archytas's reviews
1670 reviews

Simpson's prose is as lyrical as expected, with rhythms that move you through (and bonus for actual poetry).  The book also beautifully evokes Gadigal and Cammeraygal country and waterways. However, the plot and split structure of this one didn't really work for me, and I struggled to stay in Ginny's thread in particular. 

"Hassabis believed so fervently in the transformative effects of AGI that he told DeepMind’s staff they wouldn’t have to worry about making money in about five years, because AGI would make the economy obsolete, former employees say. That eventually became mainstream thinking among the senior managers.."

This book is terrifying. It is also the recent read I have become most evangelical about - I might buy copies and give them out. That's not because it particularly well written, Olson has an incline towards the schtick which irritates me slightly, but because the world of Silicon Valley Meglomaniacs (my words, not hers) she writes about has so very, very much power.
It was upon reading this book that I realised Musk is not as singular as you would assume. Even in a cohort of delusional billionaires, he stands out as unstable, but you can see that he is marinating in a world in which nuance, accountability and well, reality, have long disappeared in the rear-view mirror. It would funny except that the impact of their actions is very, very real.
Unlike the others in the crop of new books about AI, Supremacy doesn't seek to explain or focus on the technology. It focuses on the people in charge of it - specifically Sam Altman from-ish Open AI and Demis Hassabis from (Google) DeepMind. Both of whom are shown as passionately driven by their beliefs that AI technology could save or destroy the world. Their relative arcs are fascinating. Altman starts out in the free-market start up culture, morphs into a doom-predictor with AI, determined to develop it in a 'safe' way, and lands as a nascent billionaire willing to abandon all controls in service of megaprofits for Microsoft. Hassabis starts in the idealistic British games industry, morphs into a research-driven messiah of AI, convinced it will create a utopia on Earth by, y'know, the middle of this century tops, and then lands as a nascent billionaire willing to abandon all controls in service of megaprofits for Google. So much to think about here.
Now to be clear, I am not terrified because I think HAL is coming for us all. There is irony in that what these men have built are machines so far most successful at bland-ifying human life, and yes, automating some tedious or previously impossible tasks. We are not close to the singularity. But to build those machines has involved staggering amounts of climate damage, billions of hours of criminally underpaid labour, and thats not talking about the child miners of the minerals necessary. And deploying that technology has led to a new era of embedded racist, sexist and classist bias in government and private systems, which threatens to drastically widen existing inequalities just as our social, environmental cohesion fractures.
But to Altman and Hassabis, and their ilk - Musk, Bezos, Page, Theil regular appearances, as well as Mustafa Suleyman and many others - these issues are like specks of dust on the window. It isn't even that they dismiss them - they simply don't see them, so insignificant do they seem in the grand world quest of achieving utopia. This is a world where debating whether you are Oppenheimer or Einstein is normal (yes, it did make me feel very differently about that film, these people have an Oppenheimer *thing*) but checking what impact your actual technology is having actually today is not. And it is not so surprising that in the end, the world's largest tech firms, who care for nothing but making money, are able to swoop in and tie all the idealism up into a mega-disruption-profit-generating machine.
The most cogent section of the book is where Olson explains the ethical framework most of these bros belong to. "Effective altruism" is an ideology with a tagline of "shut up and multiply". It offers a "simple, rational" pathway to decision making based on math. Work out how many lives you can save, more lives, better person. And the way to get the highest numbers is to save humanity from extinction because that is like, trillions of lives. Nothing else competes. You would think this might motivate at least climate change as a priority and for some, including at least for a while, Musk, it does. But others see climate change as too specific (yes, really). Saving us from rogue AI? closer. Perfecting utopia? Bingo! Which is probably why, Olson tells us, the Future of Life Institute's single biggest grant - $25million from a crypto magnate - is more than the combined annual budget of all other AI ethics charities (the European Digital Rights initiative that focuses on bias in algorithms gets #2.2 m a year). The Future of Life's mission is to stop sentient AI-controlling weapons.
There are, I should say, some heroes who emerge from this narrative. All of them (I can remember) are women, with Timnit Gebru leading the pack, and the Open AI board members probably in the rear. That they are ultimately only effective once outside the various institutions and clubs indicates how uniformly terrible this world is.
But is a glorious study of capitalism. In the end, it is the motivation to make money - to sell people stuff they don't need; and to sell other companies stuff they think will make other people buy stuff they don't need, and yes, to sell companies stuff that they think will cut their costs. Which it probably will - and we'll all be living with robotic voices and robotic art and terrible information even if that is presented in more naturalistic version than we usually identify with robots. And that isn't starting on the potential to isolate us from each other. (I might be coming across like I think the technology is evil - I really don't. I have advocated early adoption for things that will bring joy and knowledge. But I do think if subject to the current model, bland and inaccurate is what will generate the most profit, and that it therefore what we will get). The megalomania makes these billionaires more pliable to the dynamics of profit-making, which is its own kind of AI - a dynamic that guides the people caught in its web. The sky high salaries of Silicon Valley aren't just competitive - they work to create an elite so removed from daily life that they lose any sense of how much suffering exists now, nevermind how much if it is caused by their software. When you are the most powerful person in your daily interactions, you lose the feedback loop that generates accountability. You also lose connection, and you lose community. In many ways, these are tragic figures, but not in the evil-genius way they fear.

When I finished this novella, I found myself flipping back and starting again. Partly that is because of the way that Sjon unravels the story, so you to go back and see how it feels knowing the end. But also, it is a hard mood and world to just wrench yourself out of, so hypnotic is the imagery, even in translation (kudos to Cribb here).
I do find it hilarious that this was recommended as Icelandic literature that wasn't bleak or dark, because well, it isn't exactly lighthearted or warm. But it is a tad spellbinding, and full of quiet ode to people who care for each other (balanced by a note of vengeance-induced-madness and a deserved avalanche for those who don't).

This set of interlinked short stories hovers somewhere between novel and collection. with a focus on three generations of women, and glimpses of a fourth, Darragh explores how our past, our genetics and our cultures shape us. 
Some of the individual outings are very strong - I identified, unsurprisingly, strongest with the Gen X ones. It was also compelling to see the different ways that these generations viewed and dealt with each other. The characters on the 'side', sisters especially, were engagingly drawn.
However, I thought it lacked enough momentum in overall arc or plot to entirely work as a novel, finding a drift in focus in the mid section, and the themes started to feel weighed down a bit.
I will be very interested to see what Darragh does next.

Dalrymple stated aim in this book is to revive an understanding of how significant India has been as a global power, especially east towards Arabia, North Africa and Europe, and west towards South-East Asia. This is largely achieved through his coverage of the development and spread of Buddhism and Hinduism, with a bit of Sanskrit, and the significance of numeral notation.
The book is interesting, but perhaps because I didn't come in unconvinced, I wasn't entirely sold on the structure. I found myself wanting to read more specific books on those specific things - especially the religions, where the rapid cultural conversion is fascinating, but I'm not sure coming out I entirely understand why.
I have come out with a new list of places I really, really want to visit though, so that was totally worth it.

This is an extremely moving book, the emotion heightened by the blunt cynicism of the narrator, which Tokkarczuk masterfully unpeels as the novel wears on, to show us a vulnerable heart. The book is funny when it needs to be funny, and always slightly knowing, and yet so full of love and empathy that the slow reveal is something you sadly know to be true, rather than are shocked by. And lest this seem to depressing, Tokarzuk serves us up a final full of mercy and a good dash of hope - as happy as a book this sharp could be.
And yet, despite this very specific story, it is a book with a huge amount to say about what it is to love, on a personal and a societal level, and what we can move past and what we can't. This isn't a story of who we should be, but it is a story of perhaps who we are.

This is a set of beautifully crafted short stories, with unforgettable characters, each of which stands entirely on its own as a little peek into humanity. It also works as a raw exploration of the reverberating impacts of violence, and specifically, of the actions of Ivan Milat, whose violence, arrest and conviction were a seismic event in Australian culture.
This is fiction, the chronologies have been changed*. The title inverts the highway numbers from the Hume (M31) in a winking nod that this is a mirror version, an imagining. Milat's doppelganger Joe Biga is not Milat. Nor does the killer ever assume center stage.  Some of Macfarlane's stories examine those on the periphery of his violence - the police officer who worked on his arrest; his wife's family, his mother, his neighbours, a brother still haunted by his disappeared sibling and a teenage girl who will grow up to escape him. The stories are set in different times. In three of these, where we meet characters with the violence still in their futures, the stories function as almost entirely stand alone adventures. It is only through our knowledge of the anthology, subtle connections between the stories - a name dropped here, a date there - that the darkness shades the story. In probably my favourite story Hostess, a twist ending provides the "this is what was going on all along" moment, but of course we know that this isn't the real reveal at all. It should be pointed out that while some of these characters share superficial similarities with the Milat case, they are not those people. These are fully imagined and realised characters, with engaging inner lives. In Demolition, for example, Biga's next door neighbour tries to fend off a journalist on the day 'his house' is being demolished, but is consumed with regret and longing for the lover who lived there when they were young. 
But other stories focus on those swept up in the cultural moment - true crime podcasters; rubberneckers, the actor who uses the telemovie to gain career gravitas and in the 1990s, a young women terrified her boyfriend is secretly the killer. Some of these - including a politician who shares Biga's name morosely cooking sausages on an election day he knows will not be his - are played partly for laughs, but never without realism (well, except for the pollie cooking sausages which is not how Democracy Sausage works at all, that annoyed me). There is snark at the edges of some, especially the very American podcast story, one about a big-city couple who dine out on their stories of meeting one of the victims (and the couple who in turn dine out on knowing them) and Tourists, about the rubbernecking impulse - but it always weighted, these characters don't like parts of themselves and juggle their empathy with their own sense of drama and importance. The only story I could not bear was Abroad, which includes a ghost story told at Halloween and I will confess to skimming past the story, knowing that the macabre-for-thrills was more than I could cope with in the face of the all-too-real horror I know of from the Milat case. McFarlane utilises our own knowledge to bring the dark, she does not put it on the page. (This has led, I found, to some interesting reviews from the US release of the book, where the case is not well known, and the book reads with less gravitas - it holds up).
There are other themes present through the stories. There is an enduring theme of restlessness, of characters perpetually on the move. Travel anecdotes abound, and at the other end of the scale, locals defend their turf - two older women grump at new arrivals at their open air Sydney baths (this is a real thing);  the locals cold-shoulder the new arrival at work. As someone who came of age during the era of the 'backpacker' murders, it felt as if McFarlane's themes paid tribute to the backpackers themselves. The book also explores the way we create and tell stories - how these shape our individual and collective realities.
As you can tell if you have read this far - I liked this rather a lot. I will be rather shattered if it doesn't appear on the awards circuit. McFarlane's books just keep getting better, and I really think this is a book which should be part of our national canon. Great literature helps us to understand who we are and who we have been, and there are few books which have captured the scope of Australia in the way that this one does.

*It did unreasonably distract me that Biga was born in the 1960s, a good 20 years younger than Milat, but described as being old at his death when he must have been in his 50s. I have struggled to let this go. I will get there.

I read this book when jet lagged, and now coming to review it, my memories of the details are a little hazy. I'd call this ironic but that isn't what ironic means. Grimace worthy, yes.
What I do remember is that a) there was a wealth of detail on how to better align your circadian rhythms, b) it was a little terrifying to realise the impact of indoor life and our unhelpful approach to lighting* is, c) Americans still start schools at ludicrous hours of the morning and should just stop and we shouldn't need evidence on anything for that, it is just dumb d) Peeples, like many experts deeply engaged with their subject, can see cicardian disruption at the heart of most social ills - at times perhaps in isolation from other things. e) At times, Peeples seems to want to return to some kind of idealised relationship with our natural clocks - and one based on static hours, rather than changes with the seasons. Humans, however, did not really evolve on the equator - I thought this was odd.
Would recommend, but maybe try reading it when appropriately rested.

*Nowhere near bright enough during the day; far too bright and far too blue at night. 

This is a handy book for anyone who wants to arm up with evidence around why the logging of old growth forests continues to be a very bad thing. Lindenmayer covers the economics, ecology, impact on climate change and impact on wellbeing of the industry. 
This is not a book which will convince the unconverted, however. Lindenmayer pulls no punches, and his combative style combined with a tendency to self-cite a lot, will probably mean this book is destined for the shelves of those already in agreement.  This also applies in some of his frustrations delivered at writers such as Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe.
His endorsement of Victor Steffenson's work has reminded me I should get around to reading that one.

What Carmody has been doing brilliantly since Obernetwyn is world building, creating a mystery around it that makes you want to keep reading to learn more. In the decades since, she's also honed how to write teenagers naturally and in ways that model relationship skills and social responsibility. Which is a way of saying that Comes the Night is a highly enjoyable read, hard book to put down, and peppered with characters you desperately want to be okay.
I often - okay maybe always - feel with her books that the third act plotting isn't at the level that the rest has me hoping for. It is not bad, it is just that it isn't the stupendous payoff that all that great teasing in the first half has me set up for.
But if for nothing else, it is so nice to have a novel set in Canberra - a futuristic Canberra no less - which manages to capture the vibe of the city in a very dystopian way. And it is nice to have a dystopian novel that acknowledges the likely trade offs ahead of humanity. 
As a lucid dreamer - one who developed the capability as a way to manage nightmares - I also both appreciated the acknowledgement of lucid dreaming and then eye rolled as it all turned into something else entirely.