Book 👏 Review

Free Thinking Constrained

Here are some thoughts about books I’ve read recently, no particular order.

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

• Leviathan Wakes - James S.A. Corey

  First book in The Expanse series, a sci-fi epic with a TV show I haven’t seen. Really enjoyable, lovable characters, enthralling - this book just hit the mark for me.

• Blindsight - Peter Watts

  Another hard sci-fi book… I have my preferences. I stopped reading after the first chapter for a short while, but once I picked it back up I couldn’t put it down. After a signal is discovered in the outer solar system, a ship is sent to find the source of that signal. Confined to the ship for most of the book, the characters are the key driver of the narrative. With a trans-humanist super-thesaurus, a prehistoric predator and more; Peter Watts explores ideas of consciousness, free will, neurobiology and alien contact.

• There is no Antimemetics Division - qntm

  If a ‘meme’ is something that spreads. What’s an antimeme?

  If you’re familiar with the SCP wiki, this book is a must read. A trippy non-linear story about a research division that studies entities that escape perception without special drugs. Most of these entities are harmless, they evolved mnestic camouflage as a survival mechanism against predators. Some however, aren’t so harmless. One researcher seems to find something amiss, and something important seems to escape her memory…

• Tress of the Emerald Sea - Brandon Sanderson

  A beautiful story about a young woman in a fantasy world on a journey to find her prince. She joins a pirate crew and sails seas of deadly fungi spores in search of her loved one.

• Three Body Problem + The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu

  Three Body was pretty hard to follow at times, but I really enjoyed the frayed story across timelines combining into the existential threat of an alien civilization. The Netflix show was pretty decent and it hit most of the marks but I thought the casting was a little weird, although it was certainly more widely approachable than being more faithful to the book.

  The Dark Forest, the 2nd book in the series, is most certainly worth it. It explores the reasons behind the Fermi Paradox, suggesting a reason that now has its own wikipedia article. I’d try to explain the hypothesis, but the article does a much better job, all I can say is that the book was enrapturing.