War in the Museum

This short story by Robert Rath follows everyone's favourite pair of rival bickering necrons, Trazyn the Infinite and Orikan the Diviner (of The Infinite and the Divine novel fame). Trazyn, whose quasi-eternal life's effort is to construct and fill a series of planet-sized museums with stasis-trapped specimens of cultural and historical value, may have bitten off more than he can chew with his new acquisition of a tyranid splinter fleet, complete with its hive tyrant. Once his attempt to rehydrate the damaged tyrant is nearing completion, psychic tweaks between the supposedly-locked tyranid horde start manifesting, and in no short order they're all awake and rampaging through the museum. Trazyn must commandeer the aide of a Mechanicus magos and a pair of Sisters of Battle to help him defend himself while he makes for the control room to try to save his precious displays - only then Orikan turns out to be there already, causing mischief.

   This is a fun little story, but you'll get a lot more out of it if you've already read the novel I linked in parentheses above. Undead soulless metal killing machines they may be, but Trazyn and Orikan consistently prove they're far from boring.

On Liberty

This book is a long essay by John Stuart Mill about the moral, social, political and psychological elements of liberty. It wasn't a particularly tricky read but I would struggle to summarise his ideas beyond: liberty is good for both the individual and their society; liberty of the individual in terms of their capacity to hold their own opinions free of coercion and to do what they will insofar as this harms no others is of profound value to the stability and ethical virtue of a society and these rights should be protected politically. He obviously says more than this but it all boils down to over-verbose circlings rhetorically of this core notion. Despite being written in the Victorian era the vigour of his argumentation feels astoundingly contemporary - indeed Mill as a philosopher of liberty still has much still to hope for in the 21st century, when such basic political assumptions as are enshrined in this text are losing that enshrinement when it comes to our basic political institutions. This isn't a particularly practical book, but neither is it an abstract series of obtuse or irrelevant speculations - Mill doesn't tell us where liberty comes from or how it is best used, he simply makes the case, in great detail and using very long sentences, for its being a personal and communal value and practice of profound importance to human flourishing. 

the Lord of the Rings: book three

This book is the third part of J. R. R. Tolkien's timeless classic The Lord of the Rings series. As with previous more recent posts about these books, these are ones I've read before, so please dig into my blog history through category tags or the dated archive to see my fuller thoughts and/or summaries on the themes/plots of this story - I experienced this again through the ongoing mission of YouTuber Tolkien Trash to read the whole trilogy to her audience a chapter a week, a task which I have to say she is performing excellently.

Galatians Study

This book (available for free online from that link) is a Bible study by Tim Keller working through Paul's letter to the Galatian church. I've been working through it with my dad over the last few months, and would highly recommend it as a small-group study resource. The Galatian epistle is a potent little depth-charge of a book anyway, but Keller's insightful commentary and selection of passages from other theologians (especially John Stott and Martin Luther) who have written about the letter make this study extremely edifying and fruitful for thinking through Christian discipleship in powerfully provocative and helpful ways.

Heresy

This book by Catherine Nixey declares in its subtitle to be a critical survey of "Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God" - so I naturally presumed it would be a pull-no-punches walkthrough of other claimants to Israel's Messiahship and the means by which these wannabes were variably venerated, ignored, followed, killed, arguably successful, forgotten or deliberately buried, etc. and to what extent this groupage of persons' lives undermine the uniqueness or legitimacy of the Christian claim.

   However - though it still pulls no punches, this book does virtually nothing to destabilise the historical or theological tenets of Christianity, and instead, in a manner wholly unsurprising* resorts to exploring the moral and sociopolitical muddiness of Christianity in its earliest centuries. As with the birth of any new religion, those earliest centuries of Christianity, between the floodgate-opening of Pentecost and the diversity-drawbridge-raising of the Council of Nicaea, saw an immense flourishing of diverse and often contradictory flavours of Christian life and doctrine.** This is great for growth but not so good for coherence. With the writings of the Church Fathers in the first centuries CE forming a loose but authoritative foundation for theology, alongside the formation of the New Testament canon, Christianity as a unified body of people and thought began to shave off its rougher, weirder, more questionable or esoteric edges; and once Christianity was established as the official religion of the Roman Empire any remaining hints of those edges were quietly airbrushed out of history by deliberate ignorance or overt suppression (burning of books, excommunication or in rarer cases execution of heretics, etc) and the proto-Catholic Church was born in full shape. Certain chapters of this book are incredibly interesting - I for one had no idea that there was so much early Christian literature about the magical powers of Mary's vagina, or that part of the reason extra-biblical historical sources about Jesus are so scant is that most of the documents that mention him mention him not as a robust historical figure but as a magician of rumoured great power (and thus such sources aren't taken seriously by historians) - but I feel a little undersold on the promised premise. This book did literally nothing to shake or even slightly perturb my faith; it has no clear arguments or evidence against the historical claims and theological doctrines of Christianity. Instead it sits back and points at the authoritarianism of the faith in its earliest centuries, with the faithful expected to buy into full dogmatic conformity with Only The Right Kind of Apostle and allow everything else to be gently forgotten or violently destroyed and never spoken of again: it is not a critique of Christian faith or the person of Jesus, it is a critique of the historical and sociopolitical relationship between truth and power, and as such says nothing remotely damaging to the believer who is broadly smart enough to be able to tell the difference between saying "the Church in the past did dodgy stuff!" and "the Church is wrong about serious things!"

   Worth a read I suppose if you're interested in the historical and sociopolitical influences on the development of religion, but if you're a Christian considering reading this looking to be challenged you won't be, and if you're an atheist considering reading this to bolster your arsenal of tools to undermine Christian faith - unless all the Christians you know are remarkably spiritually immature and bad at critical thinking, this probably will be quite a disappointing resource.

* To people who have read about it in any significant detail, or who follow YouTube channels like Let's Talk Religion or Religion for Breakfast.

** As I noted in my post about Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, interestingly the rate of denominational proliferation since the onset of the Protestant Reformation is pushing up the internal diversity of Christianity to levels that may be starting to come close to those of the earliest centuries before the Cohesion Enforcement - certainly there are groups of people who consider themselves Christian that a mainstream Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant wouldn't consider Christian, but the Church being divided as it is to what authority do we turn to decide who "counts"? Is it time for another ecumenical council?

the Glass Hotel

This book is Emily St. John Mandel's fifth novel - the first of hers that I've read, but I was pleasantly rewarded with being introduced to her as a new talented author who kept me entertained throughout. She is a precise and unshowy writer, her prose not particularly poetic but well-suited to detailing events and feelings with nuance, mystery and character.

   In the story, we follow a number of different threads across numerous locations, skipping around between the years 1994 and 2018 (apart from one chapter set in 2029, but that's only three pages and doesn't add much to the plot). Paul Smith is an addict struggling to make it as a composer. Vincent is his half-sister working as bartender in Canada's remote Hotel Caiette. Jonathan Alkaitis, a New York financier, owns the hotel. Leon Prevant is an executive of the Neptune-Avramidis shipping company. In spring of 2005, a hooded figure writes in acid marker the message "why don't you swallow broken glass" on the glass wall of the Hotel Caiette; in December 2008, a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme run by Jonathan implodes; and in 2018, Vincent, now working as a cook onboard a Neptune-Avramidis ship, disappears off the coast of Mauritania. These people and events are all woven together in a nebulous but gripping tale of moral compromise, thwarted hope, the impacts of crossed paths, and how one never quite escapes the bits and pieces of their past.

   This is the first non-sci-fi/fantasy novel I've read in a while, and it was a great reminder that a good story well-told doesn't need all the bells and whistles of genre to make it so. I'd recommend this to pretty much any enjoyer of fiction.

Carbon Black Cicada

This book (available as a free download from that link) by David Brookes is a remarkably diverse and powerful collection of short stories. He was an extremely talented writer, with a knack for delicate phrases that lend surgical accuracy to his descriptions of situations and feelings, and a keen eye for human nature in all its variety, from the odd and unique to the universal and predictable.

   I will give a potted summary of each story in the book. We open with Sugar Cube, in which a father & daughter acclimatise to life in a new, strange, remote place. Next we have the titular Carbon Black Cicada - a snapshot biography of an aging sailor told through his tattoos. Head Under Water sees a man trying to set the world record for holding one's breath while wrestling with unrequited love, In Hellas is an exploration of the little frictions between a newlywed couple after the wife suffers an injury, and Vanilla is a close dissection of a guy's protective jealousy over his girlfriend's "friend". In Follow the Sun Underground a wealthy Mexican emigré returns home to quarrel with nature and spirituality, in Identifier a fisherman reminisces about his friend Jack after his trawler dredges up Jack's corpse from the Channel seafloor, and A Good Match is Hard to Find gives an account of a weird experience in the tricky modern dating scene. A Dictionary of Our Time in the Wild, probably my favourite piece from the whole book, is an alphabetical collection of memories of a spiky but deeply meaningful relationship with a nature lover. The Destination Before Next sees a film location scout investigate an Istanbul dockyard, then in Silverfish we remember the story told by a boy's sister about her three-day disappearance when they were seven. Precious Targets tells the story of a wildlife officer who gets roped into security detail for a rare orchid discovered in a park, in Pass, Pass an insomniac struggles to fully engage with a normal social life, and In Your Arms is an anecdote in which a diver off the Cornish coast gets detained by an octopus. Finally in The Only Lasting Beauty we are treated to reflections on the lessons about love taught by a deceased alcoholic mother.

   I don't read many short stories, but I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and I reckon anyone with a healthy appreciation of humanly sensitive and invigoratingly originally-voiced fiction will too. You may also be interested to check out David's poetry, which is also of a superlative quality.

the Present Age

This book (available for free online from that link) by Søren Kierkegaard is a short but hella punchy treatise about the political and psychogical malaise that European modernism has left us in. The passion & activity of antiquity is gone, replaced by a blandly "democratic"* equilibrium roiling about in the seas of reflective intersubjectivity - the boons of education and understanding and the free press have left us all deeply well-informed, yet the sheer glut herein has left us existentially paralyzed when it comes to actually putting those informed understandings into action. He writes, "every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move." Rebellion in such a culture is essentially unthinkable. Readers familiar with old Søren won't be surprised to hear that he concludes that the only way for individuality and society to healthily balance each other out in any meaningful sense is the rediscovery of true religion.

   This is by far and away the most accessible Kierkegaard text I've read to date - it's not technical philosophy and should be easily readable by anyone with an above-your-average-American vocabulary. A final thought - though written in the seemingly alien atmosphere of mid-19th-century Copenhagen, this prophetic text speaks to the cultural, political and psychological snafus of 2025's dim/bright crazy/inevitable future presents with sparklingly uncanny accuracy & profundity.

   And did I mention it's very short and is online for free? Go read it.

* Kierkegaard's polemic here has left me considerably more favourable in my view of C. S. Lewis's takes on democratic equality, which as I've said left a lot to be desired when I read them in their own context.

Lays of Lost Thoughts

This book (available from that link as an online .pdf for free) by my late friend David Brookes is a phenomenal collection of poetry consisting of material written between 2016 and 2025. Before I talk about the book itself I want to talk briefly about David. He was a semi-regular attender of the spoken word night I host; I didn't know him as well as I would have liked but I liked him a lot. Softly spoken & articulate, considerate & generous, wise beyond his years & extremely easy to talk to however small or deep you wanted to go - he was a great guy and a much-valued part of our little community. So it was with great shock and sadness that I heard last month that he had taken his own life. I am publishing this post exactly a month after his memorial service. Heartbreakingly, mere days before he left us, he uploaded all of his work to his website as free .pdfs; alongside this poetry collection is a collection of short stories (which I aim to read very soon) and a monumentally ambitious five-part epic imagineering a lost mythology of the British Isles, complete with gods, monsters, heroes, and the like (which I will read at some point and which I thoroughly regret never having had the chance to talk to him about when he was alive, as it looks utterly fascinating); I urge you to check all of this out as David was a profoundly gifted writer.

   Which brings me to the book. All of the poems herein are free verse, and this collection is a dazzling testament to the power and profundity of that medium; contained within is also a breathtakingly marvellous breadth of expression. The poems range in theme from love & loss to the natural & cosmic to history & memory and more - I really struggled to select ones to mention specifically in this post as I could very easily highlight every poem in the book, but I've tried to limit myself to about 30-40% to leave a bit more wiggle-room for surprise when you go and read it yourself, which you absolutely should. In the opening few poems we get the bleary wanderlust of Where Were We followed by the tentative longing of Spools of Wool and the sheer wistful beauty of Listening to Your Recorded Presentation on Mortuary Practices in Medieval Byzantine Anatolia (which I read at our spoken word night in tribute to him after we'd heard the news). Then we get the simmering heartwrenching jealousy of There is a Burning Cold I Feel and passionate physicality of Yours Are Not the Cold Touches, the tender parasociality of The What That Happened to Brendan Fraser and even tenderer (if possible) silence of We Are Good at Looking at Each Other. After these, the blunt cynic realism of Paterson, and a delicious contrast between the indignant quietness of Look at You and the chaotic lovingness of The Riot of You. Then the demure nostalgia of Mosborough Moor and the detached pain of To the Marble in My Mouth, the familiar care of I Can't Help Her, the grimy determination of Scour, hopeful gratitude of Rievaulx, and remembered adventure of Wild Swimming. Catching up to current events, Invasion is a sensitive expression of solidarity with Ukraine, following which is the ponderous brilliance of Jabberwocky Prayer (one of my favourites). Flea Bomb almost leaves you personally itchy - you definitely feel the residual guilt, while Gold White has a gorgeous blending of love and nature imagery, and then Playlist (a found poem constructed out of collaged song lyrics) displays a deft selective precision. The final section of the book is called Songs of Extinction, each poem dedicated to a species of animal that has gone extinct within living memory - so treated are the desert bandicoot, the gloomy tube-nosed bat, the laughing owl and western black rhinoceros. Tragically, the final poem in this section and indeed the whole book is titled Self-Portrait as Animal (extinct by choice), and functions as something of a poet's farewell letter to a world that has given all it can to make life worth continuing. Serious content warning to readers who get to the end of the book for that one as though it is a beautifully written piece it is also a heartbreakingly honest portrayal of anguish and annihilation.

   This is a difficult post to write, but I think it's probably the most important post I've ever written on this blog for the simple fact that David deliberately bequeathed his work unto the wider world before his departure, and it would be a tragedy if his memory were not kept burning as brightly as possible by sharing and enjoying and being inspired by the brilliance of that work. So please, if you have even the slightest fondness for poetry (and his style is as wide as it is deep - precise yet pliable, erudite yet never indulgently elusive); go download this book and read it at your leisure. And lest it not be said, be kind to one another. You never know the intensity of pain someone might be plastering a stable face over. I've been torturing myself with the thought that had I been just a bit friendlier or more intentional or encouraging I might have tipped the balance and David would still be living and laughing and breathing and writing. But I know from his memorial service that there were many people far closer to him than I who were far better positioned to be that kind of support and it still wasn't ultimately enough to assuage everything that pushed him to where he ended up. That said, we all walk our own roads and bear our own burdens, but company is always nice and is more often than not helpful in the struggle. So share, and listen, and love. Nobody makes the world a better place simply by leaving it.

the Traitor's Hand

This book is the third Caiaphas Cain novel by Sandy Mitchell. It is preceded by a short story titled The Beguiling, in which Cain and a ragtag team of his underlings get embroiled between Nurgle-cult & Slaanesh-cult shenanigans; then in the novel proper we have much more Slaanesh-cult shenanigans with a bit of Khorne thrown in at the end to spice things up.

   That's all you're getting on the plot itself, as this is the final post about this series that I foresee doing on this blog which means it's time for me to crack out a honest can of opinionated bloviation about the characters, themes, successes & failures of this omnibus insofar as I assume it represents the [over ten books] fuller series. My main takeaways are thus:

• Sandy Mitchell is good at being funny. While the Gaunt's Ghosts series does have its moments of levity, and whole comedy novels have been put out by the Black Library, overall the grimdark nature of Warhammer 40,000 as a setting does not lend itself to making you laugh, primarily. But here we are shown a relatively reliable means of doing so.
• Caiaphas Cain narrating in first-person is a nice change from every other Warhammer 40,000 novel I've read; it makes the tension more visceral and the character interactions/situations more immersive.
• Cain being, effectively, a lazy coward who wants nothing more than to be able to keep being respected as a commissar without ever having to do anything difficult or dangerous, is such a good premise. The setting is full of paint-by-numbers heroism; the shambling accidents by which Cain "saves the day" [i.e. survives with a bonus prize] make for extremely unpredictable storytelling, which I really enjoyed.
• Because the novels are in first-person but deal with things like planetary-scale warfare which is obviously better suited to third, Mitchell has made the genius editorial decision to frame each of these books as curated snippets from an autobiographical text file Cain himself was working on; where he misses out on certain pertinent details because he wasn't there or didn't care or both we have an entertaining sporadic slew of intermission chapters and asterisky footnotes filling in the gaps. This adds an excellent dimension of depth & distance to the text as the additions are being made by one Amberley Vail, an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, who personally crops up in these stories herself a few times.

   That's it I think. Funny Commissar, exciting action, Jurgen smells. Recommended for those whose interest has been piqued by the Warhammer 40,000 universe but have hithertofore found it Too grimdark to enjoy.

Caves of Ice

This book is the second novel in Sandy Mitchell's Caiaphas Cain series. In it our cowardly hero winds up struggling to survive on a winter planet trapped between an invading horse of orks and an awakening army of necrons. As with the first book in the omnibus there's a short story preceding it, this one called Echoes of the Tomb, in which Cain encounters yet more necrons thanks to the short-sighted lust for archaic tech of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Stand by for post about book three, in which I'll give some fuller reflections on the series as a whole.*

* What I've read of it, that is. I have no plans to read past book three - I'm enjoying them but I've got lots of other stuff to be reading & frankly I'm running out of shelf space.

For the Emperor

This book is the first of three in the first* omnibus collection of Ciaphas Cain stories by Sandy Mitchell - I'm reviewing each novel in the omnibus in a separate post as that only seems fair (and boosts my numbers for blog purposes).  As I do with all series, I'll do brief posts for the first couple and then a longer more reflective post once I've finished this introductory trilogy.

   Alongside the titular novel is a prelude short story called Fight or Flight, in which we are first introduced to Cain (a commissar whose dazzlingly heroic reputation is very much at odds with the reality of his character as a cunning coward who just wants a quiet life with as little mortal danger as possible - however life in the Imperial Guard never seems to quite grant him this - an amusing subversion of the genuinely heroic nature of most other famous commissars from the Warhammer 40,000 universe**) as he is introduced to his new placement with the Valhallan 12th Field Artillery, assigned a smelly aide called Jurgen, and narrowly avoids being consumed by a tyranid incursion.

   The novel itself picks up a few years later, as Cain is newly placed as commissar to the amalgamated mixed-gender regiment of the Valhallan 597th and sent to the remote backwater world Gravalax where Imperial citizens have been trading, heretically, with the Tau Empire. War over such an insignificant planet is not deemed worthwhile by the Guard so this mission is, at first at least, primarily diplomatic; wanting the humans to stop, or at minimum reduce, their problematic relations with the alien races, in such a way as to avoid violence (all of which is very much fine by Cain) - a goal set straight from the Inquisition itself. However events conspire as to raise the stakes, and Cain finds himself at the heart of a shambolic mess of risk-whichever-way-you-turn, only for things to get less confusing but even worse safety-wise when a genestealer cult is discovered who have manipulating developments from underground (quite literally - the second half of this novel largely takes place in a tunnel complex). The resolution is more of matter of muddled luck than anything authentically courageous or clever, which I suspect is par for the course in this particular commissar's career. I look forward to the next instalment.

* At time of writing there are ten Ciaphas Cain novels and many short stories out, and while I have no doubt I would enjoy reading them they're very low down my priority list given how much else I have to read - within the same universe I'm going back to my focus on the Horus Heresy.

** Looking specifically at you, Ibram Gaunt. And I suppose Yarrick.

the Roots of Civilisation

This book by Abdullah Öcalan is an incredibly ambitious* attempt to sketch a holistic picture of the history of civilisation originating from, driven by, and leading to future questions/plausibilities for the Middle East specifically.

    Obviously a holistic history of civilisation is going to cover a lot of ground & I won't pretend that I'm going to be able to summarise satisfactorily every general thrust of argument & evidence in the book - but this blog is what it is, so I suppose I should at least give a rough outline of the contents. We start in what is typically considered the birthplace of civilisation - Mesopotamia: a new innovation in human relations, hierarchy, emerged & thus supercharged the development of complex societies out of prehistory. Gender norms calcified into patriarchy, class systems cemented themselves as cities became centres of activity, slavery boomed, & religious ideology developed to justify all of this as a new natural. These norms spread - in part organically, in part violently - across the ancient Mediterranean as other hubs of society matured. As states gradually shifted away from slave-owning to feudal systems, monotheisms like Christianity & Islam helped to ideologically & economically support & promote the status quo. These monotheisms had the side-effect of promulgating individualistic & humanistic modes of thinking & being, such that eventually feudalism gave way to capitalism: societies demanded a new relationship to the powers over them - and achieved a great deal thus, with democratic nations emerging as a new normal. However, capitalism being rooted in perpetual expansion & extraction, this trajectory could not be considered perfect in the long-term, ultimately being doomed to crisis & collapse. Öcalan argues that the concept of a democratic nation is poised to fill the void & provide the next step in humanity's civilisational journey. Finally, he takes up the implications of the history he's just walked us through to consider the ideological & socio-political challenges facing us in the 21st century - people must agitate & organise toward a democratic civilisation if we want whatever follows capitalism to be true progress rather than a deterioration: he obliterates the possible objection that "this is all simply theory" by applying these ideas to current situations facing the Kurds, Anatolia, Iran & Palestine (and makes a pretty solid case for his democratic ideology being a workable solution, imho).

   Without committing several years of research into ancient&since history, I admit it's impossible for me to properly assess how accurate the pictures presented in this book are. However the general shape of civilisational development as shown here rings true in its overlaps with what I do know, and I don't know how much access to resources Öcalan was given throughout the writing process** (as Imrali, the Turkish island where he's imprisoned, isn't renowned for its library facilities) but if this book is even half-true it represents a momentous achievement of synthesised interdisciplinary reflection. Postcolonial history done to the highest degree. Absolutely recommended reading for anyone interested in world history, especially from a non-Western angle.

* Especially since it was written entirely from a solitary prison cell. This is the first and most scholarly such book, since being followed by a second about the PKK informed by Öcalan's personal experience & a third proposing a path forward between Turkey & the Kurds. This first volume provides historical context for the theoretical & practical concerns for the contemporary Kurdish movement as attested in his other writings.

** I mean, he must've had some access, because there's 12 pages of endnotes & a smallish but significant bibliography, and though I believe him to be a pretty smart dude I doubt he had all those precise references squirrelled away in mere memory.

Against Method

This book by Paul Feyerabend is one of the most important and certainly the most radical books of philosophy of science to come out of the twentieth century. It forms almost a perfect sequel to Thomas Kuhn's book in the same field - only, where Kuhn gave us an objective "what happens and how" of revolutions in scientific fields, Feyerabend here gives us a more subjective "what could maybe happen, and how to do it". To use a comparative metaphor, Kuhn wrote of scientific revolution like Marx wrote of its socio-economic equivalent, while Feyerabend writes of it like Che Guevara, chock full of grassroots incitement to properly-informed action and ample tactical advice (using Galileo's career as prime example).

   I won't go into depth with a summary of what he talks about in this book as it spans a huge arena of the history of science, its present and future capacities, and the dynamics at play in determining what we may consider progress in all of this. To give a very brief summary of the main point of the text though, I will say that Feyerabend sees the only sustainably trustworthy epistemological approach to science as that of anarchism. That is to say, when approaching theory, fact, experiment, and so on, the only reasonable guideline to guarantee that progress can intuit itself into the field's grasp on its object is: "anything goes." I like this a lot. It's a healthy reminder that even the most open-minded empiricists can, and do, get bogged down in the accumulation of the best thinking of all the open-minded empiricists who came before them, and thus often cease being effective open-minded empiricists. Epistemological anarchism is an approach that rightly inspires terror in the hearts of academics who have devoted their careers to the minutiae of issues under particular paradigms; however as an approach deigning to liberate and guarantee the continual advancement of any kind of knowledge, it's very difficult to argue with given how unpredictable are the paradigm shifts in any given field of study.

   If you're interested in the philosophy of science I'm going to assume that you've already read this, but if you're merely a scientist who has given relatively little thought to the epistemological conditions of your work, I'd highly recommend this if you want a revolutionary energising shock.

the Lord of the Rings: book two

This book by J.R.R. Tolkien is one I've read for this blog in the last few years, hence the link going back to that post - I'm re-experiencing the series in audio form read a chapter a week by the delightful Tolkien Trash, which I'm still very much enjoying. Check out her channel for some of the best Tolkien-related content YouTube has to offer.

the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

This book by Thomas Kuhn is probably the most significant work in the philosophy of science to come out of the twentieth century. In it, Kuhn skips around the history of scientific endeavour to sketch a theory of how progress in these fields happens. Science of a particular era subsists in what he calls a paradigm, a collectively-agreed-upon web of assumptions, problems and techniques that define the scope and limits of the field at that time. It is only when a particular paradigm begins to encounter anomalies that it is unequipped to explain, and thus enters a period of crisis, that hitherto unthought-of methods and speculations emerge, and thus a scientific revolution (think Copernicus overturning the Ptolemaic astronomical system, or Einstein going so far beyond Newton that the previously accepted physics became a redundant rump) takes place - the paradigm shifts, and new modes of understanding become possible, new questions become salient, and new experiments become required to continue advancing the frontiers of knowledge. I was pleasantly surprised by how readable this book was - I'm interested in science but don't read much of it as I find myself either feeling alienated by the abundance of jargon or patronized by the author's obvious overcompensations in avoiding jargon, but Kuhn avoids both extremes and explores this whole nest of topics in an accessible and enlightening way. Absolutely highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the history and philosophy of science.

Titanicus

This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Dan Abnett - yes, I know, another one. He's my fave, what can I say. Only this one doesn't revolve around the plucky Imperial Guard or morally-questionable Inquisitors; this one is about the Titan Legions themselves. The god-machines - walking cathedrals of destruction.* I'd been aware of this novel when it came out seventeen years ago, but simply wasn't that excited about it - I mean, Titans are so ridiculously big and overpowered that how can you have any serious stakes in a story about them? Turns out I was wrong. The way you have serious stakes in a story about Titans is by A) making the enemy have even more Titans than the good guys and B) throwing in a healthy spattering of ground-level ordinary troopers and even a civilian or two so you can skip between perspectives and view the ridiculously big overpowered explosions from behind void shields 150 metres in the air or from a terrifying Normal Person's-Eye View - and Dan does both of these brilliantly. There are at least five or six separate plot threads going off within this book, and while only overlapping intermittently, they all wind up contributing somewhat to the overall resolution, and all get wrapped up largely satisfactorily. While for me this is nowhere near the re-read value of Gaunt's Ghosts, it was still a thumping good read; and it's always fun to see the Adeptus Mechanicus up close, they're so weird as a faction that I find them disturbing and fascinating and hilarious and tragic all at once, and Dan captures new angles of them in exciting and surprisingly relatable ways.

* The simplest way to explain them to non-40k initiates is to ask "have you seen Pacific Rim? well yeh, basically that, but moreso, and fighting entire armies instead of the odd kaiju."