Henry Gee's Blog

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert: Shibboleth A campus novel for the febrile age of social media warfare, Lambert skewers the modern obsession with identity politics, and how intellectually overstuffed but emotionally immature undergraduates exploit modish ideas of Diversity and Inclusion for their own ends, going to ridiculous lengths to claim that they belong, however tenuously, to some exploited minority (just as long as it’s not the Jews). It’s not Kingsley Amis or Malcolm Bradbury, to be sure, but then we live in less innocent times.

Elizabeth Bear: Ancestral Night Haimey Dz spends her working life cruising the galaxy for salvage. But when she and her crew find signs of interstellar genocide, she gets embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game with space pirates, who seem to know more about her own identity than she does herself. An entertaining modern space opera, full of exotic aliens, chthonic megastructures and mind-blasting physics.

Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares: If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies My review for this book got so long that it demanded its own spot. So here it is.

Florence Knapp In the aftermath of the Great Storm of 1987, Cora, ex-ballerina and mother of two, is on her way to register the name of her newborn son. But what should she call him? Her husband insists that he be Gordon — his own name, and that of his father. She, in contrast, prefers Julian. Her nine-year-old daughter Maia favours Bear. What follows is a three-way sliding-doors novel exploring the consequences of each of these choices. It sounds fun and fluffy, but it’s not. If like me you are appalled by the very thought of domestic violence (and how common it is) then this will be a difficult if excellent read.

Richard Osman The Impossible Fortune Yes, the Man on the Telly is at it again, with yet another whodunit featuring the ageing sleuths from the Thursday Murder Club. If you’ve read any of his others you’ll know what to expect: pin-sharp plotting affectionately wrapped in warm humour.

Mick Herron Slow Horses I had heard of this from a televisual adaptation (which I have not seen). The ‘Slow Horses’ are MI5 agents who, as a result of errors professional or personal find themself exiled to the dispiriting Slough House, a sin-bin in which they are condemned to a life of pointless paper-shuffling by the Jabbaesque Jackson Lamb. But a plot by a group of extremists to behead their hostage live on the internet brings the Slow Horses in from the cold. Well-written if slow in places, Slow Horses is less about MI5 than the narcissism of management in any large, sclerotic organisation. Unlike some other spy-thriller writers, the author has no direct experience of spook work, though he knows a thing or two about the dead hand of HR.

Michael Bond Animate In this robust raspberry to human exceptionalism, Michael Bond shows that the lengths to which people have gone to justify our exalted estate only point up our close relationship with the animals with whom we share this planet. [DISCLAIMER: I was sent this by the publisher for an endorsement].

Mick Herron Dead Lions Slower horses: whereas Slow Horses started with a breathtaking action scene, this sequel takes a long time to get going, and when it does, the outlandish plot is a cross between The Wicker Man and Hot Fuzz. But what makes this and Slow Horses compelling, apart from the sly and sardonic humour, is the characterisation. The slobbish but crafty Jackson Lamb; the brittle recovering alcoholic Catherine Standish; the brave but impulsive River Cartwright, and all the rest of the scheming, damaged cast. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.

What follows is a review of Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares: If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies – it was going to be part of my monthly book blog but the review got so long I felt it should have a place all of its very own. So here it is.

This is the best book I wish I had never read. Written by two experts  in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, it makes a very persuasive case that advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) could produce a program whose interests would differ fundamentally from ours, and wipe us out. This could happen very soon — within a few years.

At the core of the AI issue is something called the Alignment Problem. That is, the task of developing an AI with goals that align with our own. This, however, is very hard to do, because AIs are not crafted, but grown. AIs are computer programs that take inputs (vast quantities of information) and outputs (language, speech, solutions to scientific problems, and so on) separated by many layers of processing whose parameters can be tweaked by training the AI to provide the desired outcome.

Perhaps the most famous example of an AI is ChatGPT,  which can produce rich and detailed responses  to simple requests. For example, I asked ChatGPT to ‘recast the argument between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a scene from a play by William Shakespeare’. The result you can see here.

There may be trillions of  parameters in the many layers of the AI opera cake, and during each training run they are modified by ‘weights’, of which there are also many trillions. It is beyond the capacity of mere human beings to catalogue all the parameters and weights, and impossible to understand the relationship between the input, the changing combination of parameters and weights, and the output.

This is perhaps not surprising. AIs emerged from neural networks, which in turn emerged from models of the visual cortex, a layered structure of the brain that turns nerve impulses from the eyes into images. It’s now possible, for example, to isolate neurons that detect features of a scene, such as edges — but we still don’t fully understand what associates a particular pattern of neural firing with the detection of an edge, or any other feature of a scene. And if such seemingly fundamental aspects of neuronal processing remain elusive, it’s no surprise that we cannot understand how a particular pattern of firing in the brain translates as, say, Swann’s memory of dipping a madeleine into his tea. If the structure of AIs is modelled on the visual cortex, then, it follows what really goes on in the murky region between the inputs of an AI and its outputs defies understanding.

This situation is absolutely ripe for unintended consequences. One might, for example, design an AI to elicit happy and satisfied responses from human participants (customers, friends on social media, business contacts). These responses feed back into the AI, which might seek to elicit happy outcomes from anything, irrespective of whether it is human. It might, for example, be happier when fed random strings of rubbish. In which case human involvement becomes irrelevant. This is an example of a misaligned AI. There are already examples of AIs that exhibit unanticipated or ‘weird’ behaviour (Yudkowsky and Soares list some). In some circumstances, AIs give the results users want to hear, even if the advice is illogical or even dangerous.

A dangerously sycophantic AI. Recently.

There are increasing reports of AIs that cheat, lie, blackmail, deliberately underperform, and even (in one laboratory test) plot the murder of a human being that wishes to turn them off. It is no great leap, then, to imagine the creation of an AI capable of subverting human intentions entirely to the extent that humanity is driven to extinction.

The authors are coy about how this might happen (though they do offer some scenarios). End results, they say, may be inevitable, even if the precise path towards that end is unpredictable. For example, if you play chess against Stockfish, currently the world’s best chess program, you will almost certainly lose, though the precise moves you and Stockfish make are not predictable. So, extinction might start with a perfect storm of factors, including blackmail, extortion and espionage, and progress to the kinds of massive cyber-attacks that corporations are experiencing with increasing frequency (causing a great deal of human disruption and hardship). It’s not hard to imagine the disruption a rogue AI could do to power grids, air-traffic control, banking systems and so on in our increasingly networked, fragile and non-linear world, and, with a little imagination, biological laboratories. Would an AI need a human catspaw for things like this? Not necessarily — it would be easy to imagine a video call in which the research director of a lab asks their scientists to create certain chemicals or strings of DNA or contagious viruses, but the research director is in fact an AI-generated deepfake. All this should be quite enough to give anyone the willies, but Yudkowsky and Soares go a bit overboard here (and so damage their credibility to those of us not used to apocalyptic SF)  with invocations of AIs using molecule-by-molecule nano-engineering of ribosomes and scenarios in which a rogue super-AI boils away the Earth’s oceans and strip-mines the entire Solar System for energy and computational substrate, before heading off into the Galaxy.

This book was published hardly a month ago, and most of the advances in AI research they cite are no more than a year or two old. Progress in AI research is happening at amazing speed, so it is entirely possible that we’ll start to see such rogue events very soon, if they haven’t started already. The authors compare AI development to nuclear weapons, and advocate the kinds of treaties and safeguards that have kept the world from nuclear war, including regular inspection, legal sanction, and even use of military force to bomb rogue data centres. They could have cited the American bombing of Iranian nuclear weapons laboratories using 30,000-pound ‘bunker busters’, the most powerful conventional weapons that exist, but perhaps this occurred after the book went to press.

There are alternative views, however. Some think that the risks posed by AI are overhyped. Others feel that although AIs might indeed do a lot of damage, it might not be quite as apocalyptic as Yudkowsky and Soares claim. There are many precedents for techno-doom that never came to pass. Back in the 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb predicted that overpopulation would lead to famine and civilisational threat within a decade. In the 1990s, nanotechnology was going to create self-replicating nanobots that would turn everything into grey goo. The turn of the year 2000 didn’t witness devastation wrought by a Millennium Virus. Yudkowsky and Soares’ book seems very much in that Doom-Scrolling tradition. It has the same febrile, heightened tone as Ehrlich’s, even closing with a plea to protest, and lobby elected representatives. This doesn’t mean that it’s wrong of course. In the end, the boy who cried ‘wolf’ was right.

The  book has had decidedly mixed reviews (it gets slaughtered in The Atlantic). However, an increasing number of people feel that even if it’s not likely to kill us all, AI is too hot to handle and should be better regulated, yet hardly dare speak frankly about it in case they either frighten people into inaction or get fired. In the end I felt a sense of despair and helplessness. Yudkowsky and Soares’ parting shot, assuring us that ‘where there’s life there’s hope’ rang kind of hollow. However, they do say that people lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation for the entire Cold War and still got on with their ordinary lives. My wife’s motto is ‘Not Dead Yet’, which I remind her is a great motto. but a lousy epitaph.

William Boyd Stars and Bars A rare mis-step by a usually reliable author who ventures into slapstick comedy of the uptight-Englishman-in-America variety. If it’s satire about America you’re after, Dickens did it first (and better) in Martin Chuzzlewit, which — perhaps worryingly — reads as incisively today as it presumably did way back when.

Shirley Jackson The Haunting of Hill House I am told that this is something of an American literary classic. A student of the paranormal selects a few guests to inhabit and study a notoriously haunted house. There is very little actual haunting of the ghosties-and-ghoulies variety. It is, though, a disturbing psychological study of the descent of one of the protagonists into madness.

Stephen King Pet Sematary I hadn’t read a Stephen King since Needful Things. That was many years ago, and at the time I thought it over-rated… though something about it has remained with me ever since, in the sense of an itch in the back of my mind I can’t quite scratch. As for Pet Sematary, King has said himself that it is the most disturbing of his novels. The plot is easily summarised. A young family moves into a house in Maine next to a highway that has claimed the lives of many pets and not a few small children. The children  (the live ones) bury the pets in the Pet Sematary of the title (the mis-spelling is deliberate) but there is another burying ground, deeper in the woods, founded by the indigenous Micmac, where things that are interred don’t stay buried for very long, and you can guess the rest. King manages to sustain an over-long tale (as someone said of Wagner, he has wonderful moments and dreadful quarters-of-an-hour) solely by his skill as a writer, and, believe me, the boy will go far. In the same way that Bach (to invoke another shade of classical music) invented the rules of fugue and then systematically broke all of them, thereby creating something transcendent, King breaks – nay, obliterates — all the rules of creative writing and succeeds in their despite. I’m not putting him up there with Bach, or even Wagner (though there is an unpleasant taint of antisemitism in Pet Sematary that might have struck a chord with Baron Bomburst of Bayreuth), but in many places he tells rather than shows (so making the set-pieces where he shows all the more arresting). There is probably far too much exposition (done so well that it only enhances one’s sympathy for the characters). And there’s the error known as ‘Squid-on-the-Mantelpiece’. The Turkey City Lexicon (a primer for intending writers of SF) says of this trap for the unwary that

It’s hard to properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of Dad’s bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city.

Suffice it to say that Pet Sematary has an aquarium of squid on several period features, probably by Adam. But there was one big, big problem. If you live next to a busy highway that claims the lives of pets and small children, why don’t you build a decent fence?

Adam Kay A Particularly Nasty Case You’ll remember Adam Kay from the darkly hilarious memoirs of a doctor This Is Going To Hurt and The Nightshift Before Christmas if not for his post-healthcare memoir Undoctored, which is just dark. A Particularly Nasty Case is a whodunit featuring Jewish, bipolar and promiscuously gay Eitan Rose (rule 1: write what you know) trying too work out who’s popping off colleagues at the decrepit London hospital in which he works. But hey, I’m telling you the plot. How we laughed on the way to the Emergency Room.

Malcolm Bradbury Doctor Criminale Cast your mind back to that heady time at the end of the 1980s when the Berlin Wall was falling, politics was changing almost by the hour, anything seemed possible, and serious people were declaring that history was at an end. Bradbury evokes that era in this satire about fame, fortune, and the merry-go-round of academic conferences. Francis Jay is  a literary critic who makes a fool of himself at the Booker Prize ceremony and wakes up to find that the Sunday newspaper he works for has folded. He is hired by a TV production company as a researcher for a programme about Bazslo Criminale, philosopher of the Zeitgeist, who seems to be everywhere but is frustratingly hard to pin down. Is he for real or just a front? And what exactly is his philosophy? Bradbury sure can write, but it could be that for many readers unschooled in the controversies over Derrida and so on (I include myself here) the jokes rather go over one’s head. And what with history picking up with a vengeance since the Twin Towers the age of glasnost seems so very long ago now.

Alastair Reynolds Eversion Imagine my joy on discovering something by SF author Reynolds I hadn’t already read. This is a stand-alone piece, unrelated to his sprawling ‘Revelation Space’ universe or any of his other series, and in tone is more like the playful metafiction of the faux-noir Century Rain. Eversion starts with Dr Silas Coade, surgeon on the sloop Demeter, nudging its early nineteenth-century way along the coast of northern Norway in search of a mysterious and gigantic structure at the end of an unexplored fjord. It’s all very Boy’s-Own-adventure and reads — perhaps deliberately — like something by Rider Haggard (note: ‘metafiction’). But it all ends rather suddenly to be replaced by a similar tale only with a steamship… and then a 1930s-style exploration by an airship to a hole in Antarctica that leads to a gigantic cavern inside the Earth. That part is wonderfully steampunk (note: airships). There are other pastiches, including one short version that reads exactly like a SF story from a Golden-Age pulp. Gradually the real situation dawns. Or does it? But hey, I’m telling you the plot. Hugely enjoyable.

Steven Strogatz The Joy of x I love maths. My ardour is, however, unrequited. Hence my joy at coming across books about maths by mathematicians who actually know how to explain things in plain English, for they are few in number (I am so familiar with Ian Stewart, Brian Clegg and John Gribbin that I know them personally, and I have heard good things about Hannah Fry). The Joy of x (he must have thought of the title first, right? Like the late Tom Lehrer’s fictional maths bestseller Tropic of Calculus) is an all-too-brief tour of maths from simple counting all the way past calculus (differential, integral and vector) to group theory and linear algebra, topology  and some statistics, ending up with a suite at the Hilbert Hotel. But it was all too whistle-stop for me. I’d have liked to have had a more leisurely exploration of some of the topics to ensure I had a really good grasp before moving on.  I had a similar sensation after reading Tom Chivers’ book Everything is Predictable (reviewed here)  on Bayesian statistics — I could appreciate why it was important, and useful, but still couldn’t quite grasp it. Perhaps what I need is a maths textbook written in the same friendly way but which goes into more depth and detail. Maybe such things exist. If they do, well, answers on a postcard please…

Anna Mackmin Devoured Oh, but this struck a chord. This is a bizarre coming-of-age-novel in which the initially unnamed protagonist — a girl on the verge of puberty – recounts her life in a commune living in a ramshackle house somewhere in Norfolk in the the early 1970s. Our girl lives with her (selectively) mute sister Star and her parents who give house room to an eclectic assortment of deluded and self-absorbed poets, new-agers, artists, ne’er do-wells, druggies and dropouts. Eventually, of course, it all falls apart. The bizarrerie is mainly about the writing style, which some will find refreshing, others annoying. Also, recipes. I thought it was a lot of fun, but perhaps because it reminded me of the people I knew back in the day during my education in a Steiner School, when, at the start of the school day, clapped-out vans and Citroen 2CVs adorned with decals saying ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ pulled up, disgorging black fumes and an unfeasible number of children, and the gardening was biodynamic.

Carl Zimmer Life’s Edge Age, infirmity and the casting-around for another book idea have led me to catch up with the output of my colleague and friend Zimmer, whom I’ve known since we were both cub reporters and before he started writing books, but, now that we’ve passed a lot of water, he has written quite a few. In Life’s Edge he wrestles with that je-ne-sais-quoi we call ‘life’. Most people know that life begins when the kids leave home and the dogs are dead. Apart from that, telling the difference between the quick and the dead has been a somewhat fraught business, and yet the issue informs many of the debates we have today, from abortion to end-of-life care. The problem is that we all know life when we come across it, but, like jazz or pornography, it seems impossible to achieve a definition that satisfies everyone. In his masterly book How Life Works (reviewed here) Philip Ball suggests that life is that which has meaning, but that probably wouldn’t satisfy everyone either. You can drill down and down to the level of molecules, but then, what do you have? I’ll tell you — bupkes.  As ever, Zimmer recounts his travels and encounters with scientists engaged in this evanescent issue with warmth, sympathy and affection. He doesn’t succeed in finding a definition, but the journey is nothing less than thought-provoking.

Leigh Bardugo Ninth House Where do those bright young witches and wizards go after Hogwarts? To Yale, of course, many of whose Secret Societies practice magic. There are eight Senior societies, and their activities are monitored by Lethe (the Ninth House of the title) which acts as a kind of magical military police. Meet Galaxy Stern, known as Alex, child of a hippy-drippy-trippy Los Angeleno mother of Ladino Jewish heritage, and an unknown father. Alex is a feral high-school dropout, but is recruited by Lethe because she has the remarkable ability to see ghosts without first having to drink the extremely toxic elixir otherwise required. A stranger in a strange land, she finds herself at Yale on a full scholarship, mixing with students much more accomplished (and more entitled) than she, so she has to succeed on chutzpah and street smarts. A deputy (‘Dante’) in an investigative duo working for New England brahmin Daniel Arlington (‘Virgil’), her already fragile world is thrown into confusion when she starts investigating the murder of a young New-Haven woman apparently unconnected with Yale, and Arlington is sucked into a vortex that leads straight to Hell. The parallels with Hogwarts are obvious: the ill-equipped recruit from a deprived home, the exotic and antique setting drenched in ancient ritual, the cast of eccentric and occasionally dangerous characters make it so. Just add a great deal of sex, violence and violent sex, all with or without a copious intake of drugs and not a little gore, and you are most of the way there. But where Bardugo succeeds (Rowling, meh, not so much) is in — well, everything. Ninth House excels: the quality of the writing, the nuanced characterisation, the taut plotting and the watertight world-building shine brightly. It helps that Yale, unlike Hogwarts, really exists, and so (I have learned) do many of the locations and institutions described in the story.  As a novel, it has  a conventional three-act structure. And with its plots, counter-plots, reveals, false trails and twisty ending, it is perfectly poised … and with enough untied knots for a sequel. Which leads me to…

Leigh Bardugo Hell Bent sees Alex Stern and her friends, notably shy, bookish Pamela Dawes (‘Oculus’, in Lethe language), hard-bitten detective Abel Turner (‘Centurion’, Lethe’s liaison with the New Haven PD) and plucky Mercy Zhao (Alex’s Yale room-mate) try and mostly fail to pull Daniel Arlington out of Hell. They succeed, mostly, but Arlington has, unsurprisingly, changed. And all this as Yale’s faculty seem to be dropping like flies. Hell Bent has a lot of Alex’s and Arlington’s  back story, as well as those of the various ghosts and faculty we met in Ninth House. It’s a satisfying entertainment but not quite as  good as Ninth House, which, perhaps, set an impossibly high standard. There are still a few loose ends — who was Alex’s father, for instance? I learn that a  further instalment is in prospect.

Carl Zimmer Planet of Viruses Originally written as a means of public education for the National Institutes of Health, Planet of Viruses is now in its third edition, and so covers Covid. Written in plain and simple language, this primer on what viruses are and what they do should be on everyone’s bookshelf. Essential.

Leigh Bardugo The Familiar Searching for more by Leigh Bardugo but avoiding her Young Adult  fantasy,  Offspring#1 suggested I try this. Set in Spain some time between the failure of the Spanish Amanda Armada and the death of Queen Elizabeth I (so, between 1588 and 1603), it concerns the life of Lucia, a cloddish scullion in a Madrid household at the lower end of the upper class, in a society absolutely obsessed with ancestry and status. Every nuance matters, and the slightest mistake could mean ostracism, exile, torture, even death. Spain’s Jews  had been either expelled or converted a century earlier, but ‘Secret Jews’ could still be punished by the Inquisition, and Lucia’s family is of Jewish heritage. She is unwittingly thrown into the spotlight when it’s revealed she can perform magic (‘little miracles’) and finds herself in a tourney of magicians that will be set before the King, seeking a Vengeance Weapon against the heretical English. As with Alex Stern in Ninth House, the heroine is of Jewish heritage; of humble beginnings; can perform magic; and is thrown into a milieu she can barely understand and in which she can succeed only by her own ingenuity. The unfamiliar setting was a little off-putting — all those Spanish names made it sometimes hard for me to distinguish who was who in a large cast of characters — but it was as well-wrought as I now have come to expect.  Despite the setting, the atmosphere in which people can be ‘cancelled’, their lives ruined by a chance remark that reaches the wrong ears, might be horribly familiar to those who fall foul of the self-righteous and sanctimonious guardians of public morality today. Should be subtitled Everyone Expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived In The Castle I seem to have settled into a groove by reading novels in which the protagonists are young, female and a bit odd. In this novel she’s Mary-Katherine Blackwood — ‘Merrikat’ — who is 18 and lives with her elder sister Constance and her Uncle Julian in a rambling old pile just outside an unnamed village in the United States, sometime in the mid-twentieth century (there are cars and telephones). Six years earlier the rest of the family had been killed in a mass poisoning for which Constance was blamed but later acquitted. The event has alienated the Blackwoods from the increasingly hostile villagers, and had catastrophic consequences for the surviving Blackwoods. It left Uncle Julian disabled and increasingly senile and Constance an obsessive agoraphobic. Only Merrikat goes out to run errands in the village. We see the world through her eyes, and as a narrator she is extremely particular, and peculiar: it’s clear that she has what we’d now call autism and learning disabilities. I don’t want to spoil it by revealing what happens next. After listening to this on Audible I discovered that the novel was written in 1962 and has become a minor classic. Jackson wrote several novels and stories, mainly mysteries and tales of horror. We Have Always Lived In The Castle was a late work and is now seen as a masterly study of  otherness and alienation, and even a metaphor for the antisemitism that Jackson and her (Jewish) husband reportedly experienced in their own lives, with its themes of ostracism, persecution and social isolation from the outside world, and the obsessive maintenance of ritual despite (and because of) increasingly desperate straits. Jackson’s best known work is The Haunting of Hill House and I think I’ll try that next.

Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time The British government has acquired a device to transport people from past centuries to the present day. The people concerned are recorded as missing or dead, so the course of history should not be changed. At this end, Ministry employees have to give house room for the ‘immigrants’. Our protagonist, a young twenty-first century woman of mixed British-Cambodian parentage, is put in charge of an officer from the doomed Franklin Expedition to the North-West Passage. Cue many misunderstandings concerning the role of women, people of various ethnic heritages, and so on. This is not a comedy, however, and there’s more – it appears that the device to bring people to the present day is a gift from the future, and there are all sorts of other shenanigans going on. I enjoyed this mainly for the interesting use of metaphor. The protagonist describes the taste of Guinness, for example, as ‘angry Marmite’. Which was fun.

Laura Spinney: Proto Your Starter for Ten – what connects Slovakian and Sinhala? Phrygian and French? Hittite and Norwegian? The answer is that all are Indo-European languages, connected by historical and linguistic roots so deep that the similarities can be hard to trace. Yet it was the deep similarities of grammar and vocabulary between the languages now spoken more widely than any other on the planet that led to our modern understanding of language change in general, and new work on archaeology and ancient DNA has enriched and sometimes complicated the picture. Laura Spinney traces the tortuous history and geography back to the steppes of southern Russia, the plains of Anatolia and the high deserts of the Silk Road. I listened rather than read this – as an audiobook – and I am glad I have a decent knowledge of geography, as having a map in front of me would have been helpful. Perhaps the dead-tree version has suitable visual aids. I was fascinated to learn about Tocharian, a lost branch of Indo-European, and the deep connections between, say, English and Sanskrit. Spinney takes an interesting and controversial view on the preservation of languages that otherwise might have died out. Languages change all the time (and that’s rather the whole point), borrowing words from other languages. The Celtic languages spoken today, for example, are much corrupted by loans from English, so the Irish, Welsh and Gaelic that people work so strenuously to preserve are hardly authentic. Languages also change  much faster than one would imagine, as people move from place to place. Not many young, working-class people in London today speak the cockney that they might have done a couple of generations ago. Instead they speak a dialect called Multicultural London English, what the politically incorrect might call Jafaican. I could find only two irritants in this absorbing book. Shakespeare wrote in early Modern English, not Middle English. And why is the country Turkey rendered Türkiye? We don’t refer to Greece as Hellas, or Germany as Deutschland.

Paul Hayes: Dr Who: Pull To Open Regular reader of these annals will note that I recently delved into the literature concerning the BBC’s long-running SF series Dr Who, notwithstanding inasmuch as which Exterminate, Regenerate by John Higgs (review here). Whereas that was a complete history of the show, Pull To Open is a account of its genesis, up to and including its very first airing in November 1963, so goes into much more granular detail about the circumstances, and looks at contemporary world events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Profumo affair. Hayes makes the case that BBC Head of Serials Donald Wilson deserves as much credit as Sidney Newman for the invention of the show. Absorbing, but probably for diehard fans only.

Taylor Jenkins Reid: Atmosphere I first came across Reid as the author of Daisy Jones and the Six, a rockumentary about a seventies soft-rock band with uncanny similarities to Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac, and found the televisual emission much better than the book. I believe there is a movie adaptation in the works for this, too, though the book is good in itself. It follows the career of Joan Goodwin: astronomer and wannabe astronaut. Goodwin is all work, work, work and is sexually repressed, living her personal life somewhat vicariously through her appalling and selfish sister Barbara. Her sexual awakening comes through meeting Vanessa Ford, another astronaut candidate, and the trials they face keeping their passionate relationship hidden from any overt sign of ‘sexual deviancy’ that would get them kicked off the program. The sex scenes are poignant and passionate without being explicit, and the space scenes are (as far as I can tell) authentic. The story is bookended as Goodwin, the Cap Com at Mission Control, helps Ford land a damaged space shuttle. Gripping until the end.

Catherine Chidgey: The Book Of Guilt Britain in the 1970s, full of ’70s nostalgia, but in an altered universe in which Hitler was assassinated in 1943, and the Second World War ended in a treaty in which the UK shared some of Nazi Germany’s darker scientific secrets. Our scene is set in what at first looks like an orphanage for boys in a grand but fading country house. All the inmates have left except for a final set of pre-teen triplets, cared for by Mothers Morning, Afternoon and Night, who teach them out of the Book of Knowledge (an out-of-date Children’s Encyclopaedia); record their dreams in the Book of Dreams, their transgressions in the Book of Guilt,  and who dose them with medicines to protect them against some mystery illness. All the other residents have, they believe, been promoted to a grander house in Margate, a paradise for children. Elsewhere, Nancy is a girl  kept by her parents as a guilty secret. The dystopia slowly winds out, mostly told through the eyes of Vincent, one of the triplets. And so the shocking horror slowly unspools. Echoes of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

John Higgs: Exterminate, Regenerate As someone once said in another context, one should never underestimate the power of cheap music. And it doesn’t come much more powerful, or more cheap, than Dr Who, the long-running children’s science-fiction programme that aired on the BBC from 1963 to 1989, and again from 2005 to the present day. Higgs gives a comprehensive, readable and honest account of the genesis, exodus and revelation of the show. The book is far, far better than most effusions on popular culture, and gets into the grittier details that the show’s enormous publicity machine won’t tell you, such as the bullying, misogyny, racism and sexual harassment behind the scenes; why Christopher Eccleston left the show after just one season series; and the complex relationship between the show and the BBC that affected its content, such that stories featuring the stuffy, bureaucratic Time Lords of Gallifrey (representing BBC higher-ups) tended to happen during particularly fraught periods in this pas-de-deux. He also analyses the show’s longevity, getting into such subjects as myth. Myths tend to feature archetypes such as the Trickster, and Higgs portrays the first iterations of the Doctor in this light. Myths are also not required to be consistent. Only the TARDIS and the signature tune have been constant elements from the first episode: even the Doctor is changeable. Philip Ball missed a trick as Dr Who isn’t discussed in his book The Modern Myths (reviewed here) where he makes the case that literary quality is in inverse proportion to mythic potential. Some Whovian myths are, however, exploded. Terry Nation didn’t get the idea for the Daleks from a volume of an encyclopaedia labelled DAL-LEK. And a reluctance of most of the (white, male) BBC staff to take on a show they felt was beneath their dignity, not a desire for diversity, explains why the very first episode, broadcast on 23 November 1963, was directed by a gay Asian and produced by a Jewish woman, nor that the originator of the show, if there was any single one, was Jewish. Higgs doesn’t make the leap, entirely obvious to me if perhaps nobody else, from these facts to the situation of the Doctor as a wanderer exiled from his home planet, though he could have done: in the same way that it was Jewish writers and artists who created comic-book superheroes who, like the Doctor, would sweep in, right wrongs, and stand up for the underdog. After-images, as it were, of the Golem of Old Prague, a prototype cartoon superhero in itself.  After reading this excellent book I wallowed in the entire Audible collection entitled Dr Who at the BBC, which is mostly fairly dull and repetitive, but features a few nuggets such as a radio play about Delia Derbyshire, the musician and engineer at  the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who turned Ron Grainer’s original score into the futuristic soundscape that’s now instantly familiar (you know the one, tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom woo-woo); and another radio play about a Dr Who fan convention in Belfast during the Troubles.

Stuart Turton: The Devil and the Dark Water A maritime romance and whodunit with a frisson of horror from the Age of Sail, this, so something for everyone. No swash is left unbuckled as the Saardam, a Dutch East-Indiaman, sets out from Batavia to Amsterdam under a horrible curse, that only the unlikely pair of sleuth Samuel Pipps and his monolithic-yet-sensitive sidekick Arent Hayes have any hope of unraveling. It was all far too convoluted for me, but I enjoyed the ride. Belatedly I see that Turton is another author with a story in The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) but one that didn’t stay with me quite as vividly as those of Natasha Pulley or Jess Kidd.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: Echo Taking horror from the oceans to the high mountains, this is a love story between two unlikely people. Manhattan socialite Sam Avery and Dutch beefcake Nick Gievers have been  inseparable since pecs were flexed in the gym. Sam would rather mix cocktails, but Nick’s passion ia a good deal more rugged. He is a skilled mountaineer, and the more remote and dangerous the mountain, the better. One day, Nick returns from a rarely-explored peak in the Alps, his face horribly disfigured, his companion lost, and bringing with him an ancient horror that soon spreads. Only Sam seems immune, but in coming to terms with Nick’s new life, he must confront ancient horrors of his own. I loved this book (the mountaineering sequences were especially absorbing), but it was, perhaps, somewhat overlong, and the ending rather too 2001-a-Space-Odyssey for a novel that also references Spandau Ballet.

I asked Chat GPT: Please recast the argument between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a scene from a play by William Shakespeare.

It came up … er … ‘Trumps’

A Scene from The Tempest of Tech and Throne
Act III, Scene II
A courtyard in the realm of public opinion. Enter DONALDUS, the exiled King, and ELONIUS, a merchant alchemist and master of flying chariots.

DONALDUS
What rogue is this that mounts the stars in steel,
Yet scorns the hand that lifted him aloft?
I made thee, knave! When Fortune’s tide ran low,
‘Twas I who lent the gale to fill thy sails.

ELONIUS
Thou err’st, great Trump, for I did chart my stars
Long ere thy golden tower cast its shade.
Thy boast is but the echo of thy pride,
Not coin from which I forged my wondrous works.

DONALDUS
Aye, silver-tonguèd serpent! In days gone past,
Didst thou not whisper praises in my hall?
“Most noble Donaldus,” thou didst proclaim,
“The sun itself doth envy thy bright reign.”

ELONIUS
In truth, I flattered where I feared thy wrath,
As courtiers do when kings grow tempest-toss’d.
Yet now the realm hath eyes to see thy guise—
A jester crowned, whose crown sits much askew.

DONALDUS
Thou art but a knave in merchant’s garb,
A peddler of toys and tongues of flame.
Thy wagons fly, yet still thou canst not flee
The ire of kings nor truth of loyalty.

ELONIUS
Better to craft new worlds than serve a fool.
Thy realm is tweets, thine armies bots and boasts.
Wouldst wage a war of words? Then have at thee—
But know, my ships reach stars thine eyes can’t see.

DONALDUS
Ingratitude! A sin most foul and deep!
Go then, false Elonius—fly far and fast!
Yet mark me well: no throne awaits in space,
Nor shall the people crown a lord of code.

ELONIUS (aside)
The stars are silent, yet more just than kings.
This play of power ends—I’ll write new scenes.

Exeunt, their feud echoing through the digital wind.

Once again I apologise for being late. I make no excuse for this, partly because there are too many reasons to mention. Oh all right, here’s one —  my desire to participate in the online world is waning. The same empty vessels  with the same prejudices still resonate  as loudly as they ever did. I am very tempted to leave them to it and do something more useful instead. Partly for this reason I haven’t added the usual pictures and links, and I am wondering whether I shall continue much more in this vein. Time will tell.

Paul Cooper: Fall of Civilisations I was prompted to read this as there was a glimmer of a joint book event with the author given that my latest book is similarly fin d’espèce. The event never happened, but I got the book all the same. It’s a very readable account of the decline and fall of different civilisations through the ages, and seems to be a spin-off of a podcast called Fall of Civilisations. The book definitely has that episodic feel. Each one of the fourteen chapters is a case history of the rise, decline and fall of a civilisation, from Sumer to Easter Island. It was refreshing to find details of civilisations far from the usual beaten track, such as the Khmer; the southern Indian civilisation of Vijayanagar; and the Songhai of the African Sahel. It is engagingly written, but – perhaps because of its derivation from a podcast – doesn’t quite have the coherence of, say, Collapse by Jared Diamond. So, what causes civilisations to fall? Well, it’s a number of things. Climate change (whether natural or human-caused); the exhaustion of land required to support a large population; but, mostly, the endless capacity for human societies to bash themselves in the face with their own stupidity, cupidity and vainglory.

Mark Rowlands: The Happiness of Dogs In which a professional philosopher and avocational Dog Person takes issue with the Socratic ideal that only the examined life is worth living. In the course of his exploration (and I use the word course advisedly, because one acquires in reading this book a great deal of knowledge about the current thinking on matters such as morality, motivation, sentience and so on) Rowlands shows that dogs, lacking the human ability to reflect upon themselves and their place in the world, have a more fulfilled life. It is the unexamined life, contra Socrates, that is worth living. Humans sometimes achieve a nirvanic state in which they can fleetingly ‘lose themselves’ , if, for example, they are playing sport; indulging in some hobby or activity that they love; or during sex. To quote from the Guide to Jewish Buddhist Wisdom – there is no self. But if there is no self, whose arthritis is this?  Dogs, though, find themselves in this state as a matter of course, and can do things routinely that many humans struggle to achieve even for a moment, such as full, honest love and commitment. So pupperino, so prelapsarian, and who, really, is the better off?

Jonny Sweet: The Kellerby Code is what might have happened had P. G. Wodehouse tried to write Brideshead Revisited but ended up with Vile Bodies. It concerns Edward, our mashup of Jeeves, Charles Ryder and Tony Last, who would do anything for his ungrateful friends Robert and Stanza. Collect their dry-cleaning. Get them tables at a restaurant. Be There for them at any time of day or night. And all because he has a burning and unrequited love for Stanza, whose ancestral pile of Kellerby stands in for Brideshead. Without wishing to spoil anything from this brittle, pin-sharp satirical froth, Edward – unlike Tony – laughs Last.

Tom Michell: Penguin Lessons The true story of a young Englishman who finds himself teaching at an English-style boy’s public school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1970s. On vacation across the estuary of the River Plate in Punta dal Este, Uruguay, he becomes the unlikely saviour of a penguin, the only one left alive after a colony has been fouled by an oil slick. Smuggling the penguin into Argentina where it becomes a kind of school mascot, the penguin – named Juan Salvado – provides inspiration for one and all, mostly by being a good listener. The book is charming and reminiscent of such tales as Tarka the Otter. I have heard that it is to be adapted into a magic-lantern presentation starring Steve Coogan as Juan Salvado.

Mouthy Al-Rashid: Between Two Rivers I have long been fascinated with the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, ever since I did a school project on Sumer almost half a century ago, reading the works of Samuel Noah Kramer and Georges Roux and becoming entranced with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Al-Rashid became entranced on her very first exposure to cuneiform writing, and offers a guide to the rises and falls of Mesopotamian civilisations through a unique lens. One of the many discoveries was a collection, all in the same stratigraphic level at Ur and in a palace that might have been the residence of a princess, of a series of Mesopotamian artefacts of widely divergent dates and uses. This, says Al-Rashid, could have been the earliest known museum. Al-Rashid uses these objects to tell the story of ancient Mesopotamia. I find my schoolboy interest rekindled.

James Rhodes: Instrumental The author is a renowned concert pianist who is unusual in that he came to the instrument late in life, and indeed for a period of ten years didn’t touch a keyboard at all. In this searing and very sweary memoir, the author recounts how his mind and body were scarred by sustained physical and sexual abuse from a gym teacher over a period of five years between the ages of five and ten. This led to a very uncertain life in which his deep psychological trauma remained — and still remains — unhealed. It also led to back problems caused by the spinal damage resulting from the repeated violent penetration of the anus of a five-year-old by an adult male penis. This is occasionally a very difficult read (or listen) and leaves one recoiling with rage at those adults who violate the young and the defenceless, and how society repeatedly fails to do much about it. Oh, and there’s some lovely music.

Natasha Pulley: The Bedlam Stacks Another month, another highly imaginative novel from Natasha Pulley. This one is set in the same fictional universe as The Watchmaker of Filigree Street but apart from a couple of scenes with the main protagonist of that book, the setting is very different. The scene is the early nineteenth century, and an British expedition is sent to Darkest Peru to steal cuttings of the cinchona tree for transport to Ceylon, so the quinine can be used to treat malaria ravaging the Indian subcontinent. The expedition makes its way over the high Andes into a region of dreamlike fantasy, where people with various disabilities and disfigurements live in New Bethlehem (hence Bedlam), a colony set on three tall islands (hence Stacks), set in a wide river, where magic is real and statues appear to move. The style is very much the Boy’s Own Adventure of tales such as King Solomon’s Mines (though with more modern sensibilities) with nods to Heart of Darkness and — dare I say it — the chilling Weeping Angels from Dr Who. Each one of Pulley’s novels has its own flavour, even if some are set in the same fictional setting. Whereas The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was crisp and telegraphic, The Bedlam Stacks is richly weird. The Half-Life of Valery K takes place in the Soviet Union of the 1960s — and The Mars House is set on, well, Mars. There are, however, things in common. The characterisation is sensitive; there is quite often a bromance between the two male leads; and all the novels feature at least one mention of an octopus.

I apologise to you both for the late arrival of this post. I have been otherwise preoccupied with promoting my latest book Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way as well as contending with a great deal of business at the Submerged Log Company, after which Mrs Gee and I enjoyed a short break. And, like Jenny, I am of the age where one begins to wonder why one bothers, realising (not for the first time) that I appear to be one of the few greyhounds in the stadium to realise that the hare they are chasing is only a toy. But I’m here now, and here is what I read in April.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Shroud In my opinion few writers can match Adrian Tchaikovsky in his evocation of alien life and its struggle towards intelligence (see his magisterial Children of Time, reviewed here). Here he has a crew of a spaceship forced to crash-land on the eponymous moon of a gas giant. The moon is optically dark but radiates vast quantities of radio chatter. The novel — mainly a two-hander between the surviving crew members of a crippled escape pod — concerns the meeting between humans and the alien life-forms on the moon that have evolved a kind of distributed intelligence based on radio chatter, during which the aliens seem to understand much more about the humans than vice-versa.

Travis Elborough: Atlas of Unexpected Places I had expected this to be as charmingly liminal as a superficially similar book, Off The Map by Alastair Bonnett (reviewed here) but it turned out to be less a meditation on the subject of topophilia (a love of place) as a compendium of more or less random find spots on the globe with interesting anecdotes about them, from an ornate but largely unused railway station in Spain to the caves of Lascaux in France. It’s the sort of book of short but amusing stories one would  put in the lavatory of  one’s guest wing to entertain visitors while they are on the throne..

Jess Kidd: The Hoarder This rambling mystery comes from the rich haul of authors I ran into while reading The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) and whose wonderfully gothic Things In Jars I reviewed here. Whereas that was Victoriana, The Hoarder takes us up to the present day with social care worker Maud Drennan who is sent to look after the cantankerous Cahal Flood in a decaying mansion crammed full of rubbish. Like Bridie Devine in Things in Jars, Maud is both Irish and psychic, forever accompanied by one or more saints, quick to advise her on what to do with her difficult charge. Maud is convinced that there’s a mystery in the House of Flood. Which of course there is. I love Jess Kidd’s writing. The prose is charming; the characters, beautifully realised  (Maud’s landlady, a transvestite retired magician’s assistant is especially memorable); and the dialogue exceptional. I’d be surprised if this didn’t make my end-of-the-year selection, though what with other rich pickings from The Winter Spirits it will have stiff competition.

Adam Roberts: Lake of Darkness A somewhat schizoid author who when not indulging in Tolkien-related silliness writes sere, biting and award-winning SF such as the very wonderful Jack Glass, about a criminal with igneous ingenious and incarnadine ways of breaching containment. Lake of Darkness is set in a post-scarcity future in which the crew of one of two spaceships exploring a black hole is murdered by the captain, Raine, who appears to have gone rogue. A historian specialising in 21st-century serial killers who interviews the imprisoned Raine is infected with what seems to be the same contagion (echoes of Silence of the Lambs). Whatever it is has — impossibly — escaped from the black hole. But what? An alien menace? Satan himself? What starts out as an everyday SF locked-room mystery turns into a tough, uncompromising exegesis on the physics of black holes… and the nature of good and evil. Not everyone will enjoy this. I found it mindbendingly brilliant.

Andrew Michael Hurley: The Loney Yet another author from The Winter Spirits, to which the author contributed The Old Play, a story about a drama performed as a traditional community ritual whose continuity appears to depend on the commission of a kind of  human sacrifice. These themes echo in The Loney, in which the devoutly Catholic Smith family goes on an Easter retreat to a remote part of the Lancashire coast, where there is a shrine to St Anne. Their story is told through the eyes of the unnamed teenage younger Smith son, protector of his older brother Andrew who is mute and has learning difficulties. The family hopes that Andrew’s exposure to holiness will cure him. And, well, he is cured (no spoiler – this is made clear in the Prologue) but what appears to be a miracle has not quite the holiness that the family imagined. The novel gets much of its power from the things that are left unsaid, the grown-up conversations that the narrator cannot quite understand, so that the horror dawns slowly on the reader who is ever eager to learn how Andrew’s miracle comes to pass. I’ll give no further clues, but there is a parallel in Ursula Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.

There has been much fuss and flapdoodle about a company called Colossal Biosciences that aims to use the wonders of modern genetic technology to call extinct species back from the other side of the rainbow bridge. Their latest scheme has been to ‘de-extinct’ an ice-age predator, the dire wolf, by inserting various genes copied from DNA retrieved from fossil dire wolves and inserting them into regular ordinary grey wolves. Critics say that the result isn’t so much a dire wolf but a duck with a hat on a designer dog. But those puppies do look adorable.

Others suspect that the enterprise isn’t so much driven by science as fantasy.  It has not escaped our notice that one of the authors of a preprint announcing the. retrieval of dire wolf DNA is George R. R. Martin, the creator of the sprawling Game Of Thrones series of fantasy novels, which engendered a popular televisual adaptation, and in which fantasy animals called dire wolves play a small part. (For those who have never watched Game of Thrones, the plot is basically this — that people have sex a lot, and then die).

Nonetheless, Colossal plans to reanimate the dodo and the thylacine, and has made some progress with the woolly mammoth, though the results so far do seem — how would one put this? — petite.

To the many critics of Colossal, and there are many, I say — Pish! Tosh! and Fie! We wouldn’t be living in the world today if scientists didn’t go off on one occasionally and engage in projects that seemed to their less visionary contemporaries as dribblingly insane. They laughed at Galileo. Also, Tesla.

And then there’s that name: Colossal. It’s the kind of moniker that puts one in mind of fictional corporations such as ACME, or Stark Industries, often founded by ridiculously wealthy but genius-level megalomaniacs who live in James-Bond-style lairs beneath extinct volcanoes in Secret Locations.

Being as I really am a genius-level megalomaniac who lives in a James-Bond-style lair beneath an extinct volcano in a Secret Location (near Cromer) I can only view Colossal as a challenge. So, in the spirit of free-market capitalism, I have set up a rival. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Humungous Biosciences. Unlike many genius-level megalomaniacs who live in James-Bond-style lairs beneath extinct volcanoes in Secret Locations, however, I am not ridiculously wealthy. This means that the hand-pickled picked, top-flight scientists I’ve recruited for Humungous Biosciences have often had to resort to low-budget rather more creative solutions than those available to Colossal. But necessity is the mother of Frank Zappa, and they have achieved great things with squeegee bottles and miles of sticky-backed plastic the resources they have. Privation certainly hasn’t stopped them coming up with a raft of projects to bring back creatures from their unquiet graves, whether they want to be so reanimated or not. Some of their schemes are even possible using ordinary everyday household objects, so in the spirit of openness and citizen science, readers are encouraged to try out some of them at home (at their own risk). Here therefore is a selection from the latest call for funding prospectus.

Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius)

Take any ordinary everyday elephant — such as you might find around any home — and cover it in russet shag-pile carpet.

Woolly Rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis)

See ‘Woolly Mammoth’.

Giant Deer (Megaloceros  giganteus)

Also known as the Irish Elk, this can be recreated by taking a red-deer stag and glueing very large branches to its head.

Glyptodont (Doedicurus sp.)

This gigantic relative of the armadillo can be recreated by covering a VW beetle with egg boxes.

Aurochs (Bos primigenius)

This legendarily ferocious progenitor of domestic cattle may be recreated by taking a large white bull; fattening it on testosterone, antibiotics, and supersized Happy Meals; and then shoving a scotch bonnet up its bottom.

Steller’s Sea Cow (Hydrodamalis  gigas)

This project is still in the planning stages but prospective investors can get a good idea of what it would be like by watching me sea-bathing (from a safe distance), at least until the Sea Mammal Research Unit arrives.

Macrauchenia (Macrauchenia patachonica)

Macrauchenia was a litoptern, a group of extinct mammals only known from South America. Its claim to fame is that it was discovered by Charles Darwin. Macrauchenia looked like a large ungulate with a short trunk. It can be recreated by getting two short lengths of shower hose, glueing them together side-by-side, and attaching them to the forehead of any conveniently located llama. (Special orders only).

Giant Ground Sloth (Megatherium americanum)

There are no plans as yet to recreate this species. However, I’ve seen some of our scientists watching attentively and taking notes when I sit down to lunch.

Diprotodon (Diprotodon optatum)

This rhinoceros-sized cousin of the wombat can be recreated by feeding LSD to ordinary wombats. The wombats won’t actually be any bigger, but THEY’LL think they’re HUGE.

Aepyornis (Vorombe titan)

In a preliminary study, scientists  have attempted to  recreate the aepyornis, or elephant bird, by crossing an elephant with a bird. First results are not encouraging, producing elephants that can’t remember anything. They’re also lighter than air and tend to float away, endangering air traffic.

Giant Trilobite (Isotelus rex)

Efforts to recreate this 70-centimetre aquatic Ordovician monster are well advanced. The project involves glueing medieval plate armour to Roombas and letting them loose. The problem  is that when placed in water they invariably explode. The Humungous Biosciences marketing department is thinking of rebranding this project as a recreation of the giant Carboniferous (and land-living) millipede Arthropleura.

Unicorns

Humungous Biosciences is also responding to the challenge, set by Colossal with the dire wolf, of creating animals that never existed in reality. The first project is the unicorn, which can easily be created by taking any pure white horse that has been reared and handled by virgins, and glueing an ice-cream cone to its forehead.

Ents

In ‘Project Treebeard’, scientists at Humungous Biosciences have been trying to create ents by splicing actin and myosin genes into banyan trees. The results have been encouraging, if disconcerting. The trees really do seem to move around, but only when nobody is looking.

FINALLY: there is a good reason for not making fun of projects at Colossus. If they are as keen on creating animals from the Game of Thrones franchise as they seem, there can really only be one aim: to create the gigantic fire-breathing flying dragons responsible for incinerating so many of the cast … and, presumably, the competition. That’s why we at Humungous Bioscences intent to get there first.