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Modern archaeology has drastically increased what we can learn from ancient ruins, and Newitz turns this lens on the history of how cities form, how they thrive, and how they die. The writing is engaging and accessible, flowing through what we know, how we know it, how certain we are about it, and the author's first-hand experiences with archaeologists at the actual sites.

The book has added a lot to my understanding of Pompeii and Angkor. Çatalhöyük is fascinatingly weird. And I'd really like to know more about Cahokia. (So would the people studying it!)

Satellites and Microscopes

There's a recurring theme of re-examining what we thought we knew, using either new technology or new perspective. Angkor is perhaps the best example: LIDAR surveys in the last 10-15 years have revealed the remains of building foundations and an irrigation network outside the walled temple complexes. It wasn't a medium-sized city crammed into those stone walls. It was a large city built around them. And mundane records of things like workers' shift assignments and rations, previously ignored by Western archaeologists, hint at changing political conditions in later years as the infrastructure failed.

Even Pompeii, with its ruins remarkably preserved under volcanic ash, and written records still available of not just administrative details but first-hand accounts of the eruption, benefits from taking a new look at records we already have: Cross-referencing census and death records for Pompeii and nearby towns reveals where survivors resettled.

There are no written records of Çatalhöyük (in modern Turkey) or Cahokia (in modern Illinois), only ruins and artifacts, but sometimes those artifacts have stored surprisingly detailed information: There are indications of a drought during the time the city was inhabited...and sure enough, residue from stews in cooking pots indicate that the people shifted to eating animals that need less water, and that the animals ate more drought-tolerant plants, around the same time.

Lifecycle of a City

Newitz makes a point of drawing parallels to modern cities. (Pompeii had fast food carts, ads, and sports riots!) Çatalhöyük is the most alien. It's one of the oldest cities known, and it seems people were still figuring out how to make one. All the buildings are basically cubes attached to each other, accessed through doors in the roof, and they all seem to have pulled multiple duty as bedrooms, kitchens, storage, etc. Kind of like a Minecraft house, if you could bury your dead relatives under your bed. (Sometimes they'd keep the skull in a wall niche, though!)

It's easy to think of these ancient cities as dead ends where civilizations failed. Unlike, say, Rome, where you can see a continuous line from the ancient city to the modern. But they weren't all cataclysms, and the people didn't just disappear. Cahokia seems to have been wound down when people were done with it, Çatalhöyük and Angkor slowly emptied out as people moved, and even Pompeii had survivors who resettled nearby.

They're not dead ends. They're stops along the way.

Cross-posted on my website.

A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.

It starts with worlds we know the most about -- our moon and Mars, where we have plenty of direct measurements and photos from the surface -- and works its way out through asteroids, gas giants and their moons, and finally Pluto.

The second half of the book delves into more speculative situations. Types of places we know exist, like star clusters and nebulas and different types of stars. Plait links these to specific locations where possible. We know a system of planets exists around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, for instance, and we have a rough idea of how big, how far, and how fast the planets are that we've spotted so far. From there he imagines: if one of the three planets in its habitable zone is enough like Earth to visit, what would it be like to experience a red sun, multiple planets with visible phases, and so forth.

There's some repetition, but I think part of that is trying to make each chapter stand on its own in case you want to jump ahead to, say, visiting a black hole. (You do not survive the encounter.) And while there's a lot that I knew already from following space exploration from a distance, there are newer discoveries I'd missed, things I'd known pieces of but never really connected, and a deep dive into topics I'd only skimmed the surface of before.

Also, there's an insert in the middle of the book with photos. I didn't notice it until I got there, so I'd been looking up NASA and ESA pictures of the specific comets and asteroids on my phone while reading!

Some fun facts: 1. Martian sunsets are blue! 2. The biggest asteroids are like miniature planets. The smallest are like bags of rocks without the bag. (Or a really unpleasant 3D ball pit.) 3. Saturn's rings are surprisingly thin. Like, millions of miles across but only 40 feet thick in places. 4. The Orion Nebula is a bubble at the near edge of an even bigger cloud of dust. We can only see it because it broke through on our side! 5. It's entirely possible for a planet to have a stable orbit around one star of a binary pair -- or both! Sunsets on a world like Tatooine would actually look like they do in the movies! 6. I'm still amazed at how much we managed to get from a single high-speed fly-by past Pluto.

Review cross-posted on my website.

It's been ages since I read any Discworld, but it seems appropriate that I came back to it with a time travel story involving a rebellion and barricades.

It's an interesting mix of serious and silly, sometimes both at once, often treating serious things as comedy and vice versa. The situation is messy, with good cops, bad cops, really bad cops, time ~cops~ monks, and a rebellion that today's Sam Vimes knows won't accomplish what it hopes to, even if it nominally succeeds. There's plenty of comedy in Vimes mentoring his younger self and trying to clean up the "old" watch just enough to keep history on track, how the ordinary citizens handle the rebellion [2], and yet it can still manage to punch you in the gut when you finally find out what the lilac sprigs in the present are all about.

Night Watch is in the middle of the City Watch series, but it takes enough time to establish the now that while I still spent a good chunk of the book wondering who I was supposed to already recognize, I had a good sense of what had changed over the years and the future Vimes is fighting to protect -- and how hard it is to put it aside so he can focus on the job in front of him.

Definitely recommended even if you haven't read the other Watch books!

Notes: 1. Even better: Next up in my DS9 rewatch is the episode with the Bell Riots. 2. In Les Mis, there's a point where one of the rebels remarks that they'll know they've lost the support of the people when old women are emptying chamber-pots on their heads. Since it's no longer to ask Terry Pratchett whether this was intentional, I'm going to assume it's a deep-cut reference to the book. hyperborea.org/les-mis/book/low-on-ammo/

Cross-posted on my website: hyperborea.org/reviews/books/nightwatch/

Still relevant despite recent advances in AI-generated imagery and text, because the new systems still work on the same principles as the ones that were around three years ago. They just have a lot more data and processing power. This also means they have the same limitations and blind spots. What was it trained on? How was it trained? (This is the most obvious way human bias can leak into an AI model.) How well is the goal specified? And of course, did the AI actually latch onto relevant details, or did it notice that all the training pictures labeled sheep had green fields and blue skies, and completely ignore the actual sheep?

These are things to keep in mind as we enter the landscape of generative AI tools like ChatGPT: You can train an LLM to write a book review, and it'll give you a great piece of text that reads like a book review -- but it's not going to have actually evaluated the book. For that, you'd have to train another AI to categorize books as good, bad, interesting, dull, and so on. But even that can only be as good as its training data. (I don't remember whether the classic phrase "garbage in, garbage out" is used anywhere in the book, but it still applies today!)

The author has a blog/newsletter, AI Weirdness www.aiweirdness.com/, where she pushes AI over the edge to sometimes hilarious results.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/aiweirdness/

The Andre Norton books I've read over the last couple of years have all been on the action/adventure side of sci-fi, and this is no exception. What I found myself thinking about was how fuzzy, and sometimes arbitrary, the line between science fiction and fantasy really is.

90% of the book takes place on a world with pre-industrial technology. There are two factions with sufficiently-advanced technology that might as well be magic. The Cold War elements of the earlier books are pushed aside by the local conflict on Hawaika, with a handful of stranded humans and dolphins caught in the middle with nothing more high-tech than scuba gear and a convenient translator device. It could easily be a portal fantasy!

While the adventure was entertaining, I started paying more attention to the tropes connecting to the other books and, in some cases, being turned on their heads. Instead of a desert they spend most of their time on the ocean. The pair of empathic coyotes are replaced with a pair of telepathic dolphins. And the rough-and-tumble square-jawed agent finds himself out of his element so much (he has so little telapathic ability that the villains can't even attack him mentally) that by the end of the book he's desperately searching for situations where he can do manly things and fight with his hands or physical weapons, while the main battle is waged by women with "magic" and telepathy.

(There was also a floor maze that had to be danced properly to activate some great power, almost a decade before the first of Zelazny's Amber novels!)

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/key-out-of-time/

An enjoyable space western with Apaches as the good guys, wrapped up in the cold war and tossing in the Golden Horde, a lost alien city and Russians with a mind-control ray.

Third in the Time Traders series, it stands alone pretty well even though it appears much more closely linked to the second book (which I haven’t read) than the first (which I have), largely because the setting has moved from Earth’s past to a distant world in the near future.

It’s kind of a mish-mash, but as an adventure it moves quickly. The characters’ memories are all scrambled, mixed with those of their ancestors (this is how the western and Mongol Horde tropes are brought into the future). But they’re still distinct characters, and when alliances shift they’re actually for character and cultural reasons, not just plot contrivances.

All that said, I’m a white guy reading a book written by a white woman in the 1960s. She treats the Apaches a lot better than most contemporary western stories, and one of the themes is the ongoing exploitation of indigenous people by powerful nations of white people. But I don’t know how cringe-worthy the depiction might be to people who are actually part of those cultures.

Note: I read this while formatting and proofreading the Standard Ebooks edition based on the Project Gutenberg transcription.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/defiant-agents/

The original novel is a great read. Not just for the way it codified modern vampire lore. But for the way it's built entirely out of diary entries, letters, news fragments, telegrams and so on. For the way it shows modern science coming to grips with ancient superstition and figuring out how to deal with it. For showing an early example of a woman participating in her own rescue. And for some of the parts that didn't make it into general pop culture. (Count Dracula spends an awful lot of time in a shipping box.)

In some senses it's the written-word equivalent of the "found footage" horror genre. Except the "sources" are wildly varying. John and Mina write their journals and letters to each other in shorthand. Business letters are of course written formally. Dr. Seward keeps an audio diary on a phonograph. Van Helsing's speech is rendered with every quirk of his Dutch accent and speech patterns. And then halfway through the book, when all the major characters finally come together...they collate all the documents and Mina transcribes them on a typewriter, and they pass around the first half of the book so they can all read up on what the rest of them have been doing! (Literally getting them all on the same page.)

That's not to say it's flawless. It's unclear why some victims rise again as vampires while others don't. While the science/superstition contrast works well for the most part, eastern Europeans don't exactly come off very well. Especially when they'd talk about the "gypsies" carrying Dracula around Transylvania. I mean, it could have been a lot worse, but it's still jarring.

Overall, though, it's an engaging read, whether approached as a book or, as Dracula Daily did, one day's letters at a time from May 3 through November 7.

Dracula Daily: draculadaily.substack.com/archive

This review on my website: hyperborea.org/reviews/books/dracula/

It feels weird to rate this higher than the original it’s based on, H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy. I’m not sure it’s actually a better book, but it is more enjoyable, largely because it’s written in a more modern style and to today’s sensibilities. The characters are more distinct, the personal stakes are higher, the corporate malfeasance and environmental exploitation are amped up, and the twists are carefully set up instead of dropping in out of nowhere.

Fuzzy Nation tells largely the same story as Little Fuzzy: a prospector on a company-owned planet encouters a cute animal species that may or may not be sapient, in which case the company loses its license to exploit the world, finishing with a courtroom drama over murder charges and whether the fuzzies are people or animals, with a major breakthrough in communication settling the question. But it takes a different enough path that you can read it without knowing what’s coming next.

I’d recommend reading both if you have time, but space them out to let the first one you read settle.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/fuzzy-nation/

An engaging read for the general audience about what we currently know about the history and structure of the universe and what that knowledge -- and the pieces we don't know -- might mean for its future and eventual end. Katie Mack writes in a casual, entertaining style. It's clear she finds all of this absolutely fascinating. And she sprinkles the writing with funny stories and quotes and side notes to get across the basics of quantum mechanics, Higgs fields, high-energy physics and the like without delving too much into the math. But the math, and the measurements, are important, because as it turns out, very small changes in how things work at the quantum level can have major implications on the universe's ultimate fate.

The last time I read about this topic in anything resembling depth was about a decade ago. Since then there've been major discoveries in both quantum physics (chiefly confirming the existence of the Higgs boson) and astronomy, where we've found ways to look at ever more distant galaxies, and effectively farther and farther back in time.

Dr. Mack goes through the easier to grasp possibilities first, the ones based on what we do know about the universe. Big crunch, heat death, big rip - these are almost tangible, and which is more likely depends on things we can measure right now. Then she gets into the more esoteric possibilities, the ones based on the uncertainties. Like, if this quantum field we've measured is a little bit off one way or the other, reality might be unstable, so it would be really helpful to get better measurements. Or some of the multidimensional theories that have been proposed to unify relativistic gravity with quantum mechanics. If our 3D universe is just one of many in a larger-dimensional space, colliding with another one would probably be bad news for both!

She finishes up with a quick round-up of upcoming lines of research and some new theories in development that could fill in the gaps, or could shift to a new paradigm. (One theorist she spoke to suggested that even space and time might not be fundamental aspects of the universe, but built on something else)

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/end-of-everything/