Enchridion by Epictetus

 This book consists of 53 chapters, each only a few paragraphs long.  It was meant to be internalized, rather than just read.  Epictetus, the famous Stoic, concocted this small volume as an extract for everyday use from his numerous and voluminous Stoic writing. 

The Stoic philosophy is simple: only worry and fret about the things that are in your control, which are very few, mostly your own thoughts, words and emotional responses.  Everything else you just take as a given, without complaining, bitching and moaning.  It is useless.  You cannot control the world anyway, so it is a waste of time and energy.

It s a very simple philosophy, but very difficult to implement. It requires enormous control over one self which cannot be achieved over night.  One has to start with small things and build toward larger ones.

Still, a very good volume to have in your library and remind yourself once in a while. 

Children of the Sky by Vernor Virge

 Second part of the "Fire Upon the Deep", written 20 years later, so thankfully not a trace of the deeply annoying and unimaginative Usenet posts disguised as and "Interstellar" Net (with 200Kb bandwidth - that's huge!).  Also no sex scenes, thanks God, Vernor realized that he is just a CompSci geek, so he is nowhere near having the proper experience to write proper sex scenes.  The few kisses described are more than enough.

The book describes a period 10 years after the first one. The Children have been woken from Cold Sleep and they are 10 years older, meaning Johanna is 24 and Jefri is 19.  Ravna is still 35 since she received an aging treatment in the "High Beyond" that should allow her to live for 500 years or more.  This is also a part of the envy of the other children, since they grow old much faster and will die sooner, since they are stuck in the "Slow Zone" where advanced technology doesn't work.  So a rebellion occurs, lead by the fork-tongued boyfriend of Johanna - Nevil, who actually murders quite a few people throughout the book, especially at the end with the beam, but everyone seems to be OK with just letting him leave and start another 'revisionist' colony - very strange and unrealistic.

The rest of the book is more like a medieval adventure book, rather than a science fiction one. There is almost no technology mentioned at all beyond the Tines' medieval level one. The book is full of twists, betrayals, double-betrayals, but it is all character-based, not really anything to do with science fiction.  As a whole it is a weaker book than the previous one, and especially since the Tines we came to love in the previous tome, like Pilgrim and Woodcarver, barely have any page-time in this volume.

The new big-baddy is Vendacious which apparently develops an entire empire, together with Scribers brood-brother Tycoon, relying only on the "Dataset" he stole from Johanna, pretty much the equivalent of an iPad with downloaded offline Wikipedia on it.  Pretty unrealistic.

Anyway, he does get punished at the end, pretty appropriately, but not enough gloating in his death, especially since he gouged eyes, cut limbs and murdered freely throughout the book.  We don't learn too much more about the Tines than in the previous book, but things introduced there are further developed here. The "Tropical Choir" is an interesting mega-hive-mind concept, but reminds too much of Clarke's "Childhood End."  And I really hoped for more page-time for Greenstalk who gets only a couple of pages (out of 500), which is total loss, IMHO.

Oh yeah, and to emphasize once again, Vernor, buddy, there is no such thing as "Technological Singularity" and there will never be one.  There's that.