What I'm Reading

Books Read in 2024

Every year I set myself a target of reading at least sixty books. These are my reviews of the books I've read so far in 2024.

In 2023 I read and reviewed 76 books.

Published by: Titan Books, 2021

This one was a Christmas present from my brother Andy, and he knows my tastes very well. It's an A4-sized art book full of glorious colour paintings of Godzilla in most of the different shapes and sizes he's adopted since Ichiro Honda's movie was released way back in 1954. There are also some gorgeous black and white illustrations done with pen and ink of supporting characters and the (occasionally somewhat wonky) military hardware which they employed in an attempt to keep one kaiju or another in check (which almost always failed, and usually resulted in its operators being either stomped on or incinerated, or possibly both). Even as a small child I'd learned that being a member of Japan's defence forces in the movies was unlikely to offer long-term job security.

One double-page spread features pencil portraits of the Big Guy's head and it's fascinating to see how his look has evolved over the decades. There is also plenty of art featuring the franchise's villains, from King Ghidorah and Hedorah to Mechagodzilla and even the most pathetic of all the Toho monsters, Gigan—who unaccountably gets a whole page to himself.

The book's a delight.

Published by: Yellow Kite, 2023

David Nutt was fired from his position as the government's so-called "Drugs Tzar" in 2009 after ministers disagreed with the opinion he was expressing in the media—a not unreasonable one, in my opinion—that that illicit drugs should be classified according to the actual evidence of the harm they cause. The government clearly much preferred to be driven by moral panics, as they have been for the last fifty years, which (as Professor Nutt shows very clearly in this book) has led to millions of deaths occurring as a result of a number of illnesses which psychedelics may very well have been able to treat.

The book summarises the current state of affairs regarding the legality of the main psychedelics together with related drugs such as ketamine (which has some success in treating depression, but the brain damage, memory loss, and risk of death are kind of off-putting; it's what killed Matthew Perry, after all). I was surprised by just how many of the drugs which the media have demonised appear to have immense value when they are used as therapeutic tools, even if I'd never heard of most of them.

In the 1950s, many of these banned substances were viewed as promising treatments for depression, anxiety, addiction, and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the last few years, activists have finally succeeded in getting research on them restarted and modern studies have repeatedly shown that many of them, particularly psilocybin and LSD, have a remarkable success rate with patients. The results obtained in some studies have resulted in these psychedelics even being classified as "breakthrough treatments" in the United States, which signifies that further research should be organised as a matter of urgency. However, as Professor Nutt points out, it is still illegal to possess either psilocybin or LSD in the UK, and the same holds true in much of the rest of the world. It's tempting to imagine how things might have panned out if only Timothy Leary had not provoked the US Government as strongly as he did by gleefully evangelising psychedelic drugs in the 1960s. But, as Professor Nutt observes in the first chapter of the book,

"History has shown us that psychedelics were not banned because they were harmful. They were banned because they were changing the way people thought about the big issues of the world, which made them terrifying for the establishment."

Professor Nutt shows just how skewed the news media's treatment of such substances is with a selection of brutal statistics: back in the 1990s, every single death as a result of someone taking Ecstasy made the papers. Yet less than 2% of alcohol-related deaths over the same period were given equivalent coverage. Why?

But times appear to be changing. Prince Harry has written about how his experiences participating in an ayahuasca ritual and how they helped him to process his mother's death. Daily Mail readers will still clutch their pearls in horror at such revelations, of course; but the debate about psychedelics has begun again, and it would appear that the evidence is now on Harry's side. If you want to join in the conversation with an informed and sober point of view, I suggest you start by reading this book.

Published by: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

Mr Greenewald runs a popular UFOlogy website called The Black Vault which (according to its Wikipedia entry) provides access to more than two million pages of UFO-related documents, including approximately 130,000 pages of material which he obtained by submitting requests under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) to the United States Government. Although much of the content of these documents is "redacted" (in other words, it's been crossed out with black marker pen to render it illegible) Mr Greenwald has been able to tease out some interesting aspects of the US military's involvement with anomalous phenomena in the decades after Kenneth Arnold kicked things off with his sighting of mysterious objects flying over the Cascade Mountains in 1947. Aside from one or two goofs (page 42 is supposed to show two different photographs, but the second picture is just the first one rotated through 180° and slightly overexposed) it's an impressive piece of work.

But its focus is not on the UFOs themselves. Only a handful of cases are discussed in the book, and as I'll show in a moment, they constitute the weakest part of the book. Instead, Greenewald has painstakingly pieced together the procedures used by the governments of the United States and Canada to gather records of UFO sightings (even though they insisted that this doesn't happen) and he has even unearthed much of the network of agencies and organizations who are supplied with them. Clearly, the powers that be are still very interested in hearing about such things, even if the official line remains that they don't exist. However, the principal lesson which can be learned from this book (and it's a point I already made when I reviewed Nick Redfern's A Covert Agenda, below) is that government bureaucracy is invariably ridiculously inefficient and if two different departments are responsible for operating on common ground, they will always prove to be terrible at sharing information with each other, regardless of its importance. So we get instances where Agency A tells the author that they have no records of something, and a week later someone from Agency B happily tells him that they have copies of the documents on their desk because they had been forwarded there by Agency A, and would he like copies? Elsewhere, the author discovers that a form for reporting sightings can be downloaded from a government website right up until the day when he mentions it in a television interview, at which point the web page is hastily amended to remove all mention of such things.

No extraterrestrials or alien technology are required for things like this to happen. Nor need there be any form of vast, deliberate conspiracy to keep "the truth" from the general public. Basic human incompetence is all you need, and we have seemingly unlimited supplies of that.

Focusing exclusively on government paperwork puts the author at the same disadvantage I encountered with Nick Cook's book which I reviewed below: he is apparently unfamiliar with the social history of the phenomenon outside government circles and this results in an ignorance of how the belief structures of UFO culture have evolved over time (perhaps because unlike me, he hasn't been reading absolutely any and every book on the subject—good and bad—that he could get his hands on for the best part of sixty years).

For example, Mr Greenewald scoffs at the seeming anachronism of the U.S. Government's debunking of the notorious Roswell incident by citing documents which were written some ten years after the fact. He is apparently unaware that the original tale of a crashed flying disc only gained many of the accoutrements which it now has (the recovery of alien bodies, the capture of living extraterrestrial biological entities or EBEs, adoption of alien technology, the exchange of people with other planets, black ops etc.) when it resurfaced in the 1970s thanks to the efforts of flying saucer enthusiast Stanton Friedman. The original story disappeared for thirty years not because it had been hushed up, but because the media judged that the original story had been resolved satisfactorily. And I'm old enough to remember that it was the National Enquirer magazine (not exactly a bastion of honest journalism) who picked up on Friedman's story and ran with it, which led to him getting a book deal and yes, you've guessed it: his co-authors turned out to be our old friends Charles Berlitz and William Moore of The Bermuda Triangle and The Philadelphia Experiment fame and at this point your disinformation klaxon should be going off, loudly.

The wilder tales prevalent today can be explained once you realise that the Roswell incident has also been conflated with Frank Scully's 1949 hoax tale of a crashed saucer being recovered in Aztec, NM. Scully's story had already been embellished in the 1960s with accounts of an alien morgue at Wright-Patterson AFB's mythical Hangar 18 which has passed into saucer folklore (and I can remember seeing an absolutely terrible movie about it at cinema at some point early in 1981) and by then the original accounts had simply become too boring to warrant further attention. Instead, writers such as Leonard Stringfield had begun busily elaborating modern UFO folklore in much the same way that the Scottish water bailiff and practical joker Alex Campbell had single-handedly invented the Loch Ness Monster half a century earlier.

So I wasn't at all surprised to read the exasperated and sarcastic tone of many of the military reports which Greenewald has unearthed with his FOIA activities. They weren't covering anything up; they were just pissed off by how stupid and gullible their correspondents were, and oh boy, some of the USAF's derogatory comments could almost char the paper they were written on. I suspect that the Air Force would be much happier (and much of popular culture's views on the subject would change significantly) if critical thinking skills were taught more widely in schools. For example, I can remember reading claims back then that mundane technologies such as Velcro and aluminium foil owed their existence to reverse engineering of the remains of crashed UFOs, although thankfully that particular sort of nonsense seems to have died out; tin foil has been around since the turn of the last century, after all. Greenewald dodges the possibility that other witnesses could have been straight-out lying, too; but ever since the days of George Adamski, the history of UFOlogy has been riddled with unreliable narrators out to make a fast buck speaking on the convention circuit and selling photographs of gas lanterns bought at Sears...

And this leads me to the biggest dent in Greenewald's pitch: his default assumption is that UFOs really exist, despite the lack of a single shred of hard evidence proving that this is so in any of the thousands of pages of documents he has amassed. Alternative, more prosaic explanations aren't just thin on the ground here, they're entirely absent. You won't find a single mention of anomalous propagation (ANAPROP) of radar signals here, for example. If your automatic response is to treat every story as involving genuine UFOs no matter how dodgy its provenance might be, you are inevitably going to end up looking foolish. It's particularly unfortunate that two of the principal cases Greenewald uses to build his thesis turn out to be my trusted bellweather, the 1964 Socorro "landing" which is presented here as a genuine sighting instead of the student prank it undoubtedly was, and Colonel Charles Halt's lurid account of the Rendlesham Forest incident (and people were already casting significant doubt on that particular version of events more than twenty years ago, no matter how many times Nick Pope appears on TV claiming otherwise). These stories do nothing to help the book's credibility.

But hey, if it drives traffic to your website, have at it...

Published by: Backbeat Books, 2006

I set about picking up a copy of this book after Karl Coryat mentioned its ideas in his later publication Guerilla Home Recording, because from his description there it sounded like it shared the philosophy of the February Album Writing Month challenge, and this turns out to be very much the case. The strapline on the cover of this book reads, "A radical guide to cutting loose, overcoming blocks, and writing the best songs of your life" and as a musician and home recording enthusiast who has written and recorded more than 1,400 songs in the last fifteen years, I reckon that it does exactly what it says on the tin.

The book is in two sections: the first is a potted history of how the Immersion Composition Society came into being, and the second is a compendium of techniques for not just overcoming (song)writer's block, but turning you into a prolific songwriting machine. A lot of the approaches set out in the second half were very familiar, because I've used them myself and I can confirm that they undoubtedly work. My only peeve with the book is that the exercises in part two are presented on one of two columns on each page with the other column providing context and additional information. Or at least that's how things ought to work—but instead they get out of sync and I found myself flipping back and forth between pages as one column would sometimes only finish making its point on the next page. This rather disrupts the smooth flow of the text.

The heart of this book's approach is the 20-Song Game. The challenge is even more extreme than that of FAWM: you are tasked with writing 20 songs in a single, uninterrupted twelve-hour session. If you're going to do this successfully, you have to leave your inner critic out in the cold and just knuckle down and do the work, because there's not enough time for second-guessing yourself, let alone second takes. You just have to do the work. The unexpected benefit of this approach (and it's happened to me, many times) is that at some point as you're working through this intense burst of activity, your creative engine suddenly gets what's going on, and kicks into high gear. Suddenly, you're deluged with more and more inspiration and you realise that something has just let you level up your abilities and talents. It's an amazing feeling when that happens, believe me.

This is one of the most useful and helpful books about songwriting I've ever read. If you've ever thought about writing a song or two but have somehow never gotten around to doing so, this is the book you need to get you making it happen.

Published by: Arrow, 2002

At the time he wrote this, Mr Cook was an aviation editor at Jane's Defence Weekly, a publication which—before the Internet, at least—had a reputation for occasionally running stories that many governments would rather keep secret (as one official found out to his cost, the US Government squashed the practice of leaking information to the magazine early on, and quite ruthlessly). In such circumstances having a mindset that was open to wildly implausible ideas was probably an asset. But it rapidly becomes clear that Mr Cook is a journalist and not a scientist. This puts him at a technical disadvantage, because when he reads an undoubtedly fictitious report of a Nazi experiment which allegedly emitted a mysterious blue glow, he fails to make the connection with Cerenkov radiation which can only occur when electrically charged particles travel through a clear medium, like water—and because the experiment being described didn't involve anything that fits the bill, this strongly suggests that the story is a hoax. His lack of a scientific background also results in a much more significant disadvantage: he lacks the ability to determine when someone is bullshitting him, and many people are obviously doing so throughout this book. The fact that he accepts Moore and Berlitz's book The Philadelphia Experiment as an historically accurate document is more than sufficient proof of that.

He also appears to be ignorant of much of the technical and social history of science, which leads him to write about wartime "directed energy weapons" while assuming that these were lasers (they weren't; the first working laser wasn't built until 1960, well after the end of hostilities; the first maser had only been built seven years earlier in 1953) when in fact what he'd read about was more closely related to Herbert George Wells's Martians and their Heat Ray. The reality is depressingly prosaic: crank science had joined the war effort just as enthusiastically as everyone else. There was money to be made, too—if you were unscrupulous enough. My own family has a legend of a distant relative who lost a fortune during the war after investing in the development of a so-called death ray and as you can see in that Wikipedia article, he wouldn't have been the only one. Stories of such inventions abound but that doesn't mean that they would ever have existed, let alone that they worked. And yet, even though not a single working apparatus was ever built back then, in Cook's world this is taken as proof that such things had successfully been tested and had immediately become "black" projects, removed from the historical record so that they could be free from governmental oversight, accountability, or budget limitations to be refined and then perfected in secret.

In reality such things were simply the pipe dreams of incompetent theoreticians and pure fantasy. But even misinformation can be useful in diverting public attention away from what's really going on (for example, the RAF's sudden ability to successfully intercept enemy fighters at night during the closing stages of the Second World War was explained by pilots having a diet rich in carrots at the time; it was only afterwards when we realised that it might have had rather more to do with the introduction of the first radar systems). It's important to remember that fact when reading books like this one. What you're being asked to believe is not necessarily what is actually occurring and the fact that one of the main threads of Cook's book is called "The Legend" is not a coincidence. Such tales reached their nadir with Giuseppe Belluzo's mythical account of the Nazi flying saucer and soon enough we discover that this is exactly where Cook is going with this book (Pauwels and Bergier's notorious tome The Morning of the Magicians has a lot to answer for here).

Egged on by a self-proclaimed expert called "Dr Dan Marckus" (a pseudonym, so nothing he says can be verified) as well as the Polish conspiracy theorist Igor Witkowski, Cook tumbles down a rabbit hole of pseudoscience and disinformation and if you've read more than a few UFO books in your time (or the earlier reviews on this page, for that matter) many of the names which crop up will be familiar, and not in a good way; they range from Hal Puthoff, Ingo Swann, William Moore, and Carl Allen to Bob Lazar and Paul LaViolette by way of Ron Evans and Project Greenglow. I kept expecting Richard Doty to crop up; the Mirage Men must have seen Cook coming a mile off, and they clearly had a great time gleefully leading him in all sorts of pointless directions. And yet Cook never seems to realise at any point that he's being strung along for their entertainment. By the end of the book I almost felt sorry for him. What he's being fed is the same, tired old recipe: quantum woo abounds throughout and as the book's title suggests, weird physics such as vacuum energy, supraluminal travel with warp drive, wormholes, and the Casimir effect are all enthusiastically but tangentially thrown into the mix, but it's obvious that Cook doesn't really understand what he's writing about when he discusses them. The deeper he gets into repeating the technobabble people have given him, the clearer this becomes.

Rather than providing us with any substantiation of his claims, we get paragraph after paragraph where he imagines (with no evidence whatsoever) what might have happened to his protagonists. Cook may be a journalist, but he's no writer. His clumsy attempts at providing local colour as he sets the scene for each stage in his perambulations read like a second-rate science fiction novel with film noir aspirations. They start off as irritating but after half a dozen chapters they just become embarrassing. They also clash badly with his attempts at serious reportage, undermining the credibility of the work.

The thing that I found most fascinating was how credulous Cook is when he's dealing with people who (let's face it) have a certain reputation for being economical with the truth, and yet when given the opportunity to talk to a genuine authority the skepticism he normally lacks finally kicks in. For example, when he's told by someone at Northrop Grumman (who actually built the thing) that the guff he's been fed about the B-2 bomber having an anti-gravity drive is not just utter nonsense but that the immensely powerful electrostatic field which it's supposed to use (yes, we're well into the kook science world of Leonard Cramp here) would fry the airframe, he simply refuses to believe them. There's no Occam's razor here, kids. Although he never finds even the slightest corroboration for any aspect of the scenario which he's concocted, Cook treats this failure as convincing proof of a cover-up rather than the much more likely explanation that it's all bollocks.

I've seen one review of this book that praised its value as an object lesson in how an otherwise intelligent person who thinks of themselves as rational and level-headed can end up believing in the most ludicrous of conspiracy theories. If that's the case, that's pretty much the only good thing that can be said about it. Well, that—and the fact that it's such a perfect example of terrible writing, it's hilarious.

Published by: Bodley Head, 2023

My first encounter with the work of Werner Herzog happened when I was still at school. My German teacher organised a trip to the cinema so that the class could see The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) which was an extraordinary event in itself; I can't remember ever being taken to see a film at any other stage of my education. The title of Werner's memoir is a translation of the original German title of that film, "Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle." It's now nearly fifty years since I saw it. Since then, I've become a complete film nut and Werner immediately became one of my favourite directors. He remains so to this day. He's also become a character actor of considerable note working with Tom Cruise and Pedro Pascal, and has carved out a niche lending his distinctive voice to animated television series, appearing on Metalocalypse, Rick and Morty, American Dad, and he's become a regular fixture on The Simpsons. Saying that there's nobody else quite like him does nothing to convey just what an extraordinary human being the man is, but you'll get a decent impression of his personality and charisma from the pages of this memoir.

Werner has developed a bit of a reputation as an unreliable narrator over the years (as he explains in the book, he prefers to use the term "ecstatic truth" for the way he uses narrative to convey the underlying verité of a tale rather than allowing mere reality to constrain what appears on the screen) but I know that many of the most outrageous-sounding stories related here actually happened, because this is Werner Herzog we're talking about. So here he is, getting shot on camera while being interviewed for the BBC's The Culture Show by Mark Kermode in Los Angeles (including his now-legendary response to his interviewer, "It was not a significant bullet") and here he is, eating his shoe after promising that he would do so to his friend Errol Morris should Errol complete one of the documentaries the two of them had discussed. And not even Samuel Jackson can hold a candle to Werner's reading of the world's greatest bedtime story.

This is a fabulous book. It's glorious, outrageous, unbelievable, and thoroughly entertaining. As Werner recounts one ridiculous (and usually incredibly dangerous) experience after another, I found myself wondering over and over again how the man is still alive. I'm profoundly glad that he is.

Published by: W H Allen, 1977

Over the past few days I've been rereading one of the craziest books in my collection of Forteana: Stuart Holroyd's breathless chronicle of the shenanigans which took place at Andrija Puharich's property in Ossining in 1974. Puharich had just dissolved his working relationship with the famous Israeli bender of spoons Uri Geller, and he strikes me as one of the most gullible scientists who ever lived; just read his book Uri about his experiences during that period to see what I mean. Almost as soon as he had managed to escape Geller's influence, he fell under the spell of the American medium Phyllis Schlemmer and embarked on a wild ride which starts off with Phyllis channeling messages from extraterrestrials but which soon involved a British racing car driver by the name of Sir John Whitmore (who had plenty of money to throw at the endeavour), Lyall Watson (the author of the classic Fortean tome Supernature) and none other than the creator of Star Trek himself, Gene Roddenberry—who sat in on some of the channeling sessions and picked up and ran with the concepts being bandied around (allegedly originating from a gathering of entities called "the Nine" based out in Deep Space? Hmmm...) The British writer Stuart Holroyd seems to have been "selected" by the aforementioned extraterrestrials (or by Schlemmer, at least) as someone worthy of recording the affair in all its unabashed grandiosity for promotional purposes as well as being given the sage responsibility of preparing Earth for the supposed mass landing of multiple species of extraterrestrials which Schlemmer declared would be happening in the immediate future. And yes, you've probably noticed that half a century later, we're still waiting for them to show up.

The book is entertaining reading but the way that the tale develops will be depressingly familiar if you've read Leon Festinger's classic account of a Saucerian cult back in the 1950s, When Prophecy Fails. Schlemmer's communications start out being touchingly vague, but as the story develops, they become far more closely attuned to the beliefs of Puharich and his associates and the framing of the communications and their overarching purpose become more and more hyperbolic until we find ultimately that the stakes are nothing less than the spiritual development of the entire Universe. Puharich's unfortunate, profoundly unscientific habit of asking leading questions must have been a godsend to Schlemmer. How on Earth the people concerned were ever taken in by such twaddle remains the book's greatest mystery, although Schlemmer's "entities" rapidly discover that the most effective response to skepticism is to sternly chide the person expressing doubt for creating negative vibrations. Yes, people really did talk like that back in the 70s.

To the skeptical eye, the Nine's proclivity for not answering taxing questions from Puharich or Whitmore immediately but instead assuring them that "We will consult..." smacks of a con artist hoping to be given time to go off and figure out a more convincing story. It's funny how their subsequent responses always end up being just what Puharich was expecting to hear and the more closely the group worked together, the more easily such answers were forthcoming. But fifty years after the event, while the Nine's dire predictions of nuclear conflict were pretty much a given for the state of the world at the time, their insistence on the threat of an impending ice age look like nothing more than the charming fantasy of someone who didn't have a scientific background and hadn't heard of climate change yet. The language of the extraterrestrials used in their communications is full of faux jargon of a particularly amateurish sort. A favourite of Schlemmer's is "sonars" used in a context that renders the word completely nonsensical but "bio-engineering" gets used a lot too. It was a hot topic at the time; Martin Caidin's novel Cyborg (the basis for the television series The Six Million Dollar Man) had been published a couple of years earlier, for example. But it's when discussions turn to the bigger picture that the wheels really fall off. If you know the slightest thing about cosmology, the Nine's description of the Universe is laughably inept; when Puharich asks where the ETs live, he is told that they live in the "zone of cold" which sounds more like they belong in a Superman comic than in a scientific paper. These aliens don't really go in for physics or maths, patiently explaining that "this being (meaning Schlemmer) doesn't have the words." How convenient.

The second half of the book focuses heavily on the group's attempts to de-escalate the conflict between Israel and Palestine which flared up that year. While they might have believed back then that they'd achieved something, as I'm sure you're already painfully aware, that particular situation has yet to be resolved.

It's impossible not to find yourself thinking of CIA psyops when reading this book; at the time, Langley's mania for batshit crazy schemes would have been at its height and an outfit like Ossining must surely have seemed irresistible as a means of spreading disinformation to the UFO community (after all, look at what we now know about such things as related in Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men). And given the knowledge that the facility at Ossining later mysteriously burned to the ground and that Puharich died in 1995 after he allegedly fell down the stairs at his home, one has to wonder whether there might have been more to what was going on than the naive fantasies of a self-proclaimed psychic. I doubt we'll ever know.

Published by: Amazon (self-published), 2016

This barely counts as a book; it runs to just 34 pages, and they contain lazily written summaries of a selection of UFO sightings that have taken place in the UK over the past seventy years. It doesn't exactly instil confidence in the amount of critical thinking likely to have been involved when in the first chapter the author concludes (rightly, in my opinion) that the Rendlesham Forest incident was the result of "the misidentification of a series of nocturnal lights" and yet in the very next paragraph we're boldly assured that "Rendlesham is one of the few undisputed UFO close encounter events ever recorded." Um, no. It really isn't.

The writing is about as sloppy as you can get; there's a chapter titled "the Dudley Durito" (sic) about a spate of sightings of an object shaped like the popular corn snack, although after a heroic struggle the author does eventually manage to spell "Dorito" correctly. Several of the "witness reports" related here appear to have been copied directly from UFO websites like this one regarding an alleged landing in the Kent suburb of "Bexley Heath" (again, sic) or from regional newspapers—such as this report from the Liverpool Echo. The author's efforts don't seem to have run to anything more than cutting and pasting, but even this seems to have been too taxing for him to manage accurately; when he turns his attention to this particular tale (on page 30) he manages to get the date of the sightings wrong; while the Echo's report was published in 2013, the incidents being discussed had occurred earlier, in 2009. By 2013 the MoD desk that is quoted as the source of the story had been closed down for four years. But you aren't going to find any witness names, or even links to corroborative evidence here; doing additional, original research was clearly never part of the deal for this particular writer even though the case happened on his doorstep, so to speak. There's no bibliography and no index, although the book is so light in content that the effort expended in creating either would have been pointless.

If this is typical of the sort of work that's being produced about the subject these days, it's no wonder the field of UFOlogy is in a mess. This book is, quite frankly, utter garbage. Don't waste your time.

Published by: Hal Leonard, 2008

Karl Coryat is a staff editor at Bass Player Magazine and has recorded under the name Eddie Current since the 1980s, which means that (unlike some of the other books about home recording I've read this year) this one was written by someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

Given that it's sixteen years old now, some of the technical content is a bit dated, but it's surprising how much of it still applies. This is because Karl's approach focuses on how to get recordings done with whatever means or technology are available. He explains several useful techniques for organizing your recording sessions and highlights plenty of the errors which should be avoided by the studio newbie. It's clearly illustrated throughout and I've made a note of several approaches he mentions which I ought to be following in my own work. I was rather intrigued by his reference in one of the book's appendices to something called the Immersion Music Method (IMM), which sounds like an extreme version of the FAWM challenge that sets you the goal of writing and recording an album's worth of songs not in the month of February, but in a single day!

Most of all, it's refreshing to read a book that not only avoids the temptation to fetishize the latest pieces of shiny new technology but actively rejects such behaviour in favour of getting good results with the gear that you already have. Gearhead that I am, I can still get behind that approach.

Published by: Gollancz, 2008

After finishing Before They Are Hanged I moved straight on to the concluding novel in the trilogy, Last Argument Of Kings (the title is a translation of the Latin that Louis XIV had inscribed on his army's cannons). I'll try to keep things brief and spoiler free here, so I'll just say that things escalate quite a bit here and that title takes on multiple layers of significance.

While the moral ambiguity of some of the main characters (which is there in the first two books too—it's just not foregrounded quite as obviously as it is here) gives the plot an edgy, unsettling quality and you're never entirely sure how things are going to go, if you're the sort of reader who likes neat wrappings-up and happy endings, you're going to finish this book feeling rather put out.

I found myself thinking of J. R. R. Tolkien's famous line from The Fellowship of the Ring many times while reading this book: "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." There is a point in this book where subtlety is abandoned and it was at this point that the disappointment kicked in for me. And subsequent events which occur in the book's closing chapters just made things worse (one character uses the threat of rape to get what they want and the ick factor there came very close to making me throw the book across the room in disgust—and then set fire to it). After making it through all three volumes of the trilogy, the conclusion was—not to put too fine a point on it—deeply unsatisfying for me. On the whole, I'm more or less okay with writers adopting a somewhat cynical approach to the fantasy genre; the real world doesn't always give us what we want, so why should a fictitious one be any different? The success of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones novels owes much to his gleeful if brutal rejection of many of the genre's fundamental tropes and writers shouldn't have to cater to the reader's expectations, I know. But when Joe decides to reverse the development and growth of a central character and turns him into a grovelling weakling (completely ignoring the fact that this is not what the character was like when we first encountered them), I very nearly threw the book across the room once again because honestly, what's the point? And when I got to the last page and things just stopped leaving things quite literally up in the air, I sighed, tersely muttered "huh" to myself, and decided that I'll be finding my reading materials in a different section of the book shop for a while. This is a trilogy that utterly fails to stick the landing. I feel cheated.

Published by: Gollancz, 2007

Trilogies are difficult beasts. Aside from The Empire Strikes Back I can't think of any instances where the second volume of the three turns out to be the best of the bunch. This has a lot to do with plot; the author has to get all the pieces on the board from where they ended up at the end of the first volume to where they need to be for the grand finale of the third volume to play out. If we're lucky, some entertaining things will happen on the way and the main story threads will become more complicated; they can't be resolved, because that would mean the reader loses the motivation to buy the final instalment of the series, and no publisher in their right mind would allow that to happen.

I've read a number of trilogies where the "moving pieces around the board" part of the process ends up being all that happens in volume II. I'm not going to name and shame the authors I've seen do this, but some of them don't really manage to pull things off all that well and I'm sure that you've read a few novels where this occurs. At least in this second volume of Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy, people get where they need to be in a way that develops both the plot and the characters without boring the reader. The cast become far more fleshed out and some intriguing facets of their personalities come to the fore, but while this happens most of them end up having to do an awful lot of travelling. And there's a case of one of the main plot threads not resolving in a profoundly anticlimactic way that I found deeply frustrating (I'm not going to say what it is here, because it's a major spoiler—or at least it feels like it ought to be.) This is a big book; I was left feeling that it would have been better if more fat had been trimmed from the proceedings.

The narrative does become more complicated in a very entertaining way, though. And there are some splendid set piece fights, ranging from minor skirmishes to full-on battles (this is a sword-and-sorcery epic, after all; it has to do what it says on the tin.) There are some nice twists and turns which I didn't see coming, although there are one or two that are telegraphed much too obviously. But two volumes in, I'm at the stage where of course I'm going to have to read the final book and find out how things turn out...

Published by: Contemporary Books, 1993

I reread Dr Vallée's classic text on UFOs every few years and it remains the most convincing work about the phenomenon that I know about, and I have read an awful lot of books on the subject over the years (or should that be "a lot of awful books on the subject"?)

I've already discussed the book's central thesis several times in other reviews on this page, but the tl;dr version is that the phenomenon that Vallée regards as being responsible for UFO sightings and reports of encounters with alien beings (particularly those involving very small human or human-like entities or interactions with hairy, black, and often extremely bellicose dwarfs) is exactly the same thing that used to result in folk tales of fairies, elves, and goblins. Dr Vallée suggests that whatever is doing this is attempting to manipulate the cultural or intellectual development of humanity in some way. Judging by the amount of television programmes broadcast every day that are devoted to stories of people who claim to have seen or met aliens, they've been extremely successful in that regard and it doesn't look to me like that's a good thing.

The book's not perfect, by any means. Passport To Magonia was originally published in 1969 and the passage of time together with the rapid development of new research tools and techniques have changed the context in which the book should be read. For example Dr Vallée gives the 1897 wave of "mystery airship" sightings across the United States far more credence than it's now due (the sightings were triggered by several pranks which were amplified and embellished by local and regional newspapers once their editors realised what a boost such tales were giving to their competitors' circulation figures, so they joined in the fun). Several other cases in the book, such as the now infamous report by New Mexico police officer Lonnie Zamora in which he alleged that he'd witnessed a UFO "landing" just outside Socorro, or the alleged teleportation of a Mr and Mrs Vidal and their Peugeot 405 from Buenos Aires to somewhere in Mexico, are now known to have explanations which are disappointingly prosaic. Nevertheless, a lot of the encounter reports and accounts in the book still retain their capacity to intrigue and astonish the reader. If you're interested in such things, this book should be an essential part of your collection.

Published by: Gollancz, 2006

I tend to steer clear of sword-and-sorcery epic trilogies (why are they always epic trilogies, rather than just reasonably sized ones?) but I'd heard good things about The First Law trilogy and when I saw the set on sale for a very reasonable price, I bought it.

The Blade Itself introduces the principal characters, the different settings where they find themselves, and sets in motion the chains of events which will (of course) bring the various groups of protagonists into contact with each other. While the worldbuilding in particular is very entertaining stuff and the characters are nicely crafted (many of whom bear not-so-subtle hints of a dark and troubled past; others with unsuspected talents which are not immediately apparent to their companions, that sort of thing) that's kind of all that there is for the first volume—beyond a few extremely brutal skirmishes that very much live up to the sword-and-sorcery genre, of course.

I was engaged enough to start volume II as soon as I'd finished the first volume, though. Let's see where things lead...

Published by: Book Club Associates, 1980

Professor Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) was one of my favourite science fiction authors when I was a kid. He also had a very successful career as a writer of popular science books as a side-hustle and this book is a good example of his craft in that genre. Here, he takes the reader on a gentle stroll through the science, statistics, and reasoning behind both the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox in order to answer the question, "Do aliens exist?" On the book's back cover the publisher tells us that Professor Asimov's conclusion is that "We are not alone!" (and while it's Asimov's exclamation point, that's their emphasis, not mine), but once you start reading the book you quickly discover that the very important words "just possibly" precede that particular quote (which begins the third paragraph of the first chapter) because Asimov was a scientist (and as he says in this book, a conservative one at that) rather than a marketing guy.

It's an entertaining text, but the thing that struck me most as I read it is just how far science—particularly the fields of astrophysics and cosmology—has progressed in the last forty-five years or so and a lot of his pronouncements now seem incredibly dated. For example, after listing the four fundamental forces of nature (which are gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) he comments, "No phenomenon is yet so puzzling that scientists must conclude that some fifth force other than the four I've listed must exist." When Asimov wrote this, Alan Guth and his colleagues were already thinking about inflationary fields in order to explain the homogeneity of the early Universe (and gave us a process by which other Universes could be spawned into the bargain), although observational evidence of the existence of dark energy wouldn't be discovered for another eighteen years. I was more surprised by the way that the author sticks to the "planetary condensation" theory of how the Earth was formed and while Asimov comments how odd it is that the Moon doesn't contain much in the way of heavy elements, the now widely accepted theory that the Moon was formed by a giant impact with the Earth by a protoplanet called Theia doesn't get a mention at all (which is odd, because this was first proposed as long ago as 1946).

The real delight of the book lies in the closing chapters, where Asimov tackles the future: what is the likelihood of humanity living in space on the Moon or in massive, man-made cylindrical O'Neill colonies at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points? How feasible is it that humans will ever be capable of interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic travel? In answering these questions he lays the groundwork for a vast number of popular science fiction franchises which have subsequently appeared in what is effectively a single, easy to read how-to manual. It's essential reading for anyone aspiring to become a member of the Galactic Federation (or at least come up with a TV show about it).

But Enrico Fermi gets no credit here for originally asking "Where is everybody?" Perhaps Isaac thought the question too obvious to deserve it. I also thought that it was extremely cheeky to crib Frank Drake's work—to the point that three-quarters of the book is dedicated to explaining it to the reader—without crediting him for it at all (indeed, Frank only gets a mention during a side discussion of something else he did with Carl Sagan). And I found it impossible to forgive the fact that the discussion of the discovery of pulsars fails to make any mention whatsoever of the woman who discovered them, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell—even though Asimov mentions her annotation of the printout of the first recorded signal with the letters "LGM" for Little Green Men (because he could get a laugh out of that). Not cool, Isaac. Not cool.

Published by: Solaris, 2023

The Covid pandemic lurks in the background of this novella in much the same way as it does in John Scalzi's The Kaiju Preservation Society; I get the impression that both authors reacted in much the same way and found themselves needing to write something light and silly and stuffed full of allusions to their favourite things because real life was getting much too serious to want to add to the cognitive load. It feels like literary theorists will eventually recognise works like this as belonging to a genre in its own right.

Because Adrian spins a yarn which owes a great deal to C. S. Lewis's Narnia books (there's even a wardrobe on the cover, because of course there is) but he has populated it with blink-and-you'll-miss-it references to everything from Dominic Cummings to the Voynich Manuscript by way of quantum physics, Shelob the spider from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Enid Blyton. The allusions and Easter eggs come thick and fast.

It's an absolute hoot.

Published by: St. Martin's Press, 2000

Reinhold Messner is often described as the greatest mountaineer of all time, and that's with good reason. He was one of the first two people to climb Everest without using supplemental oxygen, he was first to cross both Antarctica and Greenland without using snowmobiles or dog sleds, and he crossed the Gobi Desert on foot by himself. He drives himself to the limits of human endurance (and often beyond; he casually mentions in the opening chapter of this book that he finds walking more difficult since he had to have eight of his toes amputated after catching severe frostbite on an earlier expedition). He's dogged and determined and these are excellent qualities to have if you're going to spend years investigating something.

Because this book is not about his climbing exploits. Instead it opens with an extraordinary account of his encounter in the Himalayas back in 1986 with what seemed to be an animal unknown to science; an animal that stood upright, whistled at him, and threw stones seemingly in an attempt to scare him away. The rest of the book is a chronicle of his efforts to find out exactly what it was he'd seen and establish once and for all whether the fabled yeti actually has a basis in fact. When one's thrown rocks at you, I guess you're more inclined to believe in its reality than the average man in the street.

The journey of discovery which he embarks upon is full of derring-do, narrow scrapes with the Chinese authorities, and quite a bit of luck both good and bad. I was worried for a few moments when he begins one chapter late on in the book by quoting an account of another yeti encounter from The Third Eye, a rather notorious work which was allegedly written by a Tibetan lama going by the name of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa but which subsequently turned out to have been completely made up by "the Plumber from Plympton", a certain Cyril Henry Hoskin who had never been to Tibet in his life. Deep familiarity with the land, people, and language which Hoskin was only seeing in his imagination allows Messner to suss poor Cyril as a fraud immediately. Messner is not a writer to mince his words and he has no time at all for the lazy English journalist back in the 1930s who couldn't be bothered to find out what "yeti" actually meant and christened it "the abominable snowman" instead.

I won't spoil the ending of the book for you here, but I think that the conclusions he comes to about the existence of the seemingly mythical beasts are probably spot on (and if you're not too bothered about spoilers, you may be interested to learn how in 2017 science subsequently backed his conclusions fairly er, conclusively).

It's a fine work of cryptozoology, a compelling examination of the way in which physical reality and folklore can blur into each other (yes, we're back there again, aren't we?) and it's a thrilling tale of adventure into the bargain.

Published by: Fourth Estate, 2024

So here we are, back on the Forgotten Coast for the fourth book in the Southern Reach sequence. This time around, the narrative takes the form of three novellas, which are set twenty years before the border came down around Area X, eighteen months before, and one year afterwards. Characters from the first three novels reappear and we find out that other seemingly-new characters are, actually, ones we already knew but in different contexts. The passage of time, of things being set up and also, possibly, of Area X reaching back into the past to influence events with some strange power of retro-causality, is a concept that always lurks at the edge of the page and the way that those familiar faces appear but are subtly changed in some fashion underlined this nicely, reinforcing the unsettling impression I mentioned in my review of Annihilation below that the version of reality which is being presented is unreliable and how things are (as well as how things used to be) is continually shifting. I found myself wondering whether the narrator of the book's first two sections, Old Jim, might possibly be a version of Lowry, the protagonist of the final section of the book, somehow transported back in time... There's tapping into the zeitgeist in your writing and then there's turning the practice up to eleven. Forget fake news; if you can't trust your own gun to keep being a gun, what can you trust? Another zeitgeisty theme from the earlier books—that the true monsters are actually the ones in control at the mysterious government agency known as Central—is made much more explicit here.

Although I'm trying to avoid spoilers in writing this, pretty much anything I try to discuss that's in the book constitutes one because holy cow, what a tale it is. Think of the scenario as a disturbing but exhilarating mash-up of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, Stalker, Jacob's Ladder, and The Manchurian Candidate with Lowry's manic, testosterone-fuelled craziness an echo of the gung-ho (and, ultimately, false) machismo of Bill Paxton's character Hudson from Aliens but it's amped up by Lowry's preferred diet (a cocktail of extremely strong drugs is one of the less worrisome aspects of his culinary choices, as you'll discover). The squad of scientists exploring Area X in the third section of the book comes just as grotesquely unstuck as their space marine equivalents did in James Cameron's movie, but the direction here owes more to David Cronenberg—and it's recounted in a style which comes across as if written by Hunter S. Thompson while channelling Borges—but Jorge Luis probably wouldn't have thought to use the exuberant blizzard of f-bombs which Lowry does. Many reviewers of the book have focused on the f-bombs to such a degree that they can't get past them, which I think is unfair; they're meant to unsettle the reader (and wouldn't you start swearing if you suddenly found yourself in Lowry's shoes? I'm pretty sure that I would). The necessities of survival in combat are what's driving the language Lowry uses. It's that of a man who is working in extremis; it's an ironic distortion of the madness of war, brutally direct; it's the mammalian brain handing off cognition to its reptilian core. It also adds a dash of heat to the magic bouillabaisse of language that Jeff employs when he's on top form (and believe me, he's on top form here from start to finish).

Because oh, the writing. It's visceral. It's intoxicating. There are so many gleeful turns of phrase or full sentences that are just crying out to be used as song titles (and I will), particularly once the narrative is turned over to Lowry: "An advance team of chickens?" "the refrigerator of souls" "made of stardust and applesauce" and—my favourite—"some goddamn sunfish with an accusing eye" (because if you've ever made eye contact with a Mola Mola in real life, as I did at the Monterey Bay Aquarium many years ago, believe me: that sentence really lands). I can already tell that this is a work which will reward repeated reads, and I'm sure I'll be diving back into its pages before very long to do exactly that.

Will Jeff ever return to the Southern Reach? I know he has occasionally mentioned plans for a fifth book (which may or may not be called Abdication) on social media in the past year, but when I met him last week I forgot to ask if this was still in the works. If it is, I very much look forward to reading it. Area X clearly remains fertile ground for the imagination; it's still there, inside my head, lurking.

Published by: Fourth Estate, 2014

Acceptance follows on from the events which took place at the end of the previous book in the sequence and we find out what happened to Ghost Bird and Control after they jumped into the ocean—but because this is Area X that we're dealing with here, any expectations of continuity need to be carefully managed (although it may be more helpful to gently usher them into a nice room with padded walls) because Jeff VanderMeer loves to pull the rug out from under your feet right at the moment when you're beginning to think you've finally got a handle on things and things move from being merely crazy to distinctly eldritch. I savoured every single moment of it.

The continual wrong-footing that the characters encounter isn't so much the result of one or more of them being an unreliable narrator. Instead it's more that the environment that they're attempting to navigate is itself unreliable. That narrative device is remarkably freeing and also allows the author to serve up some truly delicious levels of weirdness. So there's an owl (which might not be what it seems); there's the terrifying presence of what was once the original Biologist from the first book in the sequence; there are other returning characters who are on their own bewildered odysseys; and the narrative finally gets round to encompassing Jim Lowry (who is, needless to say, the most brutal and terrifying monster of them all). Throughout, there's a sense that any information which is encountered might be not just corrupted, but also contagious, that whatever is responsible for Area X is reshaping the informational content of our reality to further its own ends.

What those ends might be remains opaque, and for the purposes of this review I'm going to avoid spoiling things as much as I can but for me it felt like the conclusion of the book concerns an exchange of information, of a deeper level of contact, even if it can't be framed as anything resembling "proper" communication. Things are a lot less clear-cut than the rather cut-and-dried, ending-with-a-twist which Alex Garland left us with in his film of Annihilation would suggest, but there's the feel of some sort of significant change having been achieved. I'm left wondering what sort of world the surviving protagonists will find as they travel beyond the confines of the Southern Reach because Acceptance is a book that goes in and sticks, and I can think of no finer praise.

Published by: Fourth Estate, 2014

My re-read of the second book in the Southern Reach sequence follows on immediately from Annihilation. Here we discover very quickly that the Biologist, Surveyor, and Anthropologist have somehow returned to the outside world and are now being held at Southern Reach headquarters. If you've read the first book, you'll have realised that there are a couple of fairly significant problems with that revelation, but I'm not going to go into them here.

Authority is written from the point of view of a new character, the incoming new director of the Southern Reach. John Rodriguez goes by the nickname of Control, although we soon realise that this nom-de-plume is more aspirational than anything else; control is something that he doesn't actually possess in helpful quantities. The loss of agency and identity which happened to expeditions into Area X is mirrored by the rapid erosion of Control's expectations of authority outside it. What's worse for Control is that VanderMeer begins to drop hints that Area X is spreading its influence beyond its supposedly impenetrable border by strange, memetic means and Southern Reach HQ has been selected as ground zero. These hints start with Control remarking on the strange smell, "like rotting honey" which the Biologist described several times in the first book but the situation rapidly escalates in a series of weird and genuinely unsettling developments which are made all the more creepy by the way that they play out in a mundane office environment. Control, who grew up in a small town not far away, can't escape from the building sense of paranoia by returning to his childhood haunts. His mindset forces him to assess everyone he meets as being either a counter asset or a fellow operative; he watches random encounters taking place around him believing them to be staged for his benefit (or manipulation). But are you really being that paranoid when it's not just subtle events that confirm your assessment of the situation but your own super-secret-agent mother who shows up, out of the blue? Aspects of Area X's history are also revealed and we learn a little bit more about the character of Jim Lowry, the only survivor of the first expedition. And just in case you were wondering, yes, that text returns...

The themes of duplication, duplicity, deceit, and hypnotic coercion are continued. The contrast between the weird peace of Area X and the world outside it is noticeably more prominent (the lack of toxic chemicals in Area X is noted again, and more than once; there are repeated references to school shootings and other catastrophes whenever a character pays attention to television news reports, for example). The question of who—if anyone—actually has any form of genuine authority over the proceedings becomes more and more important as Control realises that each person he thought was running the show is every bit as much out of their depth as he is. Each time Control tries to rebel and reassert his authority, his efforts are thwarted; even if everyone else is losing grip on their power base, they're still competent enough to stay several steps ahead of him—or is that just the paranoia ramping up? When things do finally go pear-shaped (and that expression has a lovely bit of foreshadowing early on in the book, which made me chuckle) they do so in truly spectacular, "Oh, shit" fashion and Control's subsequent, extremely Le Carré-esque odyssey sets up the third book in the sequence perfectly.

These books are a delight. Onwards to Acceptance!

Published by: Fourth Estate, 2014

Earlier this week I attended a book signing in Bath which celebrated the release of the fourth book in the Southern Reach sequence. Jeff had a fascinating conversation with the novelist Helen MacDonald and then signed copies of his books (so I got my copies of Acceptance, Borne, and Dead Astronauts signed as well). But before I start to read Absolution and find out how Area X started off—I already know (spoiler alert) that the new book is a prequel—I decided that I really ought to read the sequence again right through from the beginning. So here we go.

Oh boy. Maybe it's just because I'm ten years older than I was when I first read the books; maybe it's because I've gone through a certain amount of crap since then; maybe it's because I'm far more aware of the aftereffects of the trauma I'd already gone through than I was in 2014 (when my response to such things was to blot out the slightest hint of conscious thought about my experiences) but Annihilation now hits home in ways that it really didn't do back then. On my first read I accepted the text as a surrealist fever dream (I already knew that it was prompted by the author's anger at the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and vivid dreams experienced during complications following dental surgery). Thinking too deeply about the book's implications wasn't something that I was likely to have considered back then given my precarious mental state. Much to my surprise, that doesn't seem to be the case any more.

Just unpacking the horrifying significance of the first volume's title landed hard. The idea that a government organization might use hypnotic conditioning to cover its own ass read as somewhat implausible to me back then but these days my reaction was more along the lines of "Well of course they'd do that." There's an immense amount of duplicity in the book (and that will continue with the next couple of volumes, at least). It's not just that the narrator may be unreliable (although she comes across as more reticent than deceptive). Instead, the entire world of the novel seems to be continually shifting and what we think we know about it in one chapter is not necessarily true by the time we reach the end of the next. Maybe I'm becoming a fatalist, or perhaps just a realist (there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between those stances right now, quite frankly) but this time around, the book feels much more dystopian. When there are any references to how the world outside Area X is shaping up, they are strikingly bleak; the comment that returnees from earlier expeditions had massively reduced contaminants from the toxic chemicals (such as microplastics that we now read about all the time) has sadly gained a new and unwanted relevancy.

There's a delicious lack of explanation and exposition that leaves much of what's going on open to the reader's own particular interpretation. The monsters in our imaginations are always more terrifying than the ones on the page (or the screen, for that matter). Ambiguity is subtly reinforced: there are repeated references to duplication, but there's an odd absence of any examination of which version—if any—is the original. I also picked up a lingering impression this time around that Area X might constitute some weird form of the afterlife in which (rather like the MCU) nobody ever really dies—at least, not for very long. But the most striking thing about the narrative has to do with the the way biologist occasionally becomes almost stupefyingly obsessed with the smallest details of organisms (Helen MacDonald likened this to the effects of an LSD trip and becoming fascinated for hours at a stretch by the texture of the creases on your pants). There's a hint of the addict in her recognition of her visceral longing to just become a part of the alien but pristine landscape, to just get out of her head and out of the world and leave everything behind. Sure, this is a novel about something that could potentially result in the end of the world as we know it, but to my surprise I felt that such an outcome wouldn't necessarily be the ultimate catastrophe which fiction normally frames it as being. Area X has a profoundly seductive quality to it and if this is the sort of experience that Syd Barrett found so compelling during his acid trips, I can understand why part of him never came back.

Published by: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2010

I've been impressed by Jacques Vallée's work in the field of UFOlogy ever since I read Passport to Magonia more than four decades ago. Dr Vallée's rationalist and considered approach to a phenomenon that steadfastly resists explanation remains as refreshing today as it did back in the 70s; finding anything of his that I haven't already read is a rare treat. As Dr Vallée points out in the introduction to this book, the heavy lifting here has been done by his co-author Chris Aubeck, who has significantly expanded the catalogue of historical sightings of anomalous phenomena from that compiled by Desmond Leslie back in the 1950s for the first half of the book—the first on the subject of UFOs that I ever read—Flying Saucers Have Landed (FSHL). The record of people encountering unidentified flying objects stretches back for millennia and the accounts of events chronicled by Leslie remain just as fascinating to this day; but let's just draw a veil over the wild stories from Leslie's collaborator George Adamski, which constitute the remaining pages of that particular book, shall we?

If you've read FSHL then a fair few of the cases given in this book will be very familiar. So will the illustrations, particularly the woodcuts of spheres and rods seen floating and fighting each other in the sky over Nuremberg in 1561 and again a few years later over Basel in 1566. But there are plenty of citations here that I'd never heard of before. While many of the descriptions strongly suggest that witnesses had seen meteors, comets, parhelia, solar haloes, circumzenithal arcs, coronas, tornadoes, and even the aurora, others (as the authors point out) appear to be accounts of something very much stranger taking place. As Dr Vallée notes, throughout history mankind seems to have been interacting with something or other that chooses to manifest as peculiar lights in the sky (and as frightening-looking beings which appear before people and occasionally abduct them, or even to present itself as young women who are strangely keen for witnesses to build shrines to the Virgin Mary on the spot). Such encounters were taking place many centuries before Kenneth Arnold saw a squadron of crescent-shaped objects flying over the Cascades in 1947. They just went by names other than "aliens" or "flying saucers". Vallée compares the case histories related here to tales of angels, elves, fairies, goblins, pixies, and demons and suggests that once you remove the cultural interpretations of the time, the striking number of common elements in them leads to the conclusion that they are all aspects of the same underlying process. And that's rather familiar territory for these reviews, isn't it?

In part one of the book, Vallée and Aubeck list 500 cases which they have selected as supporting the hypothesis that UFOs have been part of the human experience for thousands of years. The principal criterion for selection is that each event must have taken place before 1880, as this was when man-made flying objects started to become a commonplace sight in the skies. The authors include a surprising number of cases that they discount as probable fabrications, arguing that the cultural climate which led to their creation is as relevant to an examination of the current state of the field as any "genuine" sighting might be (and see the quoted text, below). It's an interesting approach to take, but I'm not sure I agree that it's a productive one. In the second part of the book they list dozens more cases that they also consider to be suspect, if not proven outright to be hoaxes (a big surprise for me was to discover that one of the most striking cases listed by Desmond Leslie in FSHL, that of a sighting by the monks at Byland Abbey in 1290 AD, was revealed as a hoax in 2002). But some cases which really ought to have been presented with a cautionary note about their purported authenticity—or even better, omitted entirely—seem to have evaded scrutiny. The sole source given for case 188 (flying red cylinders that allegedly terrified the population of Lisbon back in 1551) is given as the book Flying Saucers on the Attack by the notorious crank journalist Harold T. Wilkins. I've read that particular book, because of course I have (the cylinders are described as "rods" in Wilkins's original text). Harold came from the same journalistic school as Brad Steiger (see my review #49 below) and I think we can safely dismiss that particular report as a complete fabrication, as much of the rest of the contents of Flying Saucers on the Attack also were. However, Vallée and Aubeck make some rather interesting and timely observations about hoaxes in their closing comments:

"The problem of false testimony becomes more complex when the authors of the hoax belong to a power system, such as a religious group or a political structure. Hoaxes then become tools for disinformation and for the shaping of society, using the credulity of common citizens to propagate a certain faith or maintain existing structures."

And with that, not only are we back to Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men but we're also well into modern practices of mass media manipulation and "fake news."

The foreword to the book is written by Dr David Hufford, the author of The Terror That Comes In The Night. Dr Hufford's book (which I've also read, because of course I have; I very much enjoyed it) is an academic-grade examination of the phenomenon of night terrors (also known as sleep paralysis) and a related but less familiar experience called "the Hag" and should be required reading for anyone caught up by sensational tales from modern "experiencers" because—once again—such encounters are anything but modern. They have been taking place and reported for literally thousands of years. The experiences of the spiritualist writer Jane Lead described in this book seem to be particularly relevant to Dr Hufford's research, even if the authors don't explicitly join the dots. There are also resonances with St. Hildegard of Bingen's religious interpretation of the visions she experienced during her migraine attacks, which are discussed in part two of the book.

So that's another UFO-related book added to my collection and you won't be surprised to hear that it hasn't changed my opinion of the field, but rather it's confirmed it. To borrow a catchphrase from someone else in the field, I'm not saying it's aliens, because I don't believe for one moment that aliens are involved; instead, something far weirder is going on, and it's something which in many cases appears to be rooted in the depths of human consciousness itself. This conclusion lies at the heart of all of Dr Vallée's work and the older I get, the more I find myself in agreement with his theories.

Fascinating stuff.

Published by: Harper Collins, 2022

I have lost count of the number of times I have watched this video by Adam Buxton and the Brothers McLeod which features Mr Buxton's impeccable David Bowie impersonation, but it's a lot. I mean, a lot. The gentle sense of humour which pervades it is very much my sort of thing. Reading this autobiography of Adam's made it clear that there's a tremendous overlap in the Venn diagram of our tastes in popular culture, even if he is nearly ten years younger than I am. And yet I don't think I ever watched a single episode of the Adam and Joe show on TV or listened to them on BBC 6 Music. I'd never even heard of his podcast, despite it featuring chats with luminaries such as Brian Eno. That's totally on me, I hasten to point out. It's nothing to do with Adam (or indeed with Joe Cornish—and I only got round to watching Attack The Block a full decade after it was made); if I'd known just how funny he is I'd have paid more attention at the time (but hey, depression tends to rob you of the inclination to immerse yourself in anything more taxing than a duvet).

But this isn't an entirely comfortable read; the book is written in a breezily frank, open manner which often teeters on the brink of being too much for me. The jokey match reports of who won domestic arguments that pepper the book was too passive-aggressive for my sensibilities (I grew up in a family that used passive aggression as a weapon with brutal, surgical precision; I've hated the practice with a passion ever since and this tends to rob it of any comedy potential).

Mr B is clearly aware that he had an immensely privileged upbringing, but shies away from examining how much that might have helped his professional career. He does relate (in great detail) the struggles which his father Nigel went through in order to finance his children's education; again, it felt like oversharing. And it's not something my own father would ever have done, that's for sure.

But it's the relationship which Adam had with his late father which is the heart of the book. It's funny and touching and had me shaking my head in disbelief more than once. And the aforementioned Mr Bowie is an essential (and welcome) part of the plot, too. I'd read the whole thing in a couple of days.

Published by: Penguin, 2021

Back in the 1990s, I attended a signing session at the Forbidden Planet science fiction bookshop in London. The author in question was Terry Pratchett, or Pterry, as members of the alt.fan.pratchett Usenet group affectionately called him. I was quite active in the group at the time and so I made sure that I was wearing the group's official t-shirt featuring the Librarian (and supplied by Stephen C.M.O.T. Dibbler Briggs himself) when I showed up. Pterry signed my books, then as he rested his hand on the packet of frozen peas on the desk in front of him, he looked up at me, clocked the t-shirt, and smiled. He gestured at a motley group lurking at the back of the shop. "You see that bunch of people over there that look like refugees from Star Wars?" he asked me. "We're all going to the pub afterwards. Are you coming?"

Reader, I did not have to be asked twice. The rest of that afternoon passed in a haze in which every five minutes I found myself thinking, "I'm sitting in a pub, having a pint with Terry Pratchett. The Terry Pratchett." He was funny and courteous and quite obviously delighted to be with His People. And His People were even more delighted to be spending time with him, including me. It remains one of the most unexpectedly wonderful things which has ever happened to me.

The Terry I encountered on that day is much in evidence in this Official Biography, written by his personal assistant Rob Wilkins, making much use of Terry's own notes for the autobiography which he'd planned to write but never finished. Terry passed away in 2015 from Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA), a rare form of Alzheimer's disease which was a particularly cruel fate to befall one of the most fiercely intelligent people I have ever met. He was 66 years old.

This is a beautiful, celebratory account of an extraordinary writer. But it's painful to read. I try not to cry. I don't do so very often these days—not because I've grown hardened and cynical in my dotage or anything like that, but because I know if I really got into having a proper meltdown in my current condition I would find it impossible to stop. But this book made me cry because dammit, it brings home just how much Terry added to the world just by being part of it, and how much I loved the way his mind worked. He would have hated being described as a genius and I'm sure he would have vociferously claimed otherwise should anyone have suggested it to his face, but that is unquestionably what he was. I have an entire bookshelf dedicated to his works and dammit, in a better world than this one right now I'd be planning an extension to it so that it could accommodate even more of them.

Thank you, Pterry. And thank you, Rob, for making me cry.

Published by: Harper Collins, 1997

I wanted to get a copy of Dr Storr's examination of the psychological aspects of solitude after Jon Krakauer opened a chapter of Into The Wild with a quotation from the book. I thought it looked like the sort of thing I would enjoy reading and that turned out to be very much the case. In fact, I really wish that I'd read this book when it first came out, way back in 1997. I suspect that it would have saved me an awful lot of heartache and relieved me of the soul-crushing belief that I was somehow a failure for having ended up living my life on my own after getting divorced.

Because it's only since I found myself involuntarily retired back in 2019 that I think I've been able to attain the sort of emotional and intellectual state that I really ought have been in for my entire adult life. My decision to completely immerse myself in my creative pursuits back in 2020 (which was only possible because I quite unexpectedly and fortuitously found that I could afford to do so) enabled me to cast off the expectations which I'd been conditioned to accept as determining the sort of person I was supposed to be. I've subsequently realised that the life which I live these days is probably the best life that I'm capable of living. I don't make that claim from a position of privilege, believe me. It's simply a recognition of the things that have proved to be important (or more accurately, essential) for my own psychological survival. That's not to say that I don't cherish the dream of one day finding myself in a fulfilling relationship (yeah, right); it's just that this book has made me realise that it's totally okay to have a life where such things don't exist. This book teaches the invaluable lesson that such a life is not the failure that society has brought us up to believe it is. That's a powerful realisation at which to arrive.

You probably know someone who is in a similar set of circumstances. If you do, you really ought to get them a copy of this book as soon as you can, because—and trust me on this—they need to read what Dr Storr has to say as soon as possible.

This is a fabulously sustaining, affirmative, and important book.

Published by: Icon, 2009

I think I first encountered Dr Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance way back in the 1980s. In its simplest terms, the theory proposes that once something has happened, it becomes easier for it to happen again because the original event somehow exerts an influence on all subsequent events. With the emphasis, sadly, on that weasel word "somehow"—I have yet to read any sort of satisfactory explanation of just how this is supposed to come about. I was rather hoping that this updated edition of the book, published to commemorate 25 years since its original publication, would explain in detail what sort of processes or mechanisms might be involved and provide solid experimental evidence for their existence. It's been a quarter of a century, after all.

No dice. In fact Dr Sheldrake remains infuriatingly vague when it comes to explaining how morphic resonance might come about. Instead, in this book he just assumes that it does. This rather dodgy assumption leads him to declare that it explains a quite bewildering number of physical, biological, and even behavioural phenomena; he suggests that they all might occur as a result of morphic resonance instead of other, more prosaic and far more widely accepted processes. The text of the book tends to omit the "might" part, though. And it's this behaviour, I suspect, that resulted in the scientific establishment treating the book with the remarkable amounts of disdain which the author describes within more than once. He didn't just piss off one scientific discipline, either; the number of different fields of research to which he applies his pet theory gets so large that it just becomes ridiculous. He even picks my own field of expertise at one point and attempts to convince the reader that morphic resonance can explain the learning of skills in the cognitive and psychomotor domains, which just made me sigh heavily. For example, if morphic resonance had an effect on learning then one would expect the pass rate for, say, driving tests to show a steady increase over time but this is not the case.

The biggest problem I have with this book is that there's just no meat to the explanations, nothing at all to chew on. This isn't science, it's pseudoscience. Sheldrake might come across like a somewhat more erudite version of Leonard Cramp but he's doing exactly the same thing; let me remind you of Andrew May's definition of pseudoscience which we encountered earlier before we continue:

"Pseudoscience is "false science", not because its assertions are false (although they often are), but because they are arrived at by a non-scientific method.

Real science can be thought of as a four-step process:
  1. Pose a question
  2. Formulate a hypothesis to answer that question
  3. Analyse the hypothesis to determine its testable consequences
  4. Carry out the tests, and accept/modify/reject the hypothesis accordingly
Pseudoscience is only really concerned with the first two of these steps. It is all about making hypotheses, not putting them to the test. In fact, pseudoscientific hypotheses are often constructed so as to be untestable—and hence incapable of disproof."

Dr Sheldrake knows his scientific vocabulary; he is a professional scientist, after all. But in this book he uses it to dress up an untestable hypothesis in respectable clothes while failing to provide anything that the scientific method could gain purchase on in order to investigate and prove or (more likely) disprove the hypothesis. Indeed, Dr Sheldrake even seems unable to decide whether morphic fields involve energy of some sort or consist of something else which he never gets round to elucidating (not even vaguely). With one or two exceptions (which it's worth noting have alternative, far more parsimonious explanations) it's all just wishful, magical thinking that is exactly equivalent to telling us that it happens "because God did it." I think it's not unreasonable to expect that someone might have carried out the tests which Dr Sheldrake does propose by now, but this does not seem to have happened and without any concrete results to show twenty-five years after publication, the hypothesis looks pretty weak.

When I had a more limited acquaintance with the theory I used to think that Dr Sheldrake might be on to something, but as a result of reading his full thesis as it's presented in this book, all I see is a confused and rambling discourse that only occasionally reflects our understanding of how the Universe works and all it left me thinking about were Diana Pasulka's new friends and their insistence that original and unknown information can somehow be downloaded from some form of mystical cosmic overmind (Sheldrake even refers to Helena Blavatsky's notorious Akashic Records at one point and believe me Rupert, that's one hell of a red flag for a work of science). There's not an awful lot of difference in the amount of critical thinking involved in Professor Pasulka's book and here.

Thanks, but I'm not even slightly convinced.

Published by: Pan, 2007

This is a classic tale of someone for whom personal ideals and youthful hubris (and, arguably, a wilful lack of common sense) trumped rational or safe behaviour in a way which inevitably led to their demise. Chris McCandless abandoned the trappings of modern life in favour of a fantastical ideal of living off the land á la Jack London's classic novel of the Yukon, The Call of the Wild. McCandless was quite spectacularly ill-equipped for the challenge he'd set himself (not only did he lack decent bad weather gear, proper rations, or any form of support network, he hadn't even taken a decent map with him) and his body was discovered in September 1992 in an abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail through the Alaskan outback some thirty miles from the town of Healy. He had apparently starved to death.

Leaving aside the questions about how much of the story is speculation and how much is fact (you can read about those on the book's Wikipedia page), the one thing that you're likely to take away from Krakauer's book is that trying to do something like this without proper training is a monumentally bad idea—even when you don't have a propensity for risk-taking and self-destructive behaviour or a tendency to ignore helpful and important advice that doesn't agree with your personal philosophy. I found it difficult to feel any sympathy for McCandless at all, because the predicament he got himself into was entirely the result of his own attitude. Whether that was one of delusion or arrogance is difficult to judge, but he appears to have been one of those people who, when told that their plans are a really bad idea, just becomes more determined than ever to see them through.

McCandless wasn't a one-off; Krakauer relates the tales of several other men who rejected society in favour of the challenge of a solitary existence in a harsh and unforgiving environment with just their wits and self-belief to rely on. These accounts invariably end badly. Badly, in a "his body was never found" sort of way. Krakauer explains how he nearly fell into that category himself. The brutal reality of nature is far from the romantic wilderness that London wrote about. It needs to be treated with respect. Krakauer learned that lesson in time for him to survive it; McCandless did not.

Published by: St. Martin's Essentials, 2023

A couple of years ago my friend Robin mentioned Diana Pasulka's book American Cosmic in his podcast. He explained that it was full of insights generated by her initial experiences in the field of UFOlogy from an outsider's perspective (she's Professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina) and it sounded exactly my sort of book, so I bought a copy. I very much enjoyed it.

In that book, she related her encounters with many members of the UFO community but particularly with the pseudonymous "James" and "Tyler", two members of the nuts-and-bolts, Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) community which I've written about many times in these reviews. "James" subsequently went public and revealed himself to be Garry Nolan, a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University; "Tyler" remains anonymous (although I know who he is, I'm not telling.)

I've also written about the depressing prevalence of con artists and tricksters in the field (and it has been this way for more than three-quarters of a century, at least). In American Cosmic, Pasulka described working with "Tyler" in a way which set alarm bells ringing loudly for me; accounts of his behaviour suggested a manipulative and profoundly narcissistic character who reminded me more than a little bit of that most notorious of UFO hustlers (and the original "Space Brothers" contactee) George Adamski. In this book I was rather relieved to discover that "Tyler" and the Professor have had a falling out and are no longer working together (call me a cynic if you like, but it feels like "Tyler" had decided that his role as the story's central protagonist was being threatened by one of the Professor's more recent, Australian acquaintances in the field).

Regrettably "Tyler" seems to have been replaced in the Professor's coterie my several new fabulists; the ludicrous word salad that they spouted at her, carefully recorded in this book, is quite frankly embarrassing. There is so much of what Professor Brian Cox calls "quantum woo" it made my head spin (Brian often rails against the use of the q-word to disguise magical thinking, as it is frequently, liberally, and inaccurately applied to any amount of pseudo-new age explanations of mysterious happenings in order to make them sound plausible but at the same time completely incomprehensible, which is a convenient way of reducing the likelihood of them being called out as utter nonsense).

This book was written at the time when Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT were hitting headlines (and people were deservedly getting fired by Google for making idiotic claims that such programs are sentient). Unfortunately, several of Pasulka's new friends turn out to be rabid AI evangelists and as a result Pasulka works AI into the narrative at every available opportunity. After half a dozen times it gets embarrassing. After more than a dozen, it's become tedious. I'm sorry, but anyone who regards an LLM as anything that even remotely resembles genuine AI will always, instantly make me think of Joseph Weizenbaum's legendary anonymous secretary who was convinced of the same thing by ELIZA, the first, incredibly simple chatbot program that was written in 1964. The secretary refused to let Weizenbaum remain in the room while she interacted with ELIZA because their "conversation" was private. Humans have an innate cognitive bias that sees meaning and intent in random events and this gets seriously confused by chatbots. An LLM is just a very big version of the predictive text routine in your phone's messaging app that scans a very large database of conversations and many other text sources—not all of them necessarily acquired with the consent of their creators, by the way—and uses statistical methods together with some simple rules of grammar to string a response together. This does not require intelligence, consciousness, or awareness. LLMs know as much about the world as those generative art programs know about things like how many fingers there are on a human hand: absolutely nothing. There's no cognition going on, no sense-checking taking place; ChatGPT's responses are not guaranteed to reflect reality and Google's AI wizard has confidently told people that the best way to make cheese stick to a pizza is to use glue. The creators of LLMs like to describe such lapses of accuracy (or plausibility) as hallucinations but what's actually going on is simply bullshitting. Sadly, the (human) bullshitters have convinced the Professor that LLMs are "genuine" examples of artificial intelligence (they are not) and that they provide a portal to communication with intelligences from other dimensions (which they emphatically, most definitely do not) and provide reliable information that is intended to encourage the evolution of humanity into the next phase of its journey towards the mythical Omega Point of transcendence and Godhood (what were we just saying about glueing cheese to pizza?)

Much of the book is dedicated to this nonsense. Other parts present extremely old wine in new bottles; subconscious recall of previous learning, intuition, and confirmation bias have been mashed up and warped into the ridiculous concept of "downloading information from nonhuman intelligences" who secretly operate the Universe's "information network" (which is a clumsy, tech-bro rehashing of panpsychism and the concept of the noosphere that was popularised by the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). For a completely sober and rational discussion of what is really going on when people appear to pull new concepts out of thin air, I suggest that instead you should read about one of the most famous scientific discoveries made in this fashion, which resulted from August Kekulé's daydream about the structure of the benzene molecule. You'll also find Steven Johnson's book Wonderland (which I reviewed below) full of other examples of enabling subconscious creativity through play which do not require the existence of aliens, other dimensions, or secret galactic intelligence networks to make sense. You should always remember to apply Occam's Razor to any wild and seemingly overcomplicated story; the more improbable the explanation you're being given, the more sceptical you should be. Here, Pasulka just ends up sounding extremely gullible.

There are so many cognitive biases on display in every chapter here that it makes me despair. In fact at this point I'm sorry but I have just lost the will to write anything more about such garbage, even though the book includes encounters with intelligent researchers like Jacques Vallée (who I have a lot of time for, as you know) and even a surprise appearance by the actor Kurt Russell. The remains of the book are dedicated to earnest reports of dreams, visions, and hallucinations and quite frankly, what's the point?

Encounters is a disappointing mess of lazy, sloppy writing which shows little or no evidence of critical thinking in any form whatsoever. Pasulka only begins to redeem herself in the final chapter, which relates a few events that are genuinely thought-provoking in a manner which is open minded without becoming gullible. Unfortunately these accounts are (once again) all uncorroborated, and none of them can be substantiated in any way at all. As Dr David Clarke and Andy Roberts observed below so astutely, such tales do not constitute scientific evidence, they're just modern folklore.

Don't waste your time.

Published by: Harper Collins, 2001

No Apparent Danger was the second of two books about volcanoes included in my latest charity shop haul. I've already reviewed Dick Thompson's Volcano Cowboys, about the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Victoria Bruce's book, which is subtitled "The true story of volcanic disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz" is a much darker work. For one thing, the death toll when Nevado Del Ruiz erupted in 1985 in Colombia in South America was more than 23,000 and almost all of those deaths could have been averted had it not been for a perfect storm of domestic terrorism, organizational incompetence, professional arrogance, and international politics. And no lessons were learned from the catastrophe, either; the nine deaths that occurred in the 1993 Galeras eruption were the result of exactly the same things. Human folly and monumental hubris make a deadly combination.

I've not read a book that left me feeling so angry for a long time. The account of the way one academic in particular conducted himself both before and after the Galeras tragedy had me thinking of nothing except the immortal answer to every New Yorker caption contest.

(Oh, and Haroun Tazieff crops up in this one, too. The same caption could be applied to him as well, judging by Ms Bruce's description. What used to seem to me to be a heroic disregard for his own safety now appears to have been a side effect of a callous rejection of any responsibility to ensure the safety of his peers and subordinates...)

Published by: Hal Leonard, 2016

Sylvia Massy is an American recording engineer with a very impressive CV (she's worked with Prince, Johnny Cash, Tool, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Julio Iglesias as well as many others). She's also a very deft cartoonist. Recording Unhinged combines her two interests by presenting a fun, not-too-serious romp through the music business from the point of view of someone working in the top tier of the industry. The result is considerably more useful for practitioners than that of her mentor Rick Rubin, which I reviewed immediately below. It's stuffed full of recommendations for must-have gear, tips and tricks for working with artists at all stages of their careers, and lots of crazy ideas for unlocking your creative energies (or, importantly, those of your clients) when progress on a project reaches an impasse.

Her cartoons are lots of fun too, with each chapter being introduced by a whole-page illustration in "Where's Waldo" style showing the imaginary shenanigans at the world's craziest studio. There are also more helpful diagrams of signal chains and useful microphone setups as well as hundreds of photographs taken at sessions she's worked on. Every page is presented in full colour, and each one is a visual feast.

The graphic design does rather take over at times; Massy's polaroids of artists she's worked with during her career don't always end up on the same page as the story they're supposed to illustrate, and there are so many break-out text boxes and diversions in side bars that the main text of the book frequently gets fragmented, and sometimes lost altogether. But the book is great fun from start to finish and there are plenty of tales from the wilder side of rock music to keep even the most jaded fan entertained. Gear explodes, or catches fire; pianos get blasted with shotguns; guitars are recorded as they're being thrown off cliffs; famous artists find themselves gaffa-taped to the wall; and more than one musician is revealed as having a penchant for working in the studio while naked. Rock—and indeed roll, ladies and gentlemen.

Published by: Canongate, 2023

When I picked up my copy of this book my heart sank, because it appeared most unlikely that I was going to be reading the sort of work which I'd imagined I'd just bought. I hadn't realised just how much of a hippy Rick Rubin is, but the way this book is presented leaves little doubt in the matter. His co-writer here, the author of the notorious book about the pick-up artist community The Game and former New York Times music critic Neil Strauss makes very little effort to rein in Rubin's tendency to frame everything in terms of pseudo-philosophical woo and he's not so hot in correcting wrong word choices, either (like using "principle" when the correct choice would have been "principal", for example). And so many sentences. Are inexplicably and bafflingly split into two. The book is presented in suitably new-age, self-enlightenment fashion, with lots of white space and whole pages dedicated to a single aphorism. This conceals a lot of the writing's messiness, but most of the pronouncements come across as pompous and silly rather than truly profound. To pick two at random:

"sometimes disengaging is the best way to engage"

"Many people may seem walled off. But sometimes walls can provide different ways of seeing over and around obstacles"

These give an idea of the sort of guff that Rubin dispenses throughout the book. Forgive me for being dense but a wall is an obstacle, isn't it? That's kind of the whole point of one. Many other pages in the book—dozens of them, in fact—are left completely blank and I got to the point where I'd greet one of these when it appeared with a sigh of relief.

A fair amount of the content is cribbed from Eastern philosophy, of course; there's even a chapter entitled "Beginner's Mind". It's all kept at a superficial level, however; most of the allusions are made in the form of a sentence or two that feels like it needs to be set in Papyrus (the second most hated font of all time) against a background photograph of a mountain or a sunset or whatever and slapped on a motivational poster of the kind seen at yoga clinics. I wish I was kidding here, but I'm not. And I say this not to be petty, but from the perspective of someone who studied many aspects of Taoism and other Eastern philosophies for more than a decade. Couple that with the amount of reading I've done on the creative act over the years from authors like Arthur Koestler to Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and I found myself realising almost immediately that the perspectives being presented here are mostly shallow and superficial. It's glossy lifestyle magazine stuff, nothing more.

The book's deeper problem is that while Rubin was selecting from this grab-bag of profundities little care was taken to ensure that he didn't contradict himself too obviously. Because he does, over and over again. As a result, it's taken me far longer to read the book than it ought to have done, because every time this happened I would just sigh heavily and put the book aside for another few days until I was ready to wade through another few pages of twee, mystical claptrap. By the end I was wishing there had been a lot more of those blank pages.

But I kept going, because you don't get to be the phenomenon that Rick Rubin is simply by being an inveterate bullshitter. He's one of the business's most successful and revered producers. And in amongst all the horseshit there are some truly helpful and intelligent pieces of advice for the artist who is trying to create significant work.

You'll just need to do an awful lot of digging to find them.

Published by: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000

In my early childhood my favourite book was a weird, copyright-dodging compilation of tales called Adventure Stories on Land. Needless to say, I still have it. Every chapter in it is a second-hand retelling of bravery and derring-do, all shamelessly lifted from someone else's much more successful publication. One story in the book absolutely fascinated me. It relates the exploits of the volcanologist Haroun Tazieff (1914–1998) who was the epitome of the fearless adventurer. Just last year I finally got myself a copy of his original (and vastly superior) account, Craters Of Fire. This rekindled my childhood obsession with volcanoes, so when I popped in to the Lions charity shop in Thornbury this week and discovered a pair of interesting-looking books on the subject, I grabbed them both. And as soon as I started reading Dick Thompson's account of the U.S. Geological Survey's volcano team's experiences during the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980 and the Mount Pinatubo eruption of 1991, I was gripped. It's one of the best non-fiction books I've read in a very long time.

Mr Tazieff himself makes a brief appearance in the pages of this book, as do the legendary Katia and Maurice Krafft. But it's the character of the volcanoes themselves which the author puts at centre stage. Thompson goes into forensic detail as the scientists track the development of each eruption, and he conveys a powerful sense of the lurking menace which each volcano poses. The result is a book that's about as engrossing as a true-life tale can get, and I burned through the whole thing in two sittings.

Highly recommended.

Published by: Award Books, 1966

Brad Steiger was the pen name of Eugene Olson (1936–2018), a prolific but not-very-good writer who often turned his attention to the paranormal and whose best-known work is probably Flying Saucers Are Hostile (1967) which he wrote with Joan Whritenhour—another pseudonym; her real name was Joan O'Connell (1933–1984). I have a copy of that, as well as The New U.F.O. Breakthrough (1968) which they also wrote together. Both of those works are sensationalist in the extreme. They might be regarded as classics of the genre now, but they suffer from the fact that the authors didn't just fail to cite sources for any of the lurid tales which are related within, they were quite prepared to make some of them up entirely.

It's therefore safe to say I didn't have particularly high expectations for this book. And rightly so, it turns out; it's not terrible, but it isn't very good, either. Steiger/Olson not only doesn't bother to provide us with his references for further reading, he rather obviously hasn't bothered to check them himself—so a short story by Ambrose Bierce becomes reportage of a UFO abduction which supposedly happened several decades after Bierce originally wrote it. Intrepid newspaper reporter Arthur Shuttlewood's hyperbolic tales of the Warminster Thing are repeated without any form of critical assessment whatsoever (Brad would have found Shuttlewood to be a kindred spirit, I think. Both writers were not averse to embellishing a story if that meant it would improve circulation figures). Perhaps as a result of the coverage they receive here, many of the tales Steiger/Olson discusses are still in circulation today, although it's only the authors who haven't done any original research who stick to Brad's version of events. Most omit the grisly conclusion of the Duas Pontes incident, for example (which showed that, rather than being abducted by aliens, poor Rivalino had been murdered).

But I was surprised by the author's attitude toward the tales of contactees and "Saucerians" which he expresses in the second half of this book. It's remarkably cynical and borders on outright sarcasm in places, particularly when the subject matter turns to the claims made by George Adamski. It reads to me as if Brad was dismissing the work of a fellow grifter whose efforts he considered to be vastly inferior to his own (and he wasn't far off the mark there). This attitude is entirely absent in his later books, presumably because his publishers told him he'd sell more copies that way...

Published by: Nine Eight Books, 2023

It's quite ridiculous just how many of my favourite records Trevor Horn has worked on. He's had an interesting and varied career, to put it mildly. Each chapter in the book involves a song which either shaped his musical career or which he helped bring into being, from Leon Jessel's The Parade of Tin Soldiers to I'm A Cuckoo by Belle & Sebastian by way of Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes and Slave to the Rhythm by Grace Jones. And yes, Video Killed The Radio Star by the Buggles and Close (To The Edit) by The Art of Noise have a chapter each. I already knew that the drummer on Close was Alan White of Yes but now I also know that the "dum" vocal sample was Yes's bassist, Chris Squire; that the famous shout of "Hey!" which is still cropping up in other people's music to this day was one Camilla Pilkington-Smythe ("of the Pilkington Glass family," Trevor explains helpfully) and that the voice saying "Yeah? Oh no, I don't believe it!" at the beginning was band member and composer Anne Dudley. The book is full of snippets of information like these which any fan of music trivia will adore, even if it quite rightly draws a veil over the accompanying (terrible) music video which was made as the result of a request sent to Jimmy Savile's "Jim'll Fix It" programme...

Understandably, Mr Horn also omits any details of the dreadful tragedy which his family experienced. The book focuses on the music, just as it should do. It's a fascinating glimpse at the career of one of popular music's most interesting and talented producers.

Published by: Bantam, 1992

I've never been much of a fan of novels which set themselves in what's become known as a franchise's "extended universe", riffing on the canon and lore of an established series of movies or television shows, but I've been meaning to read this particular novel for a long time because this is the place where we first encounter some significant parts of the Star Wars saga including the first mention of Coruscant, home of the Imperial Senate and Jedi Headquarters. George Lucas was taken enough by that particular idea to weave it into the three prequels that he filmed a few years later (and let's draw a veil over those, shall we?)

My principal reason for getting a copy of this novel was that it introduces the iconic character of Grand Admiral Thrawn. If all you know of the Star Wars universe is the movies you'll have no idea who he is but as played by Lars Mikkelsen, Thrawn has played a major role in Disney's continuing expansion of the Star Wars Universe as both a cartoon character and in live action—Zahn acted as a consultant on the recent Ahsoka series, for example—and he will be the titular character in the next "proper" Star Wars movie. Thrawn is a most unusual bad guy for a big franchise like this, because he's remarkably competent. Indeed, he usually comes across as far more capable than any of the good guys he goes up against; in the novel, a minor character wonders how the Battle of Endor (which is the main event in Return of the Jedi) would have turned out, had Thrawn been in charge instead of Lord Vader. I had been wondering exactly the same thing...

And after reading his first appearance, it seems clear that Thrawn's two-steps-ahead, superior intellect was entirely Zahn's idea. Yes, the book has to hit particular thematic notes because it's a franchise and that's what franchises do; Han Solo has to be a lovable rogue, Leia has to be regal and efficient, Chewie has to be a grumpy Wookiee, and Luke has to do all the cool Jedi stuff. People have to talk about the force and reaching out with their feelings and so on. There must be some predictable plot beats to hit, with the heroes facing a certain amount of peril. But Thrawn doesn't make silly mistakes and he is never made deliberately dumb in a way that allows our heroes to conveniently escape. He's no Emperor Ming, for example—and he's the absolute antithesis of the Bond villain. Zahn also gets to work some unexpected wrinkles into the proceedings (so that Luke is stripped of his Force powers for a large portion of the book, for example) that kept me entertained and guessing how he was going to get out of the fix he finds himself in.

But was I entertained enough to want to read the other books in The Thrawn Trilogy? Well, to be honest the answer there is probably not. Again, a big franchise is going to want to follow an established formula. And Star Wars was a money-making behemoth long before Lucas sold out to Disney in 2012. Knowing that, it's already pretty obvious that the second book will involve the good guys experiencing one or more major setbacks and end on a cliffhanger and the third will wrap things up in a way that, given Zahn's undoubted talents as a writer, will be both interesting and satisfying. But for the moment I have far too many other books sitting on my "to read" pile to want to add them to it.

Published by: Cornell University Press, 2019

When I attended the Industry Masterclass at Real World back in July, my fellow delegate Jonny told me I ought to get a copy of Kenneth Womack's meticulous examination of the final recording sessions which were made by The Beatles back in 1969 which resulted in their masterpiece, Abbey Road and I'm glad he did, because I have spent the last couple of days thoroughly engrossed in it, nerding out over all the technical details (which even extend to noting which instrument was recorded on which track of the studio's 3M eight-track tape recorder, having been routed there through the then newly installed but now legendary EMI TG12345 transistorised mixing desk in Studio 2).

It's a story of a sublime artistic triumph, but it's also an account of the feuds and tensions within the band which resulted in the Fab Four breaking up their artistic partnership shortly afterwards. They never worked all together again. I felt very sorry for George Harrison by the time I'd finished the book because he was clearly overshadowed (if not outright patronised) by the writing partnership of Lennon and McCartney but it's George's songs which have always been the highlights of Abbey Road for me. And Lennon in particular comes across fairly strongly in these pages as being a bit of an asshole (and his heroin addiction, thoroughly chronicled here, can't have helped matters one little bit). The way he got Phil Spector involved in the production of Let It Be is also recounted here, and it was quite frankly a despicable thing to do. The rest of the band and their producer George Martin clearly thought so as well.

I've already gone back and listened to Abbey Road again, armed with a much deeper understanding of how it was constructed. It really was a construction job, assembled out of many different if not disparate parts; I hadn't realised the importance of Paul McCartney's tape loop experimentation in glueing them all together, nor did I know just how much of an impact George Harrison's purchase of one of the very first Moog synthesizers would have on the proceedings, and —see? I'm off in musical nerd-vana. If you're like me, read this book and you will achieve it too.

Published by: New English Library, 1986

I was very sad to get to the end of this book, the last novel in the Dune sequence to be written by Frank Herbert. As we know from the existence of preparatory notes which Frank made, he had a fairly clear outline for the seventh book in the series and he sets things up for that book in the final part of this novel. Unfortunately he died before he was able to write it. And so we're left with a cliffhanger ending that is profoundly frustrating and deeply unsatisfying. Frank's son Brian eventually made an attempt to draw things to a conclusion of sorts in two novels which got such appalling reviews that I've never had the heart to attempt to read them. Hearing that the convoluted resolution of the story—which apparently brings back pretty much all of the major characters from the previous six books (and that's a red flag all by itself)—needs not just one but four dei ex machina to get characters out of the corner the author had written them into was more than enough to convince me not to bother. And after trying to read The Butlerian Jihad, which Brian wrote with Kevin Anderson and giving up in disgust, I know that was the right decision.

Chapter House Dune follows on in short order from Heretics of Dune and you can see Herbert spinning the ideas out increasingly thin as events develop. The Honoured Matres (the Big Bad of book five) have returned because they're fleeing an even Bigger Bad who is trying to wipe them out, because of course the stakes have to be bigger and there always has to be an even Bigger Bad waiting in the wings to ramp up the tension. This is the same approach to writing employed by the showrunners of the television series The X-Files. You can sustain that for a season or two but go beyond that and you'll warp your thrilling and original saga into a laughable but lamentable parody of itself, as the increasingly silly adventures of Mulder and Scully amply demonstrated.

And so the Bene Gesserit are being wiped out. The supreme manipulators of human civilization, the invisible power behind everyone's throne for millennia, the ultimate experts in reading and subverting the intentions of their enemies are nearing the point of extinction because masters of intrigue though they might be, they have somehow suddenly become so incompetent that they are vulnerable to the depredations of a bunch of women who are so transparent in showing their feelings that their eyes literally turn orange when they get mad. And no, the plot doesn't make any sense to me, either.

But just how high are the stakes, really, if any character who gets killed off in one book can be brought back as a ghola (a sort of technological zombie clone) in the next one with all of their memories and abilities intact? How believable is it when at their moment in extremis a character suddenly discovers superpowers that have not been any part of the Dune lore up until that point? And the proliferation of conveniently useful special abilities continues here, with little consideration for either plausibility or consistency with what has gone before, let alone explanation.

The result is a rather second-rate fantasy novel with none of the richly imagined culture that pervaded the first couple of books (as I observed last year, much of that was lifted from Lesley Blanch's excellent book The Sabres of Paradise). My sadness at this being the last proper book in the series is therefore tempered by thankfulness that Frank Herbert wasn't responsible for letting things decline any further than they do here.

It's a pity his son didn't show the same restraint.

Published by: Silman-James Press, 2001

The text of this book started off as a lecture delivered by Mr Murch to an audience in the mixing theatre at Spectrum Films in Sydney, Australia in October 1988. For the second edition in 2001, Mr Murch updated his thoughts on how the process of film making had changed as a result of the technological progress made in the field, particularly with the introduction of digital recording and reproduction.

It's a fascinating book and worth reading just for the discussion of the psychological aspects of that most fundamental of cinema's building blocks, the cut. The book's title is a reference to Mr Murch's theory about why audiences accept something which ought to be an incredibly jarring visual experience.

And the quantification of just what goes in to editing a film (if you were to weigh the amount of dailies—film that is printed for the director to watch each day during shooting—it would amount to several tons) and the number of potential choices available to the editor in even a short scene shot with two camera angles to choose from is intimidating. One wonders how movies ever get made at all. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the technology of film continues to change and despite some precarious years during the recent pandemic, cinemas are still with us. Mostly, anyway. One hopes that Mr Murch and cinema will continue to be with us for a good few years yet.

Published by: SMT, 2000

I got this book for nothing as a result of a "buy three books under £10 and get another one free" offer that World of Books are running at the moment, and I'm glad that this was the case, because it's really not very good at all. Even the book's title annoys me, because that lower case "b" is not a typo, but a misguided attempt by the publisher at quirky branding. There's a whole slew of books in the series, but I won't be buying any more of them if they're all as much of a mess as this one is. I've spent much of the last fifteen years producing, writing, recording, mixing, and mastering my own music (and other people's, too) and with a body of work consisting of more than 1400 tracks and over thirty albums under my belt at this point, I think I'm justified in claiming to know a fair bit about what I'm doing. At least, I knew enough to rapidly come to the conclusion that the author here doesn't have a clue what they're writing about:

"Starting from a 20- or 24-bit master and then reducing to a 16-bit master right at the end of the process uses more bits on the final CD, which means less noise, less distortion, and better low-level resolution."

I'm pretty sure that it's not just me; that sentence (it's on page 100) is utter bollocks.

Based on a quick page count, roughly 85% of the book has nothing at all to with mixing; instead, it discusses the recording process. Yes, assuming you'll be able to "fix it in the mix" is always a mistake and it will never give you results as good as those obtained by getting the music right at the source, so of course a mix engineer needs to know the basics of capturing artist performances, but surely this should have been covered in the companion volume in the series that's, y'know, actually dedicated to that subject? Instead, we get an entire chapter on recording vocals and page after page giving poor and largely impractical advice on selecting the instruments that artists should use (good luck with telling the rock guitarist who just showed up at your studio with a collection of Les Pauls that his sound is too fat and he needs to use single coil pickups instead if he wants his guitar tone to cut through the mix, by the way). Why would a book about mixing start off with a chapter that talks (in as dull a manner as possible) about song structure, coming up with arrangements, or how to come up with an effective hook? Isn't that the artist's job? Or the producer's?

There's no sign that the manuscript was ever subjected to the tender ministrations of a proof reader. There are typos all over the place. A point is made, and then it gets made again a couple of pages later. An introductory spiel explaining when you should use particular effects or processors appears long after we've been subjected to a lot of not particularly useful discussion about reverbs and delay units. And then we're given an explanation of the difference between effects and processors which really ought to have been the first point covered, even if (again) it's not particularly helpful to someone mixing a track that's already been recorded. The second chapter starts off in a (mostly) promising fashion by explaining how to choose your monitor speakers and place them so that you experience an accurate stereo image (although the important point that their frequency response should be as flat as possible is never mentioned) but then goes off into the weeds with an explanation of how to build yourself a plate reverb unit!

And while we're on the subject of reverberation, there is no mention at all of the need for tuning the predelay time on a reverb to fit the tempo of the track being mixed—and if you get that wrong, it's a sure-fire way of reducing your track to a muddy, confused mess.

As that opening quote from the book shows, White gets a lot of what he's writing about wrong. This becomes obvious from the terminology he uses, which is often hilariously eccentric; he advocates using "fully enclosed" headphones instead of "open-foam" ones to prevent bleed when recording vocals, but I hope you and I would know to ask for "closed back" cans instead of "open back" ones in such circumstances. Some of the text is just plain impenetrable. What on earth is "Again, the of sample CD market provides plenty of variations" (sic) supposed to mean? A lot of essentials are missed entirely. You won't find a single mention of transients (or their importance in shaping a sound) at any point in the book at all, let alone any advice on ways to preserve them or modify them. And the list of things he suggests you should do to "fix" a mix that's gotten away from you aren't going to help you out; there are much simpler and more effective methods for doing that (I know, because I've been using them for years).

Looking at the author's biography on Amazon, I learn that Paul White has been a blacksmith for over 40 years and that might explain why the book is such a shambles. He clearly wasn't paying enough attention when he talked to practitioners about how they mixed music. Let me give you an example to show you what I mean. This quote is from page 29:

"(...) unless time is really tight, the mix proper should be done on a different day so that you can hear it with fresh ears. Loud sounds affect the way in which we perceive sound, so it's important to let your ears and mind rest."

Here, he's garbled together a number of important points in a way that misses every single one of them. I think I'm qualified enough to be able to unpack those two sentences as follows (if you're not a home recording nerd like me, you can skip the following bullet points):

  • To start with, White really should have explained what he means by that word, "loud". I'm not being picky here; there's a huge difference in what terms such as loudness, volume, and (sound pressure) level mean in the recording business and if you're planning on being a professional mixer, you need to know which word is appropriate to use in any given context and what units they're measured in (they're different). The book's glossary does not have definitions for loudness or volume and the entry for Sound Pressure Level (SPL) only refers to "decibels" (it doesn't mention the bewildering number of suffixes that can be added to that humble and confusing unit.)
  • White is correct when he says that loud sounds affect the way that we perceive sound, but it's not why you should give your ears a rest every now and then. Even with a fresh pair of ears, the SPL you listen at will affect how prevalent certain frequencies will be in the mix you hear. And this is a very important point that the author misses entirely. Audio engineers have known since the days of Harvey Fletcher and Wilden A. Munson in the 1930s that human hearing gets progressively worse at hearing low frequencies the quieter they get. A similar but weaker phenomenon happens with very high frequencies, too. Look at plots of perceived loudness (they used to be known as Fletcher-Munson curves but these days they're generally referred to as equal loudness curves) and you'll see that the higher the volume at which music is played back, the flatter the curves get, meaning that our hearing more accurately reflects the balance between different frequencies at higher SPLs.
  • The corollary of the last point is that the higher the SPL at which you play back a mix, the more dynamic the bass sounds because your ears can hear more of it. The high end will sound brighter, too. But if you balance a mix at this sort of level, the bass will disappear when the music is played back quietly (and yes, that's the reason why your hi-fi has a "loudness" or "enhance" button; it's there to artificially boost the low frequencies when you're listening to music at low volume).
  • So an additional, essential point which ought to have been made here is that if you want to get consistent results, you're going to want to make sure wherever possible that you're mixing at the same SPL every time. I bought myself a cheap SPL meter for the studio so that I know I'm doing just that. You can always crank the volume up for a quick check to make sure you're not overdoing things when it's played back loudly (and if you're mixing specifically for clubs where the SPL is going to be through the roof, that's a whole other mixing methodology entirely!)
  • White confuses all of the points made above with the simple fact that the act of listening to audio requires concentration. It's hard work, and your ears will get tired. The higher the volume at which you listen to music, the faster this will happen. And once it's happened you'll lack the ability to mix accurately until your ears have had a chance to rest and recover. This has absolutely nothing to do with equal loudness curves—in fact the necessities imposed by the two are always in tension. You must choose between hearing things accurately across the frequency spectrum and your ears getting tired rapidly or being able to mix for longer stretches but not hearing a balanced mix (that's where reference mixes come in, by the way; listening to the way your playback system is rendering a piece of music you know intimately will help you compensate for the loss of balance in your own mix). The passage I quoted above is the closest that White ever gets to identifying this as a problem and he doesn't have any suggestions for best practice (such as mixing at a consistent SPL) at all.

I could go on (and on) identifying other parts of the book where I think White gets things completely wrong, but I think I've made my case sufficiently already. For me (as a practitioner of what the book is ostensibly about) this book reads as if it was written by someone who hasn't done their homework and has resorted to bullshitting me from start to finish. They obviously don't understand a lot of the concepts they're trying to explain. This is the sort of book that will lead you astray and actually result in you knowing less about the subject after you've read it than you did beforehand, and you don't want that.

Avoid!

Published by: Amber Books, 2019

Peter Brookesmith is another writer whose work appears regularly in the Fortean Times; as with David Clarke and Andy Roberts he knows what he's talking about. And this is another book that focuses primarily on data, so getting a copy was a no-brainer. But it's an oddity. The title is weird, implying (to me, at least) that it's a book chronicling the times when people caught a glimpse of someone who had previously seen a UFO. I'm pretty sure that's not what the author intended! It would perhaps have been more accurate to give the book a title like "UFO Witness Testimony" or even just the plain and simple "UFO Reports."

Each sighting that is included in the book is assessed by Brookesmith for its plausibility, and that's why the book is so strange: in an impressive number of them he comes to the conclusion that the sighting—and many of the reports so identified are regarded as "classic" cases that continue to be the staple of many other books on the subject—was a deliberate hoax. Indeed, in some cases the witnesses themselves eventually confessed to fabricating the evidence. Yet these stories are still being reported elsewhere as fact and I have several other books in my Forteana collection whose covers sport photographs which Brookesmith explains actually show such exotic objects as (for example) "two hubcaps glued together".

As the hoaxes piled up, I found myself wondering whether any aspect of the phenomenon was genuine. If you've read my reviews of other books on the subject that I've read this year, you're probably way ahead of me in drawing the same conclusion. And since this book was published, even more of the stories included have been revealed as either misinformation or hoaxes. But as Brookesmith observes, there are still some extremely odd stories out there for which a convincing explanation remains to be provided...

Published by: Self-published, 2022

Sometimes you just need to read a book about UFOs which is pure data. This is one such example; I burned through it yesterday evening in one sitting (this wasn't difficult, because about a third of the book is taken up by screenshots from Google Maps; this gets extremely repetitive, particularly when the author decides he needs to use the same map on adjacent pages). Despite the rather dull presentation (the book is a cheap print-on-demand job from Amazon and it doesn't even have a title page, let alone any author or publisher details) I was thoroughly entertained from start to finish.

Schell presents concise summaries of UFO sightings from South Wales between 1975 and 2022 with no comment at all beyond the occasional funny aside about most witnesses' inability to grab a camera and take photographs of the encounter. Each incident is related in a strictly "just the facts, ma'am" manner with no attempt to interpret what was seen. As Schell explains, the stories of the Ripperston Farm encounters and the Broad Haven School sighting have been covered in much more detail elsewhere, so he simply sets out the timeline of events with a brief summary of how each one played out.

Some of the sightings which Schell includes describe what seem to me to be aircraft carrying out in-flight refuelling exercises; others are now thought to have been practical jokes along the lines of "Big John" the fireman who allegedly (and very plausibly) claimed responsibility for precipitating the Risley Humanoid case in 1978 (and that case in particular makes me think that most of the Ripperston Farm entities were most likely someone else who had had the same idea and easy access to a firefighting or hazmat suit).

But there are some classic "Earthlights" sightings listed here as well as some other encounters with things which strike this reader as being genuinely weird. And yes, there's even a crash retrieval story for good measure. It's all good-natured fun.

Published by: Simon and Schuster, 1997

In my review of Phantoms of the Sky below, I mentioned how starkly Dr Clarke and Andy Roberts's approach to the UFO phenomenon contrasted with that of the ETH (Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis) community. This book is a perfect exemplar of how fans of the ETH approach the subject and several of the people who were called out by Dr Clarke for their outright rejection of the psychosocial hypothesis (which suggests that encounters take place predominantly or exclusively inside the mind) are mentioned by name many times in the pages of this book.

Redfern's principal sources are Timothy Good (who as we saw in Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men fell for the MJ-12 hoax hook, line and sinker) and Nick Pope (who if nothing else has managed to shamelessly leverage a mundane desk job at the MoD into a lucrative speaking career as "The British Government's Fox Mulder") together with Graham Birdsall (who sadly passed away in 2003) and his brother Mark, who between them ran UFO Magazine. I have many back issues of Graham and Mark's publication on my shelves to this day, but they aren't going to convince me that this book is a balanced examination of what might be happening. This is a book for the Stanton Friedman and Giorgio Tsoukalos crowd, not those who follow the work of Jacques Vallée. It's a book written for people who have already made up their minds what the answer is, and just want to read confirmation of their beliefs.

What A Covert Agenda treats as "evidence" or "proof" does not fit the scientific definition of the terms. Redfern has a habit of telling us, "There is no doubt in my mind that..." which is nice, Nick, but the rest of us are going to need a lot more to go on than that. The thing is, while we're all pretty much aware that memory is fallible and that the stories told to you by an elderly relative when you were a child were not necessarily true, we're less aware of how unreliable documentation—even seemingly offical material— can turn out to be. A Covert Agenda was written around the time the famous (and now notorious) Majestic Twelve hoax papers were circulating around an excited UFO community. Here, Redfern portrays the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as paragons of uncorrupted truth, but as Mark Pilkington revealed in Mirage Men it turns out that they were the organisations responsible for much of the disinformation which has poisoned the field to this day (after all, PSYOPS is a cheap and remarkably effective way of diverting Soviet and Chinese attention away from the possibility that a new generation of reconnaissance aircraft developed by the United States has entered service).

While I'm sure that some of the cases discussed here were events which really took place, the interpretation that physical, nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial spacecraft were involved should never be the automatic first assumption when far more prosaic explanations of what happened also exist. For a start, many of the official "sightings" reported herein were only made on radar, and anaprop or AP (the Anomalous Propagation of returns) has been the bugbear of radar system developers since the technology was first invented. Just because your radar scope shows you something, it doesn't necessarily mean that there is actually anything there (and let's face it, anaprop is a much more likely explanation as to why fighter aircraft that were scrambled to intercept these mystery signals failed to see anything than the idea that they were chasing a flying saucer which had somehow made itself invisible). After reading a few stories like this you begin to realise that Occam's Razor is largely absent from Redfern's thinking. Read a few of my other reviews on this page and you'll encounter lots of alternative theories about UFOs involving earthlights, altered states of consciousness, misperception of phenomena ranging from stars, meteors, and ball lightning to aircraft contrails and landing lights, and even the Moon; there have also been many cases of deliberate fraud and I've mentioned some of the most notorious ones before. And what this all means is very simple: aliens really don't have to be involved in what's going on at all. Unfortunately, Redfern's beliefs reinforce themselves in exactly the same way as can be seen in the Von Daniken playbook: good old Erich loved to ask the reader if it might be possible that aliens were responsible in one chapter, then remind the reader a couple of chapters later that aliens were responsible, and then a few chapters further on, he would refer back to how he had previously provided "proof" that yes, it was aliens...

"THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT'S UFO TOP SECRETS EXPOSED", the book's strapline screams (in block capitals, of course). But after reading the book you realise that the biggest "secret" exposed here is that government departments are terrible at talking to each other and that nobody seems to have thought the issue serious enough to develop a coordinated approach to it. There are lots of FOAF stories (the sort which always happened to a Friend Of A Friend) but absolutely nothing which proves the existence (or even the likelihood) that Earth has been visited by aliens even once, let alone on a regular basis. There isn't a single photograph of anything that could remotely be considered a UFO in the entire book. I find it particularly telling that this even extends to the front cover, which shows something that might look like a flying saucer if you squinted at it hard enough, but isn't; it's an artist's impression of Messier 104, the Sombrero Galaxy. I wouldn't accept a painting as proof of the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. Would you?

There are lots of stories in the book, but as Clarke and Roberts point out in Phantoms of the Sky it's all at the level of folklore. You can have a rich repository of tales of fairies and elves, yes; but it doesn't prove that they exist and it would be ludicrous to suggest otherwise. By page 254 Redfern finally seems to realise how weak the case he's made actually is. "Evidence, unfortunately, is not proof," he writes, reassuring us that the British Government would never make an announcement that extraterrestrials exist without having concrete evidence before regaling us with tales of alleged saucer crashes at Roswell, Berwyn, Stonehenge, and even Penkridge, just south of Stafford—suggesting implicitly that this means that such evidence does exist. And yet here we are, more than a quarter of a century after this book was published, and none of these events has ever been revealed to have provided conclusive proof of the existence of ETs. A couple of incidents are described (one took place at Boscombe Down in 1994) which involved the recovery of crashed secret aircraft, yes; but these weren't flying saucers. Many of the sources which Redfern cites regarding the wilder crash recovery tales will be familiar to you if you've read Mirage Men and that's not an endorsement.

By the end of the book I found myself feeling sorry for the people who have to deal with enquiries about such reports in an official capacity. For all his theatrics, Mr Pope is to be applauded for encouraging people who see strange phenomena to report then to the authorities so that the events can be investigated. In effect, this book is telling witnesses that such people are not to be trusted and that their responses to any reports will always be lies. Responding to the public in that sort of context must be a thankless task, and one in which the "customer" will never, ever be satisfied.

Published by: Bobby Owsinski, 2022

Over the years I've taken more than one of Mr Owsinski's online music production classes and I've read several of the ebooks he wrote which are provided as additional resources there. He also co-wrote Ken Scott's memoir of his extraordinary career in the recording industry, so I've had this book on my shopping list for quite a while now. I finally set about getting myself a copy when one of the first things that Swindle did in his Masterclass session which I attended at Real World Studios in July was to cite it as the single most useful book you could buy if you want a thorough grounding in music production.

And that's a pretty fair assessment, I reckon. I might only be a bedroom producer, but I've worked hard to develop my skills over the past decade or so. I know that the ways that this book recommends you go about things will work, because they're the ways that I've ended up doing things through a considerable amount of research and trial and error.

Even so, the book contains a bounty of tips and tricks that I didn't know about but which make perfect sense, and they have already made an audible difference to the music I'm making (in a good way, too!) As endorsements go, that's pretty much the best I can give.

Published by: New English Library, 1985

In many ways, Heretics of Dune is a straight inversion of the previous book in the series, God Emperor of Dune. The demise of Leto II at the end of that book resulted in what the characters in this one refer to as "The Scattering", where humanity finally got to spread beyond the control of Empire and the constraints of Leto's grand plan, the "Golden Path". In this book, which once again is set thousands of years after the events of the previous novel, some of the people of the Scattering are returning (although the reason why this is happening is never directly addressed) and new power struggles kick off as a result. The planet Dune is now Rakis, and its central belt has been returned to a desert state and repopulated with sandworms once more. In this novel, the link to the sandworms is female rather than male. But the sandworms are no longer the key to ruling the entire Universe; the monopoly of spice production has finally been broken. And furthermore, spaceflight no longer requires guild navigators. The Bene Gesserit have somehow managed to cling to power, but one gets the impression that their tenure as arbiters and controllers of humanity's fate is close to its end; their grasp on power is actively being eroded on several fronts. But the most annoying inversion of the book is the way in which the action no longer revolves around a single person with superpowers. Here, multiple characters demonstrate superhuman abilities. There's precious little explanation of just how they acquired their powers, too.

And that, I think, is my biggest problem with the book. As a writer, if you decide that you need to rely on a superhero to sort things out for you, you're going to make me think you're being lazy. Particularly if you employ the tired trope of "with one bound, he was free" not once, but several times. But if the plot calls upon more than one character to suddenly demonstrate abilities that had gone completely unmentioned up until that point, then I'm afraid you've lost all credibility as a writer for me.

There's also a cadre of male writers who gradually become obsessed with putting lots of sex into their work as they reach old age, and Frank Herbert was very much among them. The biggest inversion that Herbert makes here is moving from Leto II's asexuality (which is remarked upon several times in the earlier novels) to writing multiple characters whose defining function turns out to involve superhuman levels of sexual performance and this is described in considerable (i.e. rather more than necessary) detail.

The principal feeling I had when I got to the end of this book was one of relief that it was over. Sequelitis is a very sad affliction for an author to suffer from and Herbert really should have called it quits at this point. But he didn't, of course. And so we move on to the sixth book in the Dune Trilogy, Chapter House Dune...

Published by: Robert Hale, 1990

Last year I read several books by Dr Clarke and enjoyed all of them. I enjoyed this one, too. David and Andy are both regular contributors to my favourite magazine The Fortean Times, and if there's an article of theirs in the latest issue I tend to read it first because I enjoy the way that their common sense, evidence-based approach cuts to the heart of whatever it is that they're writing about. They do so immediately here: there is no absolute unequivocal evidence for the physical existence of UFOs as anything other than very fuzzy lights (thirty-five years later this is still the case and anyone who wants to use US military footage from FLIR cameras to prove otherwise needs to take a course on the optics of lenses before attempting to convince me otherwise), misinterpretations of mundane objects, and intentional hoaxes. Instead they take the line that all there is to go on in determining what is going on are the statements of witnesses. And these statements, the authors argue, bear all the hallmarks of what in previous generations would have been called folk tales.

This approach does not endear them to much of the field of UFOlogy these days, however. The majority of the field, who believe in the existence of nuts-and-bolts, extraterrestrial spacecraft, tend to feel threatened by any approach to the subject that does not take the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) as gospel. This book mentions the practice adopted by one of the UK's largest active UFO investigation groups of dismissing out of hand any case which appears to be psychosocial in nature. Such groups aren't scientific in nature. Rather, they are more of a religion and their behaviour is often cult-like (how many times have you heard ETH proponents refer to themselves as "true believers", for example?) In this book, David and Andy draw explicit parallels between UFO witnesses and people having religious visions, such as the sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) by a group of children in Medjugorje, in Bosnia-Herzegovenia, for example. But people with the witnesses in Medjugorge saw nothing at all, just as Judith Magee and Paul Norman saw nothing out of the ordinary while Maureen Puddy was experiencing something that to her was very real and frightening in Victoria, Australia back in 1972. The psychosocial approach in general and such events as those described above strongly suggest that witnesses are experiencing an Altered State of Consciousness (ASC) and that the entities being encountered originate inside the mind rather than having anything to do with external reality.

David and Andy then draw parallels with similar phenomena which have been rooted in folklore for centuries, such as encounters with the sidh or fairy folk; they suggest that people who would once have interpreted what they had encountered as a "fairy mound" and experienced missing time are now culturally primed to interpret exactly the same thing as a landed or hovering flying saucer (and the fact that experiencers still report that same missing time phenomenon is strongly suggestive—to me at least—that they're being subjected to the same thing, whatever it is). After reading about the subject for more than half a century I'm very much in the psychosocial phenomena camp along with the authors of this book as well as other writers such as Jacques Vallée. Needless to say the ETH cult disagree strongly with this sort of interpretation. The only review of the book I could find on Amazon gave it a rather predictable and very churlish one-star review. This isn't a one-star book at all. In fact, it ought to be required reading for anyone taken in by the frantic and overheated coverage of the subject which has become the default approach in the popular media.

Published by: Gollancz, 1981

My copy of the book is a first edition hardback and it's a treasured possession because it's signed by Frank Herbert himself so I don't think I've read it more than a couple of times since I bought it at Forbidden Planet in Denmark Street back in 1981.

As sequels go, this one takes quite a leap. The action takes place some three and a half thousand years after the events which happened at the end of Children of Dune. The planet of Dune has become Arrakis, which is now verdant enough for Shai-hulud, the giant sandworm, to have gone extinct. And that means spice production has ended. The Emperor exerts control of humanity by doling out portions of his vast, hidden stockpile of spice or withholding them as he sees fit. Space travel, which is still utterly dependent on spice, has become rare and most of humanity remains limited to a feudal existence on their home planets (in the Dune Universe, it still sucks to be poor). The Fremen are now museum exhibits, pitiable relics who dress up and perform for the Emperor's visitors while wearing fake stillsuits and replica crysknives.

Two characters from the previous novel play a part in the proceedings here: the resurrected ghola Duncan Idaho (or at least another iteration of him) and the eponymous God Emperor himself, Leto Atreides. Leto's transformation has progressed to a shocking degree and as the plot unfolds we begin to see that he is leaving his humanity behind. His courtiers live in fear of what happens when his personality is subjugated by "the worm" and he falls into a murderous frenzy which his conscious self is powerless to control.

The Emperor has been busy manipulating the Atreides bloodline in order to preserve his vision of the Golden Path which will ensure humanity's survival (and in the process, bring Shai-hulud back to Dune). The paradox of the plot is that Leto is using his powers of prescience to breed a race of humans who will be invisible to anyone with the same powers; only in this way, Leto reasons, will humanity ever be free to spread across the Universe and escape not just the brutal control of a regime such as his own but also the eventual extinction of the human race. While Leto talks in Children of Dune of his reign lasting four thousand years, we quickly realise here that not only have his plans come to fruition, he is unable to foresee his doom as a result. His actions have drawn his tenure as ruler of the entire Universe to a close.

Many stylistic aspects from the preceding three novels are carried over into this work, but this time most of the quotations which begin each chapter are taken from a single source: the memoirs of the God Emperor himself. According to Wikipedia Herbert originally wrote the entire novel in the first person as Leto's account of events, only going back later to add chapters from the point of view of the other principal characters. I'm glad he did this, as it opens up the perspective of the action and stops things getting too claustrophobic. Even so, the pathos gets a little over the top at times. The destinies of many of the characters are positively Shakespearean in their tragedy. While the ending might be a positive one, it's not a happy one. I got a strong sense that he wanted the conclusion to be it for the franchise, although there is a framing device at the beginning and end of the book which shows he'd already plotted what would subsequently happen.

And Herbert would publish the fifth novel in the series, Heretics of Dune just three years later. I haven't read it since I bought the paperback the following year back in 1985, so I'm interested to see how it's aged...

Published by: Springer, 2017

I quoted this book earlier on in my review of Leonard Cramp's classic exemplar of pseudoscience, UFOs and Anti-gravity and this week I finally got around to finishing it. In much the same way that you wouldn't want to eat an entire tin of Quality Street in one sitting, this is a book to dip in to rather than reading right through in one go.

Before I started reading it, I had assumed (given the publisher, who specialise in academic texts) that the book would be a dry affair which would perhaps start by examining where pseudoscientific concepts come from, looking at pseudoscience's precursors (Norman Cohn's classic text The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages is an obvious jumping-off point), before moving on to looking at how pseudoscience and science fiction cross-fertilise each other, what value pseudoscience has as a creative pursuit, and then conclude by listing some of the risks it might pose to the unwary. Make no mistake; the worst examples of pseudoscience have resulted in many deaths. The most egregious example I can think of in relatively recent times is Marshall Applewhite's apocalyptic Heaven's Gate cult, although there have been others as well as some narrow escapes which nevertheless left survivors traumatised.

Establishing what is meant by pseudoscience gets the introduction off to a promising start, and there is an overview of the life and work of Charles Fort, but the rest of the book doesn't live up to its promise. The author takes a much more superficial approach and unfortunately the result reads like a compilation of the "In Popular Media" section of Wikipedia entries about pseudoscience's more well-known topics mashed up with the occasional summary of an article taken from the pages of the Fortean Times. We end up with a breezy and mostly inconsequential examination of some of pseudoscience's most notorious celebrities. Madame Blavatsky, George Adamski, Immanuel Velikovsky, Erich Von Daniken, Zechariah Stitchin, and Bob Lazar all make appearances, but May gives you no sense of the character of any of them, let alone provide biographical details of any sort. And that's an important failing in the case of such people, because (for example) George Adamski's 1930s background as a failed science fiction author and wannabe New Age guru who styled himself as "Professor" despite having no academic qualifications at all provides a context that must necessarily influence our assessment of the authenticity (and origin) of his later claims. Colin Bennett's Looking For Orthon takes a much more surgical approach to examining Adamski's reputation and is highly recommended.

Some of pseudoscience's most notorious characters like Pyotr Ouspensky or George Gurdjieff are missing entirely here, despite their links to science fiction authors like Charles Hinton or their undoubted influence on the literati of the early 20th Century including such luminaries as Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot (and later on, artists such as Kate Bush, Robert Fripp, and Timothy Leary). I was particularly surprised to find absolutely no mention at all of Bruce Cathie, who was a pseudoscientist par excellence and whose "world grid" theories lie at the root of such SF tropes as harmonic convergence. Most examinations of cross-fertilisation between SF and pseudoscience in the text seem to revolve around classic episodes of The X-Files but May doesn't even bother to identify the writers responsible for the individual episodes mentioned.

I was disappointed that there was no discussion of the psychological needs that might motivate the creators of such works, although I have a strong suspicion that a narcissistic personality is likely to be a major factor; most of the characters I've already mentioned could be said to have a type. Instead, I suspect that the book's principal value to me will lie in the extensive references that are provided at the end of each chapter; I already have a few more books on my "need to read" list as a result.

And for a publishing house of Springer's reputation, the physical book is a deplorable mess. My copy is a shitty, print-on-demand paperback whose covers curled up as soon as I took it out of the packaging it arrived in. There are copious colour illustrations, yes, but they're all low resolution images which appear to have been downloaded by the author from the Internet and when you put a 72 dpi image in a book, it is going to look like someone tried to bind the book while the ink was still wet. If you must get a copy of this, I'd suggest you buy it as an eBook instead and save yourself both money and disappointment.

Published by: New English Library, 1978

Memory is a fallible thing. Up until earlier this afternoon, I thought that I remembered reading all three of the original trilogy of books in Frank Herbert's Dune series while I was on holiday in Norfolk in 1975. But the copy of Children Of Dune I have just finished reading was printed in 1978, so that can't have been the case at all. In the interests of accuracy if not posterity I have therefore just gone back and checked the diaries that my teenage self kept during the summer holidays and discovered that instead I bought Dune and Dune Messiah together with a third science fiction novel whose title I did not record on Norwich Market on the 26th of July, 1977, two whole years after I thought I did, for the princely sum of 80p. I must have bought Children Of Dune at some time after my family moved to West Wickham in September 1977, almost certainly at either the original branch of Forbidden Planet at its premises in Denmark Street or from its competitor, Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed in St. Anne's Court in Soho. Fortunately, my memory of the book wasn't as shaky as my recollection of the circumstances in which I bought it.

Children Of Dune is a great improvement on its predecessor. Most if not all of the previous book's faults have been remedied, and the grand scale of the first book has been restored, carefully examined, and then built upon. Things shift into a higher gear and the stakes are raised accordingly. Proper, full-on tragedy returns as one member of the Atreides family is propelled towards their inevitable destruction. The forces arrayed against the clan this time around are less comedically ludicrous and more a logical extension of the galactic politics that were central to the plot of the original novel. And if Paul's Kwisatch Haderach was intended as a superman destined to rule the Universe, this time around we gradually realise that this was never going to be enough. Herbert argues that what is actually required is a literal supreme being; a god. Children Of Dune is that god's origin story.

Watching the way Herbert sets about making this happen is an education. The book was first published in 1976 but all the way through the novel I spotted clear allusions to the events which take place in the fourth book of the trilogy (yes, I know, I know) and that wasn't published until 1981. And I most emphatically remember when and where I bought my copy of that volume: it was at Forbidden Planet, and Frank Herbert signed my hardback copy of the first edition which I have right here. So on to God Emperor Of Dune it is, then.

Published by: New English Library, 1972

I bought the first couple of Frank Herbert's Dune books almost forty-nine years ago while I was a teenager on my summer holidays in Norfolk. Back in 1977, I paid 15p for this edition at a second-hand book stall on Norwich Market (and I know that, because the price is written in biro on the front cover, which bears Bruce Pennington's legendary original art). 1977 is so long ago that the two books I bought then comprised the complete set; the following year saw the publication of Children of Dune which drew what was then regarded as the completed trilogy to its conclusion. The first of what turned out to be many sequels didn't arrive until 1981. Frank wrote six books in total; his son Brian has been churning sequels and prequels out at a prodigious rate ever since but to be brutally honest, the ones I've read of his—all of which were co-written with Kevin J. Anderson—are abysmal.

The first two books made a lasting impression on me, but while I go back to the first novel every few years to read it again (and you can read my most recent account of doing so elsewhere on this page, I haven't done so quite as often with its sequel. Given that I've watched parts 1 and 2 of Denis Villeneuve's epic film adaptation several times in the past month (and it looks great on a 4K set) I thought it was about time that I did, so I can see what Denis has to do in order to complete his planned trilogy of films that will focus on the events of Dune and Dune Messiah.

There's a marked shift in tone in book two of the series. It's set some twelve years after Paul seized the Padishah Emperor's throne and set the Fremen off on their holy war (which, Paul notes in an aside early on, took more lives by several orders of magnitude than Hitler ever did.) No matter that we know that he's driven by visions of the collapse of humanity itself if he falters in his plan, Paul is still a monster, plain and simple. But he's a monster whose time is running out, and he knows it. The other great powers in the Universe, from the Bene Gesserit and the CHOAM military-industrial complex to the Steersmen of the Spacing Guild, his trophy wife the Princess Irulan, and some of the very Fremen he helped to liberate are plotting against him. Worse, many of his allies from the first book are missing. Gurney Halleck's absence is never explained, and there's a temptation to assume (wrongly, it turns out) that he's dead; Paul also lacks the counsel of his mother Jessica, who has retreated back to the Atreides homeworld of Caladan. The lack of their voices robs the book of much of its power and instead it has an intensely claustrophobic feel to it. There's no grand vision of humanity's ultimate destiny here; instead, Paul seems to spend much of his time railing and raging powerlessly at the plot which must play out. The genetic superman of the fist novel has been replaced by a rather pathetic, whiny little brat. But the text has deeper problems than this.

Paul's Kwisatz Haderach powers of precognition make the author's job of creating tension rather difficult, so Herbert introduces some weaknesses in his armour and some blind spots in his vision. These mostly work, but they're still rather obvious as crutches for the writer to use in order to add drama and a sense of threat to the narrative. The antagonists in the book are far lesser beings than the Baron and his nephew. They're comic-book villains, grotesques (there's even an evil dwarf) and the scale of the threat to the Atreides family never feels as mortal as it did in the first book. The introduction of the character Hayt even removes the threat of death from the equation altogether, as he is a resurrected version of Paul's mentor and father figure Duncan Idaho, who died midway through the first book. Where's the peril if a character can return from the grave? Instead, the biggest threat that Paul faces is Paul himself. And as he is set up to face his doom, I got the strong impression that his creator had quite simply had enough of people seeing his protagonist as a hero instead of the fascist dictator he actually was. So Herbert sets about demolishing the whole mystique of Muad'dib as superhero god.

The author of this book is a more mature, far more cynical person. Let's not forget that he was writing in far less optimistic times than he was at the dawn of the 1960s, too. The result is a dark, profoundly sad and sometimes shocking little book (not only is its scope diminished, it's also much smaller than its predecessor). It appears that Herbert wanted to tie everything up at the end and have done with Arrakis so that he could move on to other things.

Except that we know he did no such thing. Time to give Children of Dune another read, then...

Published by: Princeton University Press, 2005

This tiny little book, which reproduces an essay which Professor Franklin originally wrote for the Raritan Quarterly Review back in 1986, punches well above its weight and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 27 weeks. Which is rather surprising for a work whose aims are to determine and then define how bullshitting differs from lying, and explain why we should be wary of bullshit artists.

It succeeds magnificently.

And that explains why Professor Franklin's work has been getting lots of citations recently as people begin to realise that the current mania for using Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT is having unintended consequences—because the things are nothing more than bullshit machines. Like most of our current crop of politicians, they have no regard for the truth; but their aim is to make you think that what they're telling you is not just credible, but authoritative. And this is why we need to start teaching critical thinking skills in schools again, because bad things happen when a nation is gullible enough to believe anything that it is told by the media.

Published by: Tor, 2023

Well, this is an odd one. I had to check the publication dates of the last three Murderbot books because the story being told in Fugitive Telemetry is out of order; chronologically, it takes place before the events of Network Effect. This rather threw me, but with the seventh book in the series, things are back up-to-date. System Collapse picks things up a few days after the end of Network Effect with Murderbot and the gang still stuck in the system where most of that book took place. Needless to say, things soon start to go wrong again, and Murderbot finds itself having to help sort things out.

Except that this time around Murderbot is not operating at its best and it knows it. Although it tries very hard to dodge the issue as soon as things start deteriorating, we can see that it's suffering from the Murderbot version of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And the Murderbot version involves not just denial, but having hallucinatory flashbacks of an extremely unpleasant nature. This makes Murderbot even less happy than usual, of course.

The action plays fast and furious, and the plot took some interesting turns which I did not see coming at all. It's all very enjoyable stuff even if there's a sense that only mild peril is actually involved for the main characters. Apart from Murderbot, obviously, who keeps making a habit of getting shot and whose deadpan description of projectiles falling out of its clothes when it gets back up and starts moving around again never fails to make me wince; no wonder it has PTSD.

But I've finished the book and now I'm not very happy, because that's all of the Murderbot books that there are at the moment. I believe that Ms Wells will be writing at least three more books in the series, and I know that Apple TV are making a TV series which is being produced by (and will be starring) Alexander Skarsgård, but that's in the future, and I want them now, please.

Published by: Tor, 2021

Yes, I read this entire book in the two hours since I last updated this web page. Many of the Murderbot novels are little more than novellas (the Internet tells me that the word count of this one is just over 67,000 words, and frankly it felt like it was quite a bit less than that) and I find them lamentably brief because by the time you've got into the plot (and I really got into the plot) and are savouring every little nuance of Murderbot's wonderfully jaundiced view of things, it's all over.

This one is more of a police procedural, and is triggered by a murder that Murderbot was not responsible for, which it finds both extremely inconvenient and also annoying. Unusually for me, I rapidly identified who was responsible, not that this was a problem, but still...

Fortunately I have book #7 in the series right here, so on we go.

Published by: Tor, 2020

Yes, I'm back in the comfortable and reassuring company of Murderbot and its friends. This one's fun; it starts by setting up an adventure that you think is going to be the focus of the book, and then it turns out to be nothing of the sort. Going into more detail than that would take us well into spoiler territory, so I shall say no more.

Except to tell you that the writing is first-rate, thrill-a-minute stuff and I absolutely bloody love this series.

Published by: Penguin Books, 1981

This is a collection of some of the most popular editions of Martin Gardner's legendary "Mathematical Games" column which was published in Scientific American magazine from 1956 until 1981. The context of each article is half the fun, of course. The book takes in a bewildering variety of observations from chess boards (naturally) to planetary orbits and palindromes and finds something in each of them to challenge the reader's mathematical and reasoning abilities. This is the sort of book which expects the reader to do some work.

There are occasional nuggets of information that I didn't know, such as the fact that the mathematician and logician George Boole's eldest daughter Mary married Charles Hinton, author of many early scientific romances, the coiner of the word "tesseract," and whom we encountered last year when I reviewed P. D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum. Each chapter also contains an addendum in which Gardner relates additional items of information (and, sometimes, more elegant solutions to the problems he had set) which were subsequently supplied in letters he received from Scientific American's readers.

When I was younger, I would have felt compelled to find a pencil and paper (and probably a calculator as well) and try to figure out each of the problems which Gardner sets in the course of each chapter. I was relieved to discover that this is no longer the case, and I could just read the book and marvel at the mathematical delights which Gardner's column always contained.

Published by: Paraview Pocket Books, 2005

As its subtitle explains, this is the story of Paul Bennewitz, national security, and the creation of a modern UFO myth. "National" here means the United States of America, and the cast of characters includes representatives from not just the National Security Agency (NSA) but also the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). And yes, the book is a detailed account of what happened to the same Paul Bennewitz who features in Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men, reviewed at #22 below. Many of the other characters from Mark's book appear here, particularly William Moore and Richard Doty, but also John Lear, Linda Moulton Howe, Jamie Shandera and many, many other names you'll be familiar with if you've followed the shenanigans central to the field of UFOlogy for any length of time. There's even a mention of Carl Allen, who is so curiously missing from the pages of Mirage Men (as I observed when I reviewed that book, below). And Ivan Sanderson's name crops up too (see Invisible Residents, reviewed at #23 below).

UFOlogy has never held with the idea of Occam's Razor. It has a deplorable tendency to feed on itself and as you'll quickly realise as you read Project Beta, the subset of the field which is the most active on the Internet thrives on documents and paper trails, regardless of how authentic they might be (or even how plausible, for that matter). In Project Beta, Greg Bishop reveals where most of the truly outrageous documents came from and (spoiler alert) it wasn't from black operations tasked with looking after any visiting extraterrestrials.

Bennewitz was clearly an odd bird from the start. Although well-educated by American standards (he had a master's degree in physics and ran a successful company making components for the military) he seems to have been completely lacking in common sense or critical thinking skills. As a civilian contractor living and working in close proximity to Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico (it's adjacent to the town of Albuquerque) he would have had to pass basic security checks and—one would tend to assume—understand why they were necessary. What escapes me is why, when he started seeing strange lights flying around in the skies above the base, Bennewitz not only decided that these were alien craft (rather than, say, prototypes of Earthly military hardware being tested under field conditions, which would seem a more prosaic explanation to most people, including me) but he also decided to go out and buy some way-above-prosumer grade surveillance technology and train it on them. To cap it all, why did he not realise that the worst thing he could possibly do at that point would be to tell his handlers at the base that he had done so? But yes, that's exactly what he did.

So far, so unfortunate. But the story leaps to an entirely different level of crazy when his handlers (particularly the aforementioned Mr Doty) took the ludicrous decision to respond to Bennewitz's reports with "UFOs? Yeah, they must be!" instead of the more sensible "No, they're not UFOs, they're ours; so keep quiet about them, okay?" Maybe this seemed like a good idea at the time. AFOSI perhaps saw Bennewitz as a way of testing the base's security coverage (which was clearly full of holes) without attracting the attention of their adversaries. If that was so, it misfired spectacularly. And how were they to convince poor Mr Bennewitz that aliens were involved? Why, by making shit up, of course! The perfect excuse to indulge fantasies of being James Bond with a whole roster of government agencies picking up the tab! Bring in a genuine, honest-to-goodness Special Forces team to act as a bunch of extras? No problem! (Yes, they really did that.)

And so the book becomes the story of the mirage man known as the Falcon, of the notorious Aquarius and Majestic-Twelve hoaxes, and of how at least one US government agency was apparently totally cool with the process of turning a family man successfully running his own business into a chain-smoking, incoherent, paranoid wreck. Many of the documents involved in that process are reproduced in the book for our perusal, from Bennewitz's own summation of his research (written of course, with the CAPS LOCK key engaged from start to finish) to transcripts of the "evidence" which he and Bill Moore were supplied with (which were presumably created in large part if not their entirety by Doty and his associates). The thing that strikes me the strongest about them all is not that they are plausible (they really aren't) but that none of the authors involved in writing the papers Bishop has collated appears to have been more than semi-literate. They read more like a child's idea of what a real military intelligence document would be like, and they are all riddled with spelling mistakes and other errors of grammar. It's all rather infantile, quite frankly. But once again if you're at all familiar with the field of UFOlogy you'll know that this is one of its most obvious recurring tropes.

Poor Mr Bennewitz was eventually committed; fortunately he was able to recover and left UFOlogy altogether, although it is abundantly clear that Richard Doty desperately wanted to keep his hooks in him. Luckily for Mr Bennewitz, his family were well aware of Doty's untrustworthy nature and kept him away.

Paul Bennewitz died in 2005. Richard Doty is now a lawyer.

Published by: Bloomsbury, 2005

My interest in the movie business remains strong even though the more I read about it, the more I realise how sordid and unpleasant much of the enterprise seems to be. This is to be expected; any business which has budgets the size that many motion picture productions do is going to attract people with personalities that fall outside those you're likely to encounter in more mundane walks of life. Biskind is never better than when he's describing the extreme characters who inhabit Hollywood and its environs; here we encounter some of the best and worst of film's dramatis personae from the gifted to the pathological and the book's title of Gods and Monsters is particularly well-chosen.

The book is a selection of articles Biskind wrote over the course of some thirty years or so for a variety of publications. They don't just address the larger-than-life stories of some silver screen legends, but also delve into the behind-the-scenes politics of the business, both internal and external. When it comes to engaging with the rest of the world, Biskind shows us just how isolated and self-absorbed Hollywood actually is and how vulnerable the people at the interface of movies and reality often discover—to their cost—they have been left. However big the monsters are which swim in Hollywood's waters, there are much larger, more dangerous, and even less scrupulous ones lurking in the deeps beyond. You will find some extremely dark tales being told in these pages. You'll also find a truly egregious number of typos, but whatever...

But even the gods don't seem to have things their way all the time. When the author turns his lens toward such luminaries as Martin Scorsese and Robert Redford, their glamour evaporates and they are revealed as flawed human beings, capable of being just as self-destructive (or at least fallible) as the rest of us mere mortals. All the same, don't you wish you could have been part of the fun, back when it was fun? I certainly do. And I suspect I always will.

Published by: Faber and Faber, 2004

While I have been fascinated by cinema since I was a little kid, it was only when I watched Bob Godfrey's wonderfully anarchic television series The Do-It-Yourself Film Animation Show in the early 1970s that I became interested in finding out how the sausage was made and while I would have loved to get my hands on an 8mm film camera back then and make cartoons of my own, back then such things were completely out of my reach. As a result, even when I started earning an income of my own and could even have afforded such luxuries as a 16mm camera, I didn't harbour any ambitions of ever being able to work in the medium.

That changed once I joined BT's Distance Learning Unit in the 1980s. I was sent on a week-long crash course in video production at Sony almost as soon as I arrived in Bletchley Park, and I discovered to my delight that (a) it was incredibly good fun and (b) it was also something I didn't entirely suck at (the instructor didn't believe me when I told him that I'd no previous experience of any of the many roles we were being taught how to perform).

Affordable video technology arrived on the scene at much the same time and I became an enthusiastic cameraman and director whenever I got the opportunity. Since then, I've built up a bit of a library of books about the sausage-making side of directing and the last time I ended up in the British Lions shop in Thornbury, I found a copy of this book, which was written by Alexander Mackendrick (a writer and director who was responsible for such films as Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers, and The Sweet Smell of Success) and which has an introduction by Martin Scorsese, so I grabbed it immediately.

It's a densely technical work about the process of film-making from writing a script to editing, and it's written by a man who was not only extremely good at his job but also well aware of how the other people whose names appear in the end credits of a film contribute to the end result. As such, it's not the sort of book that the average reader is going to become engrossed in, whether they're a cinephile or not. Reading breakdowns of particular scenes from films which pull them apart to discover how the viewer's attention is controlled and the plot is driven forward so that the objectives of the story are served is not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

But I loved it.

Published by: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996

When I reviewed Mirage Men below I said that there are many "tells" that any writer specialising in esoteric literature exhibits when he or she is discussing something they don't understand and have resorted to trying to pull the wool over my eyes (or, as the common vernacular has it, "bullshitting".) A "tell" is an expression taken from the game of poker, where close observation of a player's body language can reveal when they're bluffing.

In the field of UFOlogy the most obvious of these tells—and it's one which I've mentioned in my reviews here before when I discussed books written by such pseudoscience luminaries as Bruce Cathie, Pyotr Ouspenskii, as well as Madame Helena Petrova Blavatsky and her ilk—can be seen when the author's pet thesis runs up against accepted scientific knowledge which says that their ideas won't work. That's the point at which the author can either go back to the drawing board and start again, taking this into account; or they can decide that their view of reality is more accurate than anything determined by experiment where the results were published afterwards in peer-reviewed journals. In UFOlogy, writers can almost always be relied upon to take the second option. Reality has become an inconvenience, so the author simply rejects it out of hand.

For all the armchair theorists' claims that the scientific consensus just isn't "intellectually satisfying" enough for them, observation suggests that their real motives in rejecting it are ignorance or laziness; even if they are capable of understanding what the real science means, in most cases they just can't be bothered to put the work in to do so. And so by the time he gets to chapter five, Mr Cramp has already rejected the findings of the Michelson-Morley Experiment (1887) as well as dismissing Lorentz Contraction (1889), Special Relativity and rest frames (1905), and General Relativity (1915) out of hand. Once he's dispensed with scientific consensus, he is then free to conflate electrostatic propulsion, magnetism, and gravity into a single force with properties which mostly stem from his imagination, so that's exactly what he does. We're thus presented with a rambling, amorphous mess of meaningless technobabble.

As Andrew May says in the introduction to his book Pseudoscience and science fiction,

"Pseudoscience is "false science", not because its assertions are false (although they often are), but because they are arrived at by a non-scientific method.

Real science can be thought of as a four-step process:
  1. Pose a question
  2. Formulate a hypothesis to answer that question
  3. Analyse the hypothesis to determine its testable consequences
  4. Carry out the tests, and accept/modify/reject the hypothesis accordingly
Pseudoscience is only really concerned with the first two of these steps. It is all about making hypotheses, not putting them to the test. In fact, pseudoscientific hypotheses are often constructed so as to be untestable—and hence incapable of disproof."

This is exactly Mr Cramp's approach, and by chapter five every page contains one ridiculous hypothesis after another. Sure, there are scientific-looking diagrams, but none of those make any sense, either. Cramp goes on (and on) to use his "theory" to explain what killed Thomas Mantell, why flying saucers switch off car engines, and crop circles. Oh, and he also cites as corroborative evidence not only the preachings of the original saucer contactee and hot-dog salesman, George Adamski, but also the photographs taken by other people who had copied Adamski's original pictures of his alleged Venusian scout ship (which was identified by Joel Carpenter in 2012 as the top section of a portable pressurised-gas lantern sold by the Sears department store).

That's too many tells for me. This book is utter garbage.

Published by: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2005

The 2005 publication date is a bit misleading, because at that point Ivan Terence Sanderson (1911–1973) had been dead for more than forty years. Sanderson was an interesting character; his father was killed by a rhinoceros when Ivan was just fourteen. Ivan's great Uncle William was the creator of a blend of whisky named VAT69, which became the basis of the Sanderson's Whisky empire (now owned by Diageo) and you can still buy a bottle of it to this day. Ivan was educated at Eton, studied as a zoologist at Cambridge, and served alongside Ian Fleming and Jon Pertwee (yes, really) in the British Navy's Naval Intelligence Division (NID) during the Second World War.

Until I read this book, I knew him primarily as the man responsible for coining the term cryptozoology but he was also the unfortunate "expert" who was completely bamboozled by the great Florida Giant Penguin Hoax, pronouncing confidently that the mysterious tracks which were found on a beach at Clearwater on Florida's west coast in the 1940s couldn't possibly have been faked (I lived across the bay from Clearwater for a time in the 90s and believe me, it's not exactly penguin territory). Long after Sanderson's death, the surviving hoaxer responsible for the footprints came forward and admitted what he'd done (and as news stories at the time revealed, not only did Tony Signorini still have the cast iron feet that he and his friend Al Williams had used to create the tracks, but the newspapers still remembered Sanderson's assessment of the case as being genuine). From the outset, then, I was tempted to question Sanderson's credulity, if not outright gullibility.

The original edition of Sanderson's book on USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects) is long out of print, but it was republished in 2005 by the Adventures Unlimited Press, a company which specialises in publishing exactly the sort of wild and unsubstantiated tales which Mark Pilkington describes in his book Mirage Men, which I reviewed immediately below. And if you've read Mirage Men and are familiar with the military's propensity to spread disinformation about UFOs, Sanderson's wartime military intelligence background (and his work in New York in the later years of World War Two for British Security Co-ordination along with his former NID colleague Ian Fleming as well as Roald Dahl) ought to have you raising your eyebrows at this point; it certainly got me raising mine.

Adventures Unlimited Press is run by a rather interesting character by the name of David Hatcher Childress, and Adventures Unlimited has published many of his works, which are advertised over several pages at the back of the book. These take as their subject matter such delights as Crystal Skulls and the mythical "flying machines" called vimanas that were allegedly used by the gods of ancient India. These were popularised by Desmond Leslie back in the 1950s in the classic work of the genre, Flying Saucers Have Landed, which Leslie wrote with the grand-daddy of all the flying saucer contactees, George Adamski. Other authors in the imprint's stable include one Harold T. Wilkins; I've read his book Flying Saucers On The Attack! and classing Harold's work as disinformation gives it far more credit than it deserves; I can safely say that he was very much an adherent of the "just make shit up" school of UFOlogy. At this point I'd therefore abandoned any hope that I was about to read a critical or level-headed assessment of the phenomenon under discussion.

Sanderson certainly starts things off with a bang. He recounts a UFO sighting which was allegedly made by one Dr Rubens J Vilela during the U.S. Navy's "Operation Deep Freeze" exercise in the Antarctic in the winter of 1960-61. Sanderson citses as his reference an article written by Ed Hyde garishly titled "UFOs—at 450 Fathoms!" in Man's Illustrated Magazine (which you may not be entirely surprised to know is not usually regarded as a reputable scientific journal). Hyde's wild version of events was published in March 1966. Sanderson's retelling of what happened refers to a strange object which

"suddenly came roaring up out of the sea through no less than 37 feet of ice, and went on up into the sky like a vast silvery bullet."

There's a dramatic artist's rendition of the thing emerging from the ice in the book. It's an impressive witness statement, to be sure; it's also completely falsified. And I feel confident in making that assertion, because that's exactly the way that Dr Vilela himself described it in 2007. Vilela explains that what he actually saw was what he described as a "horizontal meteor" although it would appear that he might just have seen someone firing off a distress flare. Not quite so dramatic, to be sure.

The very next reference that Sanderson throws at us is taken from a book about living under the sea called Hydrospace (which Kirkus Reviews doesn't seem to have been much impressed with when it was published in 1964). Hydrospace was written by an authority on aviation, a prolific science fiction author called Martin Caidin, who went on to write a series of rather more successful novels about a former astronaut who is transformed into a cyborg (CYBernetic ORGanism) after the crash of his experimental aircraft and who uses his superhuman abilities to fight crime for the government. You may be familiar with the exploits of this particular fictitious secret agent, because he was called Colonel Steve Austin... You may be spotting a trend here. The truth is taking second place to having a good story. And even before the first chapter has started, there's a clear signifier that this book won't be particularly fussed about the authenticity of its claims because the photograph on the frontispiece of the book is of a reproduction, owned by the author, of one of the Quimbaya artefacts beloved of the ancient aliens crowd since the days of Erich Von Daniken. Sanderson devotes a whole chapter to recounting his efforts to convince his acquaintances in the aviation industry that it's a model aircraft, and he doesn't do a good job of it.

Many of the stories and sightings recounted in the rest of the book are taken from the pages of Ray Palmer's legendary pulp magazine Fate, which you might remember also brought us Richard Shaver's wild tales of the Deros, an underground race of de-evolved humans who are responsible for all the bad stuff that happens in the world, and much of the rest of Sanderson's book relies on sources that have even less credibility than poor Mr Shaver ever did.

And like many of his contemporaries in the UFOlogical field as it was back in the 1970s, Sanderson's tone can best be described as smugly hectoring. He gives classes of phenomena nicknames. People who insist on scientific rigour in their approach to the field are dismissed as "stuffed shirts." He knows that the book is telling it like it is, so why should he have to bother to waste time or effort building a watertight case? (See what I did there?) He's not a data sort of chap and as he cheerfully admits, "I simply cannot read seed catalogs for fun or even enlightenment." Instead, he spends whole chapters regurgitating press clipping after press clipping, most of which appear to have been gleaned from earlier books by other UFOlogists rather than anything he's unearthed by original research. Indeed, the first time he mentions having investigated a case personally doesn't crop up until page 67. And this is a shame, because it's when he writes from his own experience that the book really comes alive.

Instead, his reluctance to search for corroborating evidence leads him to repeat silly tales such as that of the purportedly mysterious loss of several crew members of the sailing vessel Ellen Austin when they tried to recover a schooner found abandoned and adrift in the North Atlantic in the 1850s. The source of this story, and its subsequent evolution from fact into fantasy, has since been tracked down, as has the origin of Silvio Scherli's haunting account of the deaths of the entire crew of a mystery ship called the Ourang Medan (it turned out to be Mr Scherli himself). The evidence which Sanderson cites turns out to be fiction with depressing predictability. To give one more example, I can find absolutely no evidence that the physicist called John Carstiou mentioned in Chapter 11 ever existed, let alone that he had a paper on a second form of gravity published by the National Academy of Sciences; was Sanderson pranked by the US Office of Naval Research? I'm tempted to regard this as a case of an American military organisation putting one over on the former member of a rival, British organisation and this would probably be true even if I hadn't just finished reading Mystery Men...

Despite my mounting disappointment, I kept reading in the hope that I'd eventually come across an observation that was original or thought provoking. Needless to say, I finished the book without that happening. Everything eventually collapses in a messy tangle involving (but not at all limited to) bigfoot, poltergeists, panpsychism, and appendices. Add this one to the "bunk" pile.

Published by: Constable, 2010

Mark Pilkington is a British writer and regular contributor to one of my favourite magazines, the Fortean Times. He's also the founder of Strange Attractor Press. Mirage Men is his examination of the state of UFOlogy as it stood at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The field was not a healthy one back then (and it's only gotten worse since). It was, not to put too fine a point on things, consuming itself. I've been interested in UFOs since I first read Adamski and Leslie's classic work Flying Saucers Have Landed when I was a very small boy, but the more I read on the subject, the more sceptical I became. Aside from the work of one or two writers like Jacques Vallée who view the phenemenon as deception by person or persons unknown, most of the work being published after 1990 or so has been sensationalist garbage, and almost all of it follows what's known as the ETH, or Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, that the things which are responsible for sightings are nuts-and-bolts spacecraft piloted by aliens in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colours. These craft seem to crash an a regular basis, too—which seems an odd habit for technology that is as vastly superior as it's made out to be.

Proponents of the ETH include a tiny but vociferous few who discovered that promoting it loudly in the media can generate large amounts of income for relatively little effort. Their stories—all hearsay, or misinterpreted FLIR footage—get reported on the more credulous news channels with no critical assessment whatsoever. They have as much plausibility as the AI-generated images of cat/snake hybrids that were doing the rounds a few months ago, and the number of people who are taken in by such things is a depressing reminder that the average person can be shockingly gullible. But it's safe to say that gullibility is the watchword of the modern UFOlogist.

Any hope of a rational assessment of these ever-more outlandish claims has been steadily fading since the wave of alien abduction witnesses (also known as "experiencers") first rolled in at the tail end of the 1980s. There are multiple "tells" I know of for assessing whether a writer is trying to pull the wool over my eyes but I'll just give one example here: Lonnie Zamora's infamous 1964 encounter with an alleged landed spacecraft in Socorro, New Mexico was actually a case of a policeman being punked by the students of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology because he'd made himself deeply unpopular there in his previous job as a campus security guard. If the case is used to support the ETH, I know whoever wrote the book is just parroting the standard "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens" line. To Mark Pilkington's credit, the version of events he relates in the notes at the end of this book is that Zamora was indeed the victim of a student prank.

The idea of UFOs as nothing more than empty hoaxes tends to get UFO enthusiasts upset (if not downright angry) but if you apply Occam's Razor to the subject, you'll be hard-pressed to come up with any other explanation that's even remotely plausible. The question then becomes why such hoaxes might be perpetrated and that's what Mirage Men is about. It's a fascinating tale. As Mark Pilkington concludes, the real UFOs are "imaginary weapons for psychological wars." The problem is that the hoaxers have lost control of the hoax. Today, UFOs are less about preserving the secrecy of national security assets and more about YouTube views, convention appearances, and tie-in books.

Framed by his experiences at a UFO convention in the United States and a subsequent road trip across New Mexico to interview key players and take in some of the field's most well-known landmarks, Mark unravels the CIA and NSA's historic (and contemporary) roles in spreading UFO disinformation. In the process he relates how an alleged member of the United States' Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), a distinctly shady character called Richard Doty and his chums drove at least one innocent man completely out of his mind by feeding him bullshit about aliens. The most shocking thing in the entire book for me is the fact that nobody seems to have ever been called to account for this. Doty and the author meet several times in the book, and even though Pilkington claims to like the man, it's difficult to regard him as anything other than a devious fabuilst, a chancer of the first degree. I'd be more likely to trust a Tory MP than I would to trust anything Doty says.

I must admit I was surprised to make it to the end of the book without encountering a single mention of Carl Meredith Allen, a.k.a. "Carlos Allende", who was the quintessential mystery man responsible for many of the field's most enduring legends and who is worthy of a book all to himself. It seems like an odd omission, particularly as Allen was an associate of William Moore, who is mentioned many times.

Before you consider believing anything at all that's been happening in the UFO field recently, you would do well to read this book. If you're already a believer, it will be one of the most depressing things that you will ever read.

Published by: Penguin, 1993

From the outset I should point out that I'm not a big fan of philosophy. I'm not sure that I'd go as far as Neil deGrasse Tyson does and reject it completely, but my childhood impression of it being a domain which was almost exclusively inhabited by old white guys in beards spending their days telling each other that they're obviously asking the wrong questions has proved remarkably difficult to shake. Although introspection—thinking about stuff—is an important part of the scientific method, it's the scientists rather than the philosophers for whom all that thinking leads to experiments being designed, theories either falsified or supported, and conjectures being either proved or discarded. Philosophy is simply content to ask questions; coming up with the answers is evidently somebody else's problem.

Professor Dennett (who died recently, but who was indeed an old white guy with a beard) was a little more attuned to the value of experimental verification than most other philosophers seem to be, and he clearly had a keen mind. But I'm afraid this book does nothing to allay my suspicion that the idea of proof is alien to the field. Perhaps it's because finding the answer would put the philosophers out of a job permanently? This might explain why this book contains infuriating passages such as:

"Am I claiming to have proven that bats could not have these mental states? Well, no, but also I can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us." (p. 448)

There are also passages which reek of misunderstanding (if not outright misrepresentation), such as

"When we learn that the only difference between gold and silver is the number of subatomic particles in their atoms, we may feel cheated or angry—those physicists have explained something away: The gold-ness is gone from gold; they've left out the very silveriness of silver that we appreciate. And when they explain the way reflection and absorption of electromagnetic radiation accounts for colors and color vision, they seem to neglect the very thing that matters most. (...) Leaving something out is not a feature of failed explanations, but of successful explanations." (p. 454)

The book begins promisingly enough, even if Dennett's dismissal of the "we're all just brains in vats" simulation argument by the time we've got to page 7 feels superficial and less than convincing. In the opening chapters, Dennett examines how answers to the questions that have kept philosophers going through the centuries have changed over the years: where is our consciousness located? Who is the "me" who is writing these words, and how did I come up with them? Is consciousness limited to humans, or do all primates have it, too? Or is everything conscious to one degree or another? Next, Dennett demonstrates that consciousness is fallible. It gets things wrong in intriguing ways which suggest that how we make sense of the world is somehow off. For example, our sense-making seems to occur retrospectively; the mind is capable of re-ordering events. We might think that we're paying attention to what's going on around us in great detail, but this is an illusion. Experienced time does not necessarily play out the same way as objective time does.

Our brains do a tremendous amount of work in interpreting what we see. Dennett describes several experiments you can conduct at home with nothing more than a pack of playing cards to show just how limited our perception of fine details and colours in our visual field actually is. Our brains make us think that what we see is much more accurate and finely-detailed than it really is. But our brains are also very good at not noticing things; they literally stop paying attention every time we change the point on which our eyes are focused (a movement known as a saccade). As Dennett explains, clever experiments with eye tracking and computer displays have revealed that we are still able to see something during a saccade if it moves in the same direction and at the same speed as our eyes—and therefore our attentional focus—are moving. And yet because of the way the eye is built we all have blind spots in our vision; our brains ignore these holes so efficiently that we don't notice them. Dennett takes great pains to explain that this doesn't mean that our vision system is filling in details and somehow "papering over the cracks" but instead that it is simply not seeing the hole that is demonstrably there—and while this reveals an interesting feature of our awareness, doesn't it also contradict the point made above about the way our brains "enhance" what we see? If you find the tension between these different aspects of human vision interesting, you're going to be amazed by the classic experiment which demonstrated reliably that we can fail to spot seemingly outrageous changes that happen right in front of us. Reality is not what we think it is. But how does this further Dennett's argument? I'm not sure I know.

Dennett then sets about demolishing the idea that the mind has a "Cartesian Theatre" which posits an imaginary homunculus sitting inside our heads, monitoring all our sensory inputs and who is, essentially, the "me" we think we're referring to when we attempt to describe our experience of being conscious. Instead, Dennett argues, our minds are in constant pandemonium. The central thesis of the book is his "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness which proposes that impulses, thoughts and sensory impressions are in constant (and unconscious) competition with each other and those that win out are eventually promoted sufficiently for them to be put in control of our actions, which is how we become aware of them. You may be surprised to discover that it's not the other way around; we reverse-engineer this process in order to rationalise what we just did and convince ourselves that we meant to do it all along, even though that's really not how it happened. Since this book was first published back in 1991, some neuroscience researchers have come to much the same conclusions. It's all fascinating stuff, and also somewhat alarming.

Unfortunately the book then falls apart as Dennett gets into the weeds of what it means to be conscious and considers how we perceive the world. He starts out by denying the existence of qualia but has no alternative explanation of perception handy; no process of generating the experience of being—which eventually leads him to make the ludicrous assertion quoted above from page 454. There are many more differences between gold and silver than just their atomic weight; why should the number of subatomic particles they contain be the only characteristic which Dennett feels he is not able to dismiss as a subjective observation? Surely our knowledge of this property of theirs was acquired in exactly the same way as every other property they have? Qualia must be enmeshed in our entire experience of reality; how could they not be? But his objection to them, that they imply that our observations of macroscopic objects somehow changes their physical properties, seems to be a classic case of a straw man argument. And yes, I know the quantum world is different, but that's not the issue here. Dennett admits that readers of early drafts of the book accused him of "pulling a fast one" in this part of his argument, and I readily agreed with them. There's a lot of sleight of hand going on over what we can objectively know and what is only subjective and the plausibility of Dennett's argument evaporates.

Ultimately, Consciousness Explained didn't really teach me anything new about how the mind works, and it did nothing to change my opinion of philosophy as a whole; rather, it further confirmed it. I suspect Neil deGrasse Tyson would say the same thing.

Published by: Bloomsbury, 1999

I've been meaning to read this one for a long time and when I happened upon a second-hand copy in the Lions charity shop in Thornbury recently I grabbed it immediately (together a copy of Biskind's Gods and Monsters, which was sitting next to it on the shelf).

As the title suggests, this is a book that examines the history of what became known as the "New Hollywood": the generation of actors, directors, and producers who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. The cast of characters includes George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. It also includes movers and shakers like Warren Beatty, Dennis Hopper, Ellen Burstyn and Jack Nicholson. But this is not a glossy hagiography of movie greats. Instead, Biskind's examination of the film business is stark and unrelenting and pretty much everybody that he writes about has flaws which come under the magnifying glass. Indeed, more than one of the people encountered in the book could justifiably be described as monstrous.

When I read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential last year, I commented that the book had permanently removed any ambitions I could ever have in wanting to be a chef. This book will do the same thing for anyone harbouring a secret desire to break in to the movie business. Biskind interviewed a lot of the great and good who were working in Hollywood back then, and the thing that stuck me most strongly about the results of those interviews is how ephemeral and transitory personal relationships seemed to be for pretty much everyone concerned. The idea of sacrificing marriages, family ties, and friendships to serve ambition just seems to have been the order of the day. And with the rise of the blockbuster, starting with Spielberg's Jaws in 1975, how Tinseltown managed its affairs changed both metaphorically and literally. People who had never had money before suddenly had more of the stuff than they were equipped to handle. Regimes changed; dynasties fell; and when the industry discovered hard drugs, any constraints on ego flew out of the window and rampant excess became the order of the day. The talents of more than one young prodigy who might otherwise have gone on to make masterpieces were frittered away and promising careers crashed and burned. If you somehow managed to survive that, megalomania and self-destructive streaks a mile wide were waiting to strike (the book recounts a depressing number of cases where this happened). The amount of backstabbing and conflicting stories on show here makes for grim reading. Some of the rivalries discussed are the stuff of legend; after all, even the most sensible and level-headed of artistes, showered with plaudits though they might be, are only ever one bad film away from potential oblivion.

The money also changed the way studio management approached the idea of film. Anyone with truly independent ideas was eventually forced out as the accountants moved in and began to insist on focus groups, careful analysis of potential demographics, obsessing in endless meetings over how a movie might "play" from region to region. And as a study in just how bad cocaine can be at encouraging people to make really bad decisions, this book is hard to beat.

It's a thoroughly gripping read.

Published by: Tor, 2018

...and as I got up early this morning I've already finished book 4 of the series. Exit Strategy brings the tale of Murderbot's dealings with evil corporation GrayCris to a very satisfying conclusion while leaving enough matters unresolved for there to be plenty of room for further character development and sequels (and I already have the next three books in the series in my "to read" pile; it's a safe bet that I will be tackling the next book almost immediately). I had to smile when I read the blurb on the back of this book, as it turns out I was not the first person to see the similarities between Murderbot and Marvin the Paranoid Android.

The plot didn't exactly go as I'd expected. Murderbot's cognitive tweaks and improvements lead it (and me) to believe it's capable of rather more than it can actually handle, and it takes a bit of a hit. This results in it being incapacitated at the climax of the action in a way that reminded me of the first book, except that this time what happens is much more satisfying from the perspective of the narrative.

The author builds the tension and the stakes even more effectively than Rogue Protocol and it's easy to understand Murderbot's anxiety about whether or not it and its friends will manage to emerge unscathed as the action unfolds. A friend once described the original series of Star Trek as "competence porn" in that Kirk and his colleagues would almost always resolve a threatening situation by being not just very good at their jobs but also much brighter and smarter than the foe that they were dealing with each week. Murderbot has a similar vibe to this, but its impostor syndrome and related insecurities mean that it must work much harder to come out on top and as a result its triumphs are all the more satisfying.

Published by: Tor, 2018

Yes, I'm on a serious Murderbot binge. The books are so short that it's easy (and oh-so-tempting) to blast right through each one in a single session, and that is exactly what I have been doing. Each book I've read so far builds on the ones that have gone before, so once again this feels like a single act in a larger story rather than a self-contained novel. Not that I'm complaining. Well, not much, anyway; I'm having too much fun.

This book gives more of a glimpse of the dystopian aspects of the wider setting of the story; there's an encounter early on with a bunch of characters who have sold themselves into slavery, as they travel to a planet where the humans will be working under a twenty-year contract for one of the many conglomerates who appear to be running the Universe. Murderbot realises what a bad idea this is immediately, but refrains from pointing the matter out to the unfortunate people, who are either in denial about the truth of their situation or simply too stupid (or desperate) to think about what they are letting themselves in for. This is the only point in the story so far where Murderbot manages to succeed in its intention to not get involved, although it clearly views their plight as being morally wrong and observes that at least when it got damaged its employers would foot the bill for its repair; the slaves will have to pay for any medical expenses that they incur.

Murderbot is still investigating its own history and continues to unearth evidence of other nefarious deeds committed by the company which was responsible for the initiating incident which happened before the start of the first book. In doing so, it realises that the bunch of innocent humans in the location it's exploring are in mortal peril and ends up taking responsibility for saving them. In the process of doing this, discoveries relevant to its past are made and a big piece of the puzzle has dropped into place by the end of the book. Murderbot is also beginning to realise that its capabilities have changed significantly; it describes recoding its own mind to pass more effectively as a human being several times, and then notes that it's able to perform cognitive tasks which used to be beyond its ability. These improvements aren't big enough to start it up a singularity-type exponential curve, but all the same I get the feeling that the modifications made by ART in the last book were rather more drastic than they appeared at the time. Murderbot is beginning to transcend its original design and this will (I hope) have a pay off later on. It's also apparent that Ms Wells has now got everything in place for the end game and all the plot threads she has introduced over the first three books can be woven back together. This is obviously what's going to happen in the next book in the series so I guess I'd better start reading that one, then. On it.

Published by: Tor, 2018

I clearly enjoyed the first Murderbot tale enough to pick up the second one as my bath time reading later the same day, and I burned through the whole story before the water had gone cold. Again, the book is a thin affair, and to be honest it feels more like the second act of a larger work rather than the self-contained book which I was presented with (I picked up the first four volumes of the series as a box set, which helps things make a lot more sense). Nevertheless I think it's safe to say at this point that I have become another enthusiastic member of Team Murderbot.

The second volume is tightly plotted and I got a much stronger sense of both Murderbot's personality and of the characters that it meets as the plot progresses. There are also a couple of nice payoffs from the first book, particularly one involving Murderbot's opinion of "pleasure units", a.k.a. "sexbots". Murderbot's interactions with the ship it has hitched a lift from at the beginning of the story (and there's a hint and a half) made me realise that my initial comparisons with the Terminator and James Bond were way off the mark. Arnie's unstoppable killing machine never suffered from anxiety or depression. No, Murderbot reminds me now of Douglas Adams's wonderful and morose creation Marvin the Paranoid Android in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At one point Murderbot tells us with evident pride that it has got very good at sighing, and by the end of the book I got the distinct impression that the principal learning point that the character was taking away from events wasn't that it shouldn't always expect things to go horribly wrong (as Marvin does) but instead that it hadn't anticipated things to go south anywhere near badly enough. Although it's never described in such terms in the text, it seems clear to me that Murderbot suffers from PTSD, and by the end of the book it's easy to understand why that should be so.

As the second act in a larger tale, Artificial Condition ticks all the right boxes. The writing is more streamlined, the stakes are higher, the story opens out, new characters are introduced, and the protagonist's back story is revealed in more detail. I won't go into spoiler territory here, but will simply say that the back story was the most satisfying aspect of the book for me. Murderbot is endearing in the way it continuously beats itself up for not being a competent enough protagonist, but there are hints that the lack of confidence that it has in its ability to make its way in the Universe is beginning to be displaced by moral outrage at the injustices that it has discovered. It will be very interesting to see what happens next.

Published by: Tor, 2017

Yes, this is the first Murderbot story. Many of my friends have been enthusing about the series for years, and when someone else I know started to rave about it earlier this month I decided that it was well past time for me to find out what all the fuss was about. The first thing I'll say is that All Systems Red is a very short book. The hardback is a very thin affair, even after the publisher decided to bulk things out by including a couple of chapters from the sequel at the back. In fact at some 44,000 words it's barely larger than a novella and I read the whole thing in an afternoon. But I can see why people are so taken with the series.

The tale is told to us by Murderbot itself. It's a corporate secunit (security unit) who is essentially a half-clone, half robot badass who would much rather be left in peace so that it could watch its favourite soap operas all day but everyone else's expectations of it involve playing a role more akin to that of bodyguard and management enforcer. With cybernetic enhancements which call to mind the Terminator mashed up with Steve Austin and James Bond and a little bit of Neo from The Matrix thrown in for good measure, Murderbot's existence is a violently precarious one. Its name is a personal invention; to the rest of the Universe, it doesn't count as a person. Instead it's just an item of corporate inventory and Murderbot makes it abundantly clear that not only does it expect to be treated as such, that is in fact exactly how it views itself. The author does, too; the book only ever describes Murderbot as an "it", never as a he or she. Murderbot views the whole gender thing with amused disdain, and has no time for it.

Understandably, this all gives it a somewhat cynical outlook on life. But when its latest assignment on a strange planet goes catastrophically off the rails, Murderbot realises with horror that the humans under its protection are actually beginning to relate to it as a person. Being regarded as something more than an item of expedition equipment makes Murderbot extremely uncomfortable. And that, of course, is where the story really catches light.

The story's not perfect; much of the denouement takes place "off screen" and that meant I was left feeling rather dissociated from the action, but Murderbot's narrative voice is a delight and the tale is refreshingly free of many of the genre's more predictable tropes so I'm going to reserve judgment for the moment. This might also have something to do with the fact that I already have the next six books in the series lined up right here, too. I strongly suspect that you'll be seeing my reviews of the rest of the series here in the not-too-distant future...

Published by: Penguin Books, 1981

Maybe it's the fact that my continued ill-health has made me sharply aware of my own mortality, but the realization that there are lots of books out there that I've been meaning to read and I've only got a limited amount of time available if I'm ever going to get round to reading them has meant that over the last few months I've been acquiring a considerable number of works that I've had on my "I really must read that" list for many years. And The Mind's I was right at the top of that list. Thank you once again to World Of Books for enabling me to get hold of a copy with just a few mouse clicks.

The fact that Daniel Dennett passed away last month might also have had something to do with my decision to tackle this particular volume. It's an anthology of writing about the nature of consciousness and the big question of whether or not an artificial intelligence (i.e. a computer) might ever experience consciousness as I—and, presumably you, too—do. Can humans build a machine that can truly be said to think? And how could we prove that we had actually managed it? Is that even possible? What is consciousness, anyway? How does it happen?

Alan Turing's legendary paper from 1950 Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he first proposed the "Imitation Game" that we now know as the Turing Test is included, and so is John Searle's famous 1980 essay Minds, Brains, and Programs where he sets out the "Chinese Room" refutation of the idea that a computer will ever possess true consciousness. The book's worth reading just for those two chapters alone.

But aside from Turing and Searle, and as well as Dennett and Hofstadter's own erudite contributions and those of D. E. Harding, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Nagel, and Raymond Smullyan amongst others, there are also fine selections from writers such as Jean Luis Borges, Rudy Rucker, and Stanislaw Lem. The result is a rich and dense wander through the philosophical and scientific thinking about AI as it stood at the end of the 1970s and an examination of what the consequences of that thinking might be. Some of the predictions are remarkably prescient, but other articles consider concepts that seem to be as far away in the future now as they did more than forty years ago when the book was first published. The situation has been like that for considerably longer; when Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke created the character of HAL for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey back in the 1960s, an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) of the sort that HAL is portrayed as being was thought to be "thirty years away" (indeed, the fictional HAL relates in the film how he was first commissioned in 1992; in the subsequent book, Clarke must have thought that this was too optimistic and pushed the date back five years to 1997). When The Mind's I was published in 1981, AGI was still thought of as being thirty years away. And that seems to be the case even today, although these days the incredible range of tasks which computers can achieve without it (or genuine consciousness) would no doubt have boggled the minds of the authors back then.

There are no strong conclusions one way or the other that artificial consciousnesses might ever be possible, but for this particular conscious entity at least, the discussion is a fascinating and thought-provoking one. I'd not read Christopher Cherniak's short story The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution before, but that tale in particular is going to stay with me for a long time...

Published by: Simon and Schuster, 2012

I'm back to one of my favourite reading topics: cosmology. Professor Krauss is a theoretical physicist who taught at Arizona State University and was co-author of a paper in 1995 which proposed that most of the energy in the Universe resided in its so-called "empty" space (this was well before the idea of dark energy gained widespread acceptance as the best explanation of why everything we actually see happening out there happens the way it does). He also wrote The Physics of Star Trek the same year, which was what first brought his work to my attention, because of course it was.

In its simplest terms, this book is Professor Krauss's explanation of how the Big Bang happened. He sets out the observational evidence for it that had been discovered up to 2012 when the book was published, the basics of relativity and quantum physics that underpin our understanding of how the Universe behaves, and the theories that explain how the science of the latter accounts for the reality of the former.

And he does it very well. The book contains the most cogent explanation of why observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) surprised the world of physics by how shockingly uniform it was and the subsequent work by Alan Guth and others to develop the theory of cosmic inflation that at present is the only credible explanation of how the CMB could have ended up as smooth as it is. In the process, we get the idea of the Multiverse: an unending series of universes, each potentially different in its own way, each seemingly undetectable and separate from any of its predecessors, and each being spawned out of effectively nothing in empty space, which is the most plausible explanation we have for the anthropic principle (the Universe we live in is one that allows for life to exist and observe it; why should that be so?)

He also explains that we live at a special time in the development of our Universe where we can still see enough of it to figure out how it all started and how it will end up. Trillions of years in the future, the expansion of the Universe caused by dark energy will have taken everything apart from our own "local group" of galaxies not just out of observable range, but far beyond the ability of science to deduce that it even exists.

The book is also a refutation of the idea that a creator was necessary for all of everything to spring into existence. As Einstein famously observed, given the laws of nature that we have a creator wouldn't have had much choice in the matter because when quantum physics gets involved, "nothing" turns out to be an extremely unstable state indeed for existence to be in. It's fascinating stuff.

Published by: Pan, 2016

Last year I read a number of books written by Steven Johnson (when I find a writer I like, I tend to binge) and I eventually concluded that he's at his best when he's drawing together narrative threads from history in unexpected and entertaining ways. He does this particularly well here in Wonderland, and it's rather fitting that a book about the way humans love novelty and their need for life to contain pleasant surprises is itself full of just such surprises.

For example, I wasn't aware that the process of recording a musical performance has been known as "cutting" since at least the twelfth century (and probably much earlier than that). I did not expect the tale of a "Mechanical Museum" which opened in London in the early nineteenth century that was run by a Swiss inventor by the name of John-Joseph Merlin to suddenly reveal itself to be a life-changing experience for an eight-year-old boy called Charles Babbage...

Johnson's thesis—and he does a grand job of making it a convincing one—is that technological and conceptual innovation might well drive human civilization forwards, but in order for that innovation to happen, first and foremost someone has to be bunking off from what they were supposed to be getting on with. King Charles II of England tried to suppress the sale and public drinking of coffee, claiming that coffee houses encouraged the worthy to "mis-spend much of their time which might and probably would be employed in and about their lawful calling and affairs" but, as Johnson points out, that particular sort of bunking off powered the industrial revolution and one of those coffee houses eventually became Lloyd's of London. Humans like to play. We like to enjoy ourselves. Before agriculture had been invented, and quite possibly even before written language existed, humans were making music (and the flutes that they were playing, made out of the bones of birds and animals, were tuned to the same scales of notes that Western musicians use today).

It's a fascinating book and I think you'll find that it's worth reading just to discover the existence of the wonderfully named Book of Ingenious Devices.

Published by: Blink, 2018

I've read a large number of rock star "autobiographies" over the years. I've used inverted commas there because an awful lot of them are not the result of the book's purported author sitting at his or her computer and feverishly typing away; instead, the star employs someone known as a ghostwriter who spends a few hours with them, records a few stories and biographical details and then sets about turning the results into a book with an authorial voice that you can half-convince yourself is the star's own. This often happens without the person who actually did all the heavy lifting getting any credit at all, but the ghostwriter in question here is the current deputy editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, Mark Rudd (Mr Daltrey was completely open about this in several interviews he participated in to promote the book when it came out). And to be fair, Rudd does a fair job in capturing Daltrey's voice and putting together a tale that will keep the reader turning the pages. This wasn't much of an ask: any band with a history like that of The Who is going to have a veritable goldmine of stories of superstardom and excess, and this proves to be the case.

Because let's remember who Daltrey was in a band with. It's rather refreshing to read a rock star's account of things where they do not end up in a spiral of drugs and self-delusion, but seeing what it did to his colleagues (some far more than others) must have been a powerful lesson in restraint and self-control. Many years ago I saw legendary rocker Joe Walsh do a small spoken-word-with-a-few-songs gig at Bristol's Bierkeller pub (don't bother looking for it, it's not there any more) and I will never forget one thing Joe said: "The most terrifying experience of my life was when Keith Moon decided he liked me." Although Daltrey clearly loved Moon, the man comes across as a monster; in the end, Daltrey would make sure that he was booked into a different hotel on tour after too many occasions when he was dragged out of bed at four in the morning and arrested, together with the rest of the band and their entourage, because the drummer had decided to do something involving poor (non-existent) impulse control that had resulted in widespread property damage.

Daltrey had a very different background to the rest of the band, coming from Shepherd's Bush, a suburb in West London. He was expelled from school at the age of fifteen following an incident with an air gun (the headmaster who threw him out is the book's titular character) and the way Daltrey tells it, he could quite easily have found himself drifting into a life of crime from that point. How many other rockers could say that at one point in their careers they'd borrowed money from legendary London gangsters the Kray Twins, for example? But fortunately for Mr Daltrey (and for the world of rock in general) music exerted a much more powerful attraction. Too poor to afford to buy a guitar, he started out with a home-made affair. When that folded in two, he built another. But the stars by no means aligned when he met Pete Townshend; he was thrown out of the band early on, although the rest of the band soon recognised their mistake. One of the book's predominant features is the chronicle of squabbles which continued for decades, and it doesn't always get the balance right between setting the record straight and settling old scores.

The book's not a particularly dense affair. It's breezily written and runs to 337 pages of fairly well-spaced text. I read the whole thing in a few hours, but it's an enjoyable read. And it's nowhere near as depressing or miserable as some of the books written by Daltrey's contemporaries.

Published by: Gollancz, 1965

Dune is one of those classic works of science fiction that I keep coming back to and re-reading every few years. Each time I do, I notice new things about the story that I'd previously missed. This is the first time that I've read the book since reading Lesley Blanch's The Sabres Of Paradise last year, and Blanch's influence on the work is obvious. Herbert's book is peppered with pronouncements, descriptions and phrases that are lifted from Blanch's account of the Imam Shamyl's campaign against the Russian occupation of 19th-Century Dagestan (the literal Padishah Emperor that Shamyl was fighting was Tsar Nicholas I and now I can't think of the planet Caitain, the home of Emperor Shaddam IV as anything other than St Petersburg).

The novel of Dune is set in a far future where smart machines are banned and humanity, which has spread across the galaxy and colonised thousands of worlds, is effectively being run by a military-industrial complex which Herbert christened the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles or CHOAM for short. Everyday life doesn't get much of a look-in in the text (which instead focuses on the actions of elite members of some of the most powerful factions), but it would seem that most people could look forward to little more than a life of serfdom as pyons, stuck on their native planets. The Emperor's Sardaukar shock troops enforce order, right up to and including planetary extermination of populations which step out of line. All religious activity has been consolidated under the banner of the Orange Catholic Bible. It's a clever device which Herbert uses to show that the end goal of religion is not spiritual development but social control and protection of the interests of those running things. It's a business. Mergers are a great way to consolidate your market and increase your power, and Herbert was way ahead of his time in seeing where the American approach of megachurches and poilitical meddling was going. While his novel doesn't really show much of the Church's role as a political entity, chapters often begin with pithy, "historical" quotes which share the thoughts of various characters from the book and Herbert uses these to warn of how religion's quest for control comes at the expense of "individuality" (a thinly veiled metaphor for personal freedom).

The cost of all this is more than just planets full of oppressed masses. There is also technological and spiritual stagnation to contend with. The system of order that Herbert describes has been in place across the populated Universe for more than ten thousand years. Aside from the Bene Gesserit's breeding programme, which intends to bring about a singular Übermensch, human development has stalled. Things need to change, and Herbert seems to be suggesting that stirring things up with a lot of slaughter and conflict is how it advances. He wouldn't be the last to suggest this, either (think of how the human avatars of The Shadows justify their action in Joe Straczynski's television series Babylon 5, for example).

Enter Paul Atreides. He has been raised from birth as a killing machine, born to rule; couple this with a magnetic personality (his charisma and his uncanny ability to sway anyone he considers useful to his cause with a few well-chosen words even before he considers using the irresistible "voice" which his Bene Gesserit mother has taught him are described admiringly by other characters several times) and even without the eventual revelation of his prescient superpowers as the famed Kwizatch Haderach it's obvious to me reading the book now that he's no awkward teenager suddenly discovering that he's secretly the saviour of the Universe; he's a monster.

While Paul spends the middle section of the book (which is titled "Muad'dib") railing against the jihad that he forsees will sweep across the Universe leaving billions of dead in its wake (and notice how the J-word is curiously, completely absent from part two of Villeneuve's recent film adaptation of the book) there is a point in the narrative where he realises that it's going to happen anyway simply because of who he is and what he's already done. Villeneuve makes this explicit at the end of his second movie, where Paul literally tells the Fremen to have at it, and off they go.

Because by the third section of the book, titled "The Prophet" Paul has completely embraced his monstrous nature. His focus has changed from stopping the slaughter to assuming ultimate power over the Universe by deposing the Emperor and marrying his daughter. Who could possibly stop him? After all, he's the Chosen One, isn't he?

"Beware charismatic leaders," Herbert is telling us. Particularly when they start using the tools of religious rhetoric to get what they want. Putting the Chosen One in a position of power tends not to work out so well for the rest of us. Suddenly, a book that is nearly sixty years old seems more relevant than ever.

Published by: Harper Collins, 2017

First of all, I have a confession to make: I have only ever seen Iron Maiden in concert with Paul Di'Anno singing. I have only ever seen Mr Dickinson on stage when he went by the name of Bruce Bruce and was in a somewhat less successful band called Samson. I'm familiar with Bruce's body of work, of course; how could I not be? Maiden have spent more that forty years at the top of the pantheon of rock, and few bands have had the tenacity (or shared a harder work ethic) to stay there for as long as Maiden have.

I'd class What Does This Button Do? as a professional autobiography. It's an account of Bruce's working life and not much else. You will learn next to nothing about his personal life or his politics. As he explains at the end of the book, this was a conscious decision on his part, and it works very much in the book's favour. After describing his days at boarding school in Oundle (which were as unpleasant as most school days were, back in the days when bullying and corporal punishment were the norm) and a six-month spell in the Territorial Army, he moves on to his days at London's Queen Mary College, where he got a degree in history (this is not your average drug-addled rocker's ghost-written account of an unruly life by any means. Watch any interview with him and you'll soon realise that Mr Dickinson is a very bright chap by anybody's standards, even if he proved to be somewhat clueless about Brexit) he moves rapidly on to how he discovered his uncanny "banshee wail" singing abilities and joined a number of bands before ending up in Samson. He explains who was responsible for him being credited as Bruce Bruce in that band before relating how, at the Reading Rock Festival after Samson had played their set, he was headhunted by Iron Maiden's manager to be Paul Di'Anno's replacement and the rest, as they say, is history.

Except that side of his career is only part of the story. Bruce is not the only rock star who leveraged a love of flying into a second career as an airline pilot (Steve Morse, of Dixie Dregs and Deep Purple fame is another) but when you can fly your band as they tour the world on Boeing airliners that have had your band's mascot and logo painted on it not just once but several times, you know you're at the top of your game. So there are some interesting accounts of his career with the airline Astraeus and a number of "challenging" flights he made as a result. Oh, and there's also the slight matter of how he helped to develop a brand of bottled beer that has sold by the millions and the film what he wrote, too. (That film gave Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Christina Chong her first ever screen role, by the way.)

Bruce didn't bother with a ghostwriter. He wrote this book himself, in longhand, on paper. This is a book by a writer who gets enthusiastic about things, and that enthusiasm shines through all the way through. Tales of music, flying, beer, and even fighting (and beating) head and mouth cancer are all told with obvious relish. Describing his life as memorable simply doesn't do it justice. Bruce has had a wild ride, and he has a writer's skill at bringing us along with him.

Published by: Square Peg, 2012

I've always been interested in the processes involved in learning, and as a child, I found myself wondering first, why it should be that I found some subjects really difficult and others relatively easy to pick up, and secondly, why my classmates didn't have the same experiences. There was clearly something more complex than just finding some things "boring", which seemed to be sufficient explanation for my classmates at the time. Books have never been boring for me, as I'm sure you've figured out by now. I read Carl Sagan's Pulitzer Prize-winning essay on the evolution of human intelligence, The Dragons of Eden when I was still a teenager and as a result that interest in learning became a fascination, one which shaped my entire professional career. I spent more than forty years in all three of the public, private and educational sectors working in Learning and Development (L&D) and studied aspects of educational psychology for my master's degree. There, I read works like Vygotsky's "Mind In Society" from cover to cover rather than just the chapters we'd been set and when I discovered David Jonassen's work on constructivism I read as much of it as I could get my hands on, utterly engrossed (a phenomenon which I later learned had been named Flow by its discoverer, Mihaly Csikszentmihályi.) I find psychology in general and neuroscience in particular of great interest, and I have shelves full of books which I've read on the subject. So I feel that I'm perhaps a little better qualified than average to review this book. And, sadly, to pick holes in it.

Because let's face it: when the first thing you're confronted with when you're reading a book that is ostensibly about how we learn is a page bearing a notice warning the reader that no warranty is given with respect to the accuracy of the information presented and it includes a disclaimer that the strategies which are outlined may not work for everybody, it's difficult to avoid shifting one's critical eye towards skepticism, if not outright cynicism.

However, I don't think that the author has much to worry about being on the receiving end of accusations of misrepresentation, because the book is remarkably thin on content when it comes to descriptions of specific treatment strategies or indeed the reasoning behind their development. Given that the book seems to have been written primarily as a prospectus for the schools which Ms Arrowsmith-Young has founded across Canada and the United States, I'm assuming that worries about giving away trade secrets are likely to make you somewhat reticent about explaining just how you brought about the sometimes radical transformations of people's lives that are described in it. The book is also one third autobiography (there are a lot of entirely unnecessary family photos, for example) and as a result the final third—the part that I was most interested in, the neuroscience—gets particularly short shrift. There's not enough information for an interested reader to understand exactly how Ms Arrowsmith-Young mitigated her own learning disabilities, let alone those of her students. This lack of detail becomes increasingly annoying as the book goes on, to the point where many of the later case histories are nothing more than quick "before" and "after" sketches and how the student got from one to the other might as well have been by magic.

The examplar in the field of writing about neurological case histories is the late Dr Oliver Sacks, who was able to combine a superbly empathic bond with his patients with brilliant scholarship and an uncanny gift for intuiting (and conveying to the reader) what was at the heart of each patient's personal experience. Like Ms Arrowsmith-Young, Sacks was greatly inspired by the work of the renowned Russian psychologist Aleksandr Luria (and amongst other things, Dr Sacks wrote a chapter about Luria in the Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology). It's a fairly safe bet to assume that this book is aimed at the sort of reader who is familiar with Dr Sacks's work, such as "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" or "Awakenings" and they will probably have also seen the film of the same name (with Robin Williams perfectly capturing much of Dr Sacks's personality and Robert De Niro ably portraying his patient, Leonard L). That's why I got myself this copy, after all. This book tries hard to follow in the good Doctor's footsteps, but it falters, not just because it ought to have been three distinct and separate books, but also because the writing just feels off a lot of the time. Why? Well for one thing, there's a figure on page 119 that shows the locations of eleven of the Brodmann areas of the brain and ten of them are labelled with their appropriate numbers but Brodmann area 6, the Frontal Eye Field, is labelled instead as "FEF" and WHAT KIND OF MONSTER DOES THIS? There are odd language choices, too; on two occasions, characters in the book experience a moment of enlightenment (and I chose that particular word carefully) and each time the author describes this as "It was as if a light had gone off in their head" (my emphasis). Sudden revelations are usually described in terms of a light bulb coming on, are they not—to the point that the description of the light bulb emoji (yes, there is one) contextualizes it with regard to learning, after all. Another character, we are told, would create "flow sheets" to map out the work she needed to do, leaving me wondering whether this described a flowchart or a spreadsheet.

The author also has a habit of referring to symptoms and behaviours using her own names for things rather than standard terminology (it took me a few seconds to figure out that when we're are told about "kinesthetic perception" this refers to proprioception but rather longer to twig that the "kinesthetic speech" she was discussing was actually dysarthria). This hobbles the book's usefulness almost as much as its omission of how the author actually achieves her results—although it should be pointed out that she has achieved some striking successes.

If only the book had stuck with the approach it adopts in chapter twenty-two, "The Impact of Learning Disabilities". This is the only point at which it comes close to capturing the empathy and passion which Oliver Sacks brought to his works and it should have been the opening chapter. Sadly, the book is too unfocused and takes much too long to get round to it that when the author finally issues the call to action for improving the ways in which schools screen pupils for learning disabilities (or more often, fail to do so entirely) it's much too late for it to be of any use.

Oh, and a top tip for writers: never use your book to call out the shortcomings of any of the agency people you got to transcribe your dictated notes, even if you've identified that they might be exactly the sort of person who ought to be attending the establishment that you're plugging. Not cool.

Published by: Hutchinson, 2006

I found myself blindsided by this book of memoirs because the chatty, light conversational tone it adopts from the first page, combined with what I thought I already knew about Alan Alda (star of the long-running and consistently excellent television series M*A*S*H, master of improvisational comedy, gifted screenwriter, famous film star father) had not prepared me for an account of his upbringing and adult life that is frequently harrowing. The incident that provided him with the title of the book is just the first example, and it left me with my mouth hanging open in shock. The account of his mother's struggle with mental illness is a difficult read at times. But his account of this, together with tales of his own close shaves with death (the most recent of which happened while he was filming a science programme at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile, miles from the nearest hospital) are all recounted in a matter-of-fact way ("I looked down, and I was on fire") that just makes it impossible to put the book down. Throughout, Mr Alda shows a rare gift for storytelling that grabs the reader and does not let go.

The book is also full of love and Alda's gentle humour pervades every page. At one point he provides a list of all the famous actresses that he got to kiss in front of a camera whilst doing his job, and it is a long and most impressive list!

There's not as much about M*A*S*H as I'd expected, although it's clear that the camaraderie of the cast was entirely genuine. Alda is more focused on ensuring that his own craft equalled that of his colleagues. Throughout the book, he is open and honest about both his efforts to become as good at his profession as he could possibly be and his doubts that he was capable of reaching that goal. The journey that he goes on in order to achieve the exacting standards which he sets for for himself is the central theme of the book, and the experiences which act as milestones on that journey are recounted in a way which lets them be as revelatory for us as they clearly were for him.

This film-star autobiography is very definitely a cut above the rest.

Published by: 1984 Publishing, 2023

I had a suspicion that this book would be a bit of a curate's egg as soon as I read that clumsy, over-punctuated title. I read the first couple of Frank Herbert's novels in the space of two weeks in the summer of 1975 (edit: after checking my diaries from back then I found out that it was actually 1977). I'd bought them in Norwich while we were on holiday, and I was just the right age to be captivated by them. When the fourth book of the trilogy appeared with the publication of God Emperor of Dune in 1981, I dutifully queued up at Forbidden Planet in London and met Mr Herbert in person. He signed my hardback first edition. So yes, I'm a big Dune fan, and have been for decades.

Even before David Lynch's troubled adaptation of Dune came out, I'd been to the "The Costumes of Dune" exhibition at Universal Studios in Los Angeles and marvelled at the amazing stillsuit designed and built by Mark Siegel and Bob Bryan from an original concept by Bob Ringwood. Even then, months before the release of the film, it was clear that Universal viewed their property as the rightful successor to Star Wars (seemingly without realising that George Lucas had ripped off many of the books' themes and settings for his own work) but also that, with the director of Eraserhead at the helm, the studio was most likely going to get something else; something very different and for me much more interesting. I turned out to be right, even if what we got was neither a proper David Lynch film nor a faithful treatment of the book. That didn't matter; I was obsessed with it. I've watched it many times over the years on each new format that came on the market and my Chapman Stick page on this very site has a screen capture showing Sir Patrick Stewart (cast as Gurney Halleck) with his "baliset" in a scene from the DVD. In one of the film's many cut scenes, Gurney actually played it, and the music used (a composition called "Back Yard") was composed and played by the Stick's inventor himself, the late, great Emmett Chapman.

So yes, I'm comfortably familiar with the source books and also more than a little cognizant of Herbert's own influences. I was disappointed that this aspect of Dune gets particularly short shrift; Frank Herbert's interest in the ecology of the dunes around Florence, in Oregon (a township more famous these days for its notorious attempt to blow up a dead whale that was stranded on the beach there back in 1970) gets a couple of sentences. There's no mention of the planetary geologist Dr Farouk el-Baz in the book at all, despite the character of Liet Kynes in the first book being an obvious homage to him. At the time Herbert was writing the novel, el-Baz would have been cropping up in the newspapers regularly, as he was working on the Apollo space program—where Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts respectfully called him "King" in reference to the then-current ruler of Egypt). And yes, the shuttle on the Enterprise D in Star Trek: The Next Generation is named after him.

Dune is often erroneously cast as an example of the notorious fictional trope of the "White Messiah" and while Evry asserts that this is not the case, he doesn't really explain what Herbert was actually examining with the character of Paul. Paul is not a messiah at all; he's a monster. Herbert was deeply interested in the phenomena of charismatic dictators and the seemingly inexplicable willingness of people to commit vast atrocities in their name. Time and again in Dune, we see Paul rail against the jihad he can see will result from his seizing power, but by the end of the first book he lets it happen anyway. Perhaps there is a hint of redemption when he finds an alternative path, too late, in Dune Messiah but Herbert explicitly states in a later book that Paul is responsible for more deaths than Hitler by orders of magnitude. Evry steers well clear of framing Paul in this light.

A more serious omission is that of the work of Lesley Blanch, whose 1960 book The Sabres of Paradise was used by Herbert as the source of Fremen culture on Arrakis. Portions of Blanch's work were lifted in their entirety and used in Herbert's novel without attribution. Read the book, and amongst many other important elements of Dune's plot you'll soon see who the original Padishah Emperor was and why he was so powerful, understand the dark and murderous origins of kanly, discover why sietches are so important, find out why the Fremen use the Chakobsa language and understand why Gurney believes that "to kill with the tip of the blade lacked artistry." If you're going to examine Fremen culture and their attitude to the occupying forces of both the Harkonnens and the Atreides in the films as well as the book, you need to have read the book; it's essential to fully understanding where Herbert's novel came from. It's also an astoundingly good book.

And despite the wealth of interview material that Evry has amassed for this book (he talked to everybody he could, up to and including the film's director himself, which was a genuine coup), quite frankly it's not very well written. Most of the text reads like it belongs in the "In Popular Media" sections of Wikipedia articles (I found myself wondering why it was that important to list all the episodes of Chuck which have references to the film in them, for example). The definitive book about the first film adaptation of Dune to make it as far as a theatrical release remains as yet unpublished.

Hopefully that won't be the case for very much longer.

Published by: Bloomsbury, 1996

It's taken me quite a while to read this monumental work from cover to cover. Not because it's a hard read; it isn't at all. It's just that it contains 1,060 densely packed pages of autobiography, reportage, and criticism of a genre that I now realise I know next to nothing about. Picking up a copy of this epic has become a first step of a quest to do something about that.

Robert Gottlieb (1931–2023) was Editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and the New Yorker, so saying that he knew what he was doing in compiling this collection of writing is a gross understatement. His explanatory notes (which are often devoted to explaining the catty squabbles between different factions of jazz's many followers, cliques which had strange names such as the "moldy figs" and the "boppers") are just as entertaining as the articles they introduce. I doubt that many people could have pulled off a project like this as successfully and comprehensively as he did; he gathered an astonishing range of texts, the earliest dating back to 1919 and the latest to 1995, the year of the book's initial publication in the USA.

And what a selection of writers there is. From Cab Calloway to Philip Larkin (back in the days when he was jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph); from Art Blakey to Jean-Paul Sartre; from Jelly Roll Morton to Humphrey Lyttelton, and from Charles Mingus to Dudley Moore. And if you're reeling from the ridiculous cultural reach demonstrated by that brief pick of writers, just wait until you read what they wrote. There isn't a single misfire from start to finish. You're in for a treat.

Published by: Zoop / Fussbudget Productions, 2023

With a prologue relating the tale of how hot-dog salesman and sometime new-age guru George Adamski allegedly had encounters with all manner of extraterrestrial beings and was taken for quick trips to a distinctly verdant version of the planet Venus back in the 1950s (which was well before we discovered that anyone standing unprotected on its surface would be crushed, fried, and melted by sulphuric acid, although not necessarily in that order), a central plot that involves a presidential candidate apparently being abducted by aliens, and enough nods and references to famous UFO cases and notable figures in the field to sink a battleship, you won't be at all surprised to learn that I really, really enjoyed the original comics of Saucer Country and its sequel, Saucer State. They couldn't have been more in my wheelhouse if I'd somehow been able to personally commission Paul and Ryan to create them.

So I was more than a little bit gutted when Saucer State was rather ignominiously cancelled before its final issue was released. In days of yore, when such things happened all you could do was shrug and try to imagine what might have been.

But now there's this thing called crowdfunding, and when Paul Cornell announced on his email newsletter that he and Ryan had set up a project to finish things properly and bring out a definitive book of the whole thing using the Zoop platform, I signed up for it on the spot, because of course I did. I even paid a little bit extra, so that I could have my name listed on the inside back cover of the book because things like that make me inordinately happy for no particular reason.

The completed book arrived this week, and it's a delight. Despite the bonkers plot, the story turns out to make complete sense—at least it does if you're familiar with the sort of material which graces the pages of the Fortean Times every month. There are some lovely nods to the wilder fringes of Forteana and conspiracy theorists will have fun spotting all manner of references to real-world shenanigans; there's even a Republican presidential candidate who is every bit as self-obsessed (and orange) as the version we've been saddled with. And without spoiling anything I can definitely say that the long-awaited finale delivers the goods in style. Reading this took me to my happy place and no abductions were necessary in achieving that objective. And yes, my name's on the inside back cover. I checked.

Published by: Bloomsbury, 2023

This collection of short fiction by one of the UK's greatest creative writers is a mind-bending demonstration of the depth and range of his interests. Yes, the novella What We Can Know About Thunderman is a relentless examination of a fictionalised version of the industry where Mr Moore first made a name for himself, the comics industry. But there are also works which, amongst many other entertaining things, show a deep understanding of cosmology and quantum physics, a love of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the Beat Poets, and of course a fascination with the mysterious world of Forteana, whose themes and tropes have cropped up frequently in his work over the past six (!) decades (I was reading his Curt Vile strips in UK music newspaper Sounds when I was a teenager, and they were a strong influence on my own early scribblings as a wannabe comics artist; I'm very sure that I wouldn't have ended up drawing stuff for Motörhead if it hadn't been for Mr. Moore's example).

To say more would spoil things. Just let an intellect whose erudition and macabre sense of humour are both completely off the scale take you by the hand and lead you down some deliciously dark and unexpected paths...

Published by: Harper Collins, 2023

Last month my brother Dave and I went to see Rush's vocalist, bass and keyboard player Geddy Lee talk about his new book at the Barbican Hall in London. The ticket price included a copy of the book in hardback and since then I've been enthusiastically reading about his life and upbringing. And because it's Geddy we're talking about here, I've also been listening to him read the audiobook as well (which comes with a couple of tracks that were outtakes from his 2000 solo album, My Favourite Headache). I already have many of the books that were written by Rush's drummer; the late Neil Peart (or Pratt, to his band mates) was responsible for almost all of the band's lyrics and he was a gifted writer of prose, too. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to discover that Geddy is as well.

Geddy's parents were Polish Jews who first met in Auschwitz. Geddy was named Gershon after his maternal grandfather who was murdered in the Holocaust. Many of Geddy's aunts and uncles were also murdered by the Nazis and his father's experience in the camps was such that he died of heart failure at the shockingly early age of 45, when Geddy was just twelve years old. The early parts of the book make for sombre reading, sometimes brutally so. But they also reveal just how determined the young Jewish boy from Toronto was, once he decided that the life he wanted to lead was one spent making rock music together with his friend from school, a blonde kid called Aleksandar...

Even though they rapidly gained a reputation as one of the genre's more cerebral bands, Rush embraced the hedonism of the rock and roll life just as enthusiastically as their peers. There are plenty of tales of excess, trashed hotel rooms, and run-ins with law enforcement as well as the consumption of large quantities of acid, dope and coke, but I soon picked up on the fact that the band weren't the sort of guys who would test things to destruction. Geddy and his bandmates were smart enough to see where that road led and chose a different path. That was, perhaps, a major factor in their longevity as a functioning creative powerhouse. Rush retain their well-deserved reputation as musicians who were a profound influence on other musicians, your humble scribe very much included.

The book helped me to understand much of the band's antics on and off stage. For example I finally get why Geddy wore a t-shirt that just said Blah Blah Blah for most of the Snakes and Arrows tour.

There is so much joy in this book. Even with the profound sadness that pervaded much of the band's later history and the event which led to its eventual conclusion, this book contains love and laughter in truly prodigious amounts. I've read some rock and roll autobiographies that left me absolutely certain that I'd never, ever want to hang out with the personalities involved. Some are perfunctory accounts that are so miserable they leave you wishing you could slap the person who wrote the book around the head a few times until they realised just what a privileged and glorious life they were leading. But very few leave the reader feeling that they'd been a part of the fun while it was happening. My Effin' Life does exactly that. It's the sort of book that will make you wish you'd been fortunate enough to count the band as your friends and—even better—it gives you a pretty good idea of what things would have been like if they were.

Required reading for any rock aficionado.

Published by: Orbit, 2015

Despite the hardback copy of this running to some 466 pages, I burned through the whole thing in three sessions. I was thoroughly gripped by the tale of the people on board a generation starship as it journeys to the eponymous moon of a planet in the Tau Ceti system and what happens after they get there. The rest of this review is going to address specific things that happen in the book, so there are going to be SPOILERS ahead. If you don't want to know what happens, you should stop reading now.

Still with me? Good.

The book is first and foremost a metaphorical punch in the face to the gung-ho, "We have the technology to colonise Mars right now" attitudes exhibited by Elon Musk and his ilk. Robinson is clearly very angry about the lackadaisical approach they have to terraforming's practicalities and how they ignore the fact that anyone embarking on such a project would not only be placing their own lives at risk, they would also be doing the same with the lives of any descendants that they choose to have. That punch in the face comes in the novel's closing pages, but it is (in my opinion) one that is very well deserved.

Because the book chronicles multiple tragedies. There's the tragedy of all the people who die during the course of the events that the book recounts; those that die on the surface of Pandora when it becomes evident that there is some form of life there which is inimical to human existence; those that die in the conflicts between factions of the starship's crew as they try to decide on which alternative plan of action to take as a result; and those that die from the accidents and stresses of the voyage itself. However for me the fundamental tragedy of the book is that of its narrator, the artificial intelligence that operates the ship and its systems. Oddly, the ship is never referred to as anything other than "the ship" or just "Ship" but the AI is addressed as "Pauline" at several points as the plot unfolds. By the end of the book, the AI has become its most quirky, funny, and engaging character (and this is saying a lot, because Robinson has a rare skill at writing believable characters). The AI's examination of metaphor and narrative in deciding how to fulfil the task that one of the other principal characters has set it is full of deep insight and occasional despair at just how weird human cognition and discourse really are. There is infinite promise in its intelligence, but at the end of the book it is irretrievably lost and none of the characters who worked with it seem to have even considered the idea that measures should have been taken to preserve it somehow. There's not even a "Oops. My bad."

Robinson's solution to the Fermi Paradox is a bleak one: interstellar travel doesn't work. Terraforming takes too long to be viable. An ecology will only thrive on the planet where it originated, and any attempt to transplant it elsewhere will fail, because there are simply too many variables involved, and potential settlers may not discover the important ones until it's too late. The book's central message has much in common with Robinson's other work, particularly The Ministry for the Future, which I read last year. There are no aliens roaming the cosmos, because they're either dead or they've figured out that the only way for a species to stand any chance of long-term survival is to stay at home and take better care of the planet where it originated. Anything else is at best a distraction, at worst a catastrophe that is waiting to happen.

Published by: Fourth Estate, 2010

At first I thought that the vivid imagery that Hilary Mantel's prose was conjuring up in my head was because of my familiarity with the landscape in which it is set. Many of the events which take place in the first few pages of her autobiography occur in locations around Norfolk; my parents lived in High Kelling for many years and the book's opening scene records Dame Hilary's feelings as she moves out of Owl Cottage in Reepham, a genteel and quaintly compact market town where my sister and her family have lived for more than a decade. But it didn't take me long to realise that it was the quality of her writing which was working its magic, not my sense of place. Oh, to be able to write like that.

The book is in two main sections. The first covers Dame Hilary's early years growing up in a Catholic household in the north of England. The sectarian aspects seem odd (possibly because religion never really "took" with me; given the childhood I had, the oft-repeated line of "suffer the little children" had very different connotations and I decided that I wanted nothing to do with any deity, real or otherwise, who was cool with letting stuff like that happen to me, or anyone else). The excerpts from Catholic prayers underline the strangeness—and the glorification of suffering, which is, let's face it, profoundly twisted—but at the same time they show how she assembled the bones of her writing. For me, the most profound of all the insights she grants the reader in the entire book comes from her comment about an "excellent" semicolon in a line from The Litany for a Good Death (the title given to a prayer which begs for its subject to be allowed to die in such a way as to preserve the good grace of the Church, and isn't that a perfect example of just how warped the religious mindset can get?) It allows her to reveal how deeply her convent education and exposure to this sort of liturgical text affected her; "People ask me how I learned to write," she tells us. "That's how."

The second, larger section of the book is an account of her adult life, viewed through the lens of her battle with the disease endometriosis. It's a sad and occasionally grim history of suffering which had its roots in the lack of public access to helpful medical information back then, but which was exacerbated by the chauvinism, incompetence, and a general lack of empathy exhibited by many of the people who were working in the health service in those days. As the book progresses, we begin to see how the ghosts that its title refers to (and the book contains a menagerie of them) might have sprung into being. We are also given glimpses into the development of several of Dame Hilary's works, particularly A Place of Greater Safety, her novel about the French Revolution.

There are omissions and elisions to the story; Dame Hilary was not one for the "Tell all" celebrity autobiography by any stretch of the imagination. But all the way through the book, her carefully developed knack for observation and her mastery of language are wielded in shrewd characterizations of the people she meets (and each of these is accomplished in just a couple of perfectly judged sentences). Her writing is enough of a revelation in itself. Each new encounter had me saying to myself, "Oh, I know this person."

She was one hell of a writer.