Memory Factory- Heist of the Century- Russ Golish

Golish has produced a technically well-written science fiction, based on near future power politics and warfare. The twist with a difference is the medical enhancement of two rival leaders brain function; enhancements that has been compromised by the Perfect Recall team for a third superpower. Doctored memories are replayed in the protagonists’ minds, upsetting mental balance and so altering tactical decisions. One is eventually driven to a mental and physical breakdown, but only after his has ruined any chance of military success.

We are in a post polar ice-caped world, which has managed to maintain current levels of technology, but at great cost to humanity. The world is in power blocks based on existing geo-political realities, projected forward through the growing climate and general environmental crisis. The blocks are in an almost constant state of military rivalry that breaks out into regional war. The book has very much a male mindset, relying to a high degree on the escalation to war to drive the drama.

Note that that Golish concentrates his words on building his political and technological space in near future time rather than on looking deeply into the characters than populate the story. There are spells of character development of at least two or three of the main players, though more would help emotional buy-in, for at least this reader. Many of the cast are one dimensional, so the opening ‘dramatis personae’ is useful if one loses the plot. Despite some difficulty in developing any emotional connection with individuals the book has an exciting build. There is a balanced mix of near future technology and familiar superpower real politic and warcraft. I found no flaws in the plot, or in its execution; allowing for medical and technological inventions that are, for now at least, science fiction. Some of the content Is written a little long, and even superfluous. Deep description can be welcomed if one is building empathy or disdain for individuals. It is demanding of concentration here where the detail of technology and plot dominates.

This book is intended to be a pacesetter for a series of books based on mind enhancing technology. This should excuse some of the over-writing in the first outing. I really enjoyed reading this book, and his rather dystopian take on the future, aren’t they all. It is certainly worth five of those stupid stars that seem designed to empower those that relish doing more harm than good, by so woefully reducing every aspect of a book to individual reader’s taste. Five gold ‘kisses’ doesn’t mean this work couldn’t be made better if the author worked with a suitably exacting content editor. Or else, Golash like so many new writers, needs to play his own devil’s advocate much harder. The unknown, unconnected, independent author is usually highly financially constrained, making the job of producing first-class books far more difficult than it is for the very few, usually ‘known’ insiders, who manage to get big publisher support. That doesn’t mean we ‘the unlauded’ shouldn’t strive for perfection. Copy editing errors mostly relate to verb tense selection, and lack of full liaison between some sentences.

This book deserves to be read and positively reviewed. I very much look forward to the next instalment.

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The Crimson Heirlooms- Hunter Dennis

This historical fiction reads more like a book written in the 19^th Century than one written in our time, which says something for the quality of the Dennis’s creativeness. One must qualify that by pointing out that there is a great deal of modern rather than 19^th Century word usage and sentence structure, but for the modern reader that simply sharpens understanding, rather than detracting from the historic placement. Time shifting word patterns have often give even the greatest literature from past centuries a turgid heaviness. So I think the author was right to not too deeply play his use of 19^th century ‘building materials’.

As one is absorbed in the series of period specific vignettes, which make up the book, the descriptive detail effortlessly levers imagination back through time. I would find it hard to believe that Dennis hasn’t read a great many of the classic fictions from the period, allowing his writing to absorb something of those famous authors tones. The modern reader needs to be warned that this book also has a slow rhythm, is very long descriptive detail and has a primary plot that is almost an irrelevance. What Davis does do with a certain brilliance is draw us to the ‘atmospheres’, the social drama, the real histories, of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

My strongest criticism is firstly that the book is overlong, being at least two good-sized reads in one, and that, secondly, I see no value in flicking backwards and forwards in time. The later confused me, causing a struggle to put together the jigsaw of characters and events. I am, I’m sure, hampered by being a particularly slow reader, so necessitating many periods of reading interwoven with the demands of my real world. Particularly with my memory being far short of excellent, I was too often left half drowned. The book is far too long for all but a few to read at one or even two concentrated sittings. I would love to see this book re-engineered into a simple linear chronology.

Overall, it would be most ingenuous of me not to give this book five of those ridiculous stars. However, I feel this reads more like a work in progress than a finished article. This is the first part of a series, but that doesn’t mean that this volume is correctly ended in adagio rather than climatic allegro. The read finishes with an intellectual plot resolution of sorts, but with none of the fortissimo that some earlier episodes in the book achieved. In short, a wonderful read that is somewhat spoiled by a lack of input from a good content editor.

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The Last Days of Night- Graham Moore

I found this to be a very entertaining read, which helped give me a real feel for the period when the electricity cables started to connect the cities and then towns of North America. Moore did a great job of invoking a sense of place and time. I felt the magic of those times, so appropriately generated, by profound technological progress. The alchemy of turning night to day was of an order of wonder only matched in my lifetime by the Apollo missions to the Moon.

My difficulty with this reading is small and to many will seem pedantic. That being my strong preference that writers of historical fiction never play fast and loose with the known timelines of events. Facts and the time on which they act should be sacrosanct in the reporting of history. The writer should only weave his fiction, his story, on the solid framework of all commonly accepted truth. He may of course dispute details if there is a case to be argued, such that perhaps in one infamous earlier history ‘the princes weren’t suffocated in the Tower of London’ and Richard III didn’t have the extreme deformity reported by Shakespeare. However, to condense and distort events is to rip deep slashes into the fabric of the past.

This book, despite telling the story so well can finally stand only as an entertainment; a first class one, an informative one, but mere entertainment nevertheless.

Crude measure of a book should be awarded simply on the qualities of the writing, and so giving less than five stars where such banality is demanded would be disingenuous indeed.

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The Helicopter Pilot- Darcy Hoover

There was a brief period at the start when I thought that there was going to be rather too much engineering talk about helicopters, but this soon passed. Then very soon I was being drawn into the real story, the one about the characters that pilot those machines, and particularly the sub-culture of well-travelled pilots that ply their trade wherever it is called for. The story centres on a group of pilots working a fictitious site of oil drilling platforms of the coast of East Africa.

As the story begins to generate pace, we soon realise that its main theme is a clash between wealthy, privileged Western and a strong African culture that manage to sustain its people despite appalling relative poverty. The central figure, a form-filling, technically efficient if less than naturally talented, pilot is both naïve and prejudiced in his attitudes to foreigners in general, and especially those that live under African skies. He isn’t racist, that would be an unfair slur, but he certainly lives his bottled-up life under a thick blanket of cultural prejudices and unsound expectations. However, the mix of skin-hardened bush, ex-military and worldly-wise commercial pilots ensure that Edward sees his African contract through, if only just. We see Edward not so much change his spots, but to at least give them a depth of human understanding, that even in our widely wired, and increasingly educated population is far from always associated with first-world experience; even when burnished with occasional bursts of sunburn’t crimson in one protected tourist enclave or another.

This is a well written first book by a more than competent independent writer, who brings a good deal of personal experience to this entertaining story. However, a professional copy edit would certainly improve the read. It is, in the end, a book about the human condition, about the ability of people to make the best of what they have, wherever they happen to be, and about the prejudices in our variable characters that define us all, that make us the individuals we are. Edward would end up utterly the same man and yet profoundly changed by a few weeks in a much larger world; a place less tailored to his comfy, safe, preconceptions.

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Brief Answers to the Big Questions- Stephen Hawking

This is a great read, despite some minor repetitions. We have to bear in mind that this is really only a series of essays, some of which cover a little of the same ground. My view is that if Hawking had lived a little longer then this would have been a better compiled set of ‘letters on the big questions’, but that doesn’t much detract from the quality of the work, and certainly not from its messages. These essays run a lot wider than science, into Hawking’s hopes and fears for humankind. Some of the essays run into sensitive issues, which raise a good deal of honest debate. Well, there are just too many of us on our wonderful planet, which we are rapidly destroying, and this alone must justify our questioning of everything, even the very existence of God.

There are a few contradictions in the science, which isn’t surprising when writing about an incredibly quickly advancing field of science, cosmology, and especially when the material was compiled from words written over some spread of time. Inevitably the gravitas, the gravity of Hawking’s thoughts are also less than perfectly modulated. I was only too pleased to read every single word despite my minor criticisms.

I must add though that for me the finest words in this book were actually penned by his daughter, Lucy, in the Afterword. I quote from the many pearls among them. “I think he would have been very proud of this book.” This collection tells us a little about Hawking as a political animal, being in part autobiographical, and given yet greater insight into the man by the biography content of the other contributors. We have had a ‘Brief History of Time’, which is now augmented by this brief and personal feeling encounter with the brave genius in the electrically powered chair. Alas, the book is all too brief, and doomed now to a steady state of content, unlike our dynamic and cosmically unstable universe.

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Never Say I Can’t- Philip Catshill

This is a wonderful true to life book, written by the sufferer of a major cerebrovascular accident experienced at the very young age of thirty. Having just received his sergeant’s strips as a British Policeman, Catshill is cut down to a physical half, with a severely damaged long and short-term memory and at first a total lack of coherent speech. He had to learn how to regain control of his motor functions, especially those on the entire right side of his body, and his mind. The man even had to ‘retrain’ his injured brain to see through what had become a suddenly ‘disconnected’ right eye. His courage, honesty, and determination shine through in proverbial buckets.

Catshill has survived not only this story’s devastating stroke, but two more less severe episodes since. That is that they were considerably less severe than the first, but by no means inconsequential. In his rebuilt life he has become a first class autobiographer and in another genre fiction writer. This is the sort of story that should fortify the determination of any one of us having fallen into some form of severe health crisis. Except sadly, our own minds are likely to be so shattered or simply pre-occupied that we will fail to benefit from any memories from this amazing story about the will to recover.

This is an immensely humorous book, though of course often of a very black nature, but one that raises genuine belly laughs at that, and so it should for live is unbearable if we try to treat every unfortunate situation with only the gravity it naturally generates. It goes without saying that it also inevitably moistens one’s eyes. I felt at liberty to laugh at Catshill’s struggles, laughing with him, but taking the seriousness, the mental depression, the physical distress on-board.

In many ways this will always be a unique book, as it is rare for anyone to recover from such major trauma, and to also have the intellectual ability to subsequently write so well about the event. When the trauma is of the nature of a stroke, a literal cerebral infarction, then this book must be seen as all the more remarkable. This isn’t a some imagined third person narrative or ghost-written augmentation of the victim’s capacity, this is true, direct, gritty autobiography.

Some living individuals don’t come out of this narrative at all well, as brutal honesty extends beyond the author himself. I trust that their identities are well hidden. Arguably, biography can only be real when the wide field is truly accurate. There is no implied criticism on my part, only reason that would always prevent me getting to close to publicly disclosed personal truth. Memoir is an often-painful genre. As we read in this story, we notice how a simple sentence, spoken or written, can be totally devastating or by tone or tiny change be the greatest of empowering gifts. Recovery is always easier with the kindness of others and can hang in the balance either way on very few targeted words. The words in this book are chosen and ordered to strong affect.

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The Bit Dance- Tilmer Wright Jr.

I very much enjoyed this very near future speculative fiction. The book centres on a family drama, with a work obsessed and emotionally distant father, two teenage children that he generally fails to engage with, and a mum doing her best to hold diverging lives together. Contemporary drama is very much the emotional driver of this work. The other key elements revolve around a dangerous terrorist unit of anti-capitalists and robotic toys that communicate with each other rather too well, when their software is enhanced with a sort of bee hive logic-based application. Perhaps surprisingly, the diverse elements of the story bond together very well.

The book is well written, adequately edited and paced towards a suspenseful climax. In other words, Wright has produced a rewarding entertainment. As far as my very thin understanding of information technology goes, the artificial intelligence elements are plausible. I am accepting of the scientific understanding that sentience developed naturally through animal evolution. So perhaps that is also a realistic, and possibly even inevitable, ‘evolution’ in computer logic. Certainly, that is the basis of a massive modern outpouring of science fiction and philosophical thought. ‘We think, therefore we are’.

I have no hesitation in giving this book five stars on those media streams that demand such crude stamp collecting. I greatly enjoyed the development of all of the main characters, including Sherlock, who blossoms late in this worth reading adventure.

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Soil and Sense- Michael Graham

My copy is from the 4^th impression of the original Faber and Faber book printed by the Western Printing Services Limited, Bristol. The book was considered important enough to be first printed in 1941, when invasion of England by Hitler’s armies appeared imminent. We already had the 4^th impression by 1944, so the book was in regular demand. Its relevance at the time was extreme, as it could only help the farmers struggling against national food shortages that were threatening to bring the British nation to its knees.

The book is very general, but mostly geared to the encouragement of lea farming, as the best way of optimising fertility on many farms. The preface to the book was written by the great agriculturalist E.J. Russell, from Rothamstead Experimental Station in May 1940. Soil and Sense was deemed to be of significant war time value, though it was the Great War, (WWI), to which the written words mostly related.

The book still has a relevance today to the organic farming movement, although written before much was known about the more complicated microbial activities of soil bacteria. Note though, that the farmers best learning experience has always been practical observation of working his own lands. The book is certainly of modern interest to those concerned about the excessive demands on the planet’s agricultural land resources.

The writing is light and entertaining for what is in effect a text-book of agriculture, and Graham’s particular interest in lea farming. This is the breaking of the arable rotation with more-or-less three years of sown grass mixtures, grazed and/or cut and carted. I enjoy reading the book a chapter at a time as a way of being both entertained and relaxed. I’m sure I am biased in the books favour, my copy having once been the possession of my uncle, Bruce, struggling with my father and grandfather to make ends meet on their tenanted Lightleigh farm in North Devon. Leigh translating from Old English leah (area of cleared forest. The light, in agricultural terms is an adjective indicative of sandy soil, not heavy, from leoht (Saxon). I note that most of their income was from netting rabbits, so poor was the land and way they could afford to farm it. Michael Graham would have been appalled that the rabbits were in such great numbers that they could ravage the new sown leas. The book was much needed, to give courage to my family’s farming. Lea farming is certainly a balanced and efficient way to farm not just in North Devon, but across vast swathes of lowland Britain. And of course, what applies for the good management of land in these territories applies equally to many temperate areas of the world.

The reading of this book is a delightful way to be drawn away from the urbanised world into the countryside and its agricultural fields, and so back to the roots of our civilisation, which are the very rootstock of farmed grasses and wheats. Our true wealth is still the land on which we tread, and the richest of the lands aren’t covered in concrete, asphalt, factory and glass, but with natures tapestry, modified by arcadian care, and sustainable methods of farming.

The book is still in print though in some sources, possibly dubiously acquired and profiting. Also note the risk of confusion with other authors who have subsequently written under the name Michael Graham. Humus in the soils, humour in the words and not an ounce of hubris. A book that still should have a place in the organic farmers’ bible.

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Death of a Movie Star- Timothy Patrick

This is a well written book that passes all my standards for a five-star review. However, I have to say that I didn’t particularly enjoy the fiction. This lack of engagement being in large part because I find everything relating to celebrity status intensely dull. I was seduced to read by the outstanding opening phrases of the first chapter. The nod towards the spilling of blood suggested a read I wasn’t going to get, but let me be clear, Patrick certainly didn’t set out to deceive murder/mystery lovers and thriller fans into reading. The contents are clearly written on the label if one takes the trouble to read the full blurb.

We all have expectations about the way certain people behave. In this case those expectations are largely played too. We read a strong story about the pampered celebrity elites that fill the vacant spaces in real human-interest news stories. For many entertainment industry fans this must be exactly choice bread and butter. Hollywood, like sport or gambling, fills a lot of territory in very many individual lives. I on the other hand couldn’t ever raise a care as to which flawed characters rose or fell in the glittering fictional pond. I’m sure I’m missing out on something by not being intensely interested in the rivalries between the real stars, the Joan Crawford versus Bette Davis, Orson Welles v William Randolph Hearst, that inform the fictional ones Patrick creates.

This fiction does a convincing job of paralleling and parodying reality. Patrick plucks a little bit from a great many of Hollywood’s legendary lives and places his clever concoction into a near future time. The masked figure on the cover of the version I read gave me a clever and accurate feel for the story that waits inside. So is my negativity of any value to most of those that are planning to read this book? That is a fair question. I can recognise that this is well written escapism. The jealousies really are so very Hollywood, so well reflecting backstory reads in a thousand glossy magazines and perhaps, as a crude generalisation, so much more female than male in interest.

I failed to pick up on the dark humour mentioned in the Kirkus Review, or anything very funny at all except in the absurdity of familiar movie satire. I kept wondering if I was missing something. And indeed, perhaps the joke is on me for the view through my blinkered myopic eyes. Certainly, this book has some really good reviews, many that have no trouble in finding comedy.

In short, this is quality paint, plausible Hollywood glitter, that for me dries too slowly, if at all, and leaves too few memorable bursts of colour.

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RoboDocs- Dr. T ‘Gus’ Gustafson

What an interesting read, a novel written as imaginary documentary on a near future doctor’s career, following his path from childhood through medical school and training to eventual mixed fortunes as a robotically enhanced family practitioner. There is a depth of humanistic sentimental content, however it is future technology, not human behaviour that drives this book. The author is a retired medic who speculates the future of his profession. Gustafson brings a huge amount of personal experience of medicine and its politics to this fascinating story. His real knowledge gives real bite, a profound credibility and layered plausibility. His future ‘expectation’ is so well constructed that it is difficult at times to keep touch with the fact that we are reading of a future and not a ‘true’ life history. All the medical politics, economic constraints and technologies are already seen today in their infancy, such that very little of the science fiction seems implausible, fantastical, in 2018.

The writing is straight forward and accurate, while the plot is simple in design and yet rich with interesting detail. One might even say the book is predictable, but no less enjoyable for that. This fiction is written with almost a scientific efficiency, like a well written industrial report, with just enough of a veneer of character story to give a richness, a feeling of personal buy-in, of voyeuristic enjoyment, to the reading. I recommend this book to all who wonder about the future of medicine, and where it is taking both our medical practitioners and us all as hopeful patients. This is a fiction brim full of interest, with a backstory centred around the fears and ambitions of one particular doctor and his future long-suffering, wife; one particular doctor who may even now be considering a medical career. Gustafson has the skill to write speculation that reads as a medical future that is already established hard fact. Does this doctor actual exist, one who might possibly retire in say 2068?

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