Emma Goto

I enjoyed Weir's first book about a science dude on Mars, but decided to give his second one a miss after hearing lackluster reviews about his attempt at a female protagonist.

For his third book, he's gone back to his tried-and-true approach of having a science dude talk about a lot of science shit and although my eyes glaze over as all the science shit happens, it was a fun and heartwarming read.

Heartwarming isn't the first word that comes to mind when the plot centres around him waking up alone on a spaceship but it really does turn out that way, somehow.

I don't want to spoil it any more than that, so give it a read if you like sci-fi (I would love if they could turn this one into a movie too).

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Edit 2026/04/03:

I watched the movie, so I decided to give this one a re-read! I think the movie did such a good job of adapting this to the screen (and to be honest, removing a fair amount of the scientific explanations which weren’t that necessary to the core of the story). And considering you need an actor to basically act to himself alone in space and carry the whole movie, Ryan Gosling did a perfect job.

On a second read, and comparing it to other books I’ve read recently, I will say that the writing style itself maybe isn’t the most beautiful, but it gets the point across, and nonetheless the core plot points still make it a really fun read.

We live a lot of our lives based off of metrics. You want to get healthy? You might set a weight goal or count calories. However, philosophy professor and author, C. Thi Nguyen, argues that we sometimes focus too much on the metric and lose sight of our original goal. Weight loss doesn't always equal health, for example, and in the author's case led to him eating the same meals every day, as it made it easier to count the calories. This bias towards a specific number is a concept that Nguyen has coined "value capture".

On a larger scale, the world is full of metrics and ranking lists which people try and use to make informed choices - the top universities, the best wine choices. But Nguyen argues that ranking these on a pure number means you lose out on a lot of nuance. Certain universities will be better-suited for certain students, and the wine you should choose should vary depending on what food you pair it with, not the taste on its own. Not to mention universities and winemakers will then focus their efforts on trying to improve their ranking on the list which might come at the detriment of the quality of education, or produce less wine that actually tastes good with food.

The crux of this book is then comparing these metrics to the metrics you aim for in games, which on the surface seem to be the same thing - you try and collect 100 coins in a game of Mario, or you aim to score as many points as possible when you play basketball. But Nguyen tries here to explain how the metrics in games are actually different, and a good thing.

I think if there ever were a person qualified to write a book about philosophy and games, it would have to be this author. He loves board games, video games and in general seems to be quite the collector of hobbies - rock-climbing, yoga, fly-fishing and even yoyo-ing. To be honest I found this part of the book most interesting, and would prefer to learn more about Nguyen and his hobbies rather than the philosophy of value capture that he's trying to get at.

And so his first point about games is that although games have a metric you aim for, they are actually less about the actual outcome. If the goal of basketball is to put a ball in the hoop, you could just walk over to it with a ladder and directly drop it in. Games are more about the rules that the players collectively have decided must be followed for the ball going into the hoop to count. And so in games the process of playing the game itself is tied to the outcome.

He terms this as "striving play" - where you are ultimately trying to reach that goal or metric (win a game, catch a fish) but your purpose is in enjoying yourself with the process along the way. Of course there are exceptions (if you are a professional athlete or genuinely trying to catch a fish to eat it) but generally speaking if you lose a game and don't meet your goal, you don't really mind, because the whole point was the fun of it all.

And he proposes that we should use what we have learned from games to decide how we choose which metrics are important and which are not. Metrics are still useful since there's not enough time in the world to individually decide on everything - we still have to outsource some of our decision-making to other people. In the case of the author, like when buying a fridge - since who has the time to learn the intricacies of what makes a good fridge.

(To be honest the book started to lose me here. Although the subtitle on the cover says "How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game", the book doesn't actually have the answers).

The author also argues that chasing metrics and value capturing will give you power socially - in the case of science, publishing more papers is an indicator of success, and so people will game the system instead of being more thorough in their research and publishing fewer (but better) papers. And in the worst-case scenario, the metric-chasers will become socially dominant and we start to lose out on things that can't be summarised into a neat metric.

He finally introduces the concept of "autotelic activity" - activity that is valuable for its own sake (i.e. not tied to a metric or goal at the end of it). Because if you're trying to gain social status or wealth by chasing metrics, at the end of the day, what is the point of it all? And the answer should be that you value the process of chasing a metric - or, playing games.

After reading this book, I felt a bit lost. Although this book at first comes across like a pop-science book or self-help book thanks to Nguyen's personal anecdotes and casual tone, this doesn't go as far as giving you a list of suggestions, or an actual answer to the problem like you might expect a self-help book to do. Maybe that's too much to ask, but I feel like it's just missing something to round it off. Or maybe the problem of chasing metrics isn't something that I really connect with at this stage in my life (if that doesn't make me sound like I'm too full of myself).

Nonetheless though I think it's a solid read, maybe it wasn't just quite for me. I'd love to see Nguyen come back to this in 10 years with a follow-up - maybe with time he will be able to flesh the whole thing out just a tiny bit more.

PS: As a final thing I found amusing, Nguyen is a former food critic and an avid amateur cook. And he seems to have a specific vendetta against cookbooks. Of course he concedes it is very good for someone new to cooking as it provides the exact ingredient breakdowns and step-by-step instructions. But this results in a dish that is the same every time - he recounts a tale where he had 3 separate friends make a ratatouille, and noticed they all tasted the same (because they had all used the same NYTimes recipe). Whereas Nguyen has made ratatouille 10 different ways from all the different cookbooks he owned. Actually I was rather amazed that he's made ratatouille that many times, not to mention he has enough friends that he's had 3 of them make ratatouille (or maybe that's the sort of friend group you develop from being a food critic)?

The book follows Bertie, a trans man employed by Germany’s Institute for Sexual Science, before and after the events of WW2.

In my mind I had naively assumed that LGBT rights improved with a mostly upward trend (albeit maybe with some flat bits) as society got more progressive over time. But actually there was work being done in pre-WW2 Germany to try and improve the lives of trans people, which was all reversed when the Nazis came into power in the 1930s.

The founder of the Institute, Magnus Hirschfield, coined the terms transsexual and transvestite (although these terms are now outdated they are used in the book for historical accuracy), and is featured as a minor character in the book. He also implemented a “transvestite pass” to allow trans people to present as their gender identity (as cross-dressing was illegal at the time). The main character, Bertie, works at Hirschfield's Institute, and helps gives tours to people interested in learning more about LGBT topics.

Now it’s not like things were perfect - there was still discrimination and harassment - but there’s quite a hopeful tone at the beginning of the book. But unfortunately this is also a book about WW2, which always gets quite depressing. With the Nazis coming into power, they quickly overturn any sort of progress, burn all the books and research in the Institute and even use the previously issued passes to root out trans people.

And then what’s really a kick in the teeth - when WW2 ends and America liberates Germany, they really have no interest in helping LGBT people (if anything, they share a lot of views with the Nazis). So while Jewish people and other minorities are freed from the concentration camps, those guilty of LGBT related “crimes” instead continue to serve out a prison sentence instead of being freed as well.

The author has put a lot of care and research into painting a picture of what living as a trans person might have been like around this time in Germany, so I think it is a really valuable book. So in that sense, I feel a bit bad to give this one a 4 star rating. I thought it was an interesting and informative read, albeit a little depressing, but not one I would necessarily whole-heartedly recommend everyone to read (which is what classifies a book as a 5 star for me).

Heated Rivalry, if you haven't already heard of it, is about a pair of closeted hockey players who spend 10 years having an on-off relationship with each other. It was released as a TV series at the end of 2025 and really blew up online. It's gotten really good reviews so I was keen on watching it, but it doesn't seem to be streaming in Japan at the moment, sadly. So I decided to give the book a read instead!

I usually tend to hate-read romance novels - they're great for turning your brain off, but I don't always find the quality of them to be that high. Heated Rivalry is actually quite good though. I think this comes down to the stakes being a lot higher than your regular romance novel. One of the main characters is from Russia, a pretty anti-LGBT country, and the pair play in the NHL - which in the real world has never had a single person come out as LGBT. Which is a pretty insane statistic when you think about it. The author has mentioned that players have reached out to her privately after the release of the book, so it's not like there are actually no LGBT players - it's just the culture doesn't really make anyone feel comfortable in coming out.

In saying all that, Heated Rivalry is quite heated, so there's plenty of R18+ scenes. Maybe I'm getting old but I skimmed over them a bit - but either way I wouldn't really recommend you read this if you aren't into that sort of stuff.

40,000 years in the future, five imperial queens take turns ruling the galaxy to ensure stability. As their bodies age, they transfer their mind into a new host body, allowing them to reign eternally. The host bodies are sourced from the queen's genetic children - and they battle to get the coveted spot of next host, so it's not as dystopian as it seems (well, it still is).

An arkship sets out from Earth in 2200, and ends up here 40,000 years in the future (something something space travel). They meet Finn, a high-ranking member of the noble class. As you'd expect he's a bit of a spoilt brat, but sick of the luxurious life he leads and instead wants to explore the galaxy.

The main problem with the story is the amount of info-dumping - the first 10% was quite a struggle to get my head around. Finn meeting the arkship also gives the author plenty of opportunity to infodump, as the arkship people have about 40,000 years worth of history to catch up on.

The last Peter Hamilton book I read (Pandora's Star) I gave 3 stars, which was also for the fact that it felt very long and quite confusing with all that was going on - so maybe this is just Hamilton's writing style.

Along with the queens and Finn and the arkship, there's also another subplot around a police officer dealing with spies and politics. To be honest I had the hardest time following this and couldn't explain to you what was going on, although all three storylines come to be tied together by the end.

If I let my eyes glaze over and speed through the long explanations, otherwise the book had an interesting plot and I was keen to see it through to the end!