Front Cover

The other day I finished a proof copy of a book called The Return Man by V.M.Zigo. It is due to be published in March and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

It is a book set in a future where a mystery virus has created zombies, but the outbreak has been containe, albeit to a very large area. Basically the entire Western half of the USA has been evacuated leaving it populated only by the undead while the survivors cram in the the Eastern safe states.

One man hid from the evacuation teams and stayed behind to look for his wife with the intention of laying her to rest if she has been infected. In the meantime he takes commissions from people in the safe states to find their loved ones and ‘retturn’ them to a peaceful death.

It is an interesting twist on the whole zombie situation, making a change from the usual flight to safety. My only reservation was that it sounded like a good outline for a film and I couldn’t see how you could really capture the whole spirit of the films on paper, but it turns out you can and this bloke has done it!

The zombies are very much in the Romero tradition of shuffling slow zombies, which is the way I like them.

All the usual elements are there but with some extra depth and background. The hero is not a typical survivalist, but a surgeon who has had to teach himself how to survive in that environment and how to hunt. Thanks to satellite connections he is able to communicate with a relative out East who hooks him up with clients and provides a link to what is happening outside. The descriptions of how society has reacted and coped is not overdone but is enough to make you think seriously about how the world would adapt – not well, with the far right taking control of the remaining states.

Doctor Marco gets persuaded to take on a mission to find a specific corpse in California and on the quest he hooks up with a Chinese soldier sent from outside and here is another twist as the soldier’s Chinese cultural attitudes towards the dead make him more ready to kill live people than to re-kill corpses.

All of this means that there is a proper story arc with an objective more complex than just trying to avoid being over-run, and it is written in a decent, direct style without being trashy, and there are some spectacular set pieces in it. To go into too much detail would constitute major spoilers, but I will say that there is a sequence on a stalled train and a another where the hero wants to break into a prison crammed full of thousands of ex-con zombies who have been trapped there in order to find one specific ex-person.

All through the book, while enjoying it immensely, I could not stop myself wishing there was a film of it too so I was quite pleased to see that a company has already taken out an option on the film rights. Even so, I’m glad to have read the book because it contain a lot that a film would understandably miss out.

Best of all, the book comes to proper resolution that is satisfying enough while still leaving lots of scope for a sequel, which I will be first in the queue for when it comes out.

One of the many little pleasures of Vine is that I get to read things I would not normally have the chance to. There is no way I would fork out over £20 on a text book in a field I am neither studying nor working in, so getting these does broaden my horizons a little.

I don’t get carried away though. Also on offer was a Beekeeping for Dummies book. I don’t think I need to broaden my horizons quite that much, although seeing it on the list did make me wonder just how much of a market there is for such a book. Just how many budding beekeepers are out there?

But I digress… here is what I thought about the book:

It may be that, not being a designer or a design student, I am missing the point, but I found this book to be a bit light on hard information at the expense of filler.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a beautiful book to hold with some gorgeous pictures in it, and it is extremely well presented as you might expect from Smashing Books, but it was too lacking in substance for me. For example, of its 402 pages, 32 are taken up with the index, contents and pages that are either blank or chapter title pages. On top of that another 274 pages are just image galleries: mostly screenshots of websites or photos taken from Flickr. That only leaves 99 pages of text – and many of those pages only have a paragraph or two on pages that are otherwise blank or full of pictures.

Most of the book tells you that you need to look at things for inspiration and then gives you lots of examples of things without giving much of a clue about how to do that practically. Along the way at times the book treads a fine line between getting inspired and copying other people’s work. In fact it more or less tells you to copy from enough different places so that you avoid obvious IP infringement.

Suddenly at chapters 6 and 7 the book does what I spent the best part of 350 pages wanting it to do – giving two practical demonstrations of how to use inspiration from other websites or from more abstract sources. Up to that point I was thinking that it was all a bit ‘emperor’s new clothes’.

And yet…

I guess that if you are in the design field and the book gives you just one idea that makes a project work or gets you a commission then it is all worth it at twice the price. Just because it didn’t do what I wanted doesn’t mean that it won’t work for somebody else.

I realise this is all subjective but personally I would have welcomed a lot more chapters like 6 and 7 because I already have a source of thousands of images. Its called the internet. Having said that, the clue is in the title. It is a book of ideas and not step-by-step instructions so it actually does what it says.

Where I would quibble with the title is that it is not clear that this is a book squarely aimed at people designing websites. While somebody designing, say, fabrics, might get an idea or two it is not really aimed at them and anybody designing things other than websites would be better off with something else.

I do wonder if I am being a little unkind though. I have an architectural source book that is very similar, being little more than lots of pictures to show different aspects and styles which I find fascinating even if it is of no practical use to me. I just think that somebody who designs websites will, by definition, have access to the internet and a whole world of different pictures already.

What it reminded me of was one of those Tony Buzan memory-improving books I read ages ago. It was a 200-page hardback book. At page 33 I was thinking that it was interesting and possibly useful and then I turned the page and discovered that the book was effectively over: pages 34 to 200 were just lists of things to remember using the techniques in pages 1 to 33. Basically it was a pamphlet that had been stretched to fill a whole book.

In the same way this idea book could have contained all its information in 50 pages. But who buys 50-page books? Or 33-page books? Do we as consumers think that anything that short can’t be worthwhile and so the only way we can be persuaded to buy it is with loads of filler?

A more recent example would be Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, another pamphlet pumped up to book size, in his case by labouring the point. If anything I think that the book’s main big idea was given far less impact by being restated umpteen different ways, something a few of these popular science bokos are guilty of, especially those in the behavioural economics field.

This is a very accessible book aimed more at the casual reader rather than an academic book. What it reminds me of most is the television programme QI as it is stuffed full of the sort of things ‘everybody knows’ that turn out not to be the case like Mussolini making the trains run on time, James Watt inventing the steam engine or the defeat of the Spanish Armada being a heroic victory.

Each chapter is very short, perhaps a little too short, and the selection of ‘facts’ to debunk is a bit idiosyncratic, with some being quite vague, and some being a little obscure – I have a feeling that few people have a fixed opinion of Philippe Petain one way or the other. For all that it is still very readable, and with enough surprises to justify its title.

For me, the biggest surprises were in some of the chapters about American history, like the hostility towards democracy amongst the Founding Fathers of the US. It seems that although democracy was a result of the revolution it wasn’t the objective but more of an accidental outcome. The chapter on Abraham Lincoln was the real eye-opener though.

I had known that Lincoln was against slavery, and that the civil war effectively ended it, so it was a bit of a shock to see quotes from Lincoln like:

I am not, nor ever have been in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifiying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.

Amazing that they voted Obama in only 150 years after that!

I am not a designer. I have dabbled with knocking up logos for personal projects, but I know I will never do it as a business. As such, this book is probably not really aimed at me, but I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway.

Don’t read this expecting to be told how to come up with ideas though. Although the author describes a bit about how and where he personally finds inspiration that is not the sort of thing that can be taught: you either have some sort of creative spark or you dont. What this book does do is encourage that creative spark and provide practical information on how to apply it. There is no point being able to create beautiful and effective logos if you can’t persuade anybody to employ you to do that.

The sort of practicalities covered are what types of software to use (and why), what types of file format to use to provide the finished article, how to behave with clients, how to make sure you get paid, and so on. That makes it sound a bit boring, but this sound practical advice is in bite-sized chunks and interspersed with practical advice on techniques to use in the actual design like using vectors, aspects of typefaces or choices of colour schemes.

In the course of the book you are told the basics of writing a design brief and contract, how to avoid getting ripped off and what to include in your deliverables, including a section on writing guidelines for the use of the finished logo. Throughout the book the emphasis is on professionalism. It looks like a really good starting point for anybody starting off as a freelance designer.

You can tell while reading this that every paragraph has come from experience and is not just theory. I’m sure that every chapter could be expanded into an entire book in itself and the author recognises this, providing references to books or online resources that would expand on any topic you felt you wanted to explore more. Possibly the most important thing the book does is to make you aware that those topics are important enough that you would feel the need to learn more about some very specific things.

Of course there are lots of pretty pictures, and examples of designs not just from the author but from other companies and designers. As you would expect and hope from a book about design it is well laid out and attractive to look at in itself, but the content is also well-organised providing a logical structured approach to the process of design. Ironically the badly-designed bits (very useful examples of what not to do) are some of most interesting.

I’m sure this will be invaluable to sombebody in this field, but even for an outside it is fascinating and should be required reading for people who commission designers’ work!

Book cover

I recently read a book called I’m Feeling Lucky: the Confessions of Google Employee 59 by Douglas Edwards. No point explaining what it is about, the title sums it up quite nicely, but for what it is worth it is the erstwhile brand manager of Google telling the story of his five or so years in the company.

By a coincidence I finished reading it just before Google Plus suddenly appeared. One reason why I didn’t get round to writing the review on Amazon was that I was busy playing with Google Plus, but having just read about the behind-the-scenes decisions and debates around earlier product launches I looked at the new product launch in a different way. I couldn’t help looking at all the aspects of it and wondering what discussions and arguments might have gone into them.

Here is what I wrote about it on Amazon:

This is probably as close as we are going to get to the inside story of Google, for a good few years anyway. Douglas Edwards joined the company in 1999 just as it was starting to expand and was one of the first employees who was not an engineer. He recounts some of his experiences of the six years he spent there from his perspective in a clear way, making it interesting even for those who can’t remember the days when search meant using Alta Vista or Lycos on Netscape.

This will not be the whole story for several reasons. Firstly, there is the element of loyalty to previous colleagues and a company that still had a family atmosphere when the author joined it (at that time every new employee was still interviewd by either Sergey Brin or Larry Page). There is also the practical fact that employees from that long ago probably still have a significant shareholding and won’t want to say anything damaging or give way secrets, but on top of that it is still just one person’s point of view and maybe there are old office politics scores to settle.

Having said that, I get the feeling that the account is as honest as it can be, given those caveats. It is a shame that it is written by somebody out of the loop of the technical aspects, though that is a blessing as well in that it keeps the book readable because it doesn’t get bogged down in technical detail. Still, I sometimes found myself wanting to know just a little more, but on balance I think that the author’s status as a non-engineer makes him a bit more like the majority of us, viewing events through eyes more like ours than an engineers’ would be.

I do think that a result of all that is that Edwards downplays his own contribution and role somewhat. Towards the end, in his tales of contract negotiations with AOL he seemed to be blowing his own trumpet a bit, but otherwise I suspect a bit of false modesty. Google is a demanding employer that rewards success and probably doesn’t tolerate failure or carry passengers, especially not when it was a smaller company and waiting for its IPO. He would not have managed to stay there for six years without being more impressive than he comes across in the book. It is a bit like Nick Mason’s story of Pink Floyd where he hardly mentions his own drumming.

The other problem about the book is unavoidable – it only goes up to 2005 when Edwards left the company. By the end I was left wanting the book to go on and cover all those products that came along afterwards: Google Earth, Maps, Street View, Buzz, Wave, the instant search preview thing, the privacy controversies, Google Apps, Chrome, Android, the Chrome OS and now Google Plus. I am hoping that somebody will write the follow up.

One of the highlights was a frank (up to a point) discussion of the economics of working for a small start-up and the rewards if it becomes successful. It falls short of actually saying how much an early employee made from their share options when the company went public, but otherwise gives those of us who have always worked in stable, normal jobs a bit of an insight into that culture.

It might seem like I have just pointed out a load of bad things about the book, but they are just comparitive shortcomings – comparing this book to the perfect Google story which will probably never be written for all sorts of practical reasons. As it is this is a good read that is much more suitable to the general reading public than a standard story of a business. It has human interest, a history of a company in its infancy, as well as some background on an industry.

If you wait for the ideal Google book you will wait a very, very long time. This is more than good enough for now, and a lot better than you would expect.

A couple of things stick in my mind about this book. One is the job interview with Sergey Brin and I still can’t help wondering how I would cope with it. Brin basically said he was giving five minutes preparation and then he wanted a presentation explaining how to do something that he (Sergey) doesn’t already know. Talk about high pressure.

What is remarkable is reading about how close to failure the company came several times when it took on new contracts and had to scale everything up at extremely short notice and realising how easily things could have gone the other way at a couple of key moments – and then wondering what the online landscape would look like if Google had not won those early search wars. Would somebody else have come up with Android? Or Street View?

It is a good read: a business book for people not terribly interested in business and a computer book accesible to non-experts but which will probably interest computer experts and business geeks alike.

The Map of Time by Felix Palma

Just finished a book called The Map of Time by Felix Palma.   It is due to be published on June 9th though it is not entirely new: it was first published in 2008 in Spanish, but this is the English translation of it.

A bit strange that it has taken so long to come out in English because it is a very English book in many ways, not least its setting of Victorian London.

This was another book from Amazon’s Vine programme, and here is what I wrote about it:I’m really impressed with this book.  It is full of twists and turns, with surprises around every corner.  A large part of the pleasure was in being surprised so often, and teased by the author, so I’ll try and avoid details which might spoil that pleasure for anybody else.

The publishers are obviously keen to draw parallels with such bestsellers as The Time Traveller’s Wife and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and those comparisons are not entirely wrong because the book is a sort of mixture of those, with loads of other ideas floating around too, including hints at the Terminator films, and all in a Victorian London setting, with a large nod to the steampunk genre.

It is a large book, split into three sections which could almost work as standalone books, but although there are three distinct plots there is a lot of overlap to the stories, and right at the end you realise just how connected everything is.  It is full of ideas, and just the right mix of historical accuracy and speculation to be enjoyable.

Time travel is the theme but instead of establishing a method of time travel, this book manages to include four different methods, continually leaving you guessing whether any of them actually work. Fictional time travel (and is there any other type?) can get complicated with all the problems of paradoxes, parallel universes, out of sequence meetings and all the rest, and the real accomplishment here is to make it so complicated and yet easy to follow.

There is the almost obligatory introduction of real-life historical figures into the story, like Bram Stoker, the Elephant Man, Jack the Ripper and some of his victims, and H.G.Wells who is really the star of the book, but all are brought into the book logically and the writer doesn’t get carried away and try to cram too many in.

The book is very stylised, with an occasionally intrusive omniscient authorial voice which could easily be annoying if done wrong.  It worked for me and stayed just the right side of the line between annoying and amusing, and the conceit does make the book stand out from the crowd.

A word of praise must also go to Nick Caistor, who translated the book from the original Spanish, which must have been quite a task, and made the language fit the ideas so well.

In many ways this is a brave book.  It does so many risky things which can easily go disastrously wrong if not done well, like referencing real events, places and people, having an unconventional authorial voice, and having a writer as a character.  Not only is the main character a witer but the book touches on how he feels about writing and that can so easily turn into self-indulgence.

Any story set in the late nineteenth century and touching on Jack the Ripper brings with it the temptation to bring Sherlock Holmes into it somehow.   In this case the temptation is sort of resisted: he is mentioned but remains entirely fictional.

As with all the best books, I’m a little sad to have finished and wish I had savoured it a bit more, but as I got more into it I was reading faster and faster because I really wanted to know whether what would happen next would be what I was expecting.  It hardly ever was, but in such a way that I was pleased to have been misdirected.

In a nutshell… read this book, its really good.

More ravings about it below the fold…

This film must be one of the best-kept secrets of recent years. I had never heard of it, nor had my wife or anybody we have asked about it, but it deserves to be much better know because it is a pure pleasure to watch.

It is a gentle farce by a very good ensemble cast, led by Andy Garcia who generated quite a few out-loud laughs while playing it totally straight.  The real star of the piece may well be the location – a small fishing village in the Bronx, which sounds like a flight of fancy but turns out to be a real place.

With no prior knowledge of the film I was just hoping not to be bored, but quickly found myself completely hooked on the characters and situations, and I was not alone.  My wife sometimes just tolerates the films I watch, but with this one she watched it a second time the very next day with our daughter.

I won’t give examples of what I found so appealing: part of the appeal was the surprising little quirks and I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprises for anyone.  I think it struck the right balance between being weird and being plausible.

The extras are quite watchable too.  There is a feature called Dinner with the Rizzos which is the cast (minus the son) gathered round a table with the producer chatting about the filming and the location informally.  Such features are generally full of hyperbole about the film and cast, but this seems more genuine: the cast do seem to fit well together.  That might be because of the way they worked, with a fair bit of improvisation on-set, although having Andy Garcia’s daughter play his daughter must have helped.

The second feature is the now-familiar ‘deleted scenes’ – about thirty minutes’ worth.  Some of these are alternate takes of scenes in the film, and it ends with a very interesting sequence.  In the film there are a couple of pivotal meal scenes, and here we see several versions of them, each slightly different and illustrating the amount of improvisation going on.  The actor playing the teenage son was instructed to try and irritate and disrupt the others – be a teenage boy in other words – and you can see how well he was following his brief.  Showing just the footage from one camera shows you the bits he was doing when he would have been off-screen.

I would recommend this to anybody.  I’m sure it will bear repeat viewings so it is one to consider for buying as well as for renting, and the next time I go to New York I will be very tempted to headout to City Island itself.

My first experience with audiobooks (Bill Bryson: At Home) had put me off the concept a bit, but these worked a lot better.  I suspect a lot of this has to do with the content, audiobooks seem better suited to fiction, but they are also read with a lot more enthusiam and variation of tone than the Bryson book was.

For what it’s worth, here is what I wrote about them:

Sherlock Holmes: the rediscovered railway mysteries, by John Taylor, read by Benedict Cumberbatch.

As a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes I always approach new stories with a little apprehension in case they take liberties with the characters or are just written in the wrong way. I was greatly relieved to find that this little collection compares well with other ‘rediscovered’ stories.

There are four stories, each about 30 minutes in length. I was very pleased to find that only one of them concerned a murder. One of my favourite things about the Sherlock Holmes stories is that they often concern other mysteries, using a bit more imagination than just going for the easy sensationalism of a dead body.

As in all but two of the original stories, these are written by Doctor Watson in the first person and have much of the same atmosphere of the originals, right down to Watson’s apparent obsession with food and the subtle humour running through them. I would have been quite happy to have these in printed format alongside all my other Holmes books.

As for the reading: it is superb. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the Holmes character in the contemporary Holmes TV series, but is totally at home reading out a period piece. Like some of the more animated Jackanory presenters I remember from the 60s Cumberbatch does not just read the stories but performs them, doing all the voices as appropriate including a very good American accent for one part. I had not realised just how versatile he is.

As for practical matters, if you rip this to a PC to listen on an mp3 player the tracks all get labelled in such a way that they have meaningful titles, starting with a story and chapter number which ensures they will get displayed and played in the right order, which is not always the case.

Holmes fans will find much to enjoy in this collection, but casual listeners should enjoy it just as much – as long as they like detective stories without a body.

Torchwood: Department X, by James Goss, read by Kai Owen

First of all, it almost goes without saying that if you don’t like Torchwood on TV you won’t like this, so the real question is how will it go down with Torchwood fans?  As an avid watcher of Torchwood myself I have to say that I rather enjoyed this, but not totally.

The story is quite good, mostly well-written, and well-read.  The characters all behave and interact in the right way. My biggest complaint is about the sound effects and occasional incidental music.  This is not a radio play, but a reading of a Torchwood story.  Incidental music and sound effects would enhance a radio play, but I found them annoying in a book reading.  If the story was weaker or the reading less accomplished then it might need such gimmicks, but this did not need any help.

Kai Owen (who plays Gwen’s husband in the TV series) has a pleasant reading voice and puts plenty of emphasis, variation and emotion into the reading. He doesn’t do impressions of Capt Jack, Gwen and Ianto as such, but does characterise them quite well as well as other characters.  It really is worth listening to this just for his portrayal of Gwen’s shopgirl colleague.

When ripping to computer the file details need a little tidying up because the two discs have a slightly different way of labelling them, but nothing too confusing.

I found it an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.

If I was still commuting I might be tempted to try more fiction audiobooks to pass the journey based on this experience, and to supplement the various podcasts I subscribe to.  I think I will give non-fiction audiobooks a wide berth though.

I will particularly keep an eye out for stories read by Benedict Cumberbatch.   I was lucky enough to see Patrick Stewart do his one-man show at the Old Vic when he recites/enacts A Christmas Carol which as far as I am concerned is the absolute pinnacle of story-telling and Cumberbatch’s reading is nearly as good which might sound like damning with faint praise but is actually one hell of a thing.

It was an interesting experience for me since I have never listened to a book before.  Here is what I wrote, followed by a few thoughts on the whole paradigm of audiobooks which didn’t seem appropriate to put into an Amazon review.

I’m writing about the audiobook version of this book, which weighs in at sixteen-and-a-half hours spread over 14 CDs. This is actually the first audiobook I have read/listened to and I think I may have given the paper (or Kindle) version the full five stars.

Leaving aside my own preferences for written over spoken books, I’ll concentrate on the two main aspects of this: the content and the delivery. Comments on the content would apply equally to the other versions but comments on the delivery are unique to the audiobook.

If, like me, you already have several of Bryson’s earlier books on travel, language, science or autobiography you will know what to expect from this – lots and lots of interesting facts and stories that are loosely hung on a topic which in this case is the history of the home. This might sound like a narrow topic but it expands into stories of scientific discovery, architectural history, social history, medicine, agriculture, and more.

The whole thing is more engaging than most traditional history books because Bryson has given himself license to veer off at tangents and to effectively cherry-pick history, choosing the most interesting, amusing or mind-boggling nuggets from anywhere. This emphasis on breadth rather than depth makes it entertaining and often had me stopping and dipping into Wikipedia to look up places that are mentioned and see pictures of them, or to get a bit more detail.

A valid criticism of the book could be that it is shallow and concentrating on the sensational side of things, but that is also its strength because it makes it accessible to those of us who are not historians and may lead us to investigate some parts in greater depth elsewhere – in the same way that Brian Cox does for astronomy or Jim Al-Khalili does for physics.

Some of the facts and anecdotes may only have a tenuous relevence to the theme, and a lot of the content relates to the grand country houses and lives of the gentry rather than normal everyday homes and lives, but I can live with that.

The audiobook is read by the author and I would have expected that to be a good thing, but it didn’t work too well for me. Having done the research he must know a lot about the material included in the book and having chosen what to write about he must have included those things which most interested him. I would have thought this would result in a reading with a sense of infectious enthusiasm, but instead it was strangely flat.

Bill Bryson is a likeable chap with a soothing voice but I’m not sure that is what the book needed. It must be a bit of a chore to spent more than 16 hours reading aloud, but it was also a bit of a chore listening to it because of the flat delivery. One of Bryson’s little tropes is to include quite long lists of examples and they really did start to irritate me. In some places he even seemed to give the wrong emphasis on words more in the style of somebody reading a passage for the first time, and not what I would expect from somebody who wrote it.

As a practical matter, if you rip this to a computer to listen to it on there, or to transfer to an mp3 player, the naming of tracks is very unhelpful. Each disc is split into about 20 tracks of a few minutes each but they are just called “sang 1″, “sang 2″ and so on, and there is no indication in the track names of where chapters start. At the end of the process you will have 16 tracks called “sang 1″ for example. I spent a little time renaming the tracks and other information to make it easier to handle and to make sure I would not end up listening to things in the wrong order.

Overall, I enjoyed this, but I think it would work better as a normal book which can be dipped into, preferably with an index for reference purposes. I might even be tempted to buy the paperback at some point.

The first two paragraphs are there because Amazon does have the habit of putting reviews for all different formats together so you might be looking at the product page for the audiobook and see reviews of the hardback or Kindle versions.   It can get confusing for somebody thinking about buying the paperback and seeing somebody criticise the author’s accent or diction.

Cards on the table: I really didn’t get on with the whole concept of listening to a book.  I know a lot of people do play books on their car stereo or on their mp3 players to help pass long journeys, as I sometimes do with podcasts, and I was listening to this on a deskbound PC but even so it didn’t work for me.

Perhaps I would find it more suitable for a novel, especially something from the more action-oriented end of the market, but it doesn’t work too well with non-fiction.  If you realise that you didn’t catch the name of a person or place it is not as easy to skip back to it, or to linger on it more in the first place.  This was a problem becasue I was often swapping onto the internet to look up things like Scara Brae or Howard Castle to better visualise them.

I thought it would work better than that.  I was really expecting something more episodic, a bit like that history of the world in 100 objects series on the radio: 10-minute chapters rather than 45 to 60 minute chapters.  I thought it would be a bit like listening to a series of podcasts or radio documentaries but of course this was not written with that sort of delivery on mind and is not adapted at all – it is just the book read out aloud.

I’m not sure I could listen to this on a car stereo.  It requires a bit more concentration than I would want to spare while driving.  The monotone, deadpan delivery requiring even more concentration than if it had been read with some enthusiasm.

But I couldn’t listen to this on my mp3 player either.  I know that if I was listening on a train , plane,  bus or beach I would doze off after 15 minutes and would keep waking up and having to rewind back to the last bit I remembered.

I have no idea whether this is typical of the audiobook experience.  Maybe it is something I would enjoy and this is just not a suitable book to introduce me to the paradigm, but I suspect I am old-fashioned enough to prefer the paper version – or an electronic version of course.

Is it just me?  Anybody else out there have similar issues or do you all happily listen away?

With “universe” in the title and a yellow rubber duck on the cover, comparisons between this book at Douglas Adams are hard to avoid and may have been intended, but this is not another Hitchhiker’s Guide although it does have a bit of the atmosphere of a Dirk Gently book.

This is nominally a science fiction novel, but it is not ‘hard’ SF.  There is no real examination of the science behind it and the situation of having two alternative universes that can be travelled between is just a plot device to create the right circumstances for a comedy detective story.

I found it all quite enjoyable even if the detective aspect was not particularly mysterious or thrilling, the science understated and the humour gentle rather than guffaw-producing. Certainly a decent first novel which, after the first few pages of establishing the circumstances, had me ruashing through to find out what happens.

As the author had a PhD in electrical engineering I figure she knows a bit about science and I had a sense that she was struggling to keep it out of the book where it would have only got in the way.  Enough science does sneak in for you to have a few “what if…” thoughts about it all, and enough hints are dropped to explain why there are only two universes when the most likely options are either a single universe or an infinite number – the answer being that there are an infinite number but only these two have a link between them.  (OK, actually there would be an infinite number of other linked pairs, but now I’m starting to get bogged down in the science)

For me, the best science fiction is not about the science but about human response to the science.  In this case the concept of having a mechanism to travel between two alternative universes doesn’t result in everybody acting like Prof Brian Cox and being in awe and wonder – society’s response is to set up a huge and intricate bi-univeral bureaucracy with undertones of totalitarianism.  The reasons for this are hinted at but I would have liked more exploration of this, though I can see how that would derail the story a bit.

On a personal level, the main character has a little bit of the Arthur Dent about him.  Faced with the prospect of having an alternative copy of himn in the other universe, his preoccupation is with whether his ‘alter’ has written the book that he keeps meaning to write.  Even in the face of mounting evidence that he was personally responsible for the whole creation of the alternative universe, and growing suspicion that somebody is trying to kill him, the hero still remains fixated on this triviality.

This idea that, faced with amazing circumstances, humans remain doggedly human is what I liked best in this very readable book which should probably be read on a Kindle for reasons that will become clear before the second chapter.

On reflection, a decent companion to this book would be a collection of short stories along the lines of Other Days, Other Eyes by Bob Shaw.  In that book there is a technology (slow glass through which light travels more slowly than the speed of light) and each story tackles one potential use of it and how it affects society or an individual – like surveillance, ‘free’ street lighting, picture windows, etc.

The Ducks & Universes books mentions a few things in passing which wouldn’t make good books but could make for nice little stories.   For example, where one partner dies, but in the alternative universe the other partner dies – what if they get together?    People being employed as body doubles for their alter, opportunities for transplants, people setting up business with their alter, people finding their alter in a better situation and trying to kill them and take over their life…  all these are hinted at but not explored.