Short summary, you should read it, you should read it at any age. It is a book for children, but it respects the reader and its characters enough to not soften reality for them. Reading this book at a young age might be difficult, but the pleasure of having morality, character and goodness outweigh the pain one might experience from the plot events.

< SPOILERS BELOW - SERIOUSLY, READ THE BOOK FIRST, IT'S PRETTY SHORT >

< YOU SURE YOU READ IT? >

< I AM ABOUT TO RUIN THINGS FOR YOU! >

< LAST CHANCE! >

When I was in 4th grade (almost 20 years ago) our teacher read this book to us aloud. I remember how we all enjoyed it so much, and just how floored we were by the death. Life is funny, I remember being far more disturbed by the death of Leslie in this book than I was by most anything else at the time. For me, this was probably the book that cemented the notion of death. I had read (consumed more like) many books that had deaths in them. Most of them were "bad guys", occasionally it would be someone close to the hero, it didn't really hit you: Leslie's death hit me. I don't really have much to say about it, but I consider that the mark of good writing: allowing the reader to vicariously experience a state of being (emotion?) that they have not yet experienced themselves.

As a adult, having known many people who have died, I was actually surprised at just how literal and real Jess's account of the grieving process was. As a child, I wonder if I understood that he was in shock? Did I think he was a psychopath or slow? Perhaps I agreed with his sister and though he was some sort of monster? Until you have experienced death yourself, the way people react to the loss of someone close to them can seem very foreign, very alien. I don't really know if the process can be explained. You can describe it, you can even first person narrate it, but it is difficult to communicate. I liked how the author never specifically said something like "Jess is in shock, this is a state of reduced responsiveness and ...". Instead, she just let Jess be Jess, described him in such a way that his memory and actions seemed disparate, confused, calm, disassociated. She let the narrative speak for itself. Whether a child reading this book can understand these ideas depends on the child, but regardless of whether they "get it" or not, I think it certainly opens their eyes to something deep and true. Gives them something insightful and real to think about.

I also enjoyed the relation that Jess had with his father. It was not good. His father was not a bad man, but was not up to the task of raising Jess and supporting him the way he should have. I liked that he and his father became closer at the end, opening up just a little, without it going full blast and fully resolving like daytime television.

I liked that Jess was occasionally small and shallow, and was literally taking on the character and mannerisms of his environment. You could almost feel his desire to "leave" his world, but he would never have had the strength to do so without Leslie. I really enjoyed how Leslie was shaping Jess into the person he wanted to be, allowing him to distance himself from his surroundings, both in the form of escape and through discovery. And they were doing all of this by just being good friends to each other.

Anyway, good book. It is one of those books that I really hope I have the chance to discuss with a child someday. I think, yes, it could lead to a few nights of troubled sleep, it could scare them a little in the short term. But the knowledge and understanding they get from it, and the depth of discussion they could gather from it, make the cost entirely worthwhile.

P.S. There is also a really good 2007 movie based on the book, you should check it out.

When I read this book, I really thought it could be made into a tv show and then movies. The beginning of the book is written in small scenes, Alleyne has just left the monastery and has entered the world. Observing the different aspects of life, he recognizes the harshness and beauty of life all around him, but still colors everything he sees with his monastic upbringing. Each scene is a small story, you get Alleyne's view (and eventually that of his companions); it is left to us as the reader to determine which view is correct. TV show wise, each scene would take around 20 to 40 minutes.

The book makes a roughly linear progression from small scenes to longer stories as it progresses. Even the longest stories, which span multiple chapters, could probably fit in a movie length time budget. I will stop prattling about the episodic nature of this book, it was just a observation.

Fundamentally, this book is just a good adventure story. A (monastery) youth is let out on the world. He sees everything for the first time, life is new to him. We observe a change in him as his monastery upbringing confronts the base reality of life. Thanks to his companions, he also begins to question the sanctity of being sinless by removing oneself from sin. A man who removes himself from the world may be sinless, but by his actions, he has removed himself from the world, and thus may not improve it. Lots of fun things to think about there.

Then there is the chivalry. A difficult concept to our (well my) western sensibilities. The thought that there was honor to be gained by fighting, by dying, by committing yourself and your men to war is a ... well... for lack of a better word, disturbing idea. Assuming all present agreed to it, and all served voluntary, I suppose there is no evil in groups of people coming together to do war on each other. In this book, in this world, fighting was done by agreement of all present (with the exception of the jacks). Still, you cannot help but think to yourself , "Wouldn't Nigel's time have been better spent guiding the growth of his kingdom, rather than engaging in pointless wars?" I also often thought about the fact that the royalty was of course going to be ransomed if captured, while a ordinary soldiers is probably best off running for his (literally) worthless life. Kind of makes the incentive system for this stuff a little lopsided doesn't it? Chivalry is almost a religion in itself, you take it on faith (or group consensus) that there is this concept of honor to be gained through personal combat and war. I suppose if everyone believe it, then that makes it true? I mean, it is nothing but a social construct, and if we all agree upon it as a society, is it not so?

Anyway, this review/commentary/whatever has become too long. This is a fine book, you should give it a read. I think I might have enjoyed it even more had I read it in my early teens, but even as an adult, it held my attention throughout. It does not have a long sweeping story, choosing instead to focus on one distinct scene at a time. This allows most scenes to be read, consumed and reflected on, very similar to a parable.

I gave this book 5 stars, but as this book is in a complete category of its own, that is kind of a technicality. The Reasoned Schemer is a book that introduces you to the notion, usage, and application of logic programming. It is entirely structured in a question/answer format, which slowly introduces you to all the base "control" structures you would need in logic programming.

Non logic programming basically works from the notion of imperative data flow. This is generally represented by the concept of a function. A function takes a argument and returns a value, it takes input variables and returns output variables. A logic program creates a relation (not a function) between a set of variables. If you had a two input function, with one output, you could represent this as a logic program relation of three variables. Two of those relation variables would be what were the two inputs to the function, the third variable would be the output of the function. Here is the kicker though. You can provide concrete values for any number of those variable in any order and ask the relation what the other variables might be. At the simplest level, this means that you might run your function "backwards" (from the output to the input). But really, it means that you can ask any question relating to those variables (conceptually). Now, realistically, it is not as easy as that. Some relations may never terminate (return a answer), some grow too large and barf (overflow), some may not complete for various other reasons. It can be more complex to actually write a logical relation than a function, this must be balanced against the fact that the relation is far more powerful than the function.

If you want a primer for logical programing, this book is probably worth your time. It takes you through writing many of the fundamental parts of a logical relation. The only thing I think it really skips is the actual unification (= x y) primitive itself, which I believe it uses as a given. You can learn quite a bit by reading this code slowly and carefully. Note however, that you must complete every step of the question/answer pairings! Skimming this book will not work (unless you already know it). Really, these concepts build on each other. It is a rather small (page number and physically) book, but it will take far more time to really go through then its size would suggest. Read and work through for the purpose of understanding, and I think you will really get a good backing in logic programming, and probably enjoy yourself as well!

Technology wise, this story and "Paycheck" (also by PKD) are very similar. If you read this one, you might want to read Paycheck for contrast.

Writing is clean and accessible. In typical PKD fashion, the characters don't have a great deal of backstory, and are not that emotional in general. The strength of this book is not so much even the plot, but the idea.

The idea is simple... Oh, you should stop reading right now if you don't like spoilers at all. Seriously, go read the story, you can do so in about a hour, I will wait.



Back? Ok, as I was saying, the idea seems pretty simple. TMR relies on the fact that the precogs (as an aggregate) can see the current future. Precrimes stated goal is to look at this tracked future, and derail it a bit by preventing the crime itself. They then take the person that would have committed the crime and put them in a internment camp of sorts.

Well, ok. There are some fairly large paradoxes there, but I am not going to argue them as you can get them all by reading a "Back to the future" forum. :]

The big idea from this book is that there was no Majority Report this time, there were only 3 separate minority reports. Each minority report was a different snapshot of the current world. In general, the snapshots of the current world do not materially effect the world, as the snapshot information is only known to Precrime, and they only use the information to stop a crime.

If Precrime were to publish the list of people who would be murdered the next day in the paper, it would effect those people; they would make changes to their days and probably stay alive. The crime would never have been committed. However, Pre-crime does not taint the current state of the world by revealing information, they only change things right before a crime is to be committed. This allows them to actually assume that the crime was going to be committed, arrest the guilty, save the victims.

In this case though, the world was being tainted by the reports. Anderton was implicated in the reports, which he read at various points in the story. Each time he reads a report, he read about a new snapshot of the world. Each time he reads of a snapshot, it causes him to react (derail) from the actual report. Each subsequent report was actually a recursion of the previous state of the world + the state of the world given the reports that Anderton had read. One can see this process going on forever, a new report always creates new information for Anderton to react to, causing the need for another report to actually be generated in order to know what happens. The rub is though, by reading it, you are effecting what should have happened, and the report is now invalid again. Presumably, the best you can do is create a report, never read it, and then let Anderson commit a crime (or not?). You know who did the crime, it will say so on the report, but you have no way of really stopping him. This would be a logical though morally questionable tactic.

Anyway, it is the idea of recursion and side effects (tainting) that make this story fun. If you stop and think about it, there are some serious paradoxes going on here, as well as some questions about the nature of crime and punishment that are worth considering. Still, who cares, it is a story that gives you something worthwhile to think about, and does so in about a hours worth of reading. You don't need to know the future to know that is time well spent.

This is a very short story, so it will be a short review.

Paycheck is clear, clean writing. It actually fits in quite comfortably with The Minority Report by PKD as both deal with the ability to see events that have not occurred yet. I suppose the technology in Paycheck exceeds that in Minority as they are also capable of "reaching" into the future, not just observing it from the past.

The book was a little dry. Anachronisms littered the story like punchcards in a modern data center (terrible). It also suffers from the Deus Ex Machina problem of having a guy who knows the future providing you tools to deal with the present. Whatever. It is good, very short, and a fun read. Nothing profound, but fun.

Odd things this novel. I have also read "The Lathe of Heaven" and "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Le Guin, just for comparisons sake. This one read much more like "Wizard". The book is strange, not a challenging read, no huge word building, strange vocabulary, or anything like that; just nuanced. The story basically reads like a travel narrative. Guy run around, meets native tribes, ends up on a path of self discovery.

Anyway, I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about this story. I get the vague impression that the different tribes where supposed to be some sort of representation of different sociological/anthropomorphic though experiments. Hell, I am talking out my side here, but it is what I sorta gleamed. I won't talk about them any more in order to not taint your expectations, but if you like stories where characters interact with socially different types of people, this isn't half bad.

Some of the tribes also had different ways of handling the stagnation of society; I thought that was interesting. Fun to think of all the different ways a society can calcify after it looses the ability to advance itself.

Ok, the main thing I got from this book, the big idea (at least for me), was the idea that a honest man has strength in a civilization of liars. I don't know if that was the intent of the book, but it is what I thought about after I finished it. I wish I had something really intelligent to say here, but I don't. It is just something you will have to read on your own, and reach your own truths about. It is not just a question of being able to distinguish truth from lie based on what you know to be true, it it also a question of the liar not being able to benefit from your truths, as they expect lies. Bah, those thoughts don't quite stand up on their own, but they are approaching the grain of what I am trying to say. Lying is actually more difficult than simply saying the truth. Reality is in fact complicated, a truthful person is actually better able to face reality, because they don't have to factor the reality + their body of lies into the equation. A liar will inevitably become perverted by their own lies, incapable of distinguishing between their lies and the actual truth. Nothing profound here, just fun to think about, with actual characters.

So, quick review. Yes, it was a good book. I like books that give you something to think about afterwards. It is also a short read, so regardless of whether you like it or not, you won't have wasted too much time. If you do like it, it will probably give you something to think about, if you let the ideas percolate a little. If you don't like it, well... read something else!

I was mixed on this book. I think at some level we all enjoy reading books about characters we can relate to, problem is, these characters are difficult to relate to. Nyx is a pretty one dimensional character, she operates from a position of stubbornly moving forward while doing her best to avoid contemplation of her current actions or her past. This gets tiresome. I couldn't tell whether Rhys was a coward, or just had a aversion to violence. It really made me question why he stuck around with a bounty hunter, seemed kind of dumb.

The world was initially interesting, but then I became disappointed that it wasn't really explored or explained. I don't get why people are excited by the bug-tech idea. People keep saying she has built a new world with bugs? The bugs are just a substitution in this book: It appears that it is just a substitute for magic and technology. The bug tech idea was never clarified or elaborated. What does it feel like for Rhys to use bug tech? How did these remarkable bugs come into being. Do people know or is it just not asked, hard to tell since they never explore the question in this book? It was sort of implied that the bugs might be manipulated with pheromones: why can't it be replicated then? I mean, if you are going to have a world where bugs are basically used as scouts, observers, communication antennas, shields, attackers, defenders, cars... well, everything basically: it would be nice to invest a little in explaining them. Spend a little time explaining their characteristics and limitations.

I was also annoyed by the organ selling part. What was that about? How can we be capable of doing genetic manipulation, in space flight, genetic force fields, but we are still buying organs wholesale from people? It would be like killing a buffalo in the wild when you could just buy a cattle at the market. It would be orders of magnitude more expensive to harvest organs vs just industrially cloning them. Totally confused me.

The fact that people can have their brains blown out and then be reconstituted without brain damage (or at least memory loss) was pretty ridiculous.

I also failed to grasp how the world politics stood on its own. How can two countries honestly invest in killing 90% percent of their men in a senseless wars? Why was there no mention of strategy or logistics? The war seemed really forced, like it couldn't exist without some serious players who are willing to strongly sacrifice in order to perpetuate it. It just felt unstable. Why would anyone have a interest in perpetuating this war when it clearly cost so much to everyone involved? I felt that it was implied that it was a self perpetuating war, but such a fragile dynamic system would not seem to end in a stable state like the book implied. It bugged me (no pun intended).

Why would people not be rallying in the streets over having to sacrifice their children to a war whose cause no one could remember? Why did they not use birth control to avoid having male sons? The breeders also bugged me, as a artificial womb would seem to be far more cost effective.

Finally, lets move out of the world building and "new ideas" review of the book. Some of the plot elements were just ridiculous.

**** SPOILER * DON'T * READ * HERE ****


Nyx was able to bed Jaks by betting in her favor on a fight? This is evidently a guaranteed thing? Jake is housing her draft age brother who WILL BE KILLED if he is discovered. Jaks brings Nyx to her house and lets Nyx see her brother? Really? That is so dumb it is just beyond belief? It would be like a frenchman inviting random strangers to dine at your place when you are sheltering Jews during WWII.

Khos getting to overhear Dahab tell Khos about Nasheem (sp)? I mean really. If you are charged with securely protecting someone in hiding, probably first rule of thumb is don't go blabbing their name in front of perfect strangers.

Khos and team twice rescuing Nyx from the bell dames or intergalactic gene splicers. Really, has no one ever heard of posting a sentry? Is Nyx's team just totally badass, because they are implied to be barely scrapping by? However, every time rescue or fighting is needed, they win without any superior strategy or equipment.

Why didn't Rain have more muscle when he was trading with Nyx? Seems like he could have afforded it.

How did Rain scoop up Rhys so easily? How did Rain know where Rhys had gone to?

Isn't it convenient how Khos happens to be some sort of underground railroad hero, and as such has a safe-house everywhere you go? Really, we should be paying him more. :)


YOU CAN READ NOW ********************

Ultimately, I felt a lot of the characters were rather flat. I also felt the environment felt more like a backdrop than a actual place. Things did not seem very well thought out. If your cup of tea is basically a character that fights, gets their ass kicked, and then kicks more ass in retribution then ... umm... this is your cup of tea. If that is what you want (and you want your protagonist female) then this book rocks. If you like more to your stories than just that, I would skip this one.