Another Space in Time

Golish has produced a technically well-written science fiction, based on near future power politics and warfare. The twist with a difference is the medical enhancement of two rival leaders brain function; enhancements that has been compromised by the Perfect Recall team for a third superpower. Doctored memories are replayed in the protagonists’ minds, upsetting mental balance and so altering tactical decisions. One is eventually driven to a mental and physical breakdown, but only after his has ruined any chance of military success. We are in a post polar ice-caped world, which has managed to maintain current levels of technology, but at great cost to humanity. The world is in power blocks based on existing geo-political realities, projected forward through the growing climate and general environmental crisis. The blocks are in an almost constant state of military rivalry that breaks out into regional war. The book has very much a male mindset, relying to a high degree on the esca...

   This historical fiction reads more like a book written in the 19 th Century than one written in our time, which says something for the quality of the Dennis’s creativeness. One must qualify that by pointing out that there is a great deal of modern rather than 19 th Century word usage and sentence structure, but for the modern reader that simply sharpens understanding, rather than detracting from the historic placement. Time shifting word patterns have often give even the greatest literature from past centuries a turgid heaviness. So I think the author was right to not too deeply play his use of 19 th century ‘building materials’.    As one is absorbed in the series of period specific vignettes, which make up the book, the descriptive detail effortlessly levers imagination back through time. I would find it hard to believe that Dennis hasn’t read a great many of the classic fictions from the period, allowing his writing to absorb something of those famous ...

     I found this to be a very entertaining read, which helped give me a real feel for the period when the electricity cables started to connect the cities and then towns of North America. Moore did a great job of invoking a sense of place and time. I felt the magic of those times, so appropriately generated, by profound technological progress. The alchemy of turning night to day was of an order of wonder only matched in my lifetime by the Apollo missions to the Moon.      My difficulty with this reading is small and to many will seem pedantic. That being my strong preference that writers of historical fiction never play fast and loose with the known timelines of events. Facts and the time on which they act should be sacrosanct in the reporting of history. The writer should only weave his fiction, his story, on the solid framework of all commonly accepted truth. He may of course dispute details if there is a case to be argued, such that perhaps in one...

     There was a brief period at the start when I thought that there was going to be rather too much engineering talk about helicopters, but this soon passed. Then very soon I was being drawn into the real story, the one about the characters that pilot those machines, and particularly the sub-culture of well-travelled pilots that ply their trade wherever it is called for. The story centres on a group of pilots working a fictitious site of oil drilling platforms of the coast of East Africa.      As the story begins to generate pace, we soon realise that its main theme is a clash between wealthy, privileged Western and a strong African culture that manage to sustain its people despite appalling relative poverty. The central figure, a form-filling, technically efficient if less than naturally talented, pilot is both naïve and prejudiced in his attitudes to foreigners in general, and especially those that live under African skies. He isn’t racist, that ...

     This is a great read, despite some minor repetitions. We have to bear in mind that this is really only a series of essays, some of which cover a little of the same ground. My view is that if Hawking had lived a little longer then this would have been a better compiled set of ‘letters on the big questions’, but that doesn’t much detract from the quality of the work, and certainly not from its messages. These essays run a lot wider than science, into Hawking’s hopes and fears for humankind. Some of the essays run into sensitive issues, which raise a good deal of honest debate. Well, there are just too many of us on our wonderful planet, which we are rapidly destroying, and this alone must justify our questioning of everything, even the very existence of God.      There are a few contradictions in the science, which isn’t surprising when writing about an incredibly quickly advancing field of science, cosmology, and especially when the material was...

      This is a wonderful true to life book, written by the sufferer of a major cerebrovascular accident experienced at the very young age of thirty. Having just received his sergeant’s strips as a British Policeman, Catshill is cut down to a physical half, with a severely damaged long and short-term memory and at first a total lack of coherent speech. He had to learn how to regain control of his motor functions, especially those on the entire right side of his body, and his mind. The man even had to ‘retrain’ his injured brain to see through what had become a suddenly ‘disconnected’ right eye. His courage, honesty, and determination shine through in proverbial buckets.       Catshill has survived not only this story’s devastating stroke, but two more less severe episodes since. That is that they were considerably less severe than the first, but by no means inconsequential. In his rebuilt life he has become a first class autobiographer and in another...

     I very much enjoyed this very near future speculative fiction. The book centres on a family drama, with a work obsessed and emotionally distant father, two teenage children that he generally fails to engage with, and a mum doing her best to hold diverging lives together. Contemporary drama is very much the emotional driver of this work. The other key elements revolve around a dangerous terrorist unit of anti-capitalists and robotic toys that communicate with each other rather too well, when their software is enhanced with a sort of bee hive logic-based application. Perhaps surprisingly, the diverse elements of the story bond together very well.     The book is well written, adequately edited and paced towards a suspenseful climax. In other words, Wright has produced a rewarding entertainment. As far as my very thin understanding of information technology goes, the artificial intelligence elements are plausible. I am accepting of the scientific underst...

    My copy is from the 4 th impression of the original Faber and Faber book printed by the Western Printing Services Limited, Bristol. The book was considered important enough to be first printed in 1941, when invasion of England by Hitler’s armies appeared imminent. We already had the 4 th impression by 1944, so the book was in regular demand. Its relevance at the time was extreme, as it could only help the farmers struggling against national food shortages that were threatening to bring the British nation to its knees.     The book is very general, but mostly geared to the encouragement of lea farming, as the best way of optimising fertility on many farms. The preface to the book was written by the great agriculturalist E.J. Russell, from Rothamstead Experimental Station in May 1940. Soil and Sense was deemed to be of significant war time value, though it was the Great War, (WWI), to which the written words mostly related.     The book still ha...

    This is a well written book that passes all my standards for a five-star review. However, I have to say that I didn’t particularly enjoy the fiction. This lack of engagement being in large part because I find everything relating to celebrity status intensely dull. I was seduced to read by the outstanding opening phrases of the first chapter. The nod towards the spilling of blood suggested a read I wasn’t going to get, but let me be clear, Patrick certainly didn’t set out to deceive murder/mystery lovers and thriller fans into reading. The contents are clearly written on the label if one takes the trouble to read the full blurb.     We all have expectations about the way certain people behave. In this case those expectations are largely played too. We read a strong story about the pampered celebrity elites that fill the vacant spaces in real human-interest news stories. For many entertainment industry fans this must be exactly choice bread and butter. Holl...

     What an interesting read, a novel written as imaginary documentary on a near future doctor’s career, following his path from childhood through medical school and training to eventual mixed fortunes as a robotically enhanced family practitioner. There is a depth of humanistic sentimental content, however it is future technology, not human behaviour that drives this book. The author is a retired medic who speculates the future of his profession. Gustafson brings a huge amount of personal experience of medicine and its politics to this fascinating story. His real knowledge gives real bite, a profound credibility and layered plausibility. His future ‘expectation’ is so well constructed that it is difficult at times to keep touch with the fact that we are reading of a future and not a ‘true’ life history. All the medical politics, economic constraints and technologies are already seen today in their infancy, such that very little of the science fiction seems implausib...