Reviews and Comments

The follow up to his 2006 "Blindsight", "Echopraxia" is yet quite a separate narrative from its predecessor. There is some connecting tissue, but this is quite a different tale, and you'd miss very little if you read it by itself.

The story is set in a triple aftermath. First contact has left humanity with species-wide existential angst; a separate set of crises have left the world (already reeling from climate apocalypse), struggling with a very science-fictiony, rather than horror, undead problem (two of them, actually); and more locally, a violent confrontation leaves the protagonist and a group of strange maybe-trans-human allies in a race across the solar system.

While "Blindsight" went outward, this book heads mostly inward, toward the sun, and a station upon which the world relies for its energy. And something's not quite right...

As with the first book, the tale here is one of disorientation. The protagonist is not able to understand or keep up with any of the other characters. While this provides the basis for exposition as he figures things out (slowly), it is mostly frustrating for us as there can be no sense of agency, just hopeless thrashing and occasionally being baled out by the much more capable and informed non-POV characters. The ideas are interesting, and often compelling, but the action is often painful, given the impossibility of agency.

It is worth it, for the ideas.

I haven't read everything by Doctorow, but have been reading him long enough to see what I think is an interesting progression in his writing. His work in the last few years (from the exceptional "Walkaway", to the superb novella collection "Radicalized"), has seemed increasingly readable and smooth. I think it's probably no coincidence that the stories seem to be getting a little shorter too (mostly, "Walkaway" has a certain heft).

His latest, "Red Team Blues", is a financial tech thriller set in Silicon Valley, in which an itinerant, grizzled forensic accountant, Marty Hench, is drawn into a hunt for crucial McGuffin, one that threatens the foundations of a cryptocurrency network.

Hench as a character is a nice clash of genres. On the one hand, he's a like a gritty noir detective - a loner, connected but never settled (literally, he lives on a tour bus), no time or patience for bullshit. On the other, he's lives and breathes the most bullshit-ridden ecosystem in existence. As he gets caught up in, and tossed back and forth by, forces vying for control of cryptocurrency, Hench splits his time between the magical looms of the emperor's new clothes and the actual streets of San Francisco.

The plot is interesting, but what keeps the reader involved is Hench's no-nonsense getting on with things. His superpower is to move among those who spend their lives playing games and not lose sight of how things actually work, when you look past the hype of constant revolutionary presmises offered by the techbois. What's interesting here is that while Doctorow does give you some of the tech-lore involved, it plays much less of a role than it does in a lot of his work. He is much more interested, here, in contrasting the lives of the rich and how those lives bulldoze, trample, and otherwise destroy people in the world around them. There isn't much technical detail here, particularly of the forensic accounting bit, most of which occurs "off screen". We get a lot more time taken describing cooking of food than cooking of books. Oddly, I wouldn't have minded a little more on the technical end.

It's pace and brevity are definitely in its favour. If you want a sharp, easy-to-read, thriller with Doctorow's signature combination of tech and humanity, you'll enjoy this one.

A paean to the imagination, and the importance of re-organising our civic, educational, and political institutions to encourage and facilitate people's imaginations.

The basic message of it the book is that climate change, and other major, indeed existential, problems are not problems of technology, they are problems of imagination. The worst of the challenges are made worst by the constraints we put on ourselves in the way that address them, and the range of positive outcomes is much more broad and diverse than we have so far given credit.

Inevitably, the book is a little preachy at times. I also personally find the occasional foray into neurobollocks (the insistent belief that some particular part of the brain is the magical part that we have to 'protect' from abuse or damage, in this case, the over-worked hippocampus), very off-putting.

At its best, though, it provides a host of concrete examples of real ways in which places, institutions, and cultural practices can all be changed for the better, and potentially at scale. The diversity of them is the real strength - the point is not to find a small set of massive solutions, but to recognise that there's a plethora of small ones, none of them perfect.

It won't change your life, but it might open your mind in some interesting ways.

None of Harkaway's books are quite like one another, and they're all worth your time.

Like the pulp that inspires it, Titanium Noir is a short piece that rolls along a brisk pace. The protagonist, Cal Sounder, is a bridge between two worlds. He lives and works as a detective, doing private work and consulting for the police of Chersenesos, but has ties to the level of society occupied by those so obscenely wealthy their very being is a mixture of unsettling and glamorous both for the other characters and for us readers. When crimes involve one of these hyper-rich, Sounder is brought in to smooth things over. The book starts with Sounder arriving on scene for a crime much too complex and messy for the easier fixes he's used to.

Sounder navigates a crime, a world, and a story in which power is manifested very directly as something brutal and inhuman, something which transforms the people who have it. As the detective slowly, painstakingly pieces things together we meet his mettle and resolve in a world where no one is innocent, everyone is beholden, and everyone is more wise to the seediness of the world than you are.

It's a vaguely alter-world, somewhere between the concrete of classic city noir, a very human present, and a vague, possible future. The quasi-mythical Chersenesos is more medically advanced than us, but at the same time no one ever mentions carrying or using a mobile phone.

As metaphors for brutality of wealth and power it is not subtle, but this is not a genre of subtlety, and like many brutal things it is quite effective. And in the end, I think, also satisfying.

This is a superbly presented history of the long-running debate on what is ostensibly about the nature of time, but in fact is substantially about the relevance and value of different ways of understanding the world, and the extent to which science and philosophy in particular are valid modes of investigating the world and experiences.

Though Bergson and Einstein are at its centre, they are just the core of a complex set of relationships. Canales teases apart several strands - the people (almost entirely men), the institutions, the technologies and objects, historical events - that all play a role in how the debate unfolds over decades. The chapters are kept relatively short and focused, and the narrative shuttles back and forth across time and social groups. (Though it is anchored by a particular date when the Einstein and Bergson met, the 6th April 1922, the richness of the discussion happens elsewhere.)

I learned a lot about a number of different disciplines here, and am motivated to read more about those involved. Highly recommended.