Without doubt one of the most original science fiction books I've ever read. With a mix of narrative and reports (featuring occasional redaction-like antimimetic decays) we are introduced to the work of the Organisation, which takes on weird happenings in the world, from conventional monsters and ghosts to those central to this story. A large contingent of Organisation staff deal with mimetics - ways that concepts can spread in a non-natural fashion and have to be controlled. But a smaller group deals with antimimetics - concepts and even living things that are able to remove themselves from human memory. One of our first introductions to antimimetics is when a senior civil servant summons a supposed spy to his office, only to discover that she is in fact the head of the Antimimetics Division: an antimimetic has stopped the civil servant from taking the medication that enables him to remember the Division's existence, so he is totally unaware of it. This kind of convoluted comp...

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

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This book is something of a reboot. It was Neil deGrasse Tyson's first title, dating back to 1997, but was reissued 'fully revised and updated for the 21st century' in 2024. It's mostly a cut and paste book from the Q&A section in a magazine, despite which (or perhaps because of which) it's one of Tyson's better books. The idea is that the questions are answered by Merlin who is 'a visitor from the Andromeda galaxy who is as old as Earth and who has observed all major scientific events of Earth history.' Although some of the questions are from children (and the illustrations look like they were drawn by one) it's intended to appeal to all ages. The book is split into 13 sections, mostly with astronomical topics (such as Earth, Moon, Planets, Black Holes and Quasars), though with a couple of more physics-based sections including Gravity and Light and Telescopes. The questions themselves vary from entertaining thought experiments such as 'What ...

The sequel to Artifact Space is another wrist-busting, high class space opera, again featuring a sort of Star Trek future but where the ships are primarily merchant/military instead of exploration/military. I gave the original book 5 stars, but I've marked this one down, partly because I've already read the third in the sequence, Whalesong , and that one is significantly better. There's still a lot to like about Deep Black . Its action sequences are engaging. There's lots of impressive detail about the ships and life on them - and a far more realistic impression of the less exciting rest of life onboard than you get from most space opera. And there is a lot more on the difficulties of communicating with aliens, which is cleverly handled. But like its predecessor it is too long, and there is just far too much of the detail of daily life for central character Marca Nbaro as she goes about her daily routine. Routine gets a little dull. To add to the negatives, the writing...

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...