Microposts
📚 Books 2026, 7: Raven Black, by Ann Cleeves
I heard Ann Cleeves on the Radio — probably Radio 3’s Private Passions — a couple of years ago. I must have seen her books in shops before that, but hadn’t really paid attention. And I vaguely was aware there was a BBC detective show called Shetland.
Turns out that show is based on this novel and its successors.
Anyway, she sounded interesting on the radio and I seem to read almost as much crime fiction as SF these days, so when I was exploring a bookshop on our recent trip to Devon, and saw this, I thought I’d give it a try. I devoured it in a couple of days. Really good page-turner, engaging characters, unexpected ending, Just what you want.
📚 Books 2026, 6: The Twenty Days of Turin, by Giorgio De Maria, Translated by Ramon Glazov
I don’t recall where I first heard about this . It was probably Warren Ellis, but I seem to recall there being a second source. Anyway, I lived in Turin, or between Turin and my then-home in Walthamstow, for the best part of a year, 1989–90. My employers had a big contract with an Italian bank, and most of the work was done on site. Which seems amazingly old-fashioned for software development today, when we mostly don’t even visit our employers' premises very often.
All of which has nothing to do with the novel. It was written in the 70s and is set then. The unnamed first-person narrator is researching the titular event, which happened ten years earlier. It’s not entirely clear to what extent he experienced the ‘Twenty Days’ himself, but many people still living in the city did, and they don’t talk about it. It started with mass insomnia. Sleepless people took to the streets, some in their nightclothes. Then the violence started. Mysterious, brutal murders of the insomniacs.
But before all that, there was the Library. It seemed to be a project by well-meaning young people, possibly religious, who set up a kind of pre-computer social network. People were encouraged to share diaries or other writing — original manuscripts only, no published work. For a small fee, anyone could visit the archive thus formed, and read any of the pieces. For slightly higher fee, they could find the name and address of a chosen contributor.
The idea being ostensibly to help lonely people find like-minded folks. With a strange inevitability, that isn’t necessarily how it was used.
The implication is the Library somehow led to the sleeplessness, if not the violence. Perhaps not the violence, as our narrator’s explorations appear to find a more supernatural, if not downright bizarre, explanation for that.
And it all seems to be starting up again. The Library didn’t go away, it just went underground. And the narrator and at least one of his interviewees may be in danger.
It’s an odd one this. Reviews of the recent English-language publication speak of its prescience, comparing the combination of the Library and the insomnia with people up all night doomscrolling on their phones. Which is interesting, but takes no account of the violent attacks, and the supernatural element.
I think this will bear repeated readings.
I’ve posted here every day so far this year. That’s unusual for me — unprecedented, in fact. I might take a break now , though. Except… hello.
Off to see Project Hail Mary in Leicester Square. Time to find out what these astrophages are made of.
Watched Top Secret! 🎥 a couple of nights ago. A 1984 film by the makers of Airplane, I have to wonder why on Earth I haven’t seen it till now. It’s pretty funny. A rock star visits a weird East Germany, which is just as oppressed as the real one, but the authorities are still the Nazis. Wehrmacht and SS uniforms abound.
Our hero gets caught up in a plot to rescue an imprisoned scientist — the resistance are all french, of course — and falls for the scientist’s daughter.
It’s about as silly as it sounds. An early part for Val Kilmer, and he does a pretty decent job as the singer, which can’t have hurt when he was cast as Jim Morrison in The Doors.
How can it be that I only realised today, with the clocks going forward for summer, that we don’t have a six-month summer/standard time split. We have seven months of British Summer Time.
All the more evidence that BST should be the standard, if not the permanent state.
I’m currently reading The Twenty Days of Turin A Novel by Giorgio de Maria. 📚
It’s a very odd work, which in part slightly prefigures (because it’s set in the 1970s) some of the negative effects of social networks. But it’s about a lot more than that.
Putting this interview with Andy Weir here for future reference. We’re going to see Project Hail Mary next week, and it claims the book and film are ‘built on solid science’.
But it’s described as:
a story about humanity’s last-ditch attempt to save Earth from “astrophage,” a fictional, star-eating algae that has infected our sun.
I also watched the trailer last night, and it seemed incoherent (though trailers often do).
But algae? Biology in a star, in plasma at impossible temperatures? I can feel my inner physicist cringing already, so I hope they manage to make it make sense somehow.
The music app on iOS: what does this icon on the top right do? Or what is it supposed to do, because nothing audible or visible happens when I tap it?
Ben Werdmuller tells us ‘AI is changing the style and substance of human writing, study finds’:
the software really does change the substance of your writing in what I would call objectively bad ways: it makes it less personal and less emotional, and it actively changes its underlying meaning in the process.
This takes us back to my recent thoughts on people possibly not even understanding their ‘own’ LLM-generated writing.
To the Hackney Empire tonight, to see Bridget Christie’s Jacket Potato Pizza tour which was excellent.
We watched The Man in the Hat 🎥 a few nights ago. An odd, gentle little British/French road movie from 2020. It’s almost silent, at least as far as the main character goes. Others have dialogue, but not a lot. A man goes on the run across France, after seeing what appears to be gangsters disposing of a body. He meets lots of strangers — mostly strange in more than one sense — along the way.
Of course a quick digital lookup answers the question in my previous post: the new meaning of ‘nonplussed’ is its exact opposite.
Literally.
Kottke shares the teaser trailer for Dune: Part Three, and says he is nonplussed by it, ‘both in the traditional and modern senses.’ I was just annoyed by the whispery voiceover.
But: what is this ‘modern’ sense of ‘nonplussed’?
Hari Seldon as an undercover Sigmund Freud?
It’s a long time since I read any of the Foundation trilogy, but this article, describing it as a ‘Jewish Masterpiece’ suggests Freud as partly a model for Seldon:
The Foundation trilogy doesn’t really focus on whether or not the galaxy will be saved. What it does, like Freudian psychoanalysis and Jewish textual practice did before it, is focus on how the past can best be mined to solve the problems that spring up in the present. Both methods prize talk and debate … Asimov’s priests are men of intellect who talk and puzzle and debate over questions and explanations and theories and counter theories and false leads and red herrings much the same way students in a yeshiva talk and puzzle and debate.
It’s an interesting piece, well worth your time, especially in these disturbingly anti-Semitic times. And it makes me want to read the books again.
Good piece by Jonathan Freedland about the disastrous state of the war in Iran. I know I said I felt supportive at the start, and I still want to see the Islamic Republic’s regime fall, and Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis with it. But sadly it isn’t likely this can make that happen.
🎥 Small Prophets is Mackenzie Crook’s new comedy-drama. We watched the first episode tonight. Looks like it’s going to be really good. Interesting similarities to Ricky Gervais’s After Life, in that you’ve got a sad man living alone because he’s lost his partner, and visits his elderly dad in a care home.
I think it’s going to be very different, though, both from that and from Crook’s earlier Detectorists. We watched both of those in the last year or two. I was surprised how much I enjoyed Detectorists when I finally came round to trying it.
In more ‘AI’ nonsense, Grammarly is giving bad advice and tagging writers' names to it, without paying the writers or even getting their permission.
I tried Grammarly a few years ago and hated it, but that was long before the LLM boom. This is beyond unethical.