AI has a path dependence problem.
It doesn’t matter whether you are Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or xAI. Every frontier lab and hyperscaler is now committed to spending billions on infrastructure, data, and talent to build and scale large language models. This gamble is propping up the US economy. It is also being sold as the path to solving the world’s hardest problems. No matter where these labs started, they are now on the same road, and they are taking us with them.
I’ve been thinking about this while reading Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine, his biography of Demis Hassabis and history of DeepMind. The book is also a snapshot of the current AI moment.
Hassabis is an extraordinary figure: chess prodigy, game developer, neuroscientist, now head of Google DeepMind. AlphaGo beat the world’s best Go player. AlphaFold solved protein folding and won him a Nobel Prize. Mallaby paints a sympathetic picture. Hassabis sees himself as Turing’s champion – using inductive reasoning to solve the world’s hardest problems.
And yet Hassabis and his peers are all running the same race. Altman, Amodei, Musk, each with his own higher calling: saving humanity, transcending the body, understanding the universe. In practice they are all spending billions to replicate each other’s work. The race has a winner-take-all logic, and that logic allows only one strategy: get there first.
So we get Dario Amodei warning about the destruction of white-collar work while Anthropic ships Claude Design, a tool aimed straight at automating design work. We get Hassabis talking about hadron colliders in space while pushing Gemini to catch OpenAI.
This is what path dependence looks like. Mallaby’s book shows that even a figure as sympathetic as Hassabis has a pragmatic, competitive side that will do what it takes to win.
I find Hassabis genuinely inspiring, and that is what makes the book unsettling. If the most thoughtful figure at the frontier cannot escape the spiral, then the spiral is the story, not the people inside it.
reviews
Book Review: Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
Titanium Noir is a noir novel first, set in an interesting world second. World-building and story take a backseat to tone and genre conventions, which is either a feature or a flaw depending on what you came for.
The main character, Cal Sounder, struck me as somewhat ridiculous: no meaningful background, no real character development, just an embodiment of the noir detective archetype. This is likely intentional, a genre conceit where the detective exists primarily as a lens through which we observe the world.
A Chandler Cast in a Strange City
At its heart, this is a murder mystery. A quiet, private man gets killed, and because the victim is a Titan, Cal Sounder gets the call. He is a private investigator who works closely with police on cases involving Titans, the ultra-wealthy elite made superhuman through repeated doses of the life-extending T7 drug. Most of the book follows Sounder as he navigates a cast of characters lifted straight from Raymond Chandler: a nightclub singer, a corrupt cop, a beautiful but neurotic woman, and so on. The core plot feels secondary to atmosphere and world. There are twists, turns, and some surprisingly violent sections, but the mystery exists in service to the setting rather than the reverse. I enjoyed some of the characters, though the plot itself fades from memory faster than the world Harkaway built around it.
The World of Stasis
What I found most compelling was thinking through the implications of a world ruled by a small cadre of superhuman Titans. They are apart from everyone else in how they look, how they act, and crucially, the time horizons that shape their thinking.
The world they rule is static, and that stasis makes perfect sense. If you intend to be immortal, you want predictability and control. You actively suppress black swan events, like widespread access to T7, because such disruptions threaten your position. This stasis manifests throughout the book: repeated references to 20th century films, archaic computing infrastructure, the absence of mobile phones. Some technologies have clearly advanced, medical facilities most notably, but these directly benefit the Titans.
If I were to construct the backstory, I would imagine T7 invented toward the end of the 20th century, with the Titans consolidating control in the early 21st. This explains the new city where they reside, built fresh for their purposes, while the rest of the world still references Brazil, Greece, Beijing, Mumbai. This is not a colony planet. It is Earth, transformed by Titan influence.
Verdict
A solid 6.5. The world stayed with me; the plot did not. I am not certain I would read a sequel if one arrives, though Harkaway clearly has ideas worth following.
Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
by Elizier Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (2025)
We are at an interesting moment in artificial intelligence. Massive investment continues to pour into AI infrastructure, with McKinsey estimating $5.2 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030 for data centers alone. We’re seeing the first documented cases of what’s being called “ChatGPT-induced psychosis,” where users spiral into severe mental health crises after becoming obsessed with AI chatbots. We’re watching significant job displacement begin to unfold, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warning of a “white-collar bloodbath,” predicting that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 20% within five years. And yet, despite all this disruption, there’s still no clear path to artificial general intelligence.
My P(doom), the probability I assign to AI causing human extinction, is low. There are significant risks associated with the widespread adoption of poorly understood technology. However, I don’t believe current foundation models represent a viable path to ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence, also sometimes referred to as AGI – Artificial General Intelligence). We’re more likely to experience a dot-com-style correction than achieve exponential growth toward superintelligence.
It’s in this context that “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” arrives. The authors, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, run the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), where they’ve spent decades working on AI alignment and safety. Their new book makes an extreme claim: if anyone builds artificial superintelligence, humanity will go extinct. Not “maybe possibly,” but inevitably.
I found the book compelling in parts, incomplete in others. It succeeds at making alignment challenges accessible to a general audience. It fails to grapple with where we actually are today with AI: massive investments, uncertain results, and significant challenges and risks to the broad adoption of the technology.
The Book’s Structure
Yudkowsky and Soares have written the book for a general audience, using parables, stories, and examples to explain how AI is “grown, not crafted.” This approach makes understanding how modern AI systems work surprisingly accessible, even to readers without a technical background.
The authors divide the book into three main sections. First, an introduction to machine learning and AI concepts that grounds readers in the fundamentals. Second, a fictional scenario where a misaligned AI releases a bioengineered plague to facilitate its takeover of human society. Third, a call for a nuclear non-proliferation-style moratorium on AI development, enforced by military action if necessary.
The title leaves nothing to interpretation. It is a strident warning about humanity’s impending doom if we don’t stop the march towards ASI.
Their core thesis rests on several interconnected arguments. ASI will inevitably lead to extinction because we cannot understand current AI architectures; the interpretability problem remains unsolved. We cannot predict emergent behaviors, which they illustrate through evolution’s production of the peacock’s elaborate tail. And crucially, we cannot guarantee alignment with human welfare when the systems are “grown, not crafted.”
The fictional section follows Sable, a near-future AI platform created by a company that serves as a transparent stand-in for OpenAI or Anthropic. Sable releases a bioengineered plague to facilitate its takeover of human society. The AI’s motives remain deliberately inscrutable; that’s the author’s point. We won’t understand what drives a superintelligence any more than an ant understands human motivations.
In the final section, Yudkowsky and Soares draw parallels with the Chernobyl disaster, arguing that perverse incentives will always lead someone to take catastrophic risks. Their solution: a treaty that makes it illegal to conduct AI research that could lead to the development of ASI. Military action undertaken by the signatories will enforce this treaty. This connects to Yudkowsky’s 2023 TIME magazine piece where he called for airstrikes on rogue data centers training unauthorized AI systems.
Where the book falls short..
The fictional scenario is the book’s weakest element. Any casual science fiction fan has encountered this scenario before, from the Reapers in Mass Effect harvesting civilizations for inscrutable reasons to the Matrix’s machines farming humans for energy. An AI going rogue and taking over the solar system doesn’t offer fresh insight when we’ve seen these narratives unfold across books, movies, and video games for decades.
More critically, the book contains a glaring omission: no discussion of timelines or pathways to ASI. The authors just sort of wave their hands and assume that it will happen at some point.
Are large language models even the right approach? What if they’re a dead end? What if we never solve hallucinations?
The authors offer no guidance for our current moment, where we have invested trillions of dollars in AI infrastructure. It’s unlikely we’ll just let those investments go to waste. Will we?
The book illuminates the bind decision-makers are already in. Even a small probability of AGI makes development rational from a game-theoretic perspective; it could be a winner-takes-all scenario. Companies pursuing ASI despite risks aren’t delusional. They are responding to competitive pressure; FOMO on steroids. The race dynamics are rational, even if the outcome might be catastrophic. The book uses this bind to show that we risk triggering an uncontrollable, recursively self-improving, non-aligned ASI by simply doing what seems rational in the moment.
The authors acknowledge this dynamic and address it in the book. Here’s a passage from the book:
“Imagine that every competing AI company is climbing a ladder in the dark. At every rung but the top one, they get five times as much money: 10 billion, 50 billion, 250 billion, 1.25 trillion dollars. But if anyone reaches the top rung, the ladder explodes and kills everyone. Also, nobody knows where the ladder ends.”
But why the despair?
Yudkowsky and Soares argue that believing we can solve the alignment problem, as OpenAI and Anthropic claim, represents pure hubris. Reading their work, one senses an almost religious veneration of ASI.
It brings to mind Aquinas:
“This is the ultimate in human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know Him.”
Their thesis remains that it’s better to stop the creation of an unfathomable, unexplainable power than to try bargaining with it.
But Yudkowsky and Soares ignore the trillions already invested. There’s enough AI overhang that resources could shift to deployment and inference optimization rather than capability development. The book offers no practical path forward from where we are, only where we shouldn’t go.
Broader Implications
On a personal note, my father worked at the OPCW for many years, serving as the enforcement arm of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It’s proof that we can coordinate at a global scale and agree that some technologies are best banned and not developed further.
But just as there will always be a North Korea or Syria that ignores conventions and develops chemical weapons anyway, enforcement of an AI moratorium would be extraordinarily challenging. Moreover, a Pyongyang-aligned AGI is a far worse scenario than a localized sarin gas attack. So what can be done?
We’re not dealing with hypothetical future risks but immediate present concerns: the economic disruption and social impact of current AI systems. These challenges require attention now, not after we’ve solved the alignment problem for hypothetical superintelligences.
A More Grounded Alternative
For a more coherent treatment of the current moment, I found Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor’s “AI as Normal Technology” more compelling than either Yudkowsky and Soares’s urgent doomerism or the e/acc posturing of AI evangelists. While Yudkowsky warns of extinction, leaders like Dario Amodei paint utopian visions, and Sam Altman promises a “gentle singularity,” Narayanan and Kapoor treat AI as a transformative but manageable technology, similar to electricity or the internet before it. Narayanan and Kapoor are writing a book based on the paper, which I look forward to.
Conclusion
You should read “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” For a layperson, it effectively lays out the risks and alignment challenges of unchecked AI acceleration in accessible terms. The book succeeds as a provocation and a warning.
But it’s maximalist doomerism that ignores incentive structures and our current technological reality. While serious, it’s not a sufficient treatment of the topic. It fixates on one particular scenario, which the authors consider inevitable, while ignoring where we are today.
The book succeeds at making alignment challenges vivid and accessible. It fails at providing actionable guidance for a world that has already invested trillions in AI infrastructure. We need frameworks for managing the AI we have, not just warnings about the AI we might build.
My P(doom) remains low because I don’t think current foundation models lead to AGI. I suspect we’re in for a significant correction as massive AI infrastructure investments fail to bear fruit. A dot-com-bust style pullback is more likely than runaway exponential growth to ASI.
Moreover, even before we confront ASI, we must deal with the economic and social impact of current AI systems, something Yudkowsky and Soares don’t seem particularly interested in addressing. The apocalypse may not be coming, but the disruption has already begun.
Playground by Richard Powers
I read most of “Playground” in a rattly old plane as it shook and juddered over the Atlantic and then the vast emptiness of Russia before landing in New Delhi. I finished the book in a crowded airport, in tears and in awe of what Richard Powers has achieved.
The novel weaves together an exploration of friendship and the games people play with one another, a hypnotic love letter to the ocean, and a deep meditation on technology and meaning. Like memory itself, the story refuses to follow straight lines. Instead, it spirals and circles, guided by a narrator whose version of events becomes increasingly complex and layered as the story unfolds.
At its heart are four people – Todd, Rafi, Ina, and Evie. Todd and Rafi both call Chicago home, but they might as well be from different planets. Todd is wealthy, white, and obsessed with computers; Rafi is poor, African American, and a precocious reader. What bridges their worlds is a shared love of games – chess, Go, and eventually the intricate game of their own peculiar friendship. When they meet Ina in college, their duo becomes a trio, and their lives become permanently entangled in ways that echo across decades.
In contrast stands Evie – a scientist and pioneering diver whose sections contain the book’s most luminous writing. Through her eyes, we discover coral reefs, sunken ships, and manta rays in passages that evoke pure wonder about the ocean’s depths. While others build virtual worlds, Evie explores an actual one, until all four lives ultimately converge on the Pacific island of Makatea – a place strip-mined for phosphate in the 20th century and slowly being reclaimed by jungle. The island stands as a testament to both human intervention and nature’s resilience.
Threading through these human stories runs the history of modern technology and machine learning, embodied in Todd’s journey. He transforms his obsession with computers and gaming into a wildly successful social platform that crosses Reddit with Facebook. But as his success peaks, tragedy strikes – a debilitating neurological disease that leads him to narrate his story to an AI assistant before memory fails. This creates layers of uncertainty about perception and reality that build toward a wonderful (and slightly puzzling) final act that questions what it means to be alive and how technology might reshape our understanding of consciousness and truth.
As a technologist, I found “Playground” to be a powerful lens for examining both my relationship with technology and my feelings about the natural world as we venture deeper into the Anthropocene. The book doesn’t choose sides. Instead, it shows us how the awe inspired by a coral reef and the possibilities of artificial intelligence can coexist, each raising questions about consciousness and reality that the other helps us explore.
There’s still so much to process in this book. Like the games its characters play, each move reveals new possibilities, new uncertainties to consider. And I’m nowhere near done processing.
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor
In times of rapid change, fiction serves as a reflective lens, casting light on current anxieties and offering insights beyond simple commentary. “The Mountain in the Sea” by Ray Nayler navigates the complex relationship between humans and technology.
But Nayler’s work goes further. While the book revolves around first contact with a civilization of Octopii, it delves into the nature of consciousness. It critiques our relentless drive to build, optimize, and consume. Nayler raises pertinent questions about loneliness, isolation, and the role of technology in our lives.
In the pages of “The Mountain in the Sea,” these themes come alive through well-realized characters and intricate plotlines, providing a vital tool for understanding our relationship with the worlds we live in – social, internal, external, and digital.
There are three PoV characters – Ha Nguyen is a scientist who has spent years studying Cephalods – the family of animals that include Octopus, Squid, and Cuttlefish. The second character is a hacker, Rustem, who specializes in breaking AIs. The third is a young Japanese man, Eiko, who, through a series of unfortunate events, ends up a slave aboard an AI-powered fishing vessel.
Each character in the book deals with loneliness and isolation and has somewhat awkward if dependent, relationships with technology.
In general, AI, or the nature of intelligence, is a key theme that runs through the various plot lines of the book. Ha Nguyen and her team try to make sense of the culture and symbolic language of the Octopus civilization. Eiko has to deal with a murderous and indifferent AI driven by optimization algorithms built to maximize the amount of protein the ship hauls from the depleted oceans.
While I picked up the book because of the striking cover and because I love First Contact books – I read it in a couple of sittings because of the underlying themes of our relationship and dependence on technology and what it does to us and the world around us resonated deeply with me. As someone excited about technology’s promises and challenges, this book prompted me to consider where our pursuit of innovation is taking us.
For example, people in “The Mountain..” have AI companions called point-fives. These companions form relationships but do not make any demands on their human owners. They give, but they do not take. There is only one point five instead of two “people” in a relationship. Hence the moniker.
The loneliness of people in this world is mollified by technology, but it is not solved. The only way is through genuine contact, through a process of both taking and giving.
I spend a lot of time working on and thinking about systems that would save time, optimize workflows, and make more money. Despite the potential for disruption and displacement, I welcome new technology like Generative AI.
But, there are clearly issues and risks in the somewhat reckless attitude to embracing technology. Threats not just to our environment but also to society and to ourselves.
“The Mountain in the Sea” is a cautionary tale and a story of hope. Each character’s arc in the novel is discovery and possible redemption. This book had me thinking long and hard about where our obsession with optimization and technology is taking us.
Book Review: “Artificial Intelligence – A Guide for Thinking Humans” by Melanie Mitchell
Introduction
Melanie Mitchell’s book “Artificial Intelligence – A Guide for Thinking Humans” is a primer on AI, its history, its applications, and where the author sees it going.
Ms. Mitchell is a scientist and AI researcher who takes a refreshingly skeptical view of the capabilities of today’s machine learning systems. “Artificial Intelligence” has a few technical sections but is written for a general audience. I recommend it for those looking to put the recent advances in AI in the context of the field’s history.
Key Points
“Artificial Intelligence” takes us on a tour of AI – from the mid-20th century, when AI research started in earnest, to the present day. She explains, in straightforward prose, how the different approaches to AI work, including Deep Learning and Machine Learning, based approaches to Natural Language Processing.
Much of the book covers how modern ML-based approaches to image recognition and natural language processing work “under the hood.” The chapters on AlphaZero and the approaches to game-playing AI are also well-written. I enjoyed these more technical sections, but they could be skimmed for those desiring a broad overview of these systems.
This book puts advances in neural networks and Deep Learning in the context of historical approaches to AI. The author argues that while machine learning systems are progressing rapidly, their success is still limited to narrow domains. Moreover, AI systems lack common sense and can be easily fooled by adversarial examples.
Ms. Mitchell’s thesis is that despite advances in machine learning algorithms, the availability of huge amounts of data, and ever-increasing computing power, we remain quite far away from “general purpose Artificial Intelligence.”
She explains the role that metaphor, analogy, and abstraction play in helping us make sense of the world and how what seems trivial can be impossible for AI models to figure out. She also describes the importance of us learning by observing and being present in the environment. While AI can be trained via games and simulation, their lack of embodiment may be a significant hurdle towards building a general-purpose intelligence.
The book explores the ethical and societal implications of AI and its impact on the workforce and economy.
What Is Missing?
“Artificial Intelligence” was published in 2019 – a couple of years before the explosion in interest in Deep Learning triggered due to ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs). So, this book does not cover the Transformer models and Attention mechanisms that make LLMs so effective. However, these models also suffer from the same brittleness and sensitivity to adversarial training data that Ms. Mitchell describes in her book.
Ms. Mitchell has written a recent paper covering large language models and can be viewed as an extension of “Artificial Intelligence.”
Conclusion
AI will significantly impact my career and those of my peers. Software Engineering, Product Management, and People Management are all “Knowledge Work.” And this field will see significant disruption as ML and AI-based approaches start showing up.
It is easy to get carried away with the hype and excitement. Ms. Mitchell, in her book, proves to be a friendly and rational guide to this massive field. While this book may not cover the most recent advances in the field, it still is a great introduction and primer to Artificial Intelligence. Some parts of the book will make you work, but I still strongly recommend it to those looking for a broader understanding of the field.
Less Certainty, More Enquiry
Lessons from Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself and Win
Maria Konnikova is a journalist, writer, and professional poker player. I came across her an interview with her on the excellent Knowledge Project podcast. She intrigued me enough to want to know more about her journey, so I picked up her book, “The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself and Win.”
The Biggest Bluff is Ms. Konnikova’s account of going from being a complete poker novice to a tournament-winning pro. The book is not a “how-to” guide to making millions in Vegas. It is instead a meditation on learning, paying attention, and making decisions.
I enjoyed following Ms. Konnikova on her journey. Here are some things I took away from the book.
Paying Attention to the Present
Poker is a game of simple rules but complex behaviors. Success relies on luck and the ability to understand and predict what other players on the table might do. Ms. Konnikova had to pay attention to the cards on the table and how the other players had played throughout the day and tried and figured out what their tells were.
She also had to learn to pay attention to herself and identify when she was fatigued, and take appropriate action when going off course.
John Von Neumann describes poker as the perfect game of incomplete information. But, by paying attention, it is possible to identify when emotions get in the way of sound decision-making and to try and predict your competitors’ actions and consequences.
In life, just like in poker, paying attention to the present is table stakes.
Intuition vs. Process
Ms. Konnikova is dismissive of intuition or “gut feeling.” She says we have intuitions all the time, but we are terrible at telling the right ones from wrong. She suggests that we trust our intuition only if we are an expert in the area.
As a novice poker player, she had to work hard to identify and suppress false confidence. She did this by learning to distinguish the action and the outcome from the thought process. In the short term, it didn’t matter if she won or lost a hand provided she was thinking through things correctly. In the long run, this focus on process meant that she would have better inputs and eventually the right conclusion with more experience.
I agree with the author that we are terrible at linking outcome to process. Luck, both good and bad, always adds noise. But by having a thought-through strategy, we can avoid false confidence and learn to avoid the pitfalls of relying on unreliable intuitions.
Avoiding going Full Tilt
In poker parlance, “tilting” is when a player lets irrelevant emotion cloud their thinking. You start tilting when another player or an aggravating circumstance gets under your skin and makes you emotional.
As one of very few professional female poker players, Ms. Konnikova dealt with misogynistic behavior from her fellow players. From being called “little girl” to being propositioned on the poker table — these unpleasant experiences did end up getting under her skin and affected her game.
She came up with techniques to become mindful of her emotions. She wanted to experience them but be self-reflective and not let them affect her thought process.
Humans are emotional. We experience life through emotions and can never be purely rational. Ms. Konnikova says the key is to identify irrelevant feelings and develop strategies to ignore them — avoiding going full tilt.
Making Good Decisions
Poker forces a player to place a monetary value on the opinions driving decisions at the table. Having a flawed decision-making process makes going broke a likely outcome.
As she became a better poker player, Ms. Konnikova became less confident in her opinions. This may seem counter-intuitive — surely becoming more experienced means becoming more confident in your opinions! But Ms. Konnikova made better decisions when she forced herself to question her assumptions. Her decision-making process relied on paying attention, not relying on flawed intuition, and having a well-practiced process.
Judging the success or otherwise of a decision-making process is more straightforward in poker than in real life. If you lose money consistently, you might want to either stop playing or take a close look at how you are playing. Judging success in other domains may not be easy, but having a clear decision-making process remains crucial.
Conclusion: Less Certainty, More Inquiry
We often end up making decisions on auto-pilot. We take received wisdom and our intuitions for granted. When bad things happen, we attribute them to bad luck, crappy circumstances, or other external factors.
But, as Ms. Konnikova’s mentor advises her, it is better to be less certain about things and always inquire, ask questions, and to think through things for yourself.
To have any chance of success in complex domains, it is essential to be aware of blind spots, pay attention to what is happening, and have a deliberate and well-understood decision-making process.
The Biggest Bluff is an entertaining, well-written, and thought-provoking book. Ms. Konnikova’s journey pushed me to take a closer look at how I make decisions and to ponder where my blind spots lay.
Review: Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read a lot of science fiction. I find reading science fiction diverting, stimulating and usually a lot of fun. I finish most books in three to five days depending on my schedule and what else is going on in my life. I struggled with Ninefox Gambit. It took me 3 weeks to finally finish it. I abandon books if I am not having fun after two or three sittings. I am glad I didn’t give up on Ninefox Gambit.
We are thrown right in the deep end at the beginning of Ninefox Gambit. Cheris is a soldier and a gifted mathematician. She serves the Hexarchate; six factions or guilds that govern her part of the universe. Each faction is responsible for a facet of life within the Hexarchate. Cheris is a part of the Kel, the military faction. Ninefox Gambit starts with Cheris involved in a bloody skirmish. We get some idea of how combat works in the Hexarchate. Kel soldiers are able to use exotic weapons by deploying in a formation that uses the effects of the Hexarchate “calendar”.
I know. I was baffled too. We get given no indication of what the calendar is or how a formation works. I knew there was something important going on, but I felt too lost to be able to follow what was happening.
I put away my Kindle and picked up another book. Yet, I kept thinking of Cheris and the world of Ninefox Gambit. So I picked up where I had left off and powered through. I am glad I did, because we are swiftly introduced to General Shuos Jedao – disembodied, disgraced and quite possibly insane. Jedao is immortal and imprisoned by the Kel hierarchy after causing a brutal massacre 400 years ago. He may or may not be crazy but is a brilliant military tactician and is used by the Kel when his expertise is required.
An important world (the wonderfully named Fortress of Scattered Needles), is taken by heretics who install their own calendar in rebellion against the doctrines of the Hexarchate. The Fortress is protected by unassailable defences and lies in a strategic sector. Cheris is chosen as Jedao’s anchor – together they command the Hexarchate’s forces as they attempt to subdue the rebellion and retake the fortress.
We get to learn a lot more about the world through conversations between Cheris and Jedao as well as short vignettes from other characters caught up in the action. There are plots within plots and a lot of political intrigue. There are games with exotic rules and flashbacks to Jedao’s life and the events that led up to his immortality and imprisoning. There is also violence, and lots of blood and gore.
At times, Ninefox Gambit reads like conventional military science fiction. Exotic weapons (deadly fungus anyone?), spies and shouty sergeants. Yet, all of this action makes sense in the context of the structure of the Hexarchate. The world is governed through a combination of indoctrination and brute strength. Cheris and Jedao are the tip of the spear that is intended to destroy the rebels.
If you are still with me, you probably know that Ninefox Gambit relies on the reader being somewhat familiar with the tropes of science fiction and fantasy. I (and other readers on Goodreads) were reminded of Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. There are similarities – we have an unreliable narrator in Cheris and a brutal regime attempting to suppress a rebellion. Just like the Radch trilogy, Ninefox Gambit is deeper and a lot more interesting than your run of the mill military science fiction.
Yoon Ha Lee has built a compelling, and challenging, universe – one that I hope will be explored in further volumes in the “Machineries of Empire” series.
Review: Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Review based on a copy sent to me by NetGalley
Revenger appears to be the first instalment in an intriguing new science fiction series by Alastair Reynolds. This fast paced, character driven novel is an enjoyable departure from the dense, exposition-heavy space opera that Alastair Reynolds has been writing for the last 20 years.
We follow the story of Arafura Ness, a teenager with a sheltered life and a love of books as she ventures out from her father’s home in search of adventure with her more outgoing (and reckless) older sister Adrana.
Arafura comes from Mazarile, one of thousands of planetoids and habitats in a ruined Solar System that has seen multiple civilisations come and go. The economy is based on finding and exploiting artefacts from previous, more advanced civilisations. We have space ships with salty, and cynical crews sailing solar winds, exploring abandoned habitats looking for treasure. Arafura and Adrana start their adventure in one of these ships. Things go awry pretty quickly and the sisters are separated. The main plot of the book follows Arafura as she attempts to find her sister.
We get many hints to the shape and structure of the universe of Revenger. However, the book is written from the point of view of a teenager coming to grips with a chaotic and violent world and there are no dull expository passages.
There are a few other characters: mainly crew mates of Arafura and Adrana, but the story is very much Arafura’s. The dialogue can be a bit awkward at times, but I enjoyed following Arafura’s journey. The story builds to a violent and bloody climax. I didn’t find the violence gratuitous and it made sense in context of the plot and the wider world of Revenger.
Fans of Alastair Reynold’s work will find much to enjoy here: a strong female character, strong action scenes and a fantastic world to explore. The book has also been clearly written to attract readers of the burgeoning “Young Adult Fiction” genre, and I think it will be a great read for those readers who are looking for more science in their YA fiction.
Buy Revenger from Amazon (affiliate link):
Review: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“Oryx and Crake” is a beautifully written book set in a dystopian future where genetic engineering has gone wrong.
The book follows two plot lines. “Snowman” finds himself alone; slowly starving to death and doubting his sanity in a world that has been devastated by plague. His days are spent scavenging and hiding from mutant pigs (“pigoons”) and nasty wolf / dog hybrids (“wolvogs”). There are also the “Crakers”, gentle, genetically engineered humans that seem to be designed for this post-apocalyptic world. The Crakers see Snowman as a sort of mentor. We find more about Snowman’s relationship with the Crakers as the book progresses.
The second plot strand is set in the past. This is before the plague when Snowman was known as Jimmy. Corporations run fabulously appointed enclaves (called Compounds). Jimmy grows up in one of these compounds, alienated from his scientist father and coming to terms with being abandoned by his mother. The world outside the compounds, the “pleeblands”, is rife with poverty, crime and those people who are not lucky enough to work for one of the compounds.
Jimmy meets Crake, a strange and brilliant teenager while in high school. We follow their lives through to adulthood. The world, as described by Ms. Atwood, is teetering on the brink. Almost everything is available for sale, and the Compounds follow some ethically and morally questionable business practices. We come to understand how Snowman’s world came about. We also meet Oryx, a woman who both Jimmy and Crake fall for and who has a compelling and tragic story herself.
“Oryx and Crake” is the first installment of the “MaddAdam” trilogy. While I enjoyed reading the book and marvelled at Ms. Atwood’s writing; it was clear that Ms. Atwood does not approve of genetic engineering and does not hold the capitalistic motive in high regard. This results in a slightly laboured and cynical book. I might change my mind after reading the other two books in the MaddAdam trilogy. But for now, “Oryx and Crake” gets an average rating.
Buy Oryx and Crake from Amazon (affiliate link):
