I literally just posted Lodestar 57 and tripped over this … There’s now a word for Anuboids, also known as ‘nubies’ in Lodestar, a novel I began roundabout 15 years ago. They might even be ‘reverse-centaurs’.
I’m gob-smacked, though I shouldn’t be. I’ve been overtaken by both science and the public domain. Now by Cory Doctorow, which is a kind of thrill.
“A centaur is someone whose work is supercharged by automation: you are a human head atop the tireless body of a machine that lets you get more done than you could ever do on your own.” from https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/
A gripping read, I think partly due to the verifiable facts often quoted with present day or historical dates attached to them.
Although promoted as fiction, it’s worrying when you’re reading about increasing bushfires in Australia, for example, the fires in 2019 (!) are part of the story.
And that’s only one incident among hundreds. most events that happen in this account have their verifiable roots in the last decades of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st century.
And by 2020, Powell posits, it all already was too late. Even if by some God-decreed disaster, CO2 emmissions had stopped right then … four years ago … it was too late to stop or even ameliorate what he calls the baked-in effects of global warming.
This book is powerful enough that I will change my political affiliation and vote for the party that promotes nuclear power.
The final and short chapters in the book “Look to Sweden” twice. Sweden turned to nuclear power starting in the 1970s and was able to ride out the cascading avalanche of effects because of having enough power … presumably to power aircon and grow enough food indoors to keep their population from starving.
By the late 2010s, 10% of the world’s electricity was produced by 449 power generating reactors in 31 countries. the final chapter describes why nuclear failed in the story.
More than two dozen countries, including the US, China, Russia and India had says the author and have say I, the necessary experience and controls to build enough nuclear power generating reactors between 2030 and 2050 to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Centigrade or 3.6 degrees F.
Yep. I know it’s supposed to be fiction but I call it a thin veneer of fiction tieing together the masses and masses of facts into a palatable account of what’s facing us.
I doubt I have another ten years, but there are all you and you, my kids, and grand kids. Go read this book. Hate what happens to your country. Do something about it.
Fell through a rabbit hole and discovered what ‘product managers’ actually do. First had to google what they are … had heard the title bandied about by various acquaintances.
This definition from the Atlassian website: “A product manager is the person who identifies the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality.”
So is this a fancy name for a sales person? Maybe, maybe not. The rabbit hole took a turn.
‘Selling’ is apparently a slippery concept. Some of the people answering the question in Quora.com say product managers don’t do selling, that there are sales managers for that. Other people say product managers sell all the time, such as selling their ideas to their team (internal) and selling the product externally.
What I’m taking away from it is that product management is a process that marketers go through to identify prospective customers and set them up with the products that that marketer provides.
One example I came across is a company requiring a fleet of EVs. They applied to a product management company to help them get a deal.
Another example is the way I bought my unit in a retirement village. Although it was case of me reaching out to them through their website, in hindsight I recognize the procedures involved in getting me to the signing-up event. Interesting article I just read about it all https://assaph.substack.com/p/user-journeys-the-real-heros-journey
While I am always on the lookout for art books to interact with, every so often I see/read/hear about a book process or published article with so much promise as well as being very special in itself, I instantly would like to ‘own’ it.
To hold it in my hands. To leaf through it. Turn and turn it about, reading the story from go to woe … which in this story is the reality. To love it, in effect.
Yet this share to my blog will have to do me this time!
What’s a thing you would like to ‘own’ but cannot?
This is one of those novels that improves on a second reading. Probably I tried to race through it too fast first time I read it. And with a many stranded novel such as this, that will not work.
Although it’s a story of time travelling, and does the nitty gritty of the character in the 1300s very well, it’s also an extremely detailed story of the latter half of the twentieth century masquerading as the 2050s.
While I never confused the two eras, the detail of life in the so-called 2050s and the number of interesting lives that were being described, made it hard to sustain interest in the historian stuck in the 1320s. Especially since it became clear early in the piece that her rescue would have to originate in the future where she came from.
I found it increasingly difficult to have patience enough to go back into the 1320s and I suspect that the story set in the 1320s was always smaller. The mystery of Kithrin’s illness too had to be solved in the future.
The set-up took a long time, many pages of often not-understandable detail before we meet Kithrin in 1320. Which is normal in SF, of course. There is always a lot of material needed to be held ‘in abeyance’, as it used to be called, where a reader needs to remember a bunch of new facts before they are explained.
In this story, there were frequent reminders rather than an explanation as early as possible.
There was so much of such detail that it gave the impression of foam on the real beer underneath, or seafoam on a beach where you have to wade through to find the strand’s features.
Kithrin’s problems with the language in the medieval time where she was transposed went on for longer than I had patience for, yet this is not a novel where you can skip bits. The old words begged to be translated but the effort took me out of the story too often.
I began to look forward to Colin’s story for its comic relief, with hardly with any relevance to the main two stories.
The style tells me the time the events are taking place are maybe the 1950s to 1980s. It was published in 1992. And so the story’s present day reads like history in this present day, not the 2050s not too far into our future.
This novel will reward a patient reader prepared to chew through it steadily. Almost every actor in it, even walk on parts, get characterisation, their fifteen minutes on the stage. There were parts I enjoyed and parts that irritated me.
Reading Weaponized by Neal asher (2023) was a marathon.
Section of the Front Cover
There are a couple of Asher’s novels I’ve enjoyed, The Skinner and The Voyage of the Sable Keech, for example, the first two instalments of the Spatterjay trilogy, published in the early 2000s.
I found those inventive and engrossing. I still think with fondness about the living ship. The Polity novels that intervene between those and Weaponized are set in a human universe ruled by AIs.
In Weaponized a bunch of human characters from the polity intend to colonize an outer planet. They’re all in their second or third century and are bored. They intend to go back to basics somewhere new.
Ursula Ossect Treloon is their leader. The plot is a relentless competition for superiority between the human would-be settlers, and the native wildlife.
Neither of them wins when both appear to be taken over by superior Jain technology, from yet another universe. The end is is circular, a mystery, when a fragment of Ursula is saved by the Polity mole.
Most of the story is the ‘science’ describing the adaptations that need to be made to continue the struggle to survive an ever evolving enemy.
And this is an evolution happening at a daily at most week’s pace. The actual plot was told with a series of one liners buried in the almost baroquely detailed descriptions of the technology. Non-stop action as the back cover promises.
By about a third of the way through, I was wishing for a bit of ordinary narrative, describing the settlers ordinary time. But if anything proceedings notched up, there was never any relief.
Rita de Heer 