Mark Hood

I'm recommending a non-fiction book for once. I do read a lot of these, probably as a result of my former life as an engineer and needing to keep skills current. This particular selection is one that really did make a huge impact in my life, reducing the stress I had keeping on top of multiple projects at once, and one I still refer to even to this day. It's Getting Things Done (the art of stress-free productivity) by David Allen.

Want to get organised as a New Year's resolution? Pick this up today and you'll be ready to go!

From the synopsis:

In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential.

why

I first read Dune when I was just entering my teens - and I loved it. I can't pretend that I understood it fully, and I certainly missed many of the key themes and messages within in as I learned on later re-readings, but it's a heck of a story despite following a fairly simple outline.

The Atreides House are awarded custodianship of the desert planet Arrakis from which a mystery ‘spice' called melange comes. This spice is needed to allow ships to navigate the vastness of space, so not only is it crucially important that it continues to flow, but there is great prestige in being the House who controls it. The other Houses are understandably annoyed by House Atreides gaining this control and House Harkonnen tries to assasinate the lot of them. The son of the family, Paul Atreides, is forced to go on the run, hide among the natives and discover that he is the chosen one... Pretty formulaic, no?

On the surface, it's a political intrigue, a thriller with a man on the run for his life, and an ecological allegory that's only more timely now than it was when it was written. And yet it's justifiably a classic of the genre (Science-Fiction in case you didn't realise) published back in 1965.

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

look, look at all the work I did!

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Blade Runner 2049

Arrival

Clearly it's a dark story from the get-go. The title Borderline refers to both the protagonist's own Borderline Personality Disorder, and the boundary between our world and Arcadia - the Fairyland of myths and legends. When we first meet Millie she's in a mental institution, trying to come to grips with her illness and her two new prosthetic legs - and failing. We don't learn much about her from the get-go, her backstory is slowly and painfully revealed through the novel. What we do learn is that she's stronger than she thinks she is, more broken than she realises, and extremely suitable for a very specific sort of job.She's recruited for a secret project liaising with Arcadia, where the Fae originate. A select few have come over here, and the twist is that the majority are Hollywood stars - either actors or directors. Each of the Fae has an Echo - the human who in other situations might be considered a Soulmate. For actors they tend to be their agent, or producer, but the book at least drops a few hints that everyone has an Echo, and that they're incomplete in some way without them.The Arcadia Project itself is not quite the ‘Men In Black' organisation you might expect from books of this type. For one reason or another the mentally ill are remarkably well suited to this line of work, and so Millie is thrown into a supremely dysfunctional shared house full of people with greater or lesser problems than her own.So if you're looking for a light-hearted romp through a world where Steven Spielberg is secretly a Wizard, and every other great director has a Fae Echo as their muse, this isn't necessarily the book for you. But that being said, it's not depressing in the least. While the majority of the characters we meet are struggling, and there is murder and mayhem surrounding them on all sides, this is not a book you need to approach carefully. It's a damn good read, the characters are extremely well-rounded and elicit sympathy as quickly as they push each other away. Mental illness is a very tricky subject to discuss at the best of times, and to take it as a defining characteristic of your cast is risky - but Baker does it in such a way that the people we meet are far from two-dimensional, never cliched. You feel that they are real people, with real problems - maybe deeper-seated than most of us but they're still very much human; this is especially true when compared to the Fae who on the surface are attractive, enthralling and seemingly perfect, but operate on a completely different moral plane.So yes, I have reviewed another book which deals with mental illness (see also [b:The Calculating Stars 33080122 The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut, #1) Mary Robinette Kowal https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1539850192l/33080122.SY75.jpg 53735352] which again is not preachy and takes the illness as just another facet of the character which shapes their decisions and destiny. Which if you ask me is exactly how it should be - it's not a bit of colour to throw at a person to make them ‘edgy' or ‘interesting', it's a part of the human experience and it's refreshing to see it handled so well.

Hopefully from the synopsis you can gather that this is a Science-Fiction book, and an alternative history one at that. Imagine starting the space race a decade early, with all of the nations of the world united to work together rather than competing. Now remember that it was before the Civil Rights movement in the US, women were barred from the military and positions of authority and imagine how that would shape things.If you've read [b:Hidden Figures 25953369 Hidden Figures Margot Lee Shetterly https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1481844518l/25953369.SY75.jpg 45855800] or seen the movie, you're familiar with how women were employed as ‘calculators', allowed to do the routing and rote mathematical work but not required (or even allowed) to work as scientists or engineers. In The Calculating Stars we follow Elma York - one woman who despite her Phd and flying experience shuttling planes around during the war is under-utilised, employed as a calculator when she dreams of voyaging into space. On paper she's the perfect astronaut, except for her gender (something which ironically should make her more suitable, not less - as the book explains). She quickly discovers she is not alone among the women working towards the goal of space, and begins to agitate for change. Many reviews picked up on the similarity to the movie, and even the book's cover is reminiscent of the movie poster, but it's far from just a re-dressing of the same story.Politically charged without being preachy, and a wonderfully researched view of a space program that almost was, I absolutely loved this book. Even if you're not a fan of Sci-Fi, the human relationships are glorious and occasionally heartbreaking, the world Kowal imagines is supremely realistic and far from the ‘Humanity Pulls Together' utopia a lot of Science Fiction often inhabits. Race relations are front and centre given the time period, gender issues also - and you do wonder whether the efforts to save humanity are going to truly benefit all of humankind... or just the white, male portions.Our protagonist Elma is far from perfect too, she's almost blind to issues of race at the start and only slowly comes to realise that it's not just women that are held back. As she fights to be included in the astronaut program she ends up as the very public face of the push to space. Struggling with almost crippling anxiety when forced to speak in public, she soldiers on, and ends up being christened ‘The Lady Astronaut' - a title that many hold over her as an insult.Still not sure if it's for you? How about if I told you that these two books are actually prequels to a short story Kowal wrote in 2012, which won a Hugo award? And what if I told you that short story was available to read absolutely free?It doesn't spoil the books to know ‘how it all ends' - in that story Elma is living in our first Mars colony, all but retired when she's offered one final chance to go into space for the good of all humanity. The short story brought a lump to my throat and a tear to my eye, and I knew I'd be buying the novels as soon as they came out to see how she (and the rest of us) got there.Once again I've picked these as much for their remarkable story as their brilliant writing. Reading them has again let me ‘level up' my own writing skills, watching how Kowal weaves a world around fully-realised characters is inspiring.Read the amazing short story first, if you're interested - or save it until last.

I've read the first three and enjoyed them a great deal, but I'll just concentrate on this first one as usual.There's a sub-genre of Science Fiction which is Military SciFi - usually surprisingly buff men in shiny high-tech armour, bringing Earth Justice to the Aliens. In more recent books it can be surprisingly pneumatic women alongside or instead of the toned men, the Justice can be flawed or a thinly disguised allegory for Imperialism, Xenophobia or another of Humanity's ills.Some of these works are remarkably good - and some are clearly written by people who have read a lot of this sort of thing, love the idea of being a Space Marine, and don't understand that Science Fiction tends to be at its best when it holds up a mirror to humanity.John Scalzi's Old Man's War series honestly falls between the two for me. But I still love it.So here's the setup - humanity has colonised the stars, but not everyone got to go. In fact, if you come from a rich Western nation you are banned from emigrating - presumably because you're still valuable on Earth. So the protagonist of this book is American, 75 years old and facing a comfortable retirement - but recently widowed. He & his wife had planned to join the military together to enable them to see the stars, before her death from a stroke. He decides to go ahead with his plan, assuming that either the work the army has for him is going to be pretty non-strenuous, or (as everyone believes) there's a way to reverse ageing. In fact, they've cloned him a whole new body - and enhanced with smart blood, a brain implant that allows instant communication and a gun that never needs reloading. He's stronger, smarter, fitter than ever before - and he has to fight for the next two years, or until he dies; the implication being that the latter is much more likely.The ‘Old Farts' as they quickly name themselves fight weird aliens, zoom around the galaxy and have a lot of sex. So far, so Military SciFi.If you've read [b:Starship Troopers 17214 Starship Troopers Robert A. Heinlein https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1533117961l/17214.SY75.jpg 2534973] by [a:Robert A. Heinlein 205 Robert A. Heinlein https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1192826560p2/205.jpg] then you're familiar with the idea of a Military SciFi book. If you've seen the movie directed by Paul Verhoeven, you're familiar with using SciFi to push a message about humanity (in this case, Fascism is bad). Ironically the original book essentially read as a near-apology for fascism, being written at a time when America was struggling for identity after the Second World War and more literally against the threat of communism. The ‘bugs' in that novel were a very thinly disguised metaphor for the ‘Red Menace' and the only way to serve your society (or in fact even be a part of it) was to fight them to the death, damn the consequences.Old Man's War is not as overt in its politics - but it is also a product of its time (2005). The Colonial Defence Force are viewed by the colonists they protect as unable to do wrong, protecting humanity from the violent aliens we share the universe with. As we quickly come to realise though, this only works if a group of people give up what it is to be human, both physically and even morally - and if you're no longer human then who are you fighting for?This book reaches a long way - examining what it is to be human, what sins can be justified in the name of peace, and a number of other traditional territories where SciFi likes to weigh in. This is the first published novel by John Scalzi and it shows sometimes - the characters aren't especially well rounded and have a tendency to info-dump, for example. (To put this in perspective: I love [a:Arthur C. Clarke 7779 Arthur C. Clarke https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1357191481p2/7779.jpg] for his wonderful imagination and ideas - and he could never write two characters such that I could tell them apart. Scalzi's better than that!) These are common flaws in even the best SciFi and his later books are clearly all the better for the lessons he learned from this one. This book grabbed me for the right reasons; it's a clever idea, done well, with only some small flaws that didn't really distract me from the universe unfolding before me.