The Expert System’s Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky: Book Review

A world where people live in harmony with the nature and technology that are beyond them. Handry the main character lives with his sister in a place called Aro. They both live according to the rules of the community. Everyone in the society has to work to remain a part of the community. 

During a ritual Hendry accidentally does something which leads to him being cast out of the community. Being cast out like this brings many challenges for him like being hungry most of the time because nothing is digesting properly.

All this wandering leads to being friends with people who are dangerous but they are also the ones who have been cast out of the community and now have adopted to the new life. One of the friend from this group asks Hendry to go with him to a place which is a place only consists of people like them. Arriving in the place Handry got introduce to some ancient but advanced technology which he doesn’t understand. 

During all the hospitality he discovers something which involves his sister and Handry has to do something about this to save his sister. 

The expert system’s brother is a sci-fi book with some hint of fantasy fiction. The world building is not that grand might be because its a novella and you don’t have that much time for details. The characterization of the book is acceptable. Some of things are predictable but can be tolerated. Overall the book is a quick read and highly entertaining. 

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami: Book Review

“The little People will be watching.”

Just like all the Haruki Murakami’s books 1Q84 has also the characteristics of being surreal but in the same time dealing with realism. Haruki Murakami has the ability to imagine and portrait those imagination with words that justify the objective.

1Q84 follows the life from the perspective of two people Aomame and Tengo. Aomame is a fitness instructor and also works as an assassin with a friend of hers named Dowager. She has the ability to pin-point a location in the back of a person’s neck that can be used to kill a person that can seem like a heart attack. Dowager is a old women who has taken the responsibility upon herself to punish men who are abusing women whether through violence of sexual abuse.

Tengo is a Cram school mathematics teacher and also an aspiring fiction writer. Tengo and Aomame both are unknowingly doing something which may lead to risk of their life. Tengo is approached by his friend who is a big deal in publishing industry to rewrite a novel, which has been written by a seventeen year old girl named Fuka Eri. His friend wants the book to be recognized as well as win a new writer’s award. In doing so they tap into something they should not be a part of, something that is dangerous. 

The book is about the experience of the girl who has witnessed something very bizarre from the normal world. 

1Q84 is a very dense book with more than 1300 pages. The book is divided into three parts, making it a trilogy. But the writing is so good you won’t even notice how quickly you are going. Murakami has a way to telling even a simple thing in a manner which don’t feel boring. I would suggest the book to anyone who wants to read something surreal and imaginative. 

This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada

In an interview Emily Suvada described her book This Mortal Coil in three words as Twisting, Technical and Explosive. I could not agree more. Boy! This book is fast and technical. YA with Sci-fi can be a bit overwhelming for the author’s to write because they have to keep in mind the technical aspects as well as make sure the voice of the narrator resonates as a young personality. Emily Suvada has done a phenomenal job explaining the technologies used and also maintained a voice that can be believable as a young protagonist. 

The book is set in the future America Where gene-hacking is possible and everyone has some form of biotech panel implanted at them at birth and it grows throughout their body as they grow. The advantage of this panel is that you can download an app or code to do almost everything whether its curing disease or changing your physical appearance with enhanced abilities.

The protagonist is a girl named Catarina Aggatta, who’s a daughter of world’s most brilliant gene-hacker. She is suffering from a disease called hypergenesis, which is a kind of like an allergy which prevents her from hacking her own panel and yes she’s also a gene-hacker.

So, this all has to be done because a horrific pandemic is overtaking the world, a virus that no one has a cure for. The virus attacks the host’s DNA until every cell in the person’s body explodes in a plume of red mist.

There’s also a corporation named Cartaxus which sells and distributes apps, but only to those people who have agreed to live inside a bunker made by them.

Catarina and her father like many people refused to live inside a corporate bunker so, they are living on the surface facing the virus. There’s a temporary cure for the virus which I’ll not tell you because I want you to experience the moment when you finds out.

The story unfolds from here to a very awakening, romantic and action packed journey. 

This second book This Cruel Design is already out and there’s a third book to be released soon. So, if you like Sci-fi and YA you can not go wrong with this book.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson: Book Review

So the moon blows up. Only a few people have the audacity to put that big of an event in the first sentence of a book, one of those people is Neal Stephenson. He has a way to telling the story that grips you from the very few pages. 

Seveneves is a landmark achievement in sci-fi genre. And this is not the first time for Neal Stephenson. 

When the moon blows up the humanity is on the brink of an extinction, and they must do anything to save the human race. One idea is to create a space station and bring as many diverse set-of people as they can. 

In all of this there are politics of who should go to the station and what is the criteria for choosing the people. But humanity shows the strength and unity that was required to tackle this moral dilemma. 

Seveneves is a space opera with both the premises of dystopia as well as utopia. Anyone who likes space opera will love this work of art. 

The technologies as always have been explained in very detail for which Neal Stephenson is famous for. There is also one plot twist at the end which I’ll not discuss here. You’ll have to read the book for it. 

Renegades By Marissa Mayer

Plot: The Renegades are a group of syndicate with supernatural abilities. The main protagonists Nova hates renegades and she wants vengeance and she has a reason to do so. Her father is an important character as he’s the one responsible for most of the circumstances created. There are people who wants to kill him and there are people who wants to save him. In between of all this Nova meets a renegades Adrian who doesn’t believe in vengeance but trust that justice can be served to guilty party. Nova also has some allegiance with a very powerful person who has the ability to make an end to all this.

Renegades by Marissa Mayer deals with the issues of justice vs vengeance in a set of YA dystopian SFF. If supernatural and dystopian is your type this book has plenty to offer specially with its intriguing world. The supernatural part of the book has been well thought out its consistent throughout the book. Marissa Mayer knows when to pull back and when to release the full scope in the dystopian setting. The characters are well thought out, you can relate to their good and bad. The diversity in terms of characters has also been taken very elegantly. Some YA SFF lack the diversity in their characters but not Renegades. Being an YA book you got to have romance. The book has some hit and miss romance but don’t expect too much as this is the first book in the series and the character are still being build.

Overall Renegades is a good read specially if you like SFF plus the second book is out too. So go grab a copy and enjoy the journey.

Kraken By China Mieville

War, Religion, Apocalypse 
These are the main themes of the masterpiece by the highly imaginative China Mieville. This is a short review of the book Kraken by China Mieville. Billy Harrow is an employee in a museum, one day during the tour he finds something unsettling. Something is missing from the museum that was not supposed to. The city is changing in ways Billy can’t explain how. There are cults that worship the missing specimen from the museum. There is a prophecy that the world is going to end. Billy find himself in the middle of all this. He has no idea what is at stake and what’s going on. He acquire some friends and enemies with their help Billy is going to find out what’s wrong with the city. 

If I say more about the book it will soon turn into spoilers. So, if you like highly imaginative stories about a world which is going to end and marriage of magic, detective is your cup of tea this book will knock all those things out of the park. China Mieville’s imagination is without a doubt unseen before. The way he combines the bits and pieces of a story and bring them to life is remarkable.

Simpson's Paradox

“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Simpson's paradox is a phenomenon in which a trend appears in several different groups of data but disappears or reverse when these groups are combined. It is important to understand this concept to correctly interpret the data. Edward H. Simpson first addressed this phenomenon in a technical paper in 1951, but Karl Pearson et al. in 1899 and Udny Yule in 1903, had mentioned a similar effect earlier. 

For example, you and a friend each do problems and your friend answers a higher proportion correctly than you on two days that you've competed. Does that mean your friend has answered a higher proportion correctly. Not necessarily!

• On Saturday, you solved  out of  attempted problems, but your friend solved  out of  You had solved more problems, but your friend pointed out that he was more accurate, since . Fair enough.
• On Sunday, you only attempted  problems and got  correct. Your friend got  out of  problems correct. Your friend gloated once again, since .

However, the competition is about the one who solved more accurately over the weekend, not on individual days. Overall, you have solved  out of  problems whereas your friend has solved  out of  problems. Thus, despite your friend solving a higher proportion of problems on each day, you actually won the challenge by solving the higher proportion for the entire weekend. 

Simpson's paradox can also arise in correlations, in which two variables appear to have (say) a positive correlation towards one another, when in fact they have a negative correlation, the reversal having been brought about by a "lurking" confounder. When two different contexts compel us to take two opposite actions based on the same data, our decision must be driven not by statistical considerations, but by some additional information extracted from the context. Berman et al. give an example from economics, where a dataset suggests overall demand is positively correlated with price (that is, higher prices lead to more demand), in contradiction of expectation. Analysis reveals time to be the confounding variable: plotting both price and demand against time reveals the expected negative correlation over various periods, which then reverses to become positive if the influence of time is ignored by simply plotting demand against price.

Resources

• Simpson's Paradox
• Simpson's Paradox on Brilliant.org
• Understanding Simpson's Paradox