The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F Hamilton.

First book in the Night's Dawn trilogy. It took me abt 20 days to read this 1220 page book. It felt like reading 3 or 4 books! The story is good but I wasn't excited. I will try and read the other 2 books (which are longer than this one!) But not now. Ideas I am interested in are the way certain transhumanist societies are organised, organic/biologic, sentient spaceships and the concept of affinity which allows humans to communicate between them and with their ships. Actually the theme I enjoyed the most was that one of genetically modified humans because it connects nicely with a book I read a few weeks ago: CRISPR People about Germline Genome Editing (embryo editing). It made me wonder about the social implications of such technologies, at least in fiction. 

I also liked the mystery around space ruins left by an ancient civilisation. I got a bit bored by the events in a pre-industrial, recently colonised planet and I didn't like the idea of humans coming back from the afterlife to possess other people... not science fiction but fantasy I think.

The Tower by Schuiten and Peeters

Beautiful, wonderful. A fascinating story about a mysterious tower. The story reminded me of The Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang if only for all the climbing the protagonist has to do.

The authors explain The Tower was inspired by Giovanni Battista Piranesi's work, and others such as Bruegel, Paracelsus and Kafka. Actually the protagonist name is Giovani Battista and its design was based in Orson Well's image. The authors relate how they met with Wells to show him their work.

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury (short story) and Time by Theodore Sider (essay)

I'm already in Part V Space and Time of this collection of Essays and Short stories: Science Fiction and Philosophy.

If you want to know what I think about the other chapters in this book click #sciencefictionandphilosophy

Bradbury's story is set in the near future where a company sells Safaris into the past for people to kill dinosaurs! Safaris are carefully organised to not create time paradoxes.

Sider's essay discusses two views on Time. Time Flows and Time is like Space. The essay ends with a reference to the Back to the Future movie which "fails miserably" as a work of Philosophy as it is full of paradoxical holes. Sider considers Terminator 1 a much better movie because it never contradicts itself.

CRISPR People. The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans by Henry Greely

Maybe this has been the most interesting, enlightening, eye opening and fulfilling book I have read this year. In the sense that a learned a lot about a previously obscure topic to me. It discusses Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats CRISPR technology to edit genes in plants, animals and humans, either ex vitro, on tissues, or in vitro on living organisms.

The book explains the CRISPR technology in simple terms. That is, how it is able to modify genes by cutting out, or replacing bad genes with good genes. A good way to visualise CRISPR would be via the text editor analogy, where it can find a misspelled word, cut bits of it and/or replace the wrong bits with the correct ones.

About 4 years ago CRISPR became a viral topic when a Chinese scientist, Dr He Jiankui, claimed to have produced 3 CRISPRed babies. Two twin girls and then a third baby months after. Dr He aim was to change a gene, the way it appears in some Nordic people, which makes them immune to some forms of HIV. Greely explains everything that is known about He’s motivations, planning, carrying out of the experiment and the way he was planning to reveal it to the world. The book also covers how the scientific community reacted and what tangible actions they have taken since.

When I first learned about the experiment I read quite a few comments supporting Dr He. Saying he was a hero who deserved the Nobel prize for eradicating one of the most feared illnesses of our time. People didn’t understand why Dr He was sent to prison for his actions. This book clearly explains why. Not only that. It explains all the ethical issues arising from the technology and the (written and unwritten) rules that Dr He broke and the possible consequences for the CRIPSP babies. After reading the book it is easy to see why Greely concludes that He’s experiment was “grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal”.

But what did Dr He do wrong? To start he didn’t do any pre-clinical work. Actually no-one had done that kind of work before. He didn’t experiment with ex vitro animal or human embryos, to asses the safety and efficiency of the procedure. Very little is known in the area and a lot of work needs to be done before even thinking about editing human embryos. Maybe decades of work. So He embarked on the job with almost zero preparation. Also Dr He did not provide a good enough reason for deciding to work on that particular mutation. The book goes in-depth with this issue but the point is that the risks of changing that gene very much outweigh the benefits.

Greely explains how Dr He’s failed to produce sound informed consents to be signed by the parents of the potential edited children and how they were not aware of all the risks involved. Apparently Dr He didn’t even get (ethical) approval from any of the institutions he was working with, the university, fertility clinics or hospitals. And if the above wasn’t enough the book explains how Dr He failed to achieve what he wanted (the gene mutation HIV immunity). Dr He knew that the embryos had different mutations from the intended and even after knowing this, he decided to implant them in their mother’s uterus. As far as I understand one of the twins got the intended gene changed, not to a known variant (as in Nordic people) but to a different unknown one. The result might be that this twin might not only be not immune to HIV but also in risk of other unknown genetic conditions. The other twin got only one copy of her chromosome changed. The other remained as it was. So no immunity either and a condition called mosaicism, where the girl will have cells with different DNA. The effects of all these changes are unpredictable and possibly dangerous. Nothing is known about the third baby.

Anyways there is much more in the book, for example, an in-depth discussion on how to deal with CRISPR technologies in the future. Is it inherently bad or can it be used for good causes?    A very interesting book indeed.

The Human Brain. Inside the most complex object in the known universe. New Scientist Essential Guide N7 Edited by Caroline Williams

A super interesting read. My favourite chapters where the one about female and male brains concluding first that there aren't female or male brains but brains with a mixture of female and male characteristics and second that (adult) brains are a product of the lives we live, education, etc. I also liked the chapter about How to treat a sick brain discussing Music, Psychedelics, Ketamine and Brain electrical stimulation. Apart from the hallucinations they produce I had heard about the powers of DMT and Ayahuasca to treat illnesses and to help overcome fears (like fear of death). I think I'd like to read more about the topic.

Blue Giant by Shinichi Ishizuka

It follows a boy, Dai, who is passionate about jazz and his tenor saxophone. He learns how to play it by himself and practices every day by the river. He will never stop until he becomes the best jazz player in the world.

This is one of those reads which makes you smile all the way. Dai reminded me of my younger self when I had plans and energy, and had all the time in the world! Beautiful.

I first knew about Blue Giant when I attended the Manga Citi Exhibition at the British museum in 2019. I loved Shinichi Ishizuka's art!

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

This book has helped me to understand the concept of time a bit better. The idea of time is very complicated and I haven't grasped it all but I think I'm in a better position now to keep on reading on this topic.

I got the point that time is not absolute but relative. It varies depending on mass and speed. So time passes slower on the ground than up in the air or in space. The closest you are to matter the slower time passes. Also the fastest you are travelling the slowest time passes for you. All this makes it impossible to conceive of a unique "present time" for everything that exists in the universe. So we cannot say what is happening "now" in the Andromeda galaxy for example because we don't share the same time patterns.

There is also strong connection between Entropy and time. In fact time is defined by Entropy. We can tell time is passing because Entropy has increased. "The difference between past and future does not lie in the elementary laws of motion; it does not reside in the deep grammar of nature. It is the natural disordering that leads to gradually less particular, less special situations. "

Explaining time becomes even more difficult when we introduce quantum physics. At the quantum level there isn't time. But it is somehow created through quantum interactions? I will have to reread this part of the book at some moment...

Oh and there is an excellent section at the end with Rovelli's thoughts about mortality and death. 👍

Anyways the book is excellent and written in an easy to understand language. It's the concepts it's trying to explain which are difficult.