Tags: books

I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.

If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.

Needless to say the web book works offline. Once you go to goingoffline.adactio.com you can add it to the homescreen of your mobile device or add it to the dock on your Mac. After that, you won’t need a network connection.

The book is free to read. Properly free. Not the kind of “free” where you have to supply an email address first. Why would I make you go to the trouble of generating a burner email account?

The site has no analytics. No tracking. No third-party scripts of any kind whatsover. By complete coincidence, the site is fast. Funny that.

For the styling of this web book, I tweaked the stylesheet I used for HTML5 For Web Designers. I updated it a little bit to use logical properties, some fluid typography and view transitions.

In the process of converting the book to HTML, I got reaquainted with what I had written almost seven years ago. It was kind of fun to approach it afresh. I think it stands up pretty darn well.

Ethan wrote about his feelings when he put two of his books online, illustrated by that amazing photo that always gives me the feels:

I’ll miss those days, but I’m just glad these books are still here. They’re just different than they used to be. I suppose I am too.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making your website work offline, have a read of Going Offline. Enjoy!

I read Madeline Miller’s Circe last year. I loved it. It was my favourite fiction book I read that year.

Reading Circe kicked off a bit of a reading spree for me. I sought out other retellings of Greek myths. There’s no shortage of good books out there from Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, Jennifer Saint, Claire Heywood, Claire North, and more.

The obvious difference between these retellings and the older accounts by Homer, Ovid and the lads is to re-centre the women in these stories. There’s a rich seam of narratives to be mined between the lines of the Greek myths.

But what’s fascinating to me is to see how these modern interpretations differ from one another. Sometimes I’ll finish one book, then pick up another that tells the same story from a very different angle.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the presence or absence of supernatural intervention. Some of these writers tell their stories with gods and goddesses front and centre. Others tell the very same stories as realistic accounts without any magic.

Take Perseus. Please.

The excellent Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes tells the story of Medusa. There’s magic a-plenty. In fact, Perseus himself is little more than a clueless bumbler who wouldn’t last a minute without divine interventation.

The Shadow Of Perseus by Claire Heywood also tells Medusa’s story. But this time there’s no magic whatsoever. The narrative is driven not by gods and goddesses, but by the force of toxic masculinity.

Pat Barker tells the story of the Trojan war in her Women Of Troy series. She keeps it grounded and gritty. When Natalie Haynes tells the same story in A Thousand Ships, the people in it are little more than playthings of the gods.

Then there are the books with just a light touch of the supernatural. While Madeline Miller’s Circe was necessarily imbued with magic, her first novel The Song Of Achilles keeps it mostly under wraps. The supernatural is there, but it doesn’t propel the narrative.

Claire North has a trilogy of books called the Songs of Penelope, retelling the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective (like Margaret Atwood did in The Penelopiad). On the face of it, these seem to fall on the supernatural side; each book is narrated by a different deity. But the gods are strangely powerless. Everyone believes in them, but they themselves behave in a non-interventionist way. As though they didn’t exist at all.

It makes me wonder what it would be like to have other shared myths retold with or without magic.

How would the Marvel universe look if it were grounded in reality? Can you retell Harry Potter as the goings-on at a cult school for the delusional? What would Star Wars be like without the Force? (although I guess Andor already answers that one)

Anyway, if you’re interested in reading some modern takes on Greek myths, here’s a list of books for you:

• Madeline Miller
  1. The Song Of Achilles
  2. Circe
• Natalie Haynes
  1. A Thousand Ships
  2. Stone Blind
• Pat Barker
  1. The Silence Of The Girls
  2. The Women Of Troy
  3. The Voyage Home
• Claire North
  1. Ithica
  2. House Of Odysseus
  3. The Last Song Of Penelope
• Jennifer Saint
  1. Ariadne
  2. Elektra
  3. Atalanta
• Claire Heywood
  1. The Shadow Of Perseus
  2. Daughters Of Sparta
• Costanza Casati
  1. Clytemnestra
• Margaret Atwood
  1. The Penelopiad

In 1979, two books shaped my formative years • Supernatural Detective’s Field Guide

This is such a great project from Jon—a mashup of two books from his childhood!

Put that RSS feed in your feed reader.

PENGUIN SERIES DESIGN – the art of Penguin book covers

Exploring the graphic design history of Penguin books:

The covers presented on this site are all from my own collection of about 1400 Penguins, which have been chosen for the beauty or interest of their cover designs. They span the history of the company all the way back to 1935 when Penguin Books was launched.

Book Tour Simulator 2024

A lovely choose-your-own-adventure blog post by Robin.

75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time - What Is The Best Science Fiction Book Ever Written?

This is a damned fine list.

The 21 best science fiction books of all time – according to New Scientist writers | New Scientist

I’ve read 16 of these and some of the others are on my to-read list. It’s a pretty good selection, although the winking inclusion of God Emperor Of Dune by the SEO guy verges on trolling.

I can’t resist bookshelves.

If I’m shown into someone’s home and left alone while the host goes and does something, you can bet I’m going to peruse their bookshelves.

I don’t know why. Maybe I’m looking for points of commonality. “Oh, you read this book too?” Or maybe it’s the opposite, and I’m looking for something new and—pardon the pun—novel. “Oh, that book sounds interesting!”

I like it when people have a kind of bookshelf on their website.

• Mandy’s reading list is always worth browsing.
• Remy has a comprehensive record of his reading history.
• Maggie has her library and her anti-library.
• Molly White has one shelf for fiction and another shelf for non-fiction.

Here’s my ad-hoc bookshelf, which is manually mirrored on Bookshop.org.

I like having an overview of what I’ve been reading. One of the reasons I started keeping track was so that I could try to have a nice balance of fiction and non-fiction.

I always get a little sad when I see someone’s online reading list and it only consists of non-fiction books that are deemed somehow useful, rather than simply pleasurable. Cameron wrote about when he used to do this:

I felt like reading needed to have some clear purpose. The topic of any book I read needed to directly contribute to being an “adult”. So I started to read non-fiction – stuff that reflected what was happening in my career. Books on management, books on finance, books on economics, books on the creative process. And for many years this diet of dry, literary roughage felt wholesome … but joyless. Each passage I highlited in yellow marker was a point for the scoreboard, not a memory to be treasured.

Now he’s redressing the imbalance and rediscovering the unique joy of entering other worlds by reading fiction.

For a while, I forced myself to have perfect balance. I didn’t allow myself to read two non-fiction books in a row or two fiction books in a row. I made myself alternate between the two.

I’ve let that lapse now. I’m reading more fiction than non-fiction, and I’m okay with that.

But I still like looking back on what I’ve been reading and seeing patterns emerge. Like there’s a clear boom in the last year of reading retellings of the Homeric epics (all kicked off by reading the brilliant Circe by Madeline Miller).

I also keep an eye out for a different kind of imbalance. I want to make sure that I’m not just reading books by people like me—middle-aged heterosexual white dudes.

You may think that a balanced reading diet would emerge naturally, but I’m not so sure. Here’s an online bookshelf. Here’s another online bookshelf. Plenty of good stuff in both. But do either of those men realise that they’ve gone more than a year without reading a book written by a woman?

It’s almost certainly not a conscious decision. It’s just that in the society we live in, the default mode tends towards what’s been historically privileged (see also films, music, and painting).

It’s like driving in a car that subtly pulls to one side. Unless you compensate for it, you’ll end up in the ditch without even realising.

I feel bad for calling attention to those two reading lists. It feels very judgy of me. And reading is something that doesn’t deserve judgement. Any reading is good reading.

Mind you, maybe being judgemental is exactly why I’m drawn to people’s bookshelves in the first place. It might be that I’m subsconsciously looking for compatibility signals. If I see a bookshelf filled with books I like, I’m bound to feel predisposed to like that person. And if I see a bookshelf dominated by Jordan Peterson and Ayn Rand, I’m probably going to pass judgement on the reader, even if I know I shouldn’t.

Curious Reading Club

I think this is a terrific idea from Bobbie—be one of 25 people to get a brand new hardcover non-fiction book in the mail for just $25 and then join in the discussion afterwards.

Alas, it’s not available in the UK but US friends, check it out.

Muscular imagination

Robin Sloan on The Culture:

The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently artic­u­late and defend their values. (Their enthu­siasm for their own politics is consid­ered annoying by most other civilizations.)

Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.

I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.

Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.

2010 was a good year for me. I moved into a new home. Salter Cane released an album. We had a really good dConstruct. And I wrote a book.

It was HTML5 For Web Designers, the very first title from a new indie publisher called A Book Apart.

Back then, I wrote about the writing process, Jason wrote about the design, Mandy wrote about editing, and Jeffrey wrote a lovely foreword. What a dream team!

From there, A Book Apart went from strength to strength. Under Katel’s stewardship, they released the must-have books for web design and development.

One of the perks of being an author for A Book Apart is that I get a copy of every book published. I have a shelf of slim but colourful book spines.

Now, after 14 years and 60 titles, the collection is complete. A Book Apart won’t be publishing any more new books. Don’t worry—you can still buy the existing titles at all good bookshops, like bookshop.org. They made sure to prepare the way for this decision.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to express how grateful I am to everyone at A Book Apart. They treated me very, very well. Heck, they even let me publish a second book.

Thank you, team—it was a pleasure and honour to collaborate with you.

Against Disruption: On the Bulletpointization of Books ‹ Literary Hub

It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does. A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with.

In a world where tech billionaires dominate so much of our culture, it’s troubling to see books treated like mere vessels for self-betterment the way that cold-water therapy and Fitbits are. Some of us enjoy fiction.

I read 25 books in 2023. That’s exactly the same amount that I read in 2022.

15 of the 25 books were written by women—a bit of a dip from last year.

I read a lot more fiction than non-fiction this year. I’m okay with that.

There was plenty of sci-fi as usual, but 2023 was also the year I went down a rabbit hole of reading retellings of the Homeric epics. I’ve had a copy of The Odyssey on my coffee table while I’ve been diving into the works of Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker, and more. I’m really enjoying this deep dive and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

It’s funny; reading different takes on the same characters and interweaving storylines is kind of like dipping into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, just a few millennia older. In some ways, it feels like reading fantasy, but as Ursula Le Guin points out, things aren’t so black and white:

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek—maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

I’ve been reading some Ursula Le Guin this year too, and that’s something else I intend to keep on doing. Like the retellings of Troy, her work just keeps on giving.

Anyway, in my usual manner, here’s my end-of-year summary of what I’ve read, along with a pointless rating out of five.

To recap, here’s my scoring system:

• One star means a book is meh.
• Two stars means a book is perfectly fine.
• Three stars means a book is a good—consider it recommended.
• Four stars means a book is exceptional.
• Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

The Star Of The Sea by Joseph O’Connor

A nautical tale of The Great Hunger. It’s a tricky subject but this book mostly tackles it well. It’s fairly dripping in atmosphere.

★★★☆☆

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Another rivetting tale from Nnedi Okorafor, this one set in a world that seems quite different from ours, where magic is a powerful force.

★★★☆☆

The Rosewater Insurrection by Tade Thompson

The second book in the trilogy—this time it’s war. Once again, the setting and the vibe are unlike any other alien invasion story. I’m looking forward to reading the final installment.

★★★☆☆

Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns

On the one hand, this book feels like homework because it really is required reading for any web designer or developer. On the other hand, Heather does an excellent job in making what could be a very dry topic as interesting as possible. The contrasts between the US and Europe are particulary eye-opening.

★★★☆☆

Children Of Time by Adrian Tschaikovsky

Absolutely top-notch hard sci-fi! It feels like two of the biggest characters in the book are time and evolution. For a tale that’s told over thousands of years, the pace never lets up. Now I get why this book won so many awards. It’s quite a feat of story-telling. I loved it!

★★★★☆

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling

A fairly by-the-numbers retelling of the early days of computer hackers. To be honest, I found the pre-computer part (detailing telephone hacks) to be the most interesting bit.

★★☆☆☆

Circe by Madeline Miller

Everyone was going on about how great this book was so my expectations were high. They were exceeded. This book is just wonderful. When I finished it, I found myself craving more. That set me on the path of reading other retellings of Homeric characters, but none of them could quite match the brilliance of Circe.

★★★★☆

Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words by The Steve Jobs Archive

An assembly of speeches, memos, and emails. It’s refreshingly un-hagiographic, given the publisher. And of course it’s beautifully typeset.

★★★☆☆

The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller

After reading and loving Circe, I went back to Madeline Miller’s previous story of the Trojan War. The Song Of Achilles didn’t quite match Circe for me, but it came very close. Once again, everything is described vividly and once again, it stayed with me long after I finished reading it.

★★★★☆

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Another retelling of the Trojan war. This is an episodic book that weaves its threads together nicely. Sometimes it’s a little on-the-nose about its intentions but it mostly works very well.

★★★☆☆

Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin’s first novel is far from her best work but it’s still better than most sci-fi. A good planetary romance.

★★★☆☆

The Intelligence Illusion by Baldur Bjarnason

Refreshingly level-headed and practical. If you work somewhere that’s considering using generative tools built on large language models, read this before doing anything.

★★★☆☆

Planet Of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin

The second of Le Guin’s Hainish books. Another planetary romance that’s perfectly fine but not in the same league as her later work.

★★★☆☆

City Of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

The third of the Hainish novels, this one gets pretty trippy. I enjoyed the sensation of not knowing what was going on (much like the protaganist).

★★★☆☆

Babel by R.F. Kuang

This was such a frustrating read! On the one hand, the world-building as absolutely superb. The idea of magic being driven translation is brilliant. So is the depiction of a British empire that exploits and colonises foreign languages. But then the characters in this world are not well realised. The more the book went on, the less believable they seemed.

There’s also a really strange disconnect in the moods of the book; one minute it’s gritty revolutionary fare, the next it’s like Harry Potter goes to Oxford.

It didn’t work for me. And I know that my opinion can be easily dismissed as that of a mediocre middle-aged white man, but I really wanted to like this. I was totally on board with the politics of the book, but the way it hammered me over the head constantly didn’t do it any favours.

A message like “racism is bad” or “colonialism is bad” might work as subtext, but here, where it’s very much the text-text, it doesn’t succeed.

★★☆☆☆

That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry

A collection of short stories set in the west of Ireland. Good stuff.

★★★☆☆

The Silence Of The Girls by Pat Barker

Back to the Trojan war in the first of a series by Pat Barker. She takes a naturalistic tone with the dialogue, modernising it. It works quite well. By this time, having read Madeline Miller’s The Song Of Achilles and Natalie Hayne’s A Thousand Ships, I really felt like I was looking at the same series of events from different angles.

★★★☆☆

An Immense World by Ed Yong

Another great accessible science book from Ed Yong, this time about senses in the animal world. It sometimes feels a bit like a series of articles rather than a single book, but when the articles are this good, that’s absolutely fine.

★★★☆☆

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

Okay, this might get a bit ranty…

The plot and the writing style in this book are perfectly fine, gripping even. It’s got that Gibsonesque structure of having two or three different characters in very different settings being propelled towards an inevitable meeting point (it happens pretty much exactly at the half-way point in this book).

But this is a cli-fi book that fails. It will not encourage anyone to take action other than turn into a doomer. Instead of asking what the future might actually be like, it instead asks “what’s the absolute worst that could happen?” Frankly, it’s a cop-out.

The book takes a similar tack with its characters. It assumes everyone’s terrible and will do terrible things. It’s lazy.

So you’ve got an unrelenting series of people behaving terribly in a horrific setting. It gets boring.

I was trying to cut the book some slack, but when there was a rare scene of actual consensual sex, it quickly turned into an adolescent male fantasy.

Reading this was like reading the opposite of Kim Stanley Robinson. Avoid.

★★☆☆☆

The Women Of Troy by Pat Barker

Back to Troy we go for the second in Pat Barker’s series. More good stuff.

★★★☆☆

How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers by Tim Harford

A recommendation from Chris. He thought I’d enjoy this and he was not wrong. Tim Harford strikes just the right tone as he relays stories of statistics gone wrong as well as statistics done right.

★★★☆☆

Translation State by Ann Leckie

I’ll read anything by Ann Leckie. I loved her Imperial Radch series and this book is set in the same universe. There’s a strange juxtaposition of body horror in places with a Becky Chambers style cosiness. It’s partly a courtroom drama, but one where the courtroom gets very dramatic indeed. And there are lots of questions around identity and belonging. I liked it.

★★★☆☆

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Full disclosure: the author is a cousin of a friend of mine. She told me how much of this book was based on actual family history. It’s set in Belfast in the 70s and it is very vivid in a very kitchen-sink kind of way. It feels all-too real. Recommended.

★★★☆☆

Children Of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The sequel to Children Of Time doesn’t quite hit the same high bar, but it’s still an excellent rip-roaring space adventure that continues the themes of evolution and time. Thoroughly enjoyable.

★★★☆☆

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

My final foray to ancient Greece for the year. This is a debut novel that’s absolutely on par with the other Homeric writers I’ve been reading. Even though you know where things are headed, you can’t turn away. In other words, it’s a classic Greek tragedy.

★★★☆☆

Extra(ordinary) People by Joanna Russ

I had’t read any Joanna Russ before, which was something I’ve been meaning to rectify. I picked up a second-hand copy of this slim volume of short stories that was published by The Women’s Press back in the 80s but which is now out of print. Stories are vaguely connected and they all explore identity, gender, disguises and passing. But it’s the opening award-winning story Souls that’s the real stand-out. Well worth reading.

★★★☆☆

So that was my reading year. There were some disappointments in the sci-fi category, with both Babel and The Water Knife, but generally the quality was high.

I didn’t really read enough non-fiction to choose a best one of the year.

When it came to fiction, there was a clear winner: Circe by Madeline Miller.

If you fancy reading any of the books I’ve reviewed here, there’s a list of them on bookshop.org. Or go to your local library.

If you’re interested in my round-ups from previous years, here they are:

• Books I read in 2022,
• Books I read in 2021,
• Books I read in 2020,
• Books I read in 2019,
• Books I read in 2018, and
• Books I read in 2017.

I was doing some housekeeping on my website recently, tidying up some broken links, that kind of thing. I happened on the transcript and video for the talk I gave two years ago called “Sci-fi and Me.”

I really enjoyed preparing and giving that talk. It’s the kind of topic I’d love to speak/podcast about more.

Part of the structure of the talk involved me describing ten topics that might be encountered in the literature of science fiction. I describe the topic, mention some examples, and then choose one book as my pick for that topic.

For the topic of post-apocalypse stories, I chose Emily St. John Mandell’s Station Eleven. I love that book, and the equally excellent—though different—television series.

I’ve written in the past about why I love it:

Station Eleven describes a group of people in a post-pandemic world travelling around performing Shakespeare plays. At first I thought this was a ridiculous conceit. Then I realised that this was the whole point. We don’t have to watch Shakespeare to survive. But there’s a difference between surviving and living.

You’ve got a post-apocalyptic scenario where the pursuit of art helps giving meaning to life. That’s Station Eleven, but it also describes a film currently streaming on Netflix called Apocalypse Clown. Shakespeare’s been swapped for clowning, the apocalypse is set in Ireland, and the film is a comedy, but in a strange way, it tackles the same issue at the heart of Station Eleven: survival is insufficent.

I really enjoyed Apocalypse Clown, mostly down to Natalie Palamides’s scene-stealing performance. It very much slipped by under the radar, unlike the recent Netflix production Leave The World Behind

If you haven’t watched Leave The World Behind yet, stop reading please. Because I want to talk about the ending of the film.

SPOILERS

I never read the Rumaan Alam novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The mounting dread, the slow trickle of information, all good vibey stuff.

What I really liked was the way you can read the ending in two different ways.

On the large scale, we hear how everything that has unfolded is leading to the country tearing itself apart—something we see beginning to happen in the distance.

But on the smaller scale, we see people come together. When the final act was introduced as “The Last One” I thought we might be in for the typical trope of people turning on one another until there’s a final survivor. But instead we see people who have been mistrustful of one another come to help each other. It felt very true to the reality described in Rebecca Solnit’s excellent A Paradise Built In Hell.

The dichotomy between the large-scale pessimism and the smale-scale optimism rang true. It reminded me of The Situation. The COVID-19 pandemic was like a Rorscharch test that changed as you zoomed in and out:

I’ve noticed concentric circles of feelings tied to geography—positive in the centre, and very negative at the edges. What I mean is, if you look at what’s happening in your building and your street, it’s quite amazing how people are pulling together.

But once you look further than that, things turn increasingly sour. At the country level, incompetence and mismanagement seem to be the order of the day. And once you expand out to the whole world, who can blame you for feeling overwhelmed with despair?

But the world is made up of countries, and countries are made up of communities, and these communities are made up of people who are pulling together and helping one another.

Emily F. Gorcenski: How I Read 40 Books and Extinguished the World on Fire

I’ve found that there’s way more good people than bad. There’s way more people willing to help than willing to hurt. Some things are really scary but there’s way more people out there willing to guide us through the darkness than we think. The cynic in me wants to say that the “powers that be” want us to be endlessly doomscrolling and losing hope and snuffing out optimism. We shouldn’t give them what they want. There’s a lot of beauty in the world still within our grasp. We’re better when we’re poets, when we’re learners and listeners, when we’re builders and not breakers.

Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA? – Terence Eden’s Blog

I want to live in a future where Artificial Intelligences can relieve humans of the drudgery of labour. But I don’t want to live in a future which is built by ripping-off people against their will.

Word Count 53: The state of AI and the Goodreads fiasco

Could the tsunami of AI shite turn out to be a flash flood? Might the models rapidly degrade into uselessness or soon be sued or blocked out of existence? Will users rebel as their experience of the internet is degraded?

In my most optimistic moments, I find myself hoping that the whole AI edifice will come tumbling down as tools disintegrate, people realise how unreliable they are, and how valuable human-generated and curated information really is. But it’s not a safe bet.

Quite a few people have been linking to this list on The Verge of what they consider the greatest tech books of all time.

To be clear, this is a fairly narrow definition of technology. It’s really a list of books about the history of computing. But there’s some great stuff in there.

I’ve been thinking the books about computing and technology that I’ve managed to get around to reading, and which ones made an impact on me. Some of these made it on The Verge’s list too, which is nice to see.

Broad Band by Clare L. Evans

I was blown away by the writing and the stories uncovered in “the untold story of the women who made the internet.” Here’s what I wrote when I read the book:

This book is pretty much the perfect mix. The topic is completely compelling—a history of women in computing. The stories are rivetting—even when I thought I knew the history, this showed me how little I knew. And the voice of the book is pure poetry.

It’s not often that I read a book that I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone. I prefer to tailor my recommendations to individual situations. But in the case of Broad Band, I honesty think that anyone would enjoy it.

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

I read this one in 2020, not too long after it came out. In my end of year round-up, I described it like this:

A terrific memoir. It’s open and honest, and just snarky enough when it needs to be.

Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman

I read this in 2018, many years after it first came out. Here’s how it came across to me:

Lots of ’90s feels in this memoir. A lot of this still resonates today. It’s kind of fascinating to read it now with the knowledge of how this whole internet thing would end up going.

Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu

This book is mostly excellent. But as I wrote when I got my hands on an advance copy, the juxtaposition of memoir and manifesto didn’t work for me:

Abolish Silicon Valley is 80% memoir and 20% manifesto. I worry that the marketing isn’t making that clear. It would be a shame if this great book didn’t find its audience.

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

Okay, this isn’t technically about computing, it’s about the telegraph. But it’s got the word “internet” in the title, and it’s a terrific read. Here’s what I wrote when I put it in Matt’s book-vending machine:

A book about the history of telegraphy might not sound like the most riveting read, but The Victorian Internet is both fascinating and entertaining. Techno-utopianism, moral panic, entirely new ways of working, and a world that has been utterly transformed: the parallels between the telegraph and the internet are laid bare. In fact, this book made me realise that while the internet has been a great accelerator, the telegraph was one of the few instances where a technology could truly be described as “disruptive.”

When Jason linked to the list of books on The Verge he said:

I’m baffled that Tracy Kidder’s amazing The Soul of a New Machine didn’t make the top 5 or even 10.

I’m more surprised that this book is held in such high esteem. It has not aged well. I read it in 2019 and had this to say:

This is a well-regarded book amongst people whose opinion I value. It’s also a Pulitzer prize winner. Strange, then, that I found it so unengaging. The prose is certainly written with gusto, but it all seems so very superficial to me. No matter how you dress it up, it’s a chronicle of a bunch of guys—and oh, boy, are they guys—making a commercial computer. Testosterone and solder—not my cup of tea.

Bookin’. — Ethan Marcotte

The twelve(!) year old photo that Ethan has illustrated this post with still makes my heart sing.

There are two kinds of time-travel stories.

There are time-travel stories that explore the many-worlds hypothesis. Going back in time and making a change forks the universe. But the universe is constantly forking anyway. So effectively the time travel is a kind of universe-hopping (there’s a big crossover here with the alternative history subgenre).

The problem with multiverse stories is that there’s always a reset available. No matter how bad things get, there’s a parallel universe where everything is hunky dory.

The other kind of time travel story explores the idea of a block universe. There is one single timeline.

This is what you’ll find in Tenet, for example, or for a beautiful reduced test case, the Ted Chiang short story What’s Expected Of Us. That gets straight to the heart of the biggest implication of a block universe—the lack of free will.

There’s no changing what has happened or what will happen. In fact, the very act of trying to change the past often turns out to be the cause of what you’re trying to prevent in the present (like in Twelve Monkeys).

I’ve often referred to these single-timeline stories as being like Greek tragedies. But only recently—as I’ve been reading quite a bit of Greek mythology—have I realised that the reverse is also true:

Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.

Hear me out…

Time-travel stories aren’t actually about physically travelling in time. That’s just a convenience for the important part—information travelling in time. That’s at the heart of most time-travel stories; informaton from the future travelling back to the past.

William Gibson’s The Peripheral—very much a many-worlds story with its alternate universe “stubs”—takes this to its extreme. Nothing phyiscal ever travels in time. But in an age of telecommuting, nothing has to. Our time travellers are remote workers.

That book also highlights the power dynamics inherent in information wealth. Knowledge of the future gives you an advantage that you can exploit in the past. This is what Mark Twain’s Connecticut yankee does in King Arthur’s court.

This power dynamic is brilliantly inverted in Octavia Butler’s brilliant Kindred. No amount of information can help you if your place in society is determined by the colour of your skin.

Anyway, the point is that information flow is what matters in time-travel stories. Therefore any story where information travels backwards in time is a time-travel story.

That includes any story with a prophecy. A prophecy is information about the future, like:

Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother.

You can try to change your fate, but you’ll just end up triggering it instead.

Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.