Reviews and Comments

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Useful book showing examples of good practice around the world, and shows the author's personality.

A mixed bag. The good stories were great, but there were also some uninteresting ones too. The eBook format offers better value for money.

More of a 90s dotcom boom memoir than one about a pop artist. I wanted to know how Thomas Dolby ended up working with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Akiko Yano, but I don't remember them being mentioned at all. I also wanted to know more about the Camera Club. The book galloped past that period. There was plenty of detail about his adventures in tech in San Francisco and whilst working with Netscape and Nokia.

okay but not memorable

An interesting summary of the changes that led to Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014 by a regular contributor to The Economist magazine. It feels like the events that led to the collapse of the USSR and Yeltsin's rise to power and subsequently falling out of favour fill a lot of the book. The pace positively gallops once Putin appears. A lot of the book deals with the importance of television for communicating to the masses, both in the USSR and in Putin's Russia.

An interesting summary of the changes that led to Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014 by a regular contributor to The Economist magazine. It feels like the events that led to the collapse of the USSR and Yeltsin's rise to power and subsequently falling out of favour fill a lot of the book. The pace positively gallops once Putin appears. A lot of the book deals with the importance of television for communicating to the masses, both in the USSR and in Putin's Russia.

rather than generic science fiction, this is hardcore maths fiction. Some stories gave me a headache with their extended technobabble.

Disappointing after reading his first collection - I skipped a lot of stories in this book and didn't feel connected with any of the characters

Despite being an avid reader of Interzone in the early/mid 90s, I must have forgotten about Eric Brown. This was an interesting collection of his early science fiction - definitely not hard-SF. I don't think I skipped any stories in this one.

There was something about the relationships that the telepaths in the Engineman stories here have that made me uncomfortable, but it was the early 90s. The telepaths are created medically at an early age and are needed to guide spacecraft (perhaps like Navigators in Dune, but much younger). I think this quote encapsulates it:-
"It’s no longer illegal, but oldsters like Mass have throwback morality."

PJ McAuley can write some great books. Others are okay, and this is one of them. There is too much flashback, presented as one character telling stories to another character. There are no heroes in this book, mostly criminals of one sort or another, but some become criminals because of discrimination.