All Reviews by Iridos
The Brain, A Decoded Enigma
by Dorin T. Moisa
Dorian,
I am sorry to see you have not understood my criticism. It seems quite plain and clear to me, so I am at a loss to why this is.
Also, you misunderstand the nature of my book-review. I did not expect or even ask for a reply from you, and I surely do not intend to use "MDT terminology" in my book-reviews. In short: a book-review is not written to chat with the author.
One more thing I want to point out: It was _you_ in exactly this book, who used the term 'elephant memory', which is ... how do you phrase it... "not defined in MDT".
I.
PS. feel free to read it again, though - it might be harsh criticism, but there's a lot of good and useful advice there between the lines for someone willing to see it.
Blindsight
by Peter Watts
Rather interesting book, but the end is quite a bit disappointing.
No idea why the author had to drag (genetically re-engineered) vampires out of the science fiction writers dirt box - it's not as if they were a necessity for the story.
I.
The Impossibles
by Gordon Randall Garrett
Not much to add to R Stephans comment - still the same humor, the story of Brain Twister continues, still worth reading (and only 200 pages as "large-font-PDF"). The novelty of the 1st book wears a bit off for me, so it was a bit less enjoyable.
Also we're regrettably getting deeper into the supernatural - perhaps "just telepathy" was not enough for an exciting story?
Different from the 1st book, there was (in my opinion) not so much of a mystery one could try to guess before being explicitly told.
Oh - one more thing - what happened to the blonde that our hero had madly fallen in love with in Brain Twister in this book?!
I.
Supermind
by Gordon Randall Garrett
This third book after BrainTwister (also under the name of "That Sweet Little Old Lady") and "The Impossibles" concludes the story around FBI agent Ken Malone, so better read the other two books first.
What happened to the brunette he had fallen in love with so madly in the second book?
We don't get told if the authors still blink/wait for marriage this time - another thing we'll now never know.
One funny thing throughout all the books: People always use "visaphones" - telephones with screens to see each other - which was perhaps not one of the most surprising projections of the future - but one that couldn't have been more wrong... we have mobiles all over now, and many of them have cameras, but still this is rarely used to show the partners of the conversation to each other :)
It's nice that the story has a twist and the end to the trilogy is quite unexpected, else it would have become quite a bit boring.
As science fiction goes, the whole series doesn't have great visions - the books are detective stories with telepathy and teleporting.
I.
Jill the Reckless
by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
Quite amusing book.
Still trying to get used to peopled "ejaculating" sentences..
There had to be quite some hard work be done to keep the book humorous on this theme - and sometimes it is a bit too much...
If someone told you, he lost all your money - your fortune to be precise - would your first action be to comfort him?
Would you leave your relatives and head into New York with twenty dollars as your sole possession and no place to stay? Maybe you would - and you would end up in a lot of trouble doing so.
In the end, the story revolves around the same find-your-true-love theme as (an)other Wodehouse book(s).
I.
Eastern Standard Tribe
by C. Doctorow
The book is well-written, but I found it a bit hard to read - the pseudo-internet talk didn't help and I figured rather late, that the EST/GMT "organizations" or tribes related to the timezones, so some more abbreviations that didn't make sense.
In that regard it isn't helpful that the book starts with the end - the 'hero' is standing on the roof of a mental hospital, reflecting his fate while the story unrolls - of course, we don't know this at the time, it's just the guy standing somewhat unrelated on a roof.
The concept of "tribes" and loyalties according to timezones seems a bit ridiculous to me, as well as that great business idea that the main character develops, that just wouldn't work out (well, if it did, the author wouldn't have written this book but would enjoy the millions he made with it).
Hmmm - "one-way osmotic materials" would be a perpetuum mobile, I'd think - amazing how you can get the science wrong with so few words - and that in a book that contains so little science...
Well worth the time reading and one of the few "modern" free eBooks and as that one of the higher quality ones, but not one of the best books on a more genera scheme.
I.
Brain Twister
by Gordon Randall Garrett
The same book also appeared under the title "That Sweet Little Old Lady" and is also available here - pick one, don't bother with the other.
In the same series, "The Impossibles" (also under the name "Out Like a Light") and "Supermind" (also under the name "Occasion for Disaster") appeared.
The book is about the FBI finding out that one important space-motor project is spied on by a telepath. The discover this with the help of a machine developed by them (this part is actually pretty fishy, as it contains some very unlikely things the author thinks he needs for the narrative, covered by some pseudo-scientific babble).
"Set out a thief to find a thief", they decide and try to find other telepaths to find the spy. Being telepathic seems to turn people mad (and the only telepath they ever knew off, now dead was an imbecile), so the search begins in mental hospitals all over the US. The search is successful - what a pity that inhabitants of mental hospitals often have their own idea of reality - and now the FBI has to go along with it to humor them.
The book is quite amusing and well-written. If you like detective stories, you can guess along for the identity of the spy, and you get a fairish chance of solving the problem before it is revealed.
Except for the telepathy-detecting machine (and telepathy itself), there are no weird or extremely unlikely twists to the story, but there are some good laughs along the way.
I.
The Brain, A Decoded Enigma
by Dorin T. Moisa
Summary: don't bother reading, this is not a free scientific textbook, but something someone wrote/made up in his spare time and couldn't publish anywhere else.
This is a non-scientific book which pretends to be scientific. One indication of this is the total lack of citations. The author reasons in the book that it describes a fundamental model and hence does not need citations. This might be correct if he would just develop the model. Yet, perhaps 80% of the book are examples that try to apply the model (in a quite repetitive way) to "reality" - or what the author thinks is reality.
All these examples use "data" out of thin air. For some of them one could say that the data is self-evident (as we all own a brain and can check on ourselves), on others it is not. This is, e.g., the case for all comparisons to animal brains. Just to name one: the model is applied to an elephant which has a big brain, but (apparently) isn't very intelligent and has an 'elephant-memory'.
Do elephants really have a good memory? Folklore says so - but folklore is often wrong. This is where a citation would be needed. (Actually, from memory, it is also not the mass or size of a brain that make up complexity/intelligence, but the amount of neurons - and would you bet an elephant has more neurons? All this the author would have found out had he bothered to check the literature)
The reasoning that this book would be the first to define clear terms and hence is incompatible with previous publications is just a lame excuse - many interesting and intelligent experiments were done whose results can/should, no MUST be cited - instead of the popular method of "making things up". And such experiments/observations are clearly independent of the terminology used.
The book goes on and comes to some trivial as well as some abstruse conclusions from applying the model to the random made-up data.
Sentences like "Let's summarize the European spirit." give you a hint at the type of unjustified generalizations you have to suffer on reading (I wouldn't be too sure that there is a definite general "European spirit" that could be spoken of in any scientific way)
Quote from the Gutenberg project pages:
"In fact, Project Gutenberg approves about 99% of all [...]eBooks [...]"
The book was obviously "published with Gutenberg", because publishing it in this form in any peer-reviewed way would only yield the answer "unsuitable for publishing"
The model itself might be interesting - although there is never a rationale given, why a new layer, e.g. a ZM models had to be introduced (and why is the simplest "image" model an M-model?! why not an I-model? - The naming is also done without rationale or reason), but the way it is applied to rather random made-up claims is certainly not suitable.
I.
Blind Shrike
by Richard Kadrey
To stay in character of the book: "this is some serious shit!" (in a positive sense).
The world in this book is indeed made out of three "spheres" - one mainly contains us ordinary humans, one angels and daemons and one to exotic beasts like phoenix or vampires. The three spheres overlap and of all creatures we humans are (mostly) blissfully unaware of the other spheres: all kinds of creatures from other spheres do all types of ...weird shit... all over the place in our neighborhood, but we somehow don't notice. The same is true for "Spyder" until he gets mugged by a monster from another sphere - and rescued by a girl from another sphere one day - after that he suddenly sees creatures from all spheres.
At first I thought everything becomes a bit too nauseating for my taste - some "Black Clerks" go around stealing eyes, lips and all kinds of organs from people, somehow replacing their functions by... magic(??), thus leaving the people alive... kind of. To my relief, the yuck-factor goes down a bit - paradoxically when the hero(s) decide to go to hell.....
The book is overall well written and the story is gripping. I should probably give a PG-rating in this case: as you suspected, there is bad language and for those of you who will easily tolerate excessive amounts of violence, but are offended by the slightest mention of sex: yes, there is also sex in this book, although not in a and-he-thrust-deep-into-her kind of way (and don't get wrong ideas now, it's not a main theme either).
There are some conversion errors in the current PDF version for apostrophes or the like
Some deep-down humor is also involved (e.g. the boss of hell turns out... somehow, in a way, to be a good guy)
Perhaps a little bit is missing for all 5 stars, but not much - overall a very amusing and gripping book - perhaps the genre is more fantasy than science fiction.
The Ant King
by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Surreal, yes - too surreal for me. The Ant King is only one of several stories, but I stopped reading a few stories later.
The plot: The 'heros' girlfriend is captured by the 'Ant King' and replaced by gum-balls. After visiting a self-help group, the hero starts marketing the (addicting) gumballs very successfully. When his company becomes a big corporation he decides to follow a voice that told him to rescue his girlfriend from the ant king. He buys a magic sword from ebay, plays a video game in which the ant king is the villain to beat (but he always dies at the death bridge) and sets out to rescue her with the help of Vampire, a computer geek.
The ant king has antlers, eats tacos and can speak - it is generally left open if he is (remotely?) human.
For me, everything is just too unreal for the story to figure - there is not enough what seems real for it to go anywhere and matter.
I.
A Damsel in Distress
by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
Pretty amusing book - I wouldn't have thought I would like a book from 1925, but yes, it also had me laughing pretty hard at some times.
If you're looking for deep philosophical thoughts, then this is definitely not it, though.
What it *is*, is a smooth read, quite funny and perhaps a glimpse in the time about a 100 years back. Interesting language "these chappies" have, speaking of their "old mater" and parting with a toodle-oo".
Toodle-oo,
I.