Richard Fortey: Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind Richard Fortey is best known as an author (Life: An Unauthorised Biography) and palaeontologist (Trilobite!) but as his sparkling memoir A Curious Boy revealed, he’s been a skilled amateur mycologist since boyhood. Now you can go on a fungus foray without ever leaving your armchair in the company of someone who really knows his Armillarias from his Amanitas. [DISCLAIMER: I have written a longer review of this forthcoming title for a magazine].
Peter F. Hamilton: The Void Trilogy (The Dreaming Void/ The Temporal Void/ The Evolutionary Void) I started to read this years ago but it didn’t seem to make much sense, and I was put off by fantasy elements that didn’t seem to sit well with the SFnal framing. Now I know the reason — the Void Trilogy follows on pretty much directly from the Commonwealth Saga (Pandoras Star, Judas Unchained) I reviewed last month, and is best read (or, in my case, listened to) straight after. The action takes place some hundreds of years after the Commonwealth Saga. It’s been found that the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy isn’t really a black hole, but an entirely separate universe whose laws are rather different. Time flows faster, for one thing. And Commonwealth technology doesn’t really work. Instead there is … psychic power. Telepathy, telekinesis and so on. Two thousand years earlier (in Void time) a ship from the Commonwealth managed to get in to the Void — whose barrier seemingly prevents most incursions — and lands on a planet called Querencia, where the crew and their descendants revert to a kind of medieval-grade society (with telepathy). In the greater universe, dreams of the life of Edeard, a powerful psychic from Querencia, leak out and are received by a human called Inigo, who founds a religion called Living Dream whose aim is to migrate into the Void and achieve fulfilment — at the risk of making the Void expand to consume the Galaxy. The rest of humanity aims to stop this happening. But matters are made more complicated by the fact that since Commonwealth times, humanity has split into a series of factions that either embrace or reject technology. The most techno-enthusiastic are the Accelerators who want to enter the Void as a way of jacking them up to ‘post-physical’ status, again risking Void expansion. And there’s lots more (each one of these three volumes is enormous). Needless to say I enjoyed it hugely. The larger-than-normal amount of woo was countered by characterisation of a depth not often seen in SF. Many of the key characters carry over from the Commonwealth Saga, so we really do get invested in their fates.
John Long: The Secret History of Sharks John Long is an Australian palaeontologist interested in fossil fishes. Here he recounts the evolutionary history of sharks. Conventional wisdom has these iconic predators patrolling the seas pretty much unchanged for 400 million years. But a closer look shows that they have evolved in all sorts of interesting ways, morphing out of all the dangers and obstacles that the Earth has thrown at them. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me a pre-publication version for a cover quote].
Brian Clegg: Brainjacking Disinformation. Misinformation. Misdirection. Personal Truths. Alternative Facts. Influencers. Product placement. Deepfakes. Stage magic. Advertising. Marketing. From the dawn of advertising to modern social media, we risk drowning in floods of information designed to change our minds — such is ‘brainjacking’. Brian Clegg explains the long history of brainjacking and shows that some of the purported effects are exaggerated, whereas others really should worry us. A plain-speaking guide to our modern post-truth world. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me a pre-publication version for a cover quote].
