle to navigate the increasingly bizarre environments and political conflicts of the Galactic Center while confronting powers vastly beyond their understanding. Their immediate goal is survival; their larger problem is discovering what the galaxy's mysterious powers are doing and how humanity fits into events operating on a cosmic scale.

I found the human conflicts less interesting than the increasingly strange galactic phenomena. Petty political struggles among the various human factions continue, but I have become somewhat numb to the suffering inflicted by the powerful antagonists; survival against overwhelming forces now feels more plausible because of the larger pattern of events gradually emerging. Benford reveals more about the mysterious galactic powers without dissolving their fundamental mystery, preserving the series' sense of cosmic awe. The contrived reappearance of Benford's favorite character near the conclusion disappointed me, however; the device felt less organic than the increasingly elaborate cosmological discoveries surrounding it.

4/5 Stars

Perry Rhodan 12–13, Das Geheimnis der Zeitgruft / Die Festung der sechs Monde (1961)

 
Ich habe weiterhin großen Spaß an diesen Space Operas aus dem Goldenen Zeitalter, in denen die noch junge Terranische Raumflotte auf ausgewachsene Zivilisationen trifft, die das Leben auf der Erde bedrohen. Die Größe und der Umfang der Geschichten sind einfach herrlich: interstellare Politik, fremde Imperien, wackelige Allianzen und vor allem Flottenmanöver und Raumschlachten bieten genau die Art von Abenteuer, die ich schon als Teenager an Science Fiction geliebt habe. Besonders viel Spaß macht mir, wie Rhodans kleine Flotte gegen technisch überlegene Gegner durch Manöver, Täuschung und Kühnheit bestehen muss, statt einfach mit mehr Feuerkraft zu gewinnen.

In Das Geheimnis der Zeitgruft gerät Rhodan in ein Rätsel um eine uralte Anlage und die verschiedenen Kräfte, die sich darum streiten, während Die Festung der sechs Monde den Konflikt zu einer größeren militärischen Auseinandersetzung mit fremden Mächten und einer gewaltigen Festung ausweitet. Mir gefällt, wie die beiden Bücher zwischen Ermittlung, politischen Ränkespielen und Flottengefechten wechseln; immer wieder geraten die Terraner in Situationen, in denen sie mit ihren normalen Mitteln nicht weiterkommen und Rhodan improvisieren muss.

Die Fähigkeiten des Mutantenkorps finde ich nach wie vor etwas gewöhnungsbedürftig, besonders wenn außergewöhnliche Kräfte plötzlich die Lösung für ein ansonsten ziemlich schwieriges Problem liefern. Rhodan selbst gefällt mir dagegen immer besser: seine rücksichtslose Entschlossenheit, seine Bereitschaft zur Täuschung und sein Wille, zum Schutz der Erde praktisch alles Nötige zu tun, machen ihn für mich zu einer zunehmend interessanten Figur. Gerade die dreisten Täuschungsmanöver und taktischen Tricks sind genau die Sorte Space-Opera-Übertreibung, die mir Spaß macht; die Bücher bringen mir wieder dieses gemütliche Teenager-Gefühl zurück, das ich mit der Science Fiction des Goldenen Zeitalters verbinde.

5/5 Sterne

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennet (2024)

I picked up The Tainted Cup because its sequel won the 2026 Hugo, and friends told me I needed the first book to understand the setting. Unfortunately the book's central biological premise violates basic chemistry and physics at nearly every level: bamboo, the fastest-growing plant, extends only about 10 micrometers per second. True biological growth occurs on vastly slower scales than Bennett's world requires. The Leviathans cannot exist; biochemical locks and keys are completely impossible; and plant-driven transformations are not speculative biology. Instead they are fantasy wearing scientific vocabulary and hide the inconsistent magic system.

These foundational shortcomings are particularly frustrating because the writing, characters, plot, and dramatic structure all worked for me. I could follow the investigation and appreciate the world-building, but the pseudo-science repeatedly pushed me out of the story; every biological impossibility reminded me that the underlying systems could not function. I can accept invented technology or unfamiliar physical laws in science fiction, but I need internal mechanisms that remain compatible with at least recognizable chemistry, biology, or physics.

I enjoyed the craft and much of the story, but the central conceit prevented me from inhabiting the world. I had hoped to discover why the sequel attracted such attention, but I found a fantasy novel whose scientific framing made it harder, rather than easier, for me to enjoy the considerable skill behind the narrative. I may not read the second book that won the Hugo.

2/5 Stars

Sun Eater 5, Ashes of Man by Christopher Ruocchio (2022)

I continue to enjoy the Sun Eater series for its style, universe, and character arcs. Ashes of Man has a few minor plot contrivances and some unnecessary abuses of the magic system, but the overall story remains excellent. Hadrian is particularly interesting: centuries old yet still capable of hot-blooded rage, love, and other passions. He simultaneously seeks escape from imperial politics, longs for obscurity, pursues his ethical imperatives, and gives in to rage. Those contradictions are among the series’ greatest strengths.

Ashes of Man continues Hadrian’s struggle against the Cielcin while drawing him deeper into the politics of the Sollan Empire and the mysteries surrounding the Shapers. As usual, Ruocchio provides tantalizing hints about the ancient powers manipulating time and fate, while foreshadowing future events without explaining too much. I found the balance of action less satisfying: there was too much close combat and not enough space-fleet maneuvering and combat for my taste. The emphasis makes sense, however, because Sun Eater is essentially high fantasy with a space-opera setting.

I continue to find the series’ deviations from the conventional hero’s journey compelling. Hadrian’s conflicting impulses make him more interesting than a straightforward heroic protagonist, while the Shaper mysteries give the larger story an appealing sense of scale and inevitability. Despite a few contrivances and my preference for more fleet combat, Ashes of Man remains an excellent installment. 5/5 Stars

Special Assignments by Boris Akunin (2007)

Rather than a single novel, this book contains two novellas featuring separate Fandorin cases. “Jack of Spades” takes place in 1886;“ The Decorator” occurs in 1889; both are set in Moscow during Holy Week, the days preceding Easter. I found the atmosphere darker than in the earlier books, with Akunin moving from the adventurous romanticism of the preceding volumes toward a more pessimistic portrait of Moscow's institutions and populace.

“Jack of Spades” explores fraud, corruption, and the emerging organization of criminal enterprise; unfortunately, I found the story itself less compelling than its historical setting. “The Decorator,” however, was considerably stronger: its investigation of a series of murders evokes the Jack the Ripper era while connecting the sensational criminal culture of London with Moscow's own social and institutional pathologies. Akunin also gives me an unusually vivid view of Russian Orthodox religious practice during Holy Week, a subject about which I knew almost nothing. The contrast between intense religious observance and the corruption, violence, and institutional decay surrounding Fandorin gives the novella much of its tension. As always with the Fandorin books, I particularly enjoy the historical and “slice-of-life” detail; because I know so little about Russian life in these periods, Akunin's reconstruction of Moscow functions for me as both entertainment and an informal education in the social world behind the fiction.

I continue to read the Fandorin novels as much for their historical immersion as for their mysteries. Special Assignments is uneven, but “The Decorator” supplies enough drama, historical texture, and cultural discovery to make the volume worthwhile, while its darker conception of Moscow suggests a less romantic world emerging beneath the series' earlier adventures.

4/5 Stars

Murderbot Stories by Martha Wells (2018 - 2025)

I discovered that Reactor Magazine, formerly Tor.com, had published several short stories set in Martha Wells's beloved Murderbot universe, and I promptly grabbed and devoured all of them. Much like most "Murderbot" fans, I love Wells's strange collection of SecUnits, augmented humans, artificial intelligences, corporations, awe-and-wonder space opera, and drama.   

Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy,” follows A.R.T. and its crew rather than Murderbot. Set after A.R.T.'s encounter with Murderbot, the story gives readers a welcome opportunity to see A.R.T. wrestling with the consequences of that relationship from its own perspective. A.R.T. has enormous capabilities with distinctly personal attachments, anxieties, loyalties, and blind spots; watching ART process what happened with Murderbot gives the relationship an additional dimension. The other stories likewise provide small but satisfying expansions of the universe, filling in corners and adding more well-written space-opera universe building that the main sequence necessarily leaves unexplored.

I enjoyed the collection; Wells can make even a relatively small episode feel consequential within the larger architecture of the series. Seeing familiar characters from unfamiliar angles and stories in the universe are still great even when Murderbot is offstage. 

5/5 Stars