Du côté de chez Swann de Marcel Proust (1913)

It's not Proust—it's me.

I approached this classic with high expectations, drawn to its reputation for profound introspection and exquisite prose. And in that regard, it delivers: the philosophical musings on memory and perception can be genuinely fascinating, and Proust's writing is undeniably beautiful, with sentences that linger like poetry.

That said, for me, there was simply no "there" there. The book feels like a series of extended anecdotes about hypersensitive, neurotic characters in provincial French society, interspersed with the child's inner reflections—but without any compelling storyline, drama, or forward momentum to hold it together. The topics, while elegantly explored, never sparked my interest enough to pull me through.

I much prefer the sweeping narratives and vivid drama of someone like Victor Hugo. In the end, I put this down unfinished—not only because reading it in the original French stretched my language skills to their limit, but also because the lack of plot and emotional stakes made it feel more like form without substance. 0/5 Stars

Mindstar Rising by Peter F Hamilton (2011)

I have long admired Peter F. Hamilton's sprawling space operas. I usually steer clear of his work that includes psychic powers, fantasy, horror, or anything involving ESP, because the soft physics behind those elements bothers me. For that reason I had skipped the Greg Mandel series.

After a few disappointing recent reads in newer space opera, I decided to return to an author whose style I already trust. Mindstar Rising did not let me down.

The plot moves quickly and keeps delivering twists. The characters are engaging and easy to follow. The near-future setting—post-climate-collapse Britain—feels plausible and detailed. I especially liked the neural augmentations and the way Hamilton explores the boundary between human consciousness and machine intelligence. Those ideas are sharp and thought-provoking.
The psychic abilities remain the one part I could do without. They feel out of place in an otherwise grounded tech story. Still, they did not ruin the book for me.

Hamilton's writing pulled me through effortlessly. I have already started the next volume in the series. 5/5 stars.

Tools That Work to Stave Off Enshittificaton

Enshittification never slows down. Microsoft. Meta, Google, Amazon – the trillion-dollar giants – keep reinforcing the battlements of their evil walled-garden ecosystems. Interoperability is dying. Open standards are disappearing. Even editing a plain text file on a phone is now impossible. In 2019 Martin Kleppman, famous for Design of Data Intensive Applications,  wrote a white paper defining the concepts of "Local First Software" that is aligned to the privacy manifesto of Max Schrems and that portended Corey's book about how terrible the tech industry is becoming.

In the first half of 2025, U.S. GDP crawled at 0.1 % per year, if we ignore the AI hype bubble. Yet Microsoft found the energy to shove Copilot into every menu, activate Recall to screenshot and watch everything you do, and push Edge into every corner of Windows. The privacy invasion is deeper and more aggressive than anything Meta or Google have tried lately. My blood pressure rises and my life expectancy declines every time I open the Start menu.

Sooner or later I will flatten every Windows machine in the house and install Linux. Microsoft completely bricked a few devices with updates so they are now running Linux. Our 2011 “Kitchen” laptop still limps along on Windows 11 Server – the only edition Microsoft still allows on old hardware.

Until the final upgrade, three simple, well-maintained tools keep the worst of the poop away. They install in minutes and need almost no attention afterward.

• RemoveWindowsAI One click removes Copilot, Recall, and every built-in AI component. If I want AI, I open a browser tab. I do not want it welded into the operating system. Download → run as admin → reboot → silence. https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI

• Sophia Script for Windows: One PowerShell command turns off telemetry, ads, forced OneDrive sync, sponsored apps, and hundreds of other unwanted connections! Every change is well-documented and reversible. https://github.com/farag2/Sophia-Script-for-Windows

• PowerToys (yes, from Microsoft itself): PowerToys Run (Alt+Space) – launch files and programs without Edge https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N0DX20HK701 
  

Five minutes of setup gives back hours of calm. Keep most of the Microsoft proctological surveillance and pain away (for a while).

Use them now, while they still work. Remember: Linux is waiting.

A Letter for the Ages by Avrohom Chaim Feuer (1989)

I have long admired Maimonides' clarity in his Talmudic summary and commentaries and his  Mishneh Torah. I also enjoyed learning about his life during a visit to the museum in Córdoba. When someone recommended this book—an edition of the famous ethical letter Maimonides wrote to his son—I ordered picked it up and added it to my stack.

The original letter itself is brief, wise, and moving. Unfortunately, everything else in the book gets in the way.

Rabbi Feuer repeats the same points dozens of times, pads every paragraph with unnecessary and bad anecdotes. He buries Rambam's words under layers of superficial and often sentimental commentary. What could have been a slim, powerful volume turns into a bloated, repetitive chore.

The primary text is good. This particular edition is not. 2/5 stars.

Starship Bandits by Jonathan Yanez and Ross Buzzel (2024)

The plot moves along well and the characters are tolerable.  The writing is somewhat flat and clumsy.  Science is disastrous.  I can accept orc-like aliens who look and act human and conveniently speak English. It's like Star Trek.  The authors' biology and physics are terrible.  Haploid insects? Body sizes and strengths that ignore basic scaling laws and biophysics? Every technical detail collapses under the slightest consideration. The bad science overwhelmed everything else and ruined the book for me. Not recommended. 1/5 Stars. 

Will we finally deploy the O'Neil mass driver?

In 1937, Edwin Northrup wrote about an "electric gun" in his (terrible) novel "Zero to Eighty." The book contained diagrams and the author actually built some prototypes at Princeton to prove out the idea, demonstrating it works well. Gerard O'Neill scaled up the concept and proposed a mass driver, aka "coil gun" in 1974.  That same year, O'Neill's "Colonization of Space" paper came out in Physics Today.  Reading that article changed my life. I joined the L5 Society (our song). It seems Jeff Bezos is also one of "Gerry's kids," embracing O'Neill's vision of human space colonization.

Among the key elements in O'Neill's vision is the use of mass drivers to move materials in space and also as a form of propulsion.  Land solar-powered mass drivers on a small asteroid, and use some of the mass of the asteroid itself as reaction mass to push the rock through space and park it in an orbit you want.  Robots assemble a large mass driver on the moon, then send the lunar regolith to a Lagrange point between the Earth and Moon, where solar smelters turn the ore into aluminum to build space colonies (and oxygen to breathe).  As O'Neill said in his lecture tour (that I attended), "The calculations [proving viability] are simple freshman physics."

If you are a "space nerd" like me, you should really read the book or watch the 2023 documentary "The High Frontier." I attended the MIT independent activities period (IAP) where they built a mass driver. I was a founding member of the L5 Society.

The military developed a rail gun for ships and the system is operational, but it will be phased out in favor of other systems that are superior for the military's purposes.

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A new Space company, "Moonshot Space" just came out of stealth and will develop a terrestrial mass driver to move fuel and cargo to low earth orbit. The payloads must be able to survive extremely high acceleration and the scale-up to send over 100 Kg per launch will be interesting to watch.

Perry Rhodan: Zwei Milliarden Hefte und immer noch optimistisch

Vor ein paar Wochen bin ich zufällig über Perry Rhodan gestolpert und war sofort interessiert: Seit September 1961 erscheint jede Woche ein neues Heft, ohne eine einzige Unterbrechung gab es nie. Über 3300 Hefte, mehr als zwei Milliarden verkaufte Exemplare weltweit, allein in Deutschland über eine Milliarde. Das ist größer als Harry Potter, Herr der Ringe und Star Wars zusammen.

Ich liebe die Science-Fiction der Goldenen Goldene Ära, die unerschütterliche Zuversicht, die knappen Dialoge, das pure Staunen über die Weite des Alls. Also habe ich mir die allerersten Hefte im Original besorgt und auf Deutsch gelesen.

Die Geschichte beginnt 1971 mit der Mondlandung von Major Perry Rhodan, der auf dem Mond ein havariertes Forschungsschiff der Arkoniden findet, ein uraltes, dekadentes Sternenreich, das technologisch Jahrtausende voraus ist. Rhodan nutzt die fremde Technik, zwingt die verfeindeten Erdblöcke zur Zusammenarbeit und gründet die Dritte Macht, um die Menschheit vor sich selbst zu schützen.

Die ersten drei Hefte hatte ich an zwei Abenden durch. Mein Eindruck: Das ist genau der optimistische, raketen treibende Raumfahrt-Sound, den ich wollte, schnoddrige Sprüche zwischen Piloten und Wissenschaftlern, harte Physik bei Triebwerken und Bahnmechanik, und auf jeder zweiten Seite ein neuer atemberaubender Einblick ins Universum. Die Arkoniden und ihr sterbendes Imperium faszinieren mich richtig.

Einzig die plötzliche Einführung von Mutanten mit Telepathie, Telekinese und Teleportation in Heft drei hat mich gestört, Parapsychologie liegt mir einfach nicht. Ich weiß aber, dass das ein Markenzeichen der Serie bleibt, also werde ich damit leben.
Fazit nach den ersten drei Heften: knappe 4 von 5 Sternen. Ich lese auf jeden Fall weiter, wahrscheinlich aber nicht linear, sondern springe zu den besonders gelobten Zyklen („Die Meister der Insel", „Aphilie", die Kosmonukleotide). Dreiundsechzig Jahre wöchentliche Zukunftsgeschichte linear zu lesen wäre selbst mir zu viel.

Wer jemals Heinlein-Jugendbücher, Doc Smith oder frühes Star Trek möchte und ein bisschen deutsche Heftroman-Ästhetik erträgt, sollte Perry Rhodan unbedingt einmal probieren. Es ist die längste und wohl optimistischste Zukunftsvision, die je geschrieben wurde, und sie läuft 2025 immer noch weiter. Ich berichte, wenn ich tiefer ins All vorgedrungen bin.

Crystal Soldier by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller (2006)

I started Crystal Soldier because my usual favorite authors have not released any light, enjoyable space opera in a while, and I wanted something new to fill that gap. Unfortunately, this book did not work for me at all.

The science feels flimsy, the world-building is unconvincing, and the antagonists never seem to have meaningful motivations. Even though the prose itself is clean and the editing is competent, the story is slow and the action lacks weight. The close-quarters combat scenes in particular are so implausible that they pulled me out of the narrative rather than drawing me in.

What frustrates me most is how poorly recommendation systems categorize works like this. They keep lumping together hard science fiction with fantasy, supernatural elements, and loose world-building. This book is another example of that failure. It sits much closer to fantasy than to any credible science fiction tradition, and it left me bored from start to finish. 1/5 Stars.

Consciousness is an illusion

I saw this interesting pop science article about new advances in neuro-technology for paralyzed people that included some serendipitous discovery about measurements of unconscious thoughts.  I went down a rabbit hole looking up qualia, sentience, and consciousness.  So I chatted with some of the AI chatter-bots about my understanding and weakly-held, strong belief that consciousness is an illusion.

Here is a (long) response from one of them that concludes consciousness is real and exists, but it is different from how we currently understand what it means.  I still feel that if consciousness does exist, it is radically different from our misperception of what it really is.

Here is a different response (shorter) that agrees with me and includes better rebuttals against the counter-factuals and strong negative references I found to my hypothesis.

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.