It Is Useless To Resist Us!

The Berserker Saga

At the beginning of 2021 I decided to make a project of reading Fred Saberhagen’s entire Berserker saga, in as close to chronological order as possible. I had been accumulating the books for years already and only had a few left to find.

For those unfamiliar, the basic premise is that one of the very rare warlike species in the galaxy built a fleet of intelligent, self-replicating war machines as an ultimate weapon to overcome their bitter enemies. It worked, but random events eventually let the war machines turn on their creators. These berserker machines then proceeded to continue to eradicate all life down to bacteria around the galaxy until they ran into humans, who were the only other intelligent life violent enough and well-placed to fight back. This setting yields a universe for war and adventure stories spanning a large volume of space, and thanks to carefully balanced environmental factors around space travel, also somewhat expansive in time. It’s a shared universe too, with other authors occasionally invited to play.

Overall I enjoyed the series. It’s a similar universe in scope and wonder to Larry Niven’s Known Space, though I do much prefer Known Space.

Saberhagen’s writing style is a bit odd, especially in the early stories. He repeats bits of exposition too frequently, has some awkward phrasing and never made much headway towards having female protagonists. A friend suggested to me that this awkwardness results from editing together the originally serialized stories, and that may account for some of it but I find it had to believe it’s all from that.

He also has an unusual convention, perhaps meant to be thought-provoking, of referring to all intelligent lifeforms as “human” and our particular variety as Earth-descended human. I have a little trouble accepting this as non-accidental because I’ve seen far too much abuse of such terms in science fiction (though admittedly mostly in film). Perhaps his point is that all intelligent beings should consider themselves kin based on that property alone, which I certainly agree with. It’s just weird to abuse the term that way.

That said, the writing improved noticeably in the later (non-serialized) stories and the adventure is there and there are enough mysterious artifacts and natural wonders to fire the imagination.

If you choose to follow this path, be aware that there are lots of volumes that contain reprinted short stories. Here’s my reading order, with repeats crossed out. You might be able to find a more optimal combination of compilations than I did.

• Berserker
  • Fortress Ship
  • Goodlife
  • In Temple of Mars
  • Mr. Jester
  • Masque of Red Shift
  • Patron of the Arts
  • Peacemaker
  • Sign of the Wolf
  • Stone Place
  • The Face of the Deep
  • What T and I Did
• Brother Assassin (also titled Brother Berserker)
  • Stone Man
  • Winged Helmet
  • Brother Berserker
• Berserker’s Planet
• Berserker Man
• The Ultimate Enemy
  • The Smile
  • Pressure
  • The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron
  • Inhuman Error
  • Some Events at the Templar Radiant
  • Starsong
  • Smasher
  • The Game
  • Wings out of Shadow
• The Berserker Wars
  • Stone Place
  • The Face of the Deep
  • What T and I Did
  • Mr. Jester
  • Winged Helmet
  • Starsong
  • Some Events at the Templar Radiant
  • Wings out of Shadow
  • The Smile
  • The Adventure of the Metal Murderer
  • Patron of the Arts
• Berserker Base
  • Itself Surprised (Roger Zelazny)
  • Teardrop Falls (Larry Niven)
  • With Friends Like These (Connie Willis)
  • Deathwomb (Poul Anderson)
  • What Makes Us Human (Steven R. Donaldson)
  • Pirates of the Twilight (Ed Bryant)
  • Prisoners’ Base
  • Friends Together
  • The Founts of Sorrow
  • The Great Secret
  • Dangerous Dreams
  • Crossing the Bar
  • Berserker Base
• Berserker Throne
• Berserker: Blue Death
• The Berserker Attack (all stories duplicates)
• Berserker Lies
  • Introduction
  • The Machinery of Lies
  • Masque of Red Shift
  • In Temple of Mars
  • Brother Berserker
  • Smasher
• Berserker Kill
• Berserker Fury
• Shiva in Steel
• Berserker Prime
• Berserker’s Star
• Rogue Berserker
• Berserker Death (all stories duplicates)
• Berserkers: The beginning (all stories duplicates)
• Berserker Man (anthology) (all stories duplicates)
• Berserkers: The Early Tales (all stories duplicates)
• Berserkers: The Later Tales
  • Berserker’s Prey (alternate title: Pressure)
  • Starsong
  • The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron
  • Inhuman Error
  • Wings Out of Shadow
  • The Game
  • The Smile
  • Smasher
  • Some Events at the Templar Radiant
  • The Metal Murderer
  • The History of the Galaxy
  • Introduction to The Machinery of Lies
  • Machinery of Lies
  • The Bad Machines
  • Servant of Death (co-author Jane Lindskold)
• Earth Descended
  • The Adventure of the Metal Murderer
  • Patron of the Arts

Book report: Deep Work by Cal Newport

(link to book) I read this a while ago as part of a reading group at work. Quite a bit of the content resonated with me – I’ve always found concentration on my task to be both important and rewarding, but it’s getting harder and harder to achieve these days.

Things that I thought worthy enough to bookmark:

• The Monastic Philosophy: Schedule long periods of time time for your deep work, and isolate yourself during that time. Go physically far away from all people and distractions.
• The Bimodal Philosophy: Alternate between deep work (in periods of at least one full day) and interaction with distractions. The distractions can give you ideas and check your thinking.
• The Rhythmic Philosophy: This is Seinfeld’s “Don’t break the chain” thing. Keep a calendar on your wall, and check off every day you achieve a period of deep work, and try not to break the chain. This helps develop a habit and helps you remember to set aside time for deep work every day.
• The Journalistic Philosophy: Fit in short periods of deep work whenever you get the chance. Just sit down and do it – it doesn’t matter if you’re going to be interrupted in 20 minutes. You’ll still make some progress, and that’s better than none.
• The Grand Gesture: If you’re finding it difficult to concentrate in your normal surroundings, make a change of scene specifically for working on something you need to do. Take a mini working vacation, with luxuries, in another city and work there.
• Some useful disciplines:
  • Focus only on the most important thing.
  • Focus on the “lead measures”. Lag measures are your progress on the task so far. Lead measures are your new behaviors that will help you progress better.
  • Keep a compelling scorecard. Competition, even if it’s just with yourself, is motivating.
• Idleness is important. You need downtime, relaxation and entertainment to be energized and creative. Learn to decide when you’re crossing into laziness without berating yourself for it. Sometimes you even need to do nothing at all (not even entertainment) for a while too – it leads naturally to meditation.
• Change your perspective – instead of taking focus breaks from distraction, take breaks from focus for distraction. (This is really hard if your workplace is full of work-related distraction, as mine is.)
• Schedule your internet use both at home and at work.
• Meditate productively – occupy yourself physically and let your mind wander around your tasks. For example, I like to take a 30-minute walk after lunch every day, and I tend to think about work-related things during this time. It really helps organize my thoughts and make decisions.
• Be aware of looping. If you keep going over the same thoughts over and over, When you detect a loop, concentrate on the next step.
• Structure your deep thinking time. Identify variables and tasks, and know what your next step is.
• Consider the means by which you select your work tools (this mainly means online and software tools):
  • The Any-Benefit approach. We tend to default to using a tool if it benefits us at all, but lately this is being exploited in ways that distract us – notably by social media and web advertising.
  • The Craftsman approach. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts substantially outweigh the negatives.
  • Identify the main high-level goals in your personal and professional lives, then list the two or three most important activities that will help you achieve those goals. Evaluate your current tools on how well they help you with these activities, and look for replacements if any are found wanting.
• Spring cleaning: Pack everything up, uninstall all your software and log off from all your online accounts. Then unpack, reinstall or log back in the things you actually need during your work week. Get rid of everything still packed away after that.
• Don’t use the Internet for entertainment. One click leads to another and eats up all your personal time.
• “Drain the Shallows”: If you can clear your schedule of meetings, brainless work and other interruptions, you’ll be able to concentrate more and get more done.
  • Schedule every minute of your day. This means block off time for deep work, and block off time for petty things like email.
  • Answer this question: “What is the project represented by this email/interruption, and what is the most interruption-free way of successfully completing it?”
  • Make it your default policy to not respond to email, and write your emails in such a way that the default action of the recipient is to not respond.

If you struggle with productivity at work or at home, have distraction and concentration problems, or just want to get stuff done, it’s worth your time to read this book.

What I’ve been reading

The Purple Cow by Seth Godin

A short, easy read and one of the must-reads if you’re of a mind to start a business. It’s about how to differentiate products and carve out a market for yourself. The two main lessons that stuck for me are “Don’t be boring” and “Safe is risky” – the latter I take to mean avoid complacency.

Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson

Possibly the only likely means to beat addictive habits and the thought patterns that lead to self-defeating behavior. It’s a bit hard to internalize though; I expect to re-skim this book every year or two for a refresher. Highly recommended.

More Effective C# by Bill Wagner

Part of my career-related reading plan; I read the first volume a while back and thought I might as well follow up. This book is feeling a little dated now since a lot has changed in C# since it was published, but there’s still quite a bit if useful advice and some interesting tidbits about the language. I added a few things to my style guide as a result of reading this.

How to Think About Exercise by Damon Young

This book was given to me as a gift and it’s a fairly easy read. I’ve been on an exercise regimen for years now, and it was interesting to see how parts of this book parallel my own thinking and parts I disagree with. I find getting out for a walk during the day helps clear my head and get the creativity flowing again, I disagreed with some of the more metaphysical bits about athletic discipline and self-discovery though, but I guess that’s because I have no desire to be an athlete.

The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

A must-read for anyone who, like me, has toyed with the idea of starting up what the kiddies these days call a “side hustle” to either get some passive income going or maybe eventually become self-employed. It’s really inspiring and motivational, and I’m likely to go back to it for a refresher later. The author also has a podcast on this subject that makes a great listen.

Book report: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

(Link)

One of the most important books I’ve ever read. It gives insight into how our minds work and why we fall prey to as many errors of judgement as we do.

Kahneman observes that our mental reactions to situations can be categorized into two groups, fast and slow, and that the fast ones are both more influential and more prone to error.

The fast system, which he calls system 1, does things like distinguish between near and far objects, identify the direction of sounds, auto-complete common phrases, make and identify facial expressions, read tone of voice, answer the most familiar math problems (2+2), read easy words, do familiar tasks like riding a bike or driving a car under easy circumstances, and comprehend stereotypes.

The slow system, system 2, does things that require attention, such as: Get ready to start in a race, pay attention to particular people in a crowd, search for things meeting a description, recall memories that require searching, do familiar physical tasks under unusual circumstances, keep your foot out of your mouth, count more than a few instances of a thing, compare lists of attributes, do difficult math or evaluate logical reasoning. System 2 is a very limited resource, which is why it’s difficult to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time.

For my own future reference, I decided to itemize his findings here:

1. It’s difficult or impossible to do more than one system 2 task at the same time; you can’t do a multi-digit multiplication while dealing with dangerous traffic. This is why you don’t see the guy in the gorilla suit while counting ball passes. (p.23)
2. System 2 tasks require effort that we prefer to avoid. It’s a noticeable mental effort. Most of the time system 2 will just rubber-stamp suggestions from system 1. (p.24)
3. Your pupils dilate and your heart rate increases slightly when working on system 2 tasks. The pupil response is body language that can give away your level of interest to someone trying to sell you something. (p.32)
4. You’re more likely to make bad decisions or put your foot in your mouth while system 2 is occupied. (p.41)
5. Low blood glucose makes high cognition tasks harder. People are more likely to make hasty decisions when hungry. (p.43)
6. System 1 performs memory associations and is responsible for the priming effect. (ch.4)
   • IMPORTANT NOTE: there have been some replicability problems with chapter 4 of this book. The author may have fallen victim to some of the same overconfidence fallacies he documents.
7. Tasks that cause cognitive strain, such as reading a poorly legible font, make you more accurate but less intuitive and creative. (p.60)
8. Cognitive ease, or anything that makes our associative machinery run more smoothly, can cause bias by making it easier to reach a conclusion that is primed than a conclusion that is true. (ch.5) This is one of the mechanisms of propaganda: repetition. This is also why using simpler language makes speakers appear more credible to some.
9. Norms shape a lot of our thinking and are what we draw on to explain behavior we witness when an external explanation isn’t available. For example, norms make it possible to tell a simple story with abstract shapes by moving them in ways that mimic the human body language for different emotions. Norms are also very easily changed by our experiences, and therefore are very likely to be wrong. (ch.6)
10. Our brains are highly optimized for jumping to conclusions, and it saves a lot of time and effort, but it’s risky when the cost of being wrong is high. (ch.7)
11. The Halo Effect is a form of jumping to conclusions, in which we are likely to judge someone favorably based on irrelevant favorable impressions of them in other contexts. It’s also why first impressions carry the most weight. There are techniques for avoiding halo effect bias in some circumstances, such as blinding yourself to earlier impressions by anonymizing the data you’re presently evaluating. (p.82-84)
12. What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) fallacy: Coherence-seeking system 1 and lazy system 2 combine to cause judgments based on available evidence, without making much effort to seek additional relevant evidence or even to notice that relevant evidence might be missing. This causes lots of kinds of biased judgement, including overconfidence, framing effects and base-rate neglect. (p.86-88)
13. System 1 deals well with tasks such as averaging or comparing similar objects, but not with things like summing or judging the relative impact of numbers. This is why statistics so easily mislead. System 1 likes things that can be mapped to intensity in some way. This is also why we judge people by their faces – system 1 maps certain facial features to intensities of important attributes such as dominance and competence. (ch.8)
14. We often unconsciously answer difficult questions by answering a simpler proxy question and then using an intensity scale to map that answer back to the original question. For example, when asked how much money you would be willing to contribute to help clean oil-soaked seabirds, there is no obvious mapping from oily birds to money so you might instead ask yourself what the emotional impact of the birds’ condition is on you, then use that intensity to judge how much money to give. This effect can be exploited easily by first priming you to have a more intense reaction to the question. (ch.9)
15. The Law of Small Numbers: Small sample sizes produce more remarkable results, because they are more likely to generate sampling biases. This is one way you can get two studies of the same thing reaching contradictory conclusions. Faith in small numbers is what causes belief in winning streaks in sports and gambling. (ch.10)
16. The Anchoring Effect: Exposure to an intensity can bias your answer to a completely unrelated question. For example, first being asked “Was Ghandi older or younger than 144 when he died?” will cause people to give higher answers to the subsequent question “How old was Ghandi when he died?”, and hearing temperatures mentioned that you recognize as being warm or cool will make it easier to recognize words related to summer or winter, respectively. This is a form of priming and can be used to bias surveys. (ch.11)
17. Availability (easier recall of recent information) biases our decisions. (ch.12)
18. Our evaluation of risk depends on the choice of measure used when presenting the statistics, including the choice of what the measure is compared to. This is why it’s so easy to be misled by death statistics; they’re rarely presented with enough comparative context, and this is usually done deliberately to produce bias. (ch.13)
19. Base rate neglect: We perform our own unconscious statistical sampling of other people, and this is called stereotyping. In some circumstances stereotypes can be usefully accurate, but often they are misleading and we’re not good at recognizing when. (ch.14)
20. Conjunction fallacy: People tend to favor more specific explanations even though they are always less probable than less specific ones. Another form of this is a tendency to favor a smaller uniform set over a larger disparate one (example: a smaller dinnerware set was valued higher than a larger one that contained everything in the smaller one and more plus some broken pieces.) (ch.15)
21. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a much stronger impact on our evaluation than pure statistics, even when the statistics suggest the causal interpretation is wrong. In other words, humans are terrible at Bayes’ theorem. Also, we love generalizing from small samples but are unwilling to go the other way and assume general rules apply to specific cases. (ch.16)
22. Regression to the mean: We mistakenly believe in “streaks” of good or bad luck or performance and assume they will continue. It’s always a safer bet that things will return to the average, but we never bet that way and when we’re wrong we tend to mis-attribute the reason. (ch.17)
23. Hindsight bias: If a predictions actually happens, we retroactively assign it a higher probability and will tend to erroneously assign more of the responsibility to personal attributes than to luck. We tend to say mistakes should have been obvious after the fact, when they were not. (ch.18)
24. Illusion of validity / skill: Having a poor record of prediction does not shake our faith in our ability to predict. Example: Stock market analysts who consistently predict worse than random chance are still considered to be doing a good job. We reward luck as if it were skill. A coherent story feels better than chance. (ch.20)
25. We value intuition more than we should. Despite negative reactions, the right algorithm can always produce good decisions at a higher rate than humans. (ch.21)
26. The way to avoid the Planning Fallacy (unrealistically optimistic project estimates) is to use statistics about similar cases: how many of them fail, and how long does success typically take? The fallacy comes from having an insider’s view and not knowing the unknown unknowns. Past data gives you a partial outsider’s view. (ch.23)
27. Humans rarely reason based on expected value (economics) but on perceived value (prospect theory). Wealth change has a greater effect on our happiness than absolute value. Amount of change as a percentage is more important than the absolute value of the change. Context matters, as does priming. (ch.25)
28. Most people are risk-averse when it comes to gain, but risk-seeking when it comes to avoiding loss (prospect theory, loss aversion). (ch.26)
29. The Endowment Effect: Owning a good increases its value to you. Your sell price for something you value is typically much higher than the maximum price you would pay to get it. Another way of putting it is that you may not care what you get until you get it. (ch.27)
30. Decision weights: Probabilities close to zero or close to 100% are curved differently from the rest of the range. 5% is seen as a huge improvement over 0% (experimentally, it has been weighted at 13%). 95% is seen as vastly inferior to 100% (experimentally, 95% is felt as valuable as 79%). (ch.29)
31. The Fourfold Pattern (ch.29):
    • High probability produces a certainty effect.
    • High probability of gains produces risk aversion, fear of disappointment, and willingness to accept unfavorable settlements. (Bernoulli’s theory fits this quadrant)
    • High probability of losses produces risk-seeking, hope of avoiding loss, and rejection of favorable settlements.
    • Low probability produces a possibility effect. (fighting losing battles)
    • Low probability of gains causes risk-seeking, hope of large gains, and rejection of favorable settlements. (lotteries benefit here)
    • Low probability of losses causes risk aversion, fear of large loss, and acceptance of unfavorable settlements. (insurance benefits here)
32. We overestimate the probability of unlikely events and over-weight them in our decision making. (ch.30)
33. Denominator neglect: Larger numbers given for the numerator and denominator of a probability can have more effect on our decision than the probability they represent. (8/100 is more popular than 1/10 even though the latter is better.) (ch.30)
34. Vivid or well understood events are over-weighted relative to their probability in our decision making. This is why the “poster child” concept works. (ch.30)
35. We weight the pain of loss more than the pleasure of gain. Losing $1 feels as bad as gaining $2 feels good; even an economist won’t make that bet unless they can make the same bet many times to get the expected return of 50 cents per bet.  (ch.31)  This 2:1 weighting applies in multiple contexts. (ch.32)
36. The Disposition Effect: We want to close each transaction with a gain, rather than an average gain. This leads to the Sunk Cost Fallacy, which mistakenly uses existing investment in a failure to justify more investment in the same. (ch.32)
37. Exposure to a wider context can affect your decisions even if the extra information is irrelevant. (ch.33)
38. Framing matters: “Team A won” is very different from “Team B lost”. Costs are not losses. Gain is not the opposite of loss. (ch.34)
39. We rate the painfulness of an experience by the difference between its peak and its end. The duration is largely irrelevant. Our experiencing self is different from our remembering self. (ch.35)
40. The Focusing Illusion: Nothing is as important as you think it is when you’re thinking about it. Your emotional context at the time greatly affects your answers to questions about feelings. (ch.38)

Summary of the characteristics of system 1 (reproduced from p.105):

• Generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations. When endorsed by system 2 these become beliefs, attitudes and intentions.
• Operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control.
• Can be programmed by system 2 to mobilize intention when a search pattern is detected.
• Executes skilled responses and intuitions, after being trained.
• Creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory.
• Links cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance.
• Distinguishes the surprising from the normal.
• Infers and invents causes and intentions.
• Neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt.
• Is biased to believe and confirm.
• Exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect).
• Focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI).
• Generates a limited set of basic assessments.
• Represents set by norms and prototypes, and does not integrate.
• Matches intensities across scales.
• Computes more than intended (mental shotgun effect).
• Sometimes substitutes easier questions for difficult ones.
• Is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory).
• Over-weights low probabilities.
• Shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity.
• Responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion).
• Frames decision problems narrowly and in isolation.

 

What I’ve been reading

Benford and Niven: Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar

It’s always good to see Niven back in the Big Dumb Object game, and a team-up with Benford is a welcome surprise.

This one’s about another Ringworld-like object, only this one goes tooling around the galaxy on a slow cruise. I can’t say a whole lot more without giving away several of the many big reveals in the story, but suffice the say the back-story here is quite different from that of the other BDO books I’ve read.

I found this pair “just one more chapter” engrossing, and I couldn’t wait to find the second after reading the first. There are plot hooks in place for a possible third installment, and I hope it occurs.

Alastair Reynolds: On the Steel Breeze

Rollicking good adventure. The setting is a good example of an updated plausible future taking into account recent advancements in science. The plot centers around the tension many seem to believe is inevitable between the emergent machine sentients and the meatbags that spawned them.

This book has an uncommonly strong heroic-lineage trope, in that the already accomplished protagonists come from a family full of accomplishments that affected the course of human civilization. But I can accept that now and then in the service of good, comfy escapism.

Alastair Reynolds: House of Suns

This is one of those stories where you’re late for a family reunion and then arrive to discover that someone has assassinated nearly everyone there. The rest is about figuring out who, why, who gave them inside help, and what to do about it. In a science fiction setting six million years hence, with some interesting set dressings.

I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the other Reynolds books I’ve read, but it did feature a great example, in the historical character of Ludmilla Marcellin, of what I would like to do: She created thousands of identical clones of herself and sent them in all directions to explore the galaxy, re-convening on rare occasions to share memories.

Charles Sheffield: Dark as Day

I didn’t realize when I started this that it was the third book in a series. Thankfully that didn’t matter much; from what I can tell a couple of characters were carried over, but this installment mentioned as much of their history as was needed.

The story was interesting enough to keep me involved, but I didn’t find it remarkable. For most of the latter half I was wondering where it was going; there were multiple threads going on that didn’t look to be related in any way, and I was wondering if there was going to be any connection at all. In the end he did tie almost all of them together, but not in the usual big reveal way that shows why things turned out this way. Instead it was, here’s a massive coincidence that all of these people ended up in the right place at the right time to avert a huge disaster. A bit less satisfying, though it could be seen as refreshing in its unconventionality.

There is a slight chance I might read the other books in this series if I stumble over them, but I’m not likely to hunt them down.

Alan Cooper: The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Nonfiction about software user experience design – read as part of a UX reading group at work.

At first this book infuriated me; it read like a foaming-at-the-mouth rant about how programmers are evil bastards who delight in tormenting nontechnical users (true, but it’s supposed to be a secret) that had been forcibly toned down by editors. By the end of the book though, I found myself violently agreeing with him about almost everything.

The central messages are:

1. User-friendly software should not be designed by the programmers implementing it. They are too close to the problems to see them, and they will inevitably and unconsciously use themselves (or “The User”, who is as flexible as Reed Richards) as the person they design for.
2. Software should not only be designed by UX specialists, but the designers should be the ones accountable for the quality of the software, not programmers. Designers should make the decisions that affect users and mandate changes in the best interest of the users.
3. Long-term planning is a must. Even the common annual release development cycle is too short to properly do the concept-design-code-debug-market cycle, and trying to overlap design with coding doesn’t work. Focusing on short-term gain results in crufty software. Long-term planning, even at short-term expense, is vital to produce a lasting quality product.

There’s lots more. I highly recommend reading this book if you develop software for which usability is important. Just try not to hulk out and rip it in half during the first few sections. :)

Alastair Reynolds: Terminal World

The cover art and blurb of this one reminded me of Inverted World, a novel I disliked because it (probably intentionally) conveyed a fuzzy and confusing image of the world. Thankfully there wasn’t much more resemblance than that; this one had enough exposition for my taste. It left a lot unrevealed even at the end, but I understood the setting well enough to be able to fill in the blanks.

I didn’t like this as much as Reynolds’ other works, but I think there is room for another novel or two set in this universe – one in in the distant past and one in the near future.

Charles Sheffield: Aftermath

I didn’t like this one very much. Heroic ordinary people struggling for survival after a major natural disaster has been done, as has throwing in a secret cult as the foil. Also I tend to dislike stories featuring cults – I read science fiction to escape, dammit!

There was one tantalizing hint about the cause of the disaster that might convince me to read the sequel, if its cover copy is further encouraging, but I’m not in a hurry to seek it out.

Alastair Reynolds: Chasm City, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap

Finishing off the Revelation Space series to date. I really, really liked this series and I’ve decided that Reynolds has become one of my favorite authors. Could not put down any of these books, and I’ve taken to reading everything else of his I can find to try to capture more of the flavor – which led me to:

Alastair Reynolds: Blue Remembered Earth and Poseidon’s Wake

Precursor and sequel, respectively, to On the Steel Breeze, mentioned above. I didn’t know these existed when I read the middle book, and I was afraid reading them out of order would spoil the first one, but not at all; it stands independently because there is a large time separation between the first book and the other two, and few characters in common.

Blue Remembered Earth was not as strong as the other two, but still worth the read. I preferred the latter two though, because they’re set further from home in both time and space, and are largely post-Mechanism. The Mechanism is a super-invasive surveillance state described in the first book and part of the second, where crime and violence have been almost totally eliminated but at the cost of privacy. Not worth it in my opinion.