Reading Notes

The Mountain in the sea
Ray Nayler
  • published in 2024
  • read in 2025
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Ha is a scientist who specialises in octopus communication/consciousness/civilisation.  
She's invited to study on an island, with the only synthetic human on earth, the possibility of such octopi found. 
The other person on the island is a war veteran - who controls drones from a cage in liquid - and the drones are bilateral extentions - a bit like an octopus. 
Two other stories that we follow: a hacker hired to hack the synthetic and a slave on a fishing fish. 
The octopi are developing and there is a contact. 

my comment:

It's a book that made me think about connections/networks. It has in a subtile interesting way connected this idea of thinking legs of the octopi with society, where individuals are the product of a system and yet change the system. 
A great exploration into complexity, agents and consciousness.

Finite and Infinite Games
  • published in 1986
  • read in 2025
  • genre "science"

synopsis:

In life, there are many finite games - games where there's a winner, voluntarily join and taken seriously - and one infinite game, that is fun to play. 

In 100 paragraphs, we're presented with both an analogies of each. It makes you think about life and the roles we take in it and how flexible they can be. 

my comment:

I should add maybe a genre for philosophy. 
It is a fantastic book to make one think about life. 

Null State
malka older
  • published in 2017
  • read in 2025
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Following the events of Infomocracy, side characters now are the main protagonists. The story happens in Darfour, where there's suspicion about Information as well as old habits that die hard. The protagonists discover that there are people abusing of the system. And also there's a war brewing with nations, and micro-democracies do not have an army yet. 

my comment:

It's interesting as it is touching at the limits of micro-democracy as well as exemplifying how systems take time to change culture

related to Infomocracy
Infomocracy
malka older
  • published in 2016
  • read in 2025
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

We're a century in the future and there's a new form of politics: centennals. They are agglomeration of 100.000 people who get to vote on their government. The elections are organised by "Information" which is also the tool to get live info about almost anything. Kind of a wikipedia for AR. 
It's been 20 years since this type of government exists - and there is a super majority government and there are elections now - and for the system to survives, it kinda needs to have a new super majority and a smooth transition. 

my comment:

Interesting, and a few months afterwards, made me realise that this new social organisation is very similar to the "Hives" of terra ignota by Ada Palmer

Super Forecasting
Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner
  • published in 2017
  • read in 2017
  • genre "science"

synopsis:

The Ten Commandments of Superforecasting

  1. Focus your time and effort on forecasts that will prove rewarding.
  2. Unpack problems to expose assumptions, catch mistakes, and correct biases.
  3. Consider the larger category before looking at the particular case.
  4. Revise your beliefs often, and in small increments, to reduce the risks of both over- and under-reacting to the news.
  5. Find merit in opposing viewpoints
  6. Reject the illusion of certainty and learn to think in degrees of uncertainty.
  7. Avoid being either a blowhard or a waffler. Aim to be prudently decisive.
  8. Learn from experience, whether success or failure.
  9. Use precision questioning to bring out the best in others--and to let others bring out the best in you.
  10. Try, fail, analyze, and adjust. And try again.
  11. There are no universally correct commandments, including these. Question everything.

my comment:

Far from the light of heaven
Tade Thompson
  • published in 2021
  • read in 2023
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

A spaceship, the Ragtime, goes from earth to the planet Bloodroot passing by the Spacestation Lagos. Arriving at Bloodroot, the captain Shell Campion wakes up and the ship AI is not responding and strange things happen on the ship. An inspector is sent from Bloodroot and the mystery grows deeper. Most of the story is set on the ship and slowly more characters come and each has a back story chapter. An augmented human carrying a malicious AI is responsible, as he was trying to take revenge for his exploited community of miners. In the end, the Spacestation had to protect themselves from Earth and cut there bridge and the captain feels very responsible for everything even if she did as best as she could. 

my comment:

Tade writes a mystery in space that contains a lot. It's nice to read afrofuturism again, the Lambers aliens being old human spirits is a fun take, though not central, yet. It was maybe a bit too much stories at the same time for a quick resolution. It might have been because the book is preparing itself for sequels. 

The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
  • published in 2012
  • read in 2023
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

It's the story of a woman and a man set against each other by their fathers. Their contest is hidden, even from them, and their playing field is a circus where they perform magic. Celia performs magic from within while Marco performs from the outside. Celia was trained close by her father and has innate talents, Marco was trained from afar by his adoptive father and had to learn everything. It's really a book about world building - and so maybe about story telling. 

my comment:

It's an entertaining book where I found some depth, and the depth is there for the reader is  the reader wants to find some - and if the reader doesn't want it, it's still a good fantasy. 

The Burning God
R.F. Kuang
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Rin decides to rally all the poor people of the south to take over the Dragon Lord

my comment:

related to The Poppy War
The Doubt Factory
paolo bacigalupi
  • published in 2014
  • read in
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

A teenager girl from a well-off family is living a life without worries, until some day, incidences happen at her school - a stranger disrupts her life and ask her to question her father. She is kidnapped, discover other teens, all bent on converting her into believing her dad is evil. He is the owner of a "Doubt Factory" - meant to help prolong dangerous drugs from being taken out of the markets. She betrays them, but then does her research and investigation and discovers that they were right. 
 She tries to find them back, and find the first stranger, and they fall in love with each other. She betrays her father and manage to still information about his clients to disclose to the public. 

my comment:

It is a young adult novel, and so it's stylishly not very rich. The story is gripping though, and it's based on real facts - the doubt factories do exist. 
I wouldn't recommend it to an adult, but it's a good book for a teenager, a bit like a Cory Doctorow book

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Christopher Paolini
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 A crew goes to inspect a new planet for colonization, a small crew. Our protagonist is a woman, and she discovers an old alien ship ( humanity hasn't encountered aliens yet ) and somehow falls. She wakes up back on her ship, and as she wakes up she kills all the crew because of spikes coming from her body. She has an alien skin on her that reacts to her. An army ship takes her and it gets attacked by aliens which seems to be hunting for the skin. 
 A big war happens and she escapes, joining another ship with a crew of misfits. She learns that there is a third alien race, hunting down both the first aliens ( kinda like land-octopi aliens ) and humans - we later on learns it's a composite human/octopi/skins. The skin starts talking to the protagonists through dreams and they learn that there is a faction of octopi aliens that do not want war. The skin tells the hero about a super powerful weapon, they try to reach it, but the weapon is old and doesn't work, but they manage to kill the leaders of the Octopi. And there ends the book. 

my comment:

 It's slightly entertaining, but the ideas in the book are not amazing

Rule 34
Charles Stross
  • published in 2011
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

A strange murder that includes a sex toy happens in Edinburgh and we follow 3 people linked to that murder. 
One is a petty criminal who's trying to reform and the other person is a police officer that is linked to the "Rule 34" squad. 
We discover that a criminal organisation is selling malleable plastic that can print on illegal 3D printers anything and an autistic person ( the 3rd person we follow ) is a business developer for that organisation. 
The petty criminal is working as an honori consulate for a kinda fakish country that is trying to play the big bonds market and the killer has worked all over europe and is an anti-spam bot.

my comment:

 It's a very entertaining book and the main idea around was really spamming and human evolution.

The Water Knife
paolo bacigalupi
  • published in 2015
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

In Phoenix Arizona, a man get killed and somehow it moves around a lot of people. 
This in the USA where water has become a scarce resource. Not so scarce as everybody struggles to find water, but enough so that everybody knows it's a limited resource and that it means power. 
We follow a journalist, a "water knife" - a professional killer working for a big water criminal organisation, and a poor orphan girl. They all kinda know the system and yet working for it and against it to make themselves a place. 

my comment:

 It's a really good problematic. There is a book constantly mentionned, Cadillac desert, which is from the 80s about water issues -- I'm curious about wither it's worth reading as well. I like how Bacigalupi always has many characters that are neither total allies nor total enemies. 

The Delirium Brief
Charles Stross
  • published in 2017
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 An old enemy of The Laundry, a preacher from the USA, is coming to British soil. 
The Laundry is already not going well because of the invasion of elves (alfars) that made it public. Because it is public, it becomes political. 
 The Laundry discovers that it's going to be privatized, and that it's partly a plan by the preacher, to take over Great Britain. 
 The laundry last resort was to call an elder god, cold the Black Pharaoh, that is incarnated by the Mandate. 
 It's the end of Britain, but on The Laundry's term. 

my comment:

  Like all The Laundry files book, it has the same more or less rythm -- it starts long with the setting, and then it ends with a lots of actions. What I like with Stross is that it has a lot really well written paragraphs. In this one, there were 2 memorables about privatizations. It's also nice to see that Charles stross has been working in the last three books giving hints of things to come. And this is it, "New Management", Capitalism taking over bureaucracy

related to Dead Lies Dreaming
Dead Lies Dreaming
Charles Stross
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Eve Starcky and Imp are brothers and sisters, children of mages from mages family. They followed both different path, Eve being high in the corporate world and Imp being a vagabond trying to make a movie about Peter Pan. Eve is tasked to retrieve a book for her Boss and she charges Imp and his band of merry men to capture it. They have to rehash their past and fight off people with guns. And find the book in their family home behind a door to a place set in dream world that set the dreams of London Past. 

my comment:

 Somehow, Stross deviates from the Administration setting where the other laundry files books were set. It's still funny, to some extent, and it's more adventurous -- but we don't have anybody present really from the past books, except for the Black pharao. 

related to The Labyrinth Index
The Labyrinth Index
Charles Stross
  • published in 2018
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Mhari used to work for the Laundry Service. The UK, in a previous book, has now a God ( the black pharao) as a PM and he is directing the Laundry Service, which he kinda dissolved. Mhari is a vampire and is send on an assignment to the USA, where everybody forgot that there is a President. She has to build up a team and infiltrate the country,  which somehow is full of an army of vampire policemen and their Service of the Occult actually took over to try and resurrect their god. 

my comment:

 It's the usual fun of the Laundry Files 

The Relentless Moon
Mary Robinette Kowal
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 This time we follow a side character of the Calculating Stars. She is a pilot that is also the wife of a senator. She's on the moon as the colonization keeps on working. There are issues with a terrorist faction on Earth trying to stop the space program, mainly through sabotage. She has to uncover the culprits on the moon. 

my comment:

 It's again an entertaining continuation of the books. It delve a little bit more into the issues of having space colonization ( mainly the fact that not everybody on earth can be saved by going to space) 

related to The Calculating Stars
The Fated Sky
Mary Robinette Kowal
  • published in 2018
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 We keep on following our Pilot-Computer. The equivalent of the NASA has accepted women being pilots, especially at the end of the last book. Here though, it's about the Mars Mission. They are sending 2 ships and racial/gender inequalities are still prevalent. They arrive though to Mars

my comment:

It's a good continuation to the first book, though I'm not sure what it brings more intellectually wise

related to The Calculating Stars
The Calculating Stars
Mary Robinette Kowal
  • published in 2018
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 A meteorite crashes close to Washington DC in the early 1950's and the USA's east coast is devastated. The only long term solution for humanity ( because of the coming Climate Change due to the sudden hyper-warming of the planet ) is to go to space. An international coalition is set to go to space. We follow a computer ( a female mathematician ) who used to be a pilot, as she pushes for the idea of sending women to space, especially since the plan is to colonize planets to survive. 

my comment:

 It's a really good book. The times are difficult and a lot of social issues are shown -- not only the position of women within societies. The characters are also deep, in the sense that no character flawless. It's also an entertaining book. 

Redshirts
John Scalzi
  • published in 2012
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Ensigns on a spaceship are aware that something is wrong, as no one wants to go down on missions. Why ? Because ensigns going on missions die often. So often that the new ensigns we find are trying to find out why. They discover that they are in a tv show, that's when "the narrative" takes over.  So they decide to go back in time to when the TV show was running. They explain what's happening to the creators, and help out also the creators with one of their son in the comma. This makes our ensigns living more normally. The books end by following 3 people "in the past" affected by knowing about fiction affecting reality and vice-versa. 

my comment:

 The book was well written. The content though read a bit like a first novel. The whole meta thing is very very discoverable and it feels a bit easy. That being said, it's a very very entertaining book.

Heaven's River
Dennis E. Taylor
  • published in 2021
  • read in 2022
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Fourth Volume of the "We are Bobs" 
 Bobs find a superstructure were a species seem to be lightly controlled. In parallel, some Bobs are hacking 3D printers and routers, as Bobs have a strong replicative drift: they change from the original too much. They discover that an AI is trying to preserve the specie inside the mega-structure and that the group of Bobs behind the whole hacking are bobs trying to recreate the AI. 

my comment:

It still could have been better written, especially the distinctions between bobs, they do not have much voices

related to We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
All These Worlds
Dennis E. Taylor
  • published in 2017
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Bobs have to fight the Aliens, and help humans adapt to another planet. Bobs get attach to their ancestors, and at the same time discover that price of eternity. 

my comment:

 Though the voices are the same, the development of the Bobs is well. 

related to We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
For We Are Many
Dennis E. Taylor
  • published in 2017
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Bobs go back to earth and discovers they really need help, as a nuclear winter threatens to wipe out humanity. A bob also discovers a planet where there is a life that looks like bats and is primitive but evolving like humans and Bob helps them. Planets need to be terraform and at the end of the book, and Aliens life-form that is a real Von Neuman machine terror ( destroying everything to replicate ) is discovered. 

my comment:

 It's fun to read but not great literature and the ideas do not go really much places and are not that original. 

related to We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Dennis E. Taylor
  • published in 2016
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Young CEO dies young, but got to have his brain frozen. He is revived centuries later and learns that Earth is not going so well. He is to be the AI behind a spaceship to find another liveable planet. He becomes a Von Neuman machine, replicating himself and discovers that his copies are never exactly himself -- version of himself that named themselves after pop-culture characters. There is a Riker who is a bit military and yet peaceful. 

my comment:

 This is the first volume of a sci-fi book based on classic ideas. It had a lot of potential and the space battle are quite realistic - physics wise -  but the writing was not really thought through: the bobs all have the same voice 

Numbers don't lie
Vaclav Smil
  • published in 2021
  • read in 2021
  • genre "science"

synopsis:

 Vaclac Smil, a mathematician/environment specialists analyses 71 themes in a very short manner related to math/engineering/social sciences/environment.

my comment:

 The mind of Smil is impressive. The book is super informative, and at the same time it's weirdly useless book for it facts. 
The good thing is to see how he came to conclusions. I don't see myself rereading it to remember all the facts and conclusions, a lot of open conclusions as well. Seeing the use of data was super interesting though 

Termination Shock
Neal Stephenson
  • published in 2021
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 A rich Texan who has invested in real estate in Houston, decides to build giant sulfure shooting guns in the texas, to cool down the earth. 
He invites the queen of the netherlands, the president of singapour, the lord mayor of london and some ancient family of Venice to inaugurate the gun, as they are the one most favorables to cooling down the earth. China and India are unsure about the side-effects and so China tries early on to play in a role in knowing and controlling the situation. They manage to create a tsunami on the Netherlands and post fake videos of the queen, which forces her to abdicate. 
 In the meantime, a Canadian Sikh is becoming a super-hero of India by fighting on the Line of Actual Control in Tibet. 
The Venetians and the Texan, financed by Arabs, are building another guns in Albania. And the Texan is building one on Guinea, so to spread the cloud and making sure that the Earth is homogenously receiving the sulfur.
  The India send BigFish, their super-hero, to destroy the Gun, but he is stopped by a Wildboar hunter we have been following. 

my comment:

The book was very much in the style of Seveneves and even more in the style of Fall or, Dodge in Hell.. So we follow people connected to the overall stories, and they have theories and stories that are a bit wild, but also make a little bit of sense. The book was also very contemporary, in the sense that it did mention Trump supporters and Covid in interesting ways. Somehow the geoengineering political issues were put on an interesting light. 
Anyway, a good read, but not my favorite Neal Stephenson 

Prelude to Foundation
Isaac Asimov
  • published in 1988
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Hari Seldon proves that psycho-history can exist. He just doesn't know how it works. He is sent on a quest to find how to make it work. 
He thinks he needs to look at the origin of humanity, and his adventures brings him all around the capital/planet of the Empire: Trantor. 
What he comes to discover is that Trantor is a microcosme of the human empire, and is enough of a sample to establish the rules. 

my comment:

 I had read it when I was 16 and kinda remembered the ending. I thought I might get at what kind of rules Asimov had in mind, but he stayed both close and far from what the rules would be. Anyway, made me want to read more, like the first time

Diaspora
Greg Egan
  • published in 2000
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Three types of humans exist: digitalized, cyborgs and dna-enhanced. The protagonists are digitalized and one is actually constructed as a digital being. They become a bit friendly with some humans. Cyborgs realize though that stars have clashed with each others and the shock-wave will decimate the humans. This astronomical events go against their knowledge of the universe, so starts a quest to find out what happens. Our digitalized minds go on planets constructed to have messages in atoms, and they jump through universes with different dimensions. 

my comment:

Crazy dense 

Shape Up
Ryan Singer
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2021
  • genre "management"

synopsis:

 How they ship products and features at Basecamp. 
  • Shaped vs unshaped work
  • setting appetites instead of estimates
  • Designing at the right level of abstraction
  • Conception through fat markers
  • Making bets with capped downside and honoring them with uninterrupted time 
  • Choosing the right cycle ( 6 weeks at basecamp ) 
  • cool-down period between cycles
  • Break projects into scopes
  • Downhill Vs Uphill work and communicating about unknowns
  • Scope hammering to separates must-haves from nice-to-haves

my comment:

 It felt like ti was really made for basecamp's team 

Fugitive Telemetry
Martha Wells
  • published in 2021
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Murderbot is on a "free" planet, working for his favorite group. This time though it is a murder mystery.

my comment:

 It changes a little bit genre, but always entertaining to have this super powerful security bot

related to All Systems Red
Network Effect
Martha Wells
  • published in 2021
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Murderbot is now working for the humans. He is sent on a survey mission, but as they come back, they discover that ART needs help. His crew got kidnapped  by Aliens and Murderbot needs to save everybody from this mindcontrolling aliens. Murderbot frees another construct like him, that understands agency like he does.

my comment:

 Got more spacey in a way, still funny and the relationship with ART is really fun. Especially as Murderbot denies any sentiment

related to All Systems Red
Exit Strategy
Martha Wells
  • published in 2018
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 So murderbot goes back to help the group of humans that "rescued" him from servitude. He deduces that his preferred human has been kidnapped and works on freeing her.

my comment:

 Full of action and spying intrigues.. and still entertaining

related to All Systems Red
Rogue Protocol
Martha Wells
  • published in 2018
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Murderbot volume 3. He finally lands on the asteroid where he committed attrocities. There he comes to understand that the company actually made him kill everybody as to hide the illicit activities.

my comment:

 Entertaining. Martha Wells brings about the other type of construct ( instead of security, they are for companionship ) but won't really exploit them. 

related to All Systems Red
Artificial Condition
Martha Wells
  • published in 2018
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Murderbot is free and want to explore his past. To do so, he takes on a job as security consultant.  In his adventure, he meets a spaceship that is sentient, that he calls ART, for Asshole Research Transport. He manages to do his job fully, and understands that the company that was bad in the first book, is systematically bad

my comment:

 Entertaining, and the relationship with a super smart spaceship is fun

related to All Systems Red
Ruby Under a Microscope
Pat Shaughnessy
  • published in 2013
  • read in 2021
  • genre "science"

synopsis:

 It's a book that explains how is ruby working and what are, as a programming language, it's particularities.  

my comment:

So it's a good book. I think it helped that already knew some C as most of the code in the book are examples of ruby internals written in C. 
It helped be grasp the power of blocks&yield, and that was a very useful thing. There were also some useful/interesting tricks that I've learned, like disabling the garbage collector ( and how it works ) -- also I discovered that it's Marvin Minsky, from the society of minds, who developed that algorithm. 
All in all, it might have made me a little bit a better ruby dev, but I'm not 100% convinced. Yes, it did, but maybe not in directly applicable way. 

The Eye of the Heron
Ursula K. Le Guin
  • published in 1978
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 6000 colonists on a planet. 2/3 are exiled criminals, the other third are exile pacifists. The pacifists, 80 years after having arrived, want to be independent.. 

my comment:

 It's like other Ursula books: there are many metaphors  that flew over my head. 
That being said, it's an interesting book about ego and fighting with principles. 
It's not one of Ursula's best but it's still a good book

All Systems Red
Martha Wells
  • published in 2017
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 A survey of a planet turns into a a skirmish between half-human battle bots. 
The protagonist is a battlebot that managed to be free of its governing module. 

my comment:

 It reads really well, though it feels easy by times. It's really easy to get attached to that "murderbot". 

the beginning place
Ursula K. Le Guin
  • published in 1980
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 A man, I forgot his name, with an unhappy mother who he feels responsible for, discover another place, calm, where time is slower. He encounters a girl there, and she is also in an unhappy family. She knew the place already, and went further than the man. She knew the village where families exist, a mayor ( for whom she has a crush) and a noble family lives and speak a foreign language. The village needs their help, so the man and the woman go find the reason why the village needs their help. It was a womanly dragon, that they manage to kill. And they decide to live together

my comment:

Somehow it's a short book, but like other U K LG, it feels like there are a lot of metaphors and it's a book about the development of characters. The emancipation from their mothers is the obvious one, but there is more, I feel it like an itch, but I'd have to study it chapter by chapter to untangled it.

Of ants and Dinosaurs
Liu Cixin
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Ants and Dinosaurs are in alliances: ants are the scientists/mathematicians and the dinosaurs have the imaginations. 
 Dinosaurs are not caring about the environment and ants are not trusting of the dinosaurs, with reason and faults. 
They all destroy the earth in the end

my comment:

 It's a metaphor for the environmental catastrophe that's coming. An  easy reading with an easy , slightly simplistic, metaphor I thought

The Ministry of the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 In 2024, the Paris Agreement creates an office, un-officially called the ministry of the future. At little after that, and unrelated to the creation of the ministry, a heat wave strikes India and kills millions. It's a slow wake-up call for humanity and the books chart in a humane way everything that is done to counter climate change. Following the head of the ministry principally, but in a KSR way, follows the discussions, thoughts and notes of other participants. 

my comment:

 It's again a great book by KSR. It's the building of a credible Utopia and in a way that is believable. At the same time, the act of writing it makes it a bit a fantasy that the cynics will believe will never happened. It gives hope and destroys it at the same time, because all the initiatives are deemed good, but the initiatives most important in the book are complicated to replicate. I think I'll read it again though in not too long.

Hold Up The Sky
Liu Cixin
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

It's a collection of short-stories by Liu Cixin .
  •  The Village Teacher: The story of a provincial village with a devoted teacher. Aliens discover the notion of teacher as a way to transmit knowledge. 
  •  The Time Migration: Forgot a bit what it was, but I think it is all in the title. 
  •  2018-04-01: Forgot 
  •  Fire in the Earth: About the Coal industry, and someone trying to save it but ending up burning the earth 
  •  Contraction: Forgot 
  •  Mirror: Forgot 
  • Ode to Joy: Music played for aliens that gives the UN a new perspective
  • Full-Spectrum Barrage Jamming: forgot 
  • Sea of Dreams: forgot 
  • Cloud of Poems: Aliens want to destroy earth to use its resources, a poet give them a challenge that leaves a chance for earth 
  • The Thinker: forgot 

my comment:

 Somehow it's not as striking as his novels. I can't put my finger on it, but the style/content is too much like him somehow

The Dragon Republic
R.F. Kuang
  • published in 2019
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 Following on the adventure of Rin. In this book she defends the Dragon Warlord, who allies himself with the westerners, against the Empress. She hesitates wither she's defending the right side.   

my comment:

It was again a page-turner. It seems like the Dragon Warlord is a Chang Chai Chek and the republic he wants to instore is the Kuomintang. We discover as well the view on westerners where they have one god and are more technology advanced and highly judging of the Chinese pantheon  

related to The Poppy War
Originals
Adam Grant
  • published in 2016
  • read in 2021
  • genre "science"

synopsis:

"How non-conformists change the world"

Individual actions: 
  1.  Question the defaults 
  2. Triple the number of ideas you create 
  3. Immerse yourself in a new domain
  4. Procrastinate strategically
  5. Seek feedback from peers
Voicing original ideas
  1. Balance your risk portfolio 
  2. highlight reasons NOT to support the idea
  3. Make your idea familiar (repetition&analogies) 
  4. Speak to a different audience
  5. Be a tempered radical 
Managing Emotions
  1. Motivate yourself differently when you're committed (how much left to go) vs uncertain (how far you are so far )
  2. Don't try to calm down, rather excite yourself 
  3. Focus on the victim, not the perpetrators
  4. Realize you're not alone 
  5. Remember that if you don't take initiatives, status quo persists 
Leader Actions:
sparking ideas: 
  1. run an innovation tournament 
  2. picture yourself as the enemy
  3. invite people from different functions and different levels ( mid-management alone is anti-innovation) 
  4. Hold an opposite day 
  5. ban the words like, hate, love
building cultures of originality 
  1. Do no hire on cultural fit, but  on cultural contribution
  2. shift from exit interview ( what they would have like the company to have, would have kept them ) to entry interview
  3. Ask for problems, not solutions ( better to acknowledge everything ) 
  4. Do not assign devil's advocate, find them 
  5. Welcome criticism 
 Parent&Teachers actions: 
  1. Ask Children what their role models would do 
  2. link good behavior to moral character
  3. explain how bad behaviors has bad consequence for others
  4. Emphasize values over rules
  5. create novel niches for children to pursue 

my comment:

That was a great book. Thoroughly researched and yet lots of fun anecdotes

The Poppy War
R.F. Kuang
  • published in 2018
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 The book is set in a fantasy china at the beginning of the 20th century. We follow a girl as she gets into the military academy and discovers that she can calls on the power of the phoenix god, making her a shaman. She has power of the fire, but the phoenix god tries to take over her body. A war starts with the mugenese ( the japonese ) and she needs that power to fight them off.  

my comment:

 It's a page turner. It's not badly written and it's kinda of a classic tale. Some things can be guessed ( like who her master is ) but some other things are surprises. 

A desolation called peace
arkady martine
  • published in 2021
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 So following up the events of a memory called empire, our ambassador and her connection at the empire are sent on the front of a war against an alien species. The species is discovered to be a fungi symbiote with one mind. 

my comment:

It was again a very well written book. The issue I had with it is that I felt like a lot was unresolved.   

related to a memory called empire
The Effective Engineer
Edmond Lau
  • published in 2015
  • read in 2021
  • genre "science"

synopsis:

What's an Effective Engineer?

  • They are the people who get things done. Effective Engineers produce results.

Adopt the Right Mindsets

Focus on High Leverage Activities

  • Leverage = Impact Produced / Time Invested
  • Use Leverage as Your Yardstick for Effectiveness
  • 80% of the impact comes from 20% of the work.
  • Focus on high leverage and not just easy wins.

Optimize for Learning

  • Change jobs if you have to.
  • Optimizing for learning is high leverage.
  • Adopt a growth mindset. 
    • Talk to people. Become good at telling stories. It gets better with time.
    • Those with a growth mindset believe that they can cultivate and grow their intelligence and skills through effort.
    • Own your story.
  • Invest in the rate of learning 
    • Learning compounds. Compounding leads to exponential growth. Earlier the compounding starts, the better.
    • Working on unchallenging tasks is a huge opportunity cost. You missed out on compounded learning.
    • Prioritize learning over profitability.
    • Invest your time in activities with the highest learning rate.
  • Seek Work Environments Conducive to Learning 
    • Fast Growth: Companies where #problems >> #resources. Opportunity to choose high impact work.
    • Make sure you are working on high priority projects.
    • Openness: Look for culture with curiosity, where everyone is encouraged to ask questions.
    • Fast Paced.
    • People smarter than you.
    • Autonomy: Freedom to choose what to work on. Smaller companies => More autonomy.
  • While on Job 
    • Make a daily habit of acquiring new skills.
    • Read code written by brilliant engineers.
    • Jump fearlessly into code you don't know.
    • Always be learning. Invest in skills that are in high demand.
    • Read Books. Attend Conferences.
    • Build and maintain strong relationships.

Prioritize Regularly

  • Opportunity cost of working on wrong ideas can set back growth by years.
  • Prioritize tasks based on ROI.
  • Regular prioritization is high leverage activity.
  • On TODO Lists: 
    • Maintain a 'single' todo lists where all tasks are listed.
    • Don't try to remember stuff. Brain is bad at remembering. It's rather good at processing.
  • Ask yourself regularly: Is this the most important thing I should be working on?
  • Focus on what directly produces value.
  • Learn to say no.
  • Focus on the important and non-urgent.
  • Find ways to get into flow. “A state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems.”
  • When possible, preserve larger blocks of focused time in your schedule.
  • Limit the amount of Work in Progress. 
    • Cost of context switching is high.
  • Prioritizing is difficult.
  • Prioritization is high leverage. It has huge impact on your ability to get right things done.

Invest in Iteration Speed

  • Continuous Deployment is high leverage. 
    • Will save a lot of time in manual deployment of code. They are the people who get things done. Effective Engineers produce results.
  • Move fast to learn fast. 
    • Move fast and break things.
    • Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn at faster rate.
  • Invest in time saving tools. 
    • If you have to do something more than twice, write a tool the third time.
    • Tools are multipliers that allow your to scale your impact beyond the confines of a day.
    • Faster tools get used more often.
    • Faster tools can enable new workflows that previously weren't possible.
    • Productivity skyrockets with tools.
    • Time saving property of tools also scale with team adoption.
  • Shorten your debugging and validation Loops. 
    • Extra time spent in optimizing debugging workflow can help you fix annoying bugs with less headache.
    • Debugging is hard. It's time consuming. Upfront investments to shorten debugging loops are worth it.
  • High test coverage to reduce build and site breakages.
  • Fast unit tests to encourage people to run them.
  • Fast and incremental compiles and reloads to reduce development time.
  • Master you programming environment. 
    • One editor. One high level language. Shell. Keyboard > Mouse. Automate manual workflows. Use interactive shell. Make running specific tests easy.
  • Faster you can iterate, faster you can learn.

Measure what you want to Improve

  • Use metric to drive progress. 
    • If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.
    • Good metric. 
      • Helps you focus on right things.
      • Drives forward progress.
      • Helps you guard against future regressions.
      • Performance ratcheting: Any change should strictly improve the metric.
      • Bad metric can lead to unwanted behavior.
      • Examples: 
        • #hours worked < productivity.
        • click through rates < long click through rates.
    • Metric you choose influences your decisions and behavior.
    • Look for metric that, when optimized, maximizes impact for the team.
    • Actionable metric - Whose movement can be casually explained by team's effort.
    • Responsive metric - Updates quickly to give back feedback whether a given change was =ve or -ive.
    • Choosing a metric is high leverage.
    • Dedicate time to pick right metric.
  • Instrument everything to understand what's going on. 
    • Measure anything, measure everything.
    • Graphite, statsd. A single line of code lets you define a new counter or timer on the fly.
    • Measuring goals you want to achieve is high leverage.
  • Internalize useful numbers. 
    • Knowledge of useful numbers provide a valuable shortcut for knowing where to invest efforts to maximize gains.
    • Need upfront work. Need not be accurate, ballpark idea suffices.
    • Knowing useful numbers enables you to do back of the envelope calculations to quickly estimate the performance properties of a design without actually building it.
    • Internalizing useful number help you spot anomalies. Be skeptical about data integrity.
  • Log data liberally.
  • Build tools to iterate on data accuracy sooner.
  • Examine data sooner.
  • When numbers look off, dig in to it sooner.

Measure your progress. Carefully choose your top-level metric. Instrument your system. Know your numbers. Prioritize data integrity.


Validate your ideas early and often.

  • Not validating early leads to wasted efforts.
  • Don't delay get feedback.
  • Find low effort ways to validate work.
  • Power of small batches. Helps you avoid making a big mistake by stopping the flow.
  • Approach problem iteratively.
  • No large implementations.
  • Working solo? Be wary. Be extra vocal and get feedback.

Improve project estimation skills.

  • Beware of mythical man month. Communication overhead is significant.
  • Reduce risk early.
  • Rewrite projects - almost always fail.
  • Additional hours hurt productivity. Causes burnout.
  • Do the riskiest task first.
  • Allow buffer room for the unknown.

Balance Quality with Pragmatism

  • High code quality. Code readability.
  • Establish sustainable code review process.
  • Code reviews help: 
    • Catch bugs and design problems early.
    • Sharing working knowledge of the codebase.
    • Increases long term agility. Easier to understand, quicker to modify.

Manage complexity through Abstraction

  • Example: MapReduce.
  • Right abstractions make huge difference.
  • “Pick the right ones, and programming will flow naturally from design; modules will have small and simple interfaces; and new functionality will more likely fit in without extensive reorganization,”
  • “Pick the wrong ones, and programming will be a series of nasty surprises: interfaces will become baroque and clumsy as they are forced to accommodate unanticipated interactions, and even the simplest of changes will be hard to make.”
  • The right abstraction can increase engineering productivity by an order of magnitude.
  • Simple abstractions avoid interweaving multiple concepts, so that you can reason about them independently rather than being forced to consider them together.
  • Designing good abstractions take work.
  • An abstraction's usage and popularity provides a reasonable proxy for its quality.

Automate Testing

  • Unit test cases and some integration testing provide a scalable way of managing growing codebase.
  • A suite of extensive and automated tests can reduce overall error rates by validating the quality and by safeguarding against regressions.
  • Tests also allow engineers to make changes, especially large refactorings, with significantly higher confidence.
  • Despite its benefits, it can be difficult to foster a culture of automated testing.
  • Focus on high leverage tests.
  • Writing more tests, creating a virtuous feedback cycle and saving more development time.

Repay Technical Debt

  • Technical debt refers to all the deferred work that’s necessary to improve the health and quality of the codebase and that would slow us down if left unaddressed.
  • Accumulating technical debt is fine as far as it is repaid within time.
  • Refactor often.

Reduce Operational Complexity

  • Keep no. of technologies low. Don’t sway towards shiny new technologies.
  • Every additional technology you add is is guaranteed to go wrong eventually. Will need your time.
  • Do the simple thing first.
  • Embrace operational simplicity.
  • The first solution that comes to mind is generally complex. Don't stop. Keep peeling off the layers of onion.
  • Simplify the architecture to reduce their operational burden.
  • “What’s the simplest solution that can get the job done while also reducing our future operational burden?”
  • Discipline to focus on simplicity is high leverage.

Fail Fast

  • Fail immediately and visibly.
  • Doesn’t necessarily mean crashing your programs for users.
  • fail-fast to surface issues immediately.
  • Failing fast is high leverage as it saves debugging time.

Relentlessly Automate

  • Automating mechanics is good.
  • Automating decision making - no.
  • Hone your ability to respond and recover quickly. 
    • Leverage recovering quickly > Leverage preventing failures.
  • “script for success,” practice failure scenarios, and work on our ability to recover quickly.
  • Make batch process idempotent
  • Make processes retryable, i.e., not leaving any global state.

Invest in your team's Growth

  • Invest in onboarding.
  • The higher you climb up the engineering ladder, the more your effectiveness will be measured not by your individual contributions but by your impact on the people around you.
  • "You’re a staff engineer if you’re making a whole team better than it would be otherwise. You’re a principal engineer if you’re making the whole company better than it would be otherwise. And you’re distinguished if you’re improving the industry.” - Focus primarily on making everyone around you succeed.
  • Your career depends on your team's success.
  • Make hiring everyone's responsibility.
  • Shared ownership of code. 
    • Keep bus factor more than one.
    • Shared ownership removes isolated silos of information.
  • Build collective wisdom through post mortems.
  • Invest in automated testing. 
    • Automated test cases lead to higher confidence when refactoring.
    • Write test cases when the code is fresh in mind.
    • Don’t be dogmatic about 100% code coverage.
    • Value of tests increases over time and cost to write goes down.
  • Hire the best.
  • Surround yourself with great advisors

“Leverage is the lens through which effective engineers view their activities. ” 


10 Books to read:

  • Peopleware Productive projects and Teams. Amazon. My Summary.
  • Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others. (Debugging Teams) Amazon. My Summary.
  • High Output Management
  • Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
  • The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
  • Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values
  • Your Brain at Work
  • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
  • Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

my comment:

 I copy pasted these bullet points because they are as such in the book 
It was a great read, and I'll advise it to all the junior developers now from now on

Hothouse
Brian Aldiss
  • published in 1962
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 In a world where the sun stopped moving, we follow some humans. One human in particular is still curious enough to travel around. He founds a morsel that talks to him and is somehow a bit smarter than what humans have become. Some baboons living on the dark side of the earth have become almost humans, and the dolphins are the smartest things there are on earth. The smart parasitical morsel attaches itself to the dolphin and understands that earth is doomed and goes on a giant spider space-ship to another planet with humans from the moon, when our hero decides to stay on earth.

my comment:

 It was well written, in the sense that the beginning of the book starts in a world where there are almost no more animals but insects and some humans, and the rest is vegetal. It felt very vegetative and at some point I was scared of getting bored of the book. It got interesting when we met the humans from the moon. In some ways, it made me think of the book "cage of souls' as it is also a book about earth being close to its end, and especially humanity not having much chances of survival. 
 I also appreciated that the hero doesn't go to another planet, and decides to spend the rest of his life on a dying earth. Somehow it was not the American feel-good ending expected.

Space Opera
Catherynne M. Valente
  • published in 2018
  • read in 2020
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Eurovision in Space in the style of Douglas Adams

my comment:

it was okay but nothing much more than the synopsis states

Exhalation
Ted Chiang
  • published in 2019
  • read in 2020
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

  8 short stories fantasy and sci-fi. 

my comment:

a really good read like Borges

a memory called empire
arkady martine
  • published in 2019
  • read in 2020
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

 An newly ambassador from a space-stations confederations is sent to an empire. These stations have the particularity of adding an "image" of a person unto them. She received the previous ambassador but, his last "image", was 15 years old. Coming to the empire, she discovers that her predecessor was killed. Or at least died in mysterious circumstances. She investigates and discovers that the empire is at a problematic succession moment and that her predecessor promised the current emperor the "image" technology, which is a taboo technology for that empire. 
 In the end she and the emperor helpers find a good solution for the succession and she asks to go back to the stations. 

my comment:

 It was a great book. 
It was about empire-like culture and its perpetuity, compared to the perpetuity of individuals. It's also about station-like psyche compared to planet psyche, and it was really well written  

Cage of Soul
Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2021
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

In the future, very very far in the future, humanity has overused all its resources. 
The only thing left is one city, of ten thousands inhabitants, and its prison in the jungle. 
"Cage of soul" is an expression used by the last scientist, to describe either the prison or the city. 
The protagonist tells its tales, and he travelled to all the places we can still travel: the desert, the jungle, he spends a long time 
in prison, in the underground. 
It's all a very adventurous tale, and Tchaikovsky does not insist on making intelligent animals like he usually does, though we do meet humans that have evolved to adapt to the environment, or animals that have evolved to be like humans. 

my comment:

 It's a book about destruction, to a large extent. It's a good read like his books, and its gripping. It's very sad though 

The Unicorn Project
Gene Kim
  • published in 2019
  • read in 2021
  • genre "fiction"

synopsis:

A team of developers gets frustrated about how stuck their company is concerning software projects. The protagonist is a competent developer who takes a blame for a bug she solved and sent to 'The Phoenix Project', which is a bin project that top management state will save the company. She finds devs and operational software engineers that want to have better practice. They manage to work as an invisible rebellion by not following the managers, and save their company doing so. 

my comment:

 It's a nice follow-up to the Phoenix project, following the actors that are not top management. The key ideals defended by the book are:
 
  1. Locality and Simplicity
  2. Focus, Flow, and Joy
  3. Improvement of Daily Work
  4. Psychological Safety
  5. Customer Focus

Those are the ideals that devs and their managers should always strive for. Then top management should always think of the 3 horizons. 

  1. Horizon 1: Mature businesses
    • This is what most companies concentrate their focus on
  2. Horizon 2: rapidly growing businesses
    • This is either the innovation of processes in horizon 1
    • Or the clear adoption of horizon 3 
  3.  Horizon 3: emerging businesses
    • These are tests businesses -- start-up like attempts 

All in all, it's a fun and good book to learn how some companies ( like adiddas ) have adapted to changes within the world 

related to The Phoenix Project
Infinite Detail
Tim Maughan
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2020
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

It's the story of the before and after of a virus that takes down every networks. The before is a dystopia of constant control by a few big tech companies with the accumulation of personal data. The after is a chaotic almost post-apocalyptic world. Salvation comes from a decentralized network.

my comment:

 It's nice to see stockcroft ( Bristol), a neighborhood that I know for having lived 10 minutes from it, as the center of the revolution. The whole book has a cory-doctorowesque thing to it. The "before" is a bit of a "little brother" world. Then it's good to see that tech is not the problem, but centralizing the power of tech is.  

The Old Drift
Namwali Serpell
  • published in 2019
  • read in 2020
  • genre "fiction"

synopsis:

 The saga of three families in mainly Zambia, passing by England, Italy and India. 
 It starts at the end of the 19th century, and goes on with chapters of the life of family numbers, with in-between a page each time written by mosquitoes. 
It ends in a kind of scifi-ish way with a new small city-state zambia after the three last main heroes destroy the dam. 

my comment:

 It was really well written -- there was some sentences that you would enjoy reading twice as they were really well written. 
 The sci-fi part, at the end of the book, not so sci-fi but a little bit, with mini mosquitoe bots, was good and believable. 
 It was also interesting to read about Zambia, a country that is not in the news often, and its history. 
 Like how they had a " Space Program" that was serious and not at the same time, mainly a tool for political recognition and financing. 
 I will read that author again I think.

So good they can't ignore you
Cal Newport
  • published in 2012
  • read in 2020
  • genre "management"

synopsis:

 Go through 4 rules: 
  
 1. Don't follow your passion:  
       Passion comes afterwards 
 2. "Be so Good they ignore you": 
     Invest in your career capital.  Do this by having a craftsman mindset and go through deliberate practice 
3. Try to gain control over what and how you do what you do: 
     Have capital against control 
     Unless people are willing to pay for it, it's not an idea worth going after 
 4. Make a mission out of your career 
      Mission is best at the cutting edge   
      Do lots of little bets 
      The best is to have a remarquable mission in a context ready to be remarkable 
 

my comment:

Devolution
Max Brooks
  • published in 2020
  • read in 2020
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

An Eco Village in America get stuck and technology less after a volcano. Then a Sasquatch tribe hunts them

my comment:

A great analysis on how un-prepared we usually are.

The Phoenix Project
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
  • published in 2014
  • read in 2020
  • genre "fiction"

synopsis:

the subtitle is: "A Novel about It, Devops, and helping your business Win" -- It's not badly written, but not great either. It's really a book about the position of IT within companies, and how IT work is like any other type of work. It also proposes the three ways to make the work go at its best: 

1rst: it should flow; 
2nd: it should have feedback mechanisms; 
3rd: it should promote a learning/testing/risking culture 

It's really an east good read for anyone working close or with IT as it shows the problems of taking it all for granted.

my comment:

I'm curious about the 2nd one: the unicorn project.

Stories of you life and others
Ted Chiang
  • published in 2002
  • read in 2020
  • genre "sci-fi/fantasy"

synopsis:

Collection of short stories : 
- Tower of Babylon: great story about language and recursion 
- Understand: I don't remember 
- Division by zero: a mathematician disproof mathematics 
- Story of your life: adapted into 'Arrival' -- as good as the film 
- Seventy-two Letters: Fantasy around the Golem, and how letters create life and self-reference 
- The evolution of human science: After the technological singularity, how do human understand the science of Super-Infos ( my term ) 
- Hell is the absence of God: ok, about belief in the world where angels appear and you know who goes to hell and heaven 
- 'Liking what you see: a documentary': a short story from different angles about the bias of beauty in human society

my comment:

Most of the stories were really good, well-written - though without 'artifice', without something special about the style. The fact that language was the theme of few of them and that they were sci-fish was interesting -- I feel like language as such, except for inventing terms, is not in itself such a common theme in sci-fi