Has France lost its charm, its cars, and now its schools?

During my misspent youth I had a full-blown Francophile stage. I watched French films, read French newspapers, followed French politics, and tracked every development of the May 1968 student uprising. At the time, it genuinely felt like it might turn into another French Revolution.

Then I read Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly. Her long section on the American (and earlier French) disaster in Indochina/Vietnam cured me of the romance. The French had already demonstrated the same combination of arrogance, denial, and eventual collapse that the Americans later repeated. Interest evaporated.

In 2022 I picked up Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace (the classic account of the Algerian War of 1954–1962). That book filled in the missing piece. Suddenly the post-colonial migration from North Africa into France, and the broader pattern of Muslim demographic and cultural pressure on Europe, made a lot more sense. One of the clearest lessons from that war is the sheer effectiveness of a death-cult’s intransigence: refuse every compromise, raise the body count, outlast the democratic will, and the other side eventually folds.

Because we are all bombarded by news, France is impossible to ignore. The “disaffected youth” (mostly of Algerian and other North African origin) were already torching cars sporadically in the banlieues in the 1980s. The real annual “Carbeque” tradition, hundreds to thousands of cars set alight every New Year’s Eve and Bastille Day solidified in the 1990s and 2000s and has never stopped. The numbers fluctuate, but the ritual is now well-entrenchenched and decades old. The 2023 riots simply scaled it up: several thousand vehicles burned in a single week of mayhem.

And the newest generation of “disaffected youth” has updated the repertoire. They have started burning down their own schools. The French protest tradition evolves, but the underlying energy remains the same. Examples here, here, here or here.

Prodigal Son by Gregg Hurwitz (2021)

I continue to enjoy the Orphan X series for its combination of kinetic prose, close-quarters combat, relentless suspense, melodrama, and super-spy-versus-super-villain entertainment, but by book six, Hurwitz is pushing the underlying mythology toward implausibility. Evan's sudden discovery of a globe-trotting, immensely powerful mother, the newly revealed blood relationships, and the autonomous-AI plotline collectively stretch my willingness to suspend disbelief. Hurwitz is not a science-fiction writer, and I preferred the earlier approach of keeping his characters' extraordinary hacking abilities in the background rather than introducing an AI antagonist whose capabilities require increasingly conspicuous technological hand-waving. Still, the thriller mechanics remain tight, and the teenager and pre-teen drama works surprisingly well when Hurwitz restrains the melodrama. By now, I am invested in Evan and the network of people surrounding him, which makes every new mystery and improbable coincidence entertaining to unravel.

Plot: Evan becomes entangled in revelations about his family while confronting a new threat that combines personal history, international intrigue, and artificial intelligence. The investigation pulls him and his allies through escalating dangers as they attempt to determine whom they can trust.

I enjoyed Prodigal Son despite the increasingly elaborate mythology and the moments when the story made me think, "That is too ridiculous." Hurwitz remains skilled at constructing tightly sequenced action and keeping the narrative moving, while Evan's relationships provide enough emotional grounding to offset the increasingly extravagant threats. I found the book less convincing than earlier installments, but still sufficiently entertaining to make the series' continuing mysteries worth pursuing.

3/5 Stars

A drop of corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (2025)

This second Ana and Din fantasy detective novel is a 2026 Hugo Award nominee and improves on its predecessor. I particularly enjoyed the uncomfortable collaboration between our talented, neurodivergent protagonists and the bureaucratic machinery of their society. Against them stands a supervillain with superpowers.  The antagonist's patience, intelligence, and meticulous preparation gives our plucky heroes what seems like an insurmountable task. Bennett also uses the case to explore institutional power, social hierarchy, and the ways bureaucracies can either preserve or endanger a society.

I remain frustrated, however, by the magic system. The biological systems underlying its fantasy world violate physics. I am equally bothered that generations of supposedly brilliant natural philosophers have apparently discovered none of the basic insights that transformed our own understanding of biology and the physical world, leaving the society trapped in pre-Enlightenment ignorance, suffering, and squalor. Still, Bennett’s characters, dialogue, plotting, and prose are so compelling that I am willing to suspend disbelief. I particularly enjoyed the social dynamics and the tension between individual intelligence and institutional capability.

Ana and Din investigate a seemingly inexplicable biological threat, gradually uncovering an elaborate scheme whose scope and consequences extend far beyond the initial mystery. Their investigation brings them into conflict with an adversary whose preparation and intelligence repeatedly outmaneuver their expectations.

Bennett compensates with compelling characters, intelligent dialogue, inventive plotting, and writing that makes the world’s social and political tensions wonderful literature.

4/5 Stars

Memoirs of a thinking radish by Peter Medawar (1986)

Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1960, but I know him almost as much for his popular science essays, where wit, intellectual clarity, and unfiltered criticism make even difficult subjects entertaining. Memoirs of a Thinking Radish collects his recollections of childhood and youth, his studies at Oxford, and the research career that eventually brought him international recognition. I particularly enjoyed the contrast between the magnitude of his scientific accomplishments and the deliberately ridiculous title, which reflects the humility running throughout the book.

Medawar gives considerable credit to the collaborators, mentors, colleagues, technicians, and other members of the support network who contributed to his success. His willingness to puncture his own reputation keeps the autobiography from becoming an exercise in self-congratulation, while his sharp observations provide much of its entertainment. I found his account especially interesting because it reveals the human infrastructure behind scientific achievement rather than presenting discovery as the product of solitary genius.

I did not find Memoirs of a Thinking Radish quite as entertaining as Richard Feynman's autobiographical books, whose exuberance and eccentricity make them difficult to match. Nevertheless, I found Medawar's combination of scientific accomplishment, humility, humor, and candid criticism thoroughly enjoyable.

4/5 Stars

Buy a Bullet by Gregg Hurwitz (2016)

I have always been interested in the possibility that a series novella or short story began as a writer's private character exercise: a vignette written to discover how a character's past shaped the motivations, reactions, and inner dialogue required by a larger work. During my own amateur writing years, from 1979 to 1986, my small writers' mutual-support group occasionally assigned such exercises for our longer projects. Successful writers sometimes discover that one of those discarded pieces can stand on its own, whether as a prequel, a deleted scene, or simply an opportunity to monetize material already written. I cannot tell whether Buy a Bullet originated that way, although its function within the Orphan X series makes the possibility intriguing.

The story is a prequel to Evan Smoak's transformation into the "Nowhere Man," the protector of people who have nowhere else to turn. The story supplies the decisive experience that moves Evan toward the moral purpose he embraces in The Nowhere Man, showing the psychological hinge between the government-trained assassin and the self-appointed protector. The premise interests me more than the execution: the story is too short to develop much tension, and Hurwitz pushes the emotional turning point toward melodrama. Even so, I enjoyed seeing the particular experience that helps explain why Evan eventually chooses to spend his considerable skills helping strangers rather than simply disappearing into a private life.

The story is more useful as an Orphan X character history than compelling as an independent thriller. It fills an important gap in Evan's trajectory, but the compressed format leaves little room for the suspense, tactical ingenuity, and character interplay that make the novels entertaining.

4/5 Stars

The State Counselor by Boris Akunin (2017)

In this sixth Fandorin mystery, we experience the collision of Fandorin’s humanistic, enlightened ethics with the labyrinthine bureaucracy and Czarist power politics of 1891 Moscow. Fandorin is now a State Counselor, placing him inside the very apparatus whose corruption and institutional self-interest test his commitment to justice. I continue to value the series most for its vivid historically accurate slice-of-life: Akunin makes Muscovite society, political factions, manners, and official machinery come alive. The revolutionary Nihilists again provide the adversarial force, led by an autistic mastermind with fun eccentricities and powers. I found the thriller mechanics enjoyable, although the Christie-like reversals sometimes become melodramatic and over-done. The passionate, sexually liberated women are less convincing as characters; their opacity serves the mystery but leaves them underdeveloped. Fandorin himself is also less dominant than in earlier installments, with his deductions and actions constrained by his position.

A political assassination draws Fandorin into a conflict among revolutionary conspirators, government officials, and competing factions within Moscow’s ruling apparatus. He must investigate while navigating institutional rivalries, concealed loyalties, and a conspiracy whose real architect is hidden.

I enjoyed The State Counselor as much for its historical atmosphere as for its mystery. Fandorin’s diminished freedom is an interesting evolution of the character, even if it reduces some of the earlier books’ intellectual fireworks. The plot twists are entertaining  despite their excesses, while the depiction of 1891 Moscow is, again, the best part of the series. The original Russian novel was so popular in 1999 that it became the most-expensive film in Russian history in 2005, for which Akunin wrote the screenplay.

4/5 Stars

Second-mover advantage in the age of AI

The internet bubble of 1995–2001 produced a classic mismatch between investor returns and eventual economic impact. Early backers of Amazon watched the stock collapse and then languish; the net present value of those investments looked terrible for decades. Eventually, the company’s extraordinary effects on retail, cloud computing, and logistics become fully visible. Capital destroyed on the way up created the conditions for patient capital to buy undervalued assets on the way down. The second movers won.

Eerily similar events are unfolding in AI. Trillions of dollars are flooding frontier model companies and the surrounding ecosystem. Hype cycles are reliable: AI will reach the plateau of productivity only after the bubble deflates and the trough of disappointment has been crossed. When those events occur, valuations will reset. Clever investors will again find underpriced assets whose economic viability is clearer than their current market prices suggest.

The geography of those assets will matter. SemiAnalysis’s recent mapping of Chinese AI infrastructure shows a market already larger than EMEA and the rest of Asia combined, with more than 24 GW of capacity across a thousand facilities, with ByteDance alone occupying roughly a fifth of delivered space. Build-out is rapid: 100 MW facilities routinely appear in under twelve months. Policy (“Eastern Data, Western Compute”), state carriers, and hyperscalers are driving wholesale AI demand while legacy retail racks sit underutilized. Chip constraints and high vacancy rates exist, yet the physical capacity keeps expanding.

Dan Wang’s Breakneck supplies the cultural contrast. China is an engineering state whose elite, trained in civil and chemical engineering, prefers to build first and manage consequences later. The United States has become a lawyerly society whose elite, steeped in process and compliance, excels at obstruction. The difference shows up in high-speed rail timelines, power permitting, and the speed of modular data center construction. After the AI bubble pops, government influence will shape which second movers capture durable economic value. In China, engineering-oriented leadership is already directing capital toward infrastructure that can be filled once model economics stabilize. In the United States, the same leadership style that slows housing and transmission lines may also slow the reallocation of capital toward the firms that survive the trough.

The frontier labs may still produce the most advanced models. The second-mover advantage, however, is likely to accrue to those who own the undervalued capacity, the power contracts, and the policy alignment that turn models into sustained economic activity. History suggests the largest returns will go not to those who paid peak prices for the most hyped names, but to those who bought the right assets after the bubble popped.

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

Hell Bent by Greg Hurwitz (2017)

I continue to enjoy the Orphan X series as Evan Smoak works through the trauma of his childhood and earlier adventures, gradually transforming from a damaged weapon into something resembling a self-directed hero. In Hell Bent, Greg Hurwitz pushes Smoak's abilities toward the nearly supernatural: his tactical instincts, physical skills, and clever improvisations repeatedly allow him to survive increasingly-impossible situations. I particularly enjoyed the close-combat sequences, where Smoak's movements and decisions feel almost algorithmically precise; Hurwitz makes his mastery of violence convincing.

The novel sends Smoak into a brutal confrontation with a super-villain whose resources are overwhelming. As Smoak fights his way through increasingly desperate circumstances, Hurwitz alternates close-quarters combat with strategic maneuvering, forcing him to solve "big-picture" problems rather than mindlessly overpowering his opponents. The supporting characters and antagonists have well-crafted motivations rather than generic malice. Meanwhile, Smoak's struggle to reconcile the conditioning of his past with the person he is consciously becoming gives the increasingly improbable action humanity.

The escalation is entertaining because Hurwitz embraces the superhero dimensions while retaining enough tactical and psychological detail to make his victories earned. The story arc remains consistent with the earlier novels, yet the increasingly extreme situations demonstrate how far Smoak has evolved from the robot assassin introduced at the beginning of the series. The ending surprised me, and I found its resolution both pleasing and enticing to continue the series.

5/5 Stars

Biology and Human Behavior by Robert Sapolsky (2024)

I started listening to Robert Sapolsky’s lecture series because I particularly enjoyed neuroscience when I studied biomedicine in the 1970s; I am also a longtime fan of popular science, sociology, social psychology, and psychographics. These lectures are exceptionally engaging and well organized. Sapolsky presents important facts, experiments, and behavioral phenomena without unnecessary detail or jargon. He explains the reality of all of the complex interactions that destroy the simple genetics vs environment dichotomy. Genes, development, physiology, evolutionary history, environment, culture, and immediate circumstances interact across many different and complex biological, biochemical, and timescales to produce human behavior.

I was particularly impressed by Sapolsky’s willingness to follow evidence into uncomfortable territory. His ethical and political judgments are frequently conspicuous and extreme, and I occasionally found his interpretations colored by those commitments. Yet he generally allows empirical evidence to complicate conclusions he would apparently prefer to reach. I found those tensions more intellectually valuable than a supposedly neutral presentation would have been: the data are often more interesting precisely because they resist his moral framework.

The examples are intrinsically fascinating, but the greatest value for me was the conceptual framework. Sapolsky replaces simplistic explanations with layered causal interactions, making familiar questions about human behavior considerably more complicated and, consequently, more interesting. I highly recommend the series.

5/5 Stars

Referral

https://discord.com/channels/834634720611926035/1512211373080182964/1541967789491888249