"The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur Clarke lured me into lifelong science fiction fandom.  I still remember reading his "Against the Fall of Night" and long afterwards dreaming about the cities of Diaspar and Liz.  Eventually I made up my mind to read everything Clarke ever wrote, and almost finished all his fiction works!  Almost, but not quite.  Although I read Clarke's non-fiction as well, I was less impressed by it than by his fiction.  I really liked the Mysterious World series on TV, and bought the book that went with it (actually all three books), but I was disappointed that the book was written by other people, while Clarke would only give his thoughts on the chapter/episode subject matter.

"The light of other days" is a similar case.  It is written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis (probably just an idea) by Clarke.  It uses elements from Clarke's "Childhood's End" which is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. 

The idea is along Einsten's joke that if you had a lens powerful enough you could see around the curvature of the Universe, and thus see the past.  You wouldn't be able to travel back in time, as that is always to remain impossible because of entropy and preservation of mass, but you would be able to see the light of the past and thus also the images that light is carrying.   There is no such thing as physical time travel and there will never be one (otherwise we'd be swarmed with time tourists already), despite the silly story arches in sci-fi shows.  Also no one will every be able to influence the past, since light travels only one way, from the past to the present and the future.

Baxter's book talks about a WormCam, which is a wormhole into time and space, that can see light from past events, pretty much anywhere and anytime.  Besides the romantic story and the sociological didactic story about a self-made billionaire creating a clone of himself in order to be in full control (spoilers!!!), the book is mostly a speculation on what changes in society and people when everybody knows that they are under constant surveillance at every moment of their existence.

Obviously the society as we know it would fall apart, as everyone sane knows that it is based on lies, delusions and secrets, that are mostly getting passed for "morality and rules."  When everyone knows everything about everyone else, politics and crime are almost impossible, while people start walking around naked and having sex in public, as everyone can see them through a WormCam nomatter where and when.

Also many myths fall apart, like Jesus, Moses, Ice Age, Human Ancestors, Columbus, etc. as now everyone can see what really happened (or nothing happened at all!) and uncover the lies and cover ups in the official versions.

Interesting book, but it has the attraction of non-fiction, more than that of a fiction book.

"The Last Wish" by Andrzej Sapkowski

This is the first book of The Witcher heptalogy (so far) and it is actually good!  Well, anything would be good compared to "Blood of Elves" so the bar was not particularly high.  This book is presented as a collection of short stories, and it is true that many of the stories have been published before in various magazines, but the first story is an over-arching narrative within which the other stories are presented as chapters in Chaucerian style, as stories told by Geralt to various people while waiting in the temple for his wounds to recuperate.

"The Voice of Reason" is the over-arching story, giving us insight into how the local authorities view the witchers (hint, horribly, which is tenuous, because witchers perform enormous services to the government and the people by taking on monsters that even the bravest (?) knights and soldiers are afraid to do.  In fairy tales witchers would be offered kings' daughters hands in marriage for the things they do, but Sapkowski has them treated as vermin.  Unconvincing.). 

"The Witcher" (Wiedzmin) is the first story about Geralt ever published by Sapkowski back in 1986.  It tells of how Geralt defeated the stryga which was actually illegitimate child of King Foltest's incestuous relationship with his own sister. 

"A grain of truth" is the second story and my favorite, telling about a monster-looking man who is not actually a monster (doesn't react to silver).  He was cursed by a temple priestess to transform outwardly into a monster while he was raping her in order to "become a man" as his father told him.  Nivellen, the monster-man, actually finds out that many merchants are happy to leave their daughters for a year at his disposal, in exchange for a share of his treasure.  The daughters themselves, to the last one, enjoy the sexual prowess of the monster-man quite a lot, after the initial acclimatization.  However Nivellen longs for true love which can lift the curse and that comes in a form of a Bruxa, a super-vampira, which can turn invisible and has a sonic attack that renders people unconscious.  Geralt defeats the Bruxa with Nivellen's help, and with her dying breath she professes true love for Nivellen, who is also mortally wounded by her, and just before he dies, he is transformed back into a man.

"The Lesser Evil" tells the story of how Geralt, undeservedly, got to be called "The Butcher of Blaviken."  He kills a group of thugs who intend to kill the market-goers in the city of Blaviken, but the locals were unaware of the thugs intention, so they think Geralt frivolously committed a massacre.  Renfri, the beautiful leader of the thugs, is actually a princess who cast away by the wizard Stregobor and her evil mother, sent to a forest with a hunter to kill her.  But the hunter, in his "mercy" doesn't kill her, but rapes her, robs her of all she has and lets her go.  The following years Renfri spends begging for food and being raped by various men for shelter, but eventually grows strong and becomes an assassin who now wants to kill Stregobor.  Geralt refuses to choose between the greater and lesser evil, saying all evils are the same.  Renfri sleeps with him saying she will leave town the next morning, but she goes to kill Stregobor.  When Geralt confronts her and tells her to leave town or be killed, she decides to fight him and inevitably is cut open by Geralt.  With her last words she tries to lure Geralt closer, but he doesn't fall for it, and as she dies a sharp dagger falls out of her clutched hand.  Geralt is exiled from Blaviken forever.

The third story, "A question of price" is a precursor to much of what happens later in the books and the games.  Queen Calanthe of Cintra is marrying her daughter Pavetta, who just turned 15, for a political alliance, but a man-hedgehog (urcheon) appears claiming he has a right to her already.  Pavetta turns out not only to have already chosen the urcheon-man, but is already pregnant with his child.  This child is to be Cirilla, or Ciri, who is the main plot device for all the later books and all The Witcher games.

The fourth story, "The end of the world" is probably the weakest, but it sets the stage of how Elves are treated in The Witcher universe and their ultimately inevitable demise.

The fifth story, "The Last Wish" is about when Geralt first met Yennefer, the love of his life.  She has had pretty wild love life before Geralt and initially does't pay him much attention, even being very crude and rude to him yelling "you would like to lick my tits, and something else."  This changes when Geralt saves her from a genie, which she thought she could put under her control, and the genie insists of fulfilling a wish of Geralt's who wishes that he and Yennefer are bound together forever.  At the moment of the wishes fulfillment, he has an insight that Yennefer was a hunchback before becoming a sorceress, which was common at the time, since parents only gave their daughters for sorceress school if there was no chance of them ever getting married.  The sorceress training corrected her physical flaws and made her beautiful (although not conventionally, Sapkowski says).

"Blood of Elves" by Andrzej Sapkowski

This is the first novel in "The Witcher" pentalogy of novels (for now), and if you count the first two collections of Witcher short stories, then this is the third book in a fantasy heptalogy.  Sapkowski published his first Witcher (Wiedzmin) story in his native Poland in 1986.  The books were apparently very popular in Eastern Europe, but they really got to be known in the west after the Polish software/gaming company CD Project RED published the series of Witcher games, the third installment of which, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is proclaimed by many specialized magazines and sites as the "Best Action RPG of all time" (btw, Action RPG is different from just RPG).

Well, the author of this blog LOVES the game Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and has already sunk about 120 hours of playing into it (still just level 31, and haven't finished the main story, nor started the DLCs).  And because (obviously) the author of this blog also loves to read, he (yes, a guy! how curious!) also found the books, that is the English translations, by Sapkowski and started reading.

Let me tell you form the get go that if you expected something of Tolkien or even Martin quality - you will be very disappointed.  The writing is much poorer, and so are the characters and plots.  However it is not that bad.  True, the first 150 pages of "Blood of Elves" are so boring and horribly written that it is an act of masochism to force yourself to read them, but it gets better.  The last 50 pages are actually gripping.

You will meet familiar characters from the games, the Witchers: Geralt, Vessimir, Eskell, Lambert; the Sorceresses: Triss Merigold, Yennefer of Venderberg, Philippa and others; and the other assortment of characters: Dandelion, Zoltan. the Scoia'tail, the Nilfgardians, and of course, Ciri.  The characters have much more dialogue, and do not sound exactly like in the games, but the differences are welcome.  There are differences in characters' looks and manners from the games (Triss does not show a neck cleavage), but they are not major.

The book starts after the conquest of Cintra and many parties looking for Ciri, the last heir to Cintra's throne and possessing Elder Blood which gives her special powers.  Geralt saves her and takes her to Kaer Morhen, the Witchers' fortress, to be hidden but also trained as a Witcher, though there have never been female Witchers in the entire history.  Eventually Triss Merigold arrives at Kaer Morhen to give Ciri a female perspective and advises that Ciri is moved somewhere else because many sorcerers already learned about her location.

Many betrayals and battles happen during the moving but eventually Ciri is given as a ward to Yennefer who undertakes to train her as a sorceress.  After initially butting heads, Ciri and Yennefer take to each other and the actual sorcery training begins.  The book ends with Ciri learning telekinesis and Yennefer comparing the Witcher's Aard sign to real telekinetic sorcery.

"The Art of Invisibility" by Kevin Mitnick

The Art of Invisibility is the latest book by Kevin Mitnick, published in 2017, so it is pretty current with the events happening in the tech world, as books like these very soon become obsolete because of the flood of new information and happenings.

Mitnick talks about how easy it is to figure out someone's moves online only if you knew some basic information and gives examples from his past life as a hacker.  The bottom line is that it is very difficult to be invisible or anonymous online, even if one has a perfectly good and legal reason for it, like being harassed for example. 

His previous book, the autobiographical "Ghost in the Wires" is a much more exciting read, and it seems like this book has been cobbled together to take some advantage of Mitnick's name and brand (which is fading nowadays), and pull together some advice that can readily be found around the internet and organize it in one place.

Most of the advice in the book can be found around the internet, and is nothing terribly complicated, but all recommendations come down to either not be online at all (the best way), or if you do to keep separate, anonymously purchased devices and accounts for the anonymous dealings online. 

It is unclear if the main purpose of the book is to protect your sensitive data online (for example your banking info and logins, but then again, you cannot be anonymous to your bank), or how to be anonymous in your writings/actions online.

There is some good advice on never keeping browser history, using plugins like EFF HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, AdBlocker and Ghostery, and also using TOR in order not to be tracked by your ISP or social media sites, however most of the book is anecdotes from the life of Kevin Mitnick.

"Ghost in the Wires" by Kevin Mitnick

Unlike his other books, this one is pretty much an autobiography of Mitnick.  The book starts when he's a teenager who doesn't really fit in the common social groups and starts to do HAM radio chats to find friends.  HAM radio leads to phone "phreaking" which leads to computer hacking.  He starts small, hacking free long distance for his mother, then hacking school computer systems - "just for fun", then moving onto hacking commercial companies like DEC and downloading source code for their top paid Operating Systems, like VMS. All for fun, of course, he claims that he never sold any information or code, and never used any credit card numbers that he obtained.  This might as well be true, as he pretty much lived most of the time around the poverty line standard, and if he really made a huge amount of money with his hacks there would be no need for him to beg his mother and grandmother to sponsor him from their meager savings.

His hacker friends have pretty much all betrayed him to the authorities, and even though some of them he forgave (why?), he does claim that the ancient proverb "There's no honor amongst thieves" is still very true and valid.  His best friend not only betrays him to the feds, but also becomes his wife's lover, which is a really shitty thing to do.

The feds come off as some horrible people, and so do pretty much all law enforcement people in the book, with a few honorable exceptions.  Sometimes these things ring true, like Mitnick being put in solitary and in top security prisons with uber-violent offenders, while in reality he was never aggressive or violent towards anybody.  Seems that his reputation and rumors have scared law enforcement people and judges and they wanted to err on the cautious and punitive side, because they really did not understand the subject matter and did not want to be played for fools.

Mitnick is amazing in what he calls "Social Engineering" which most people would call "lying" and passes himself for a variety of different people, even cops and FBI officers, and extracts all kind of information from unsuspecting patsies who should have known better.  Mitnick is very proud of his Social Engineering skills, and often describes the meticulous research with which he approaches every such situation.

Eventually he does get caught, despite having piles of birth certificates (from South Dakota!), false identities and all kinds of phone faking equipment.  He spends some pretty rough time, a couple of years, while waiting for trail, and is so broke he cannot even afford his own lawyer.  He gets sentenced to a couple of years, after which he becomes a security consultant where the book ends.  This book is published much after the "Takedown" book which describes his case from the POV of the law enforcement people, because the judge ordered that Mitnick is not to profit from his story for a certain amount of years afterwards.

Today, some people even forgot Mitnick - I read a review on Amazon claiming that Julian Assange (!) is a bigger hacker.  Newsflash: Assange is a journalist, not a hacker.  I guess time destroys everything, which is why even bloodthirsty tyrants are seen in a positive light after a few centuries have passed.

The book is written in a very easy, conversational style and is monotone and repetitive at times, but still a good read.  At some points the reader wants to yell "Kev, don't do it! Why would you do that Kev, when you know you're sure to get caught?" but I guess there's some compulsion at play here, so we cannot assume a totally logical actor.

"Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson

I had this book on my reading list for a long time, but deprioritized it multiple times, as stories about Mars never much interested me.  Mars has always seemed mundane, and little green Martians never stroke any kind of connection to me, neither did stories of Mars colonization (why waste all that money, time and resources when we can just build generation ships like Clarke's Rama, or make asteroids inhabitable).  On the other hand, this novel has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and that is usually a good indicator of an amazing novel (to think I'd never discover The Wind-Up Girl or The Three Body Problem if I didn't scour the Hugo and Nebula awards - two best Sci Fi works of modern times!).

Not in this case.  The novel is pretty average; the science is OK, but nothing special, the characters are paper thin, hollow shells, uninteresting and devoid of complexity, basically just reciting replicas without any real feeling.  John Boone, the wild west super hero that's addicted to drugs, Frank Chalmers, the bad guy who is really just incompetent and petty, and Maya Toitovna (I can't help but reading her last name as Hoyti-Toytovna each time :) the materialistic Russian chick who uses her vagina to achieve her goals, and of course the all-mysterious Hiroko Ai (Ai is love in Japanese), who is supposed to add exoticism to the story, especially with her relation to The Coyote (another useless character), and her acting as the Queen Mother Bee to an army of children later.  Why do Western authors think Japanese are exotic?  Japanese cultural tropes are a mainstay in the Western World, only if you take a little time to look.

The "First 100" get over to Mars on Ares, the long-haul ship assembled in space.  Once they get there, the primitive primate brain takes over and they fuck (a lot!), cheat each other, kill each other, split in petty little groups, based on petty beliefs and become a sort of the Wild West for Earth, which is overpopulated and ran by huge corporation (TransNats).  Eventually there's a rebellion because the TransNats keep sending more immigrants to Mars and the local infrastructure cannot support it, many people are killed, most infrastructure is destroyed, but not everybody and not all, because, of course, we have a sequel coming!

Overall a very boring and disappointing book - I will not be reading the sequels.

"Conscience : The Search for Truth" by P.D. Ouspensky

This book, which in reality is five different essays put together, develops some of the topics that are present in Gurdjieff's and Ouspensky's writings and system.  The system is, of course, Gurdjieff's, while Ouspensky is the most advanced pupil.  There are passages from the "In Search Of The Miraculous" interspersed throughout, but most of the material is from talks and answers to questions that Ouspensky gave.

In the first part, “Memory,” Ouspensky gives some insights on memory formation and durability that are not yet discovered by modern neuroscience but ring true to one's experience.

In the second part, “Surface Personality,” principles of the self are explained and the false or surface personality explained, as a necessary but, in a correct setup, subservient part of the unified personality.  Unfortunately, the modern science called Psychology devotes most of its breadth to researching this surface or false personality.

In the third part, “Self-Will,” the difference between will, or Real Will, is juxtaposed to Self Will, or what is usually thought of as will in everyday language.  The real will does not exist in the vast majority of humans which are thrown around by the resultant of the sum of forces of all the vectors that are influencing them, without the possibility, even the smallest one, of a personal choice, except in trivial and non-consequential matters.  

In the fourth part, “Negative Emotions,” Ouspensky talks about the utter uselessness of negative emotions, which include angers, sadness, depression, patriotism, sports rooting and pretty much everything that saps and wastes energy rather than preserving and storing it.  He points out to a common misconsception that a man who exresess negative emotions (in the wider, Ouspensky sense), is honest and genuine, instead saying that such a person is weak and self-indulgent. 

The final part, “Notes on Work,” an emphasis is put that development on one's own is utterly impossible, but only through a school with a teacher on another level of being any kind of progress can be made.  Otherwise all work would be just in the imagination, i.e. imagining one is working instead or thinking about working, rather than actually doing the work.