The patience of the spider by Andrea Camilleri

A kind of sad inspector Montalbano book. There is more of a feeling with this one that he may be retiring soon and his relationship with Livia may be coming to an end, at least the ground has been set.

234 pages in this book and it was by page 80 that I knew what the plot was, though as always, I had to wok my way to the end and very enjoyable it was.

One of my wishes in life would be to have a meal with the inspector in an eatery of his choice.

Coalescent by Stephen Baxter

A good read, though there were a couple of places that I wished it would move on a bit. Historically very interesting, and gripping in a few places. The ending could have been better, but then, it does continue in another book, so let's see what the second in the series will be like. I would give it a 3 out of 5

The book is comprised offour distinct parts. The primary purpose of part one is the introduction of the characters, in ancient Britain and the present. Part two introduces a modern first-person view of the Order in Rome while following Regina's budding legacy centuries before. Part three hosts the clash and resolution of Poole and the Order's realities. Part four is a look eons into Humanity's Expansion into the Universe and provides a conclusion in George Poole's present.

Part one

George Poole

George Poole copes with the mid-life crisis of losing his father. He meets Peter McLachlan, an eccentric member of an online free-thinking group called the Slan(t)ers. George Poole
uncovers an old picture showing a sister he never knew. Poole also discovers that his father regularly donated large sums of money to an organisation called the "Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins". Combined with a sense of futility in determining his future and encouragement from both his former wife Linda and Peter, Poole decides to uncover the mystery of his missing sister.

Poole leaves England to visit his sister Gina in Florida for information, despite their strained relationship. After spoiling his clever nephews as well as clashing with his distant sister Gina, Poole extracts the contact of a Jesuit priest in Rome and his own retired grandfather in Florida. Poole learns from his grandfather, Lou Casella, that his twin sister was given to the ancient Order when Poole's parents were unexpectedly landed with twins.

Regina

Born into a wealthy mosaic-designing family of 5th-century Roman Britain, seven-year-old Regina is uprooted from her comfortable villa due to her Father's death and the Roman Empire's withdrawal. The Roman Empire loses its strength in Britain as invading Saxons pummel the Great Wall north of Roman settlements to where Regina and her grandfather Aetius relocated. Aetius dies after losing control over his unpaid mutinous soldiers.

Regina seeks refuge with her servant Cartumandua's relatives in Verulamium but is betrayed by Regina's boyfriend Amator who rapes and abandons her. Verulamium burns down, forcing Regina and Cartumandua's family to live off the land in poverty for over sixteen years. Regina kills a roaming Saxon who nearly rapes her daughter, Brica. This event convinces Regina, the leader of their hamlet, to accept the invitation of warlord Artorius (King Arthur) to help restore order to Britain again.

Part two

Lucia

In modern Rome, Lucia, a fifteen-year old scribe for the Order, is devastated when she begins to menstruate — unlike any of her friends and colleagues within the Order. Once this is discovered Lucia is initiated into in her new role within the Order. Meanwhile, Lucia falls in love with seventeen-year-old American Daniel Stannard despite what is expected of her. After giving birth following only three months of pregnancy, Lucia never sees her baby again. Emotionally unstable, she runs away with Daniel.

Regina

Back in 5th-century Britain, Regina establishes her life working with Artorius, eventually managing his kingdom's record keeping. Artorius takes Regina as his wife for symbolic and moral reasons. She disdains Artorius' barbaric practices and thirst for conquest. Regina accompanies Artorius to a War Council where she realizes to stay attached with the reckless Artorius would mean certain doom for her progeny. In order to search out her mother, Julia, Regina secures passage to Rome by allowing herself and her daughter to give sexual favours to a wealthy merchant named Ceawlin.

Upon arriving in Rome, Regina contacts Amator, now openly homosexual and a wealthy bakery owner, and demands recompense for abandoning her and her family. Regina re-establishes contact with her mother, Julia, after a cool reunion. Regina joins the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, a Christian-adapted faction of the Vestal Virgins located on the Appian Way — an organisation that her family has become intimate with. Regina's leadership revives the ageing Order by converting it into a successful private school. Years later, on the night following her daughter's marriage, the Sack of Rome in 455 by the Vandals occurs. Regina's foresight saves the Order when the women and children are evacuated into the underground Catacombs she had had dug for a sanctuary.

In Regina's twilight years, she establishes important rules precedents for the Order. Unnecessary and unsupportable birthsare prohibited. A handful of mothers must dedicate their lives to replenishing the Order with births. Before her death in 476 AD, Regina establishes three main rules to govern the Order:

• Sisters matter more than daughters.
• Ignorance is strength.
• Listen to your sisters.

Part three

In the centuries following Regina's death, the Order assists the poor, robbed, and injured, gaining donations to its coffers from the occasional assisted person who became wealthy. Another Crypt that developed similarly to the Order is found and plans made for its eradication and occupation. In 1537 the Order survives the pillage of Rome by Antipope Clement VII by sacrificing five of its members to rape and death in order to divert Clement and his men's attention from an entrance to the Crypt.

George Poole

Meanwhile, in the present, George Poole, followed by a nervous Peter McLachlan, has a cool reunion with his lost sister Rosa. Rosa gives George a tour of the Crypt, the Order's secret human cache. Peter speculates with George about evidence of intelligent dark matter life moving through earth. Daniel serendipitously meets with George Poole, who is searching for additional information about the Order. Daniel, George Poole, and Peter take the very pregnant Lucia to a hospital where Peter becomes suspicious of the mysterious Order. The Order promptly retrieves Lucia from the hospital but not before Peter and George learn that most of the Crypt's inhabitants remain prepubescent indefinitely (reproductive suppression).

George Poole convinces his Jesuit priest contact to grant Peter access to ancient Catholic records. George's patriarchal roots are traced to a surveyor named George Pool who came to Rome in 1863. George returns to the Crypt looking for information and finds himself smothered with the familiar smell and contact of those in the Crypt, all of whom share his similar facial features (namely, cloudy grey eyes). His sister Rosa almost persuades him to become assimilated into the Order as a stud but an urgent text message by Peter brings him to his senses.

Peter has a theory explaining the strange peculiarities of the Order. The Order is a family of eusocial humans that evolved from the intense pressures to survive the various conquerings of Rome over the centuries. He cites naked mole rats as an example of eusocial behaviour in mammals. He explains how Regina's three rules result in a "genetic mandate for eusociality." He calls the Order a "human hive" and labels them "Coalescents" — a new kind of human. Peter then suddenly leaves after receiving a text message.

Days later, George learns that Peter has invaded the Crypt and is threatening to set off Semtex plastic explosives in order to expose the Order. Peter and the Slan(t)ers are responsible for the recent bombing of a San Jose research facility investigating quantum gravity technology — under the belief that a higher intelligence would notice the manipulation of space-time and eradicate a possible threat to their superiority. Peter's reasoning in exposing the Crypt is that the Order does not exist for any purpose except for itself. It threatens to destroy humanity as individuals and replace it with mindless drones. Peter Mclachlan then detonates his bombs and dies. George begins the evacuation of the Crypt and the mob of drones emerge hive-like from the crater in the middle of Via Cristoforo Colombo.

A geography of time : the temporal misadventures of a social psychologist by Robert Levine

A reccomendation from someone who certified me in a particular method(ology), Scrum, and he suggested a number of books. This was one of them, but it had very little to offer in terms of the original subject, but made for some very interesting reading nontheless.

In terms of a rating I would gie the book a 4 for readability and a 3 for content.

I liked his reasoning for why inner city kids from unemployed families do particularly bad in school and also a quote in the book that "to westerners the opposite of talking is not listening, it is waiting" for their turn to talk and express their view.

It also offered a very interesting explanation as to why Japanese have a habitof falling asleep in meetings. Something I had found strange and rude, but his explanation made me revise that opinion, and hopefully went a little way in helping me to not criticise what I do not understand in other cultures.

Flux by Stephen Baxter

Flux

As the novel begins, a glitch - an instability of the magnetic field inside the star caused by changes in the star's rotation - is about to destroy a net made up of ropes, where a group of 50 humans live. During this several of the older humans are killed, and importantly the humans lose their primary food source - a herd of "air pigs" - animals indigenous to the star.

In order to find more food, Dura, together with her young brother Farr, Adda (the oldest of the Humans and one of the novel's main characters), Philas (wife of a man killed during the glitch, this man was also seeing Dura) and 6 other adults travels high into the top of the mantle of the star to find food in the forest.

Whilst there Adda is injured by a pregnant sow air pig. Just after, the humans encounter Toba Minaxx, a human from Parz City. Parz is a massive wooden city where other star humans live, with a functioning economy and upper and lower classes etc. As becomes apparent, the ancestors of Dura's group did originally live in Parz, but left when their belief that the Xeelee should ultimately be accepted as being for the good of humanity was not accepted by the rulers of Parz. A hospital, "The Hospital of the Common Good" in the heart of Parz City is Adda's only chance for survival.

While in Parz, we meet several other characters: Muub, the head physician and advisor to Hork, the administrator of Parz. In order to pay for Adda's treatment, Dura's labour is sold to a "mantle farm" (where trees are harvested for use as fuel or as building blocks for the city), and Farr is sold to work in the underbelly of the city.

Farr makes two friends whilst here: Toba Minaxx's son Criss and Byza, a fellow miner. Criss teaches Farr to board (using a specially constructed plate to "surf" along the flux lines), an ability which allows him to escape from the eventual attack by the Xeelee.

After various plot points, the characters realise the instabilities are actually being caused by the attack of the Xeelee, and the next instability could destroy both Parz and possibly the star itself. Hork calls a combination of Muub, Dura (called due to her experience as a star human), Adda, Farr and a scientist to go down into the inhabitable centre of the star and try and retrieve ancient weapons, supposedly left by the humans who originally created the star human race.

Timelike infinity by Stephen Baxter

Timelike Infinity

Set thousands of years in the future (5407AD), the human race has been conquered by the Qax, a truly alien turbulent-liquid form of life, who now rule over the few star systems of human space - adopting processes from human history to effectively oppress the resentful race.

Humans have encountered a few other races, including the astoundingly advanced Xeelee, and been conquered once before - by the Squeem - but successfully recovered.

A human-built device, the Interface project, returns to the solar system after 1,500 years. The project, towed by the spaceship Cauchy returns a wormhole gate, appearing to offer time traveldue to the time 'difference' between the exits of the wormhole (relativistic time dilation), with one end having remained in the solar system and the other traveling at near lightspeed for a century. The Qax had destroyed the solar system gate, but a lashed-up human ship (a great chunk of soil including Stonehenge, crewed by a group called the Friends of Wigner) passes through the returning gate, traveling back to the unconquered humanity of 1,500 years ago.

One of the crew of the Cauchy returns with the Friends, Miriam Berg. The Friends have a complex scheme, which does not include a simple military return-and-rescue - the 1,500 year technology gap makes this "risible". From the Wigner thought experiment they have postulated an unusual theory on the ultimate destiny of life in the universe. They believe that quantum wave-functions do not collapse like the Copenhagen interpretation holds, nor that each collapse actually buds off separate universes (like the quantum universes hypothesis holds) but rather that the universe is a participatory Universe: the entire universe exists as a single massive quantum superposition, and that at the end of time (in the open universe of the Xeelee Sequence, time and space are unbounded, or more precisely, bounded only at the Cauchy boundaries of "Time-like infinity" and "Space-like infinity"), when intelligent life has collected all information (compare the final anthropic principle and the Omega point), and transformed into an "Ultimate Observer", who will make the "Final observation", the observation which collapses all the possible entangled wave-functions generated since the beginning of the universe. They believe further that the Ultimate Observer will not merely observe, but choose which world line will be the true world-line, and that it will choose the one in which humanity suffers no Squeem or Qax occupations. However, the Ultimate Observer cannot choose between worldlines if no information survives to its era to distinguish worldlines- if the UO never knows of humanity, it cannot choose a worldline favorable to it. In other words, some way is needed to securely send information forward in time.

As a consequence of this necessity, they intend to turn Jupiter into a carefully formed singularity and use the precisely specified parameters as a method of encoding information. Miriam Berg is more concerned over the immediate fate of humanity, with the threat of the future Qax, and transmits a 'help' message to the gate designer Michael Poole.

The Qax, naturally, panic a little at the escape to the past. A complex, unavoidably fragile species in their huge living Spline spacecraft, the few Qax present are somewhat at a loss. They decide to build their own Interface, with major human-collaborator assistance (headed by Ambassador Jasoft Parz), to create a link to their future to gain aid in resolving the problem - with more modern GUT-engine spacecraft they can make a 500 year link in just eighteen months. A startling high-technology future vessel (in truth, one of the legendary Xeelee nightfighter, an advanced and long-range fast scout ship), with a future Qax comes through the gate. Its first act is to execute the Qax Governor of Earth and gather up Parz, before passing through the original portal after the Friends and all humanity. The future Qax takes two Spline ships (presumably leaving behind the nightfighter; this might be the nightfighter that is discovered by the crew of The Great Northern millennia later in Ring through the gate and on the journey reveals to Parz the reason behind its desire to completely destroy the human race.

The Ring

The future Qax tells Parz that over the centuries, the Qax had worn down humanity through constant oppression, and had eventually decided to completely eliminate its space-faring capabilities. But before they did, as economical traders, they wished to get as much value out of their human pilots as possible. So certain pilots were dispatched on a number of dangerous or quixotic missions.

One such pilot was a man named Jim Bolder. The Qax had come into possession of a Xeelee nightfighter, and had modified it to support human control. Bolder's mission was simple: go to the Great Atractor, the cause of most galactic drift and find out why and how it exists. Bolder travelled to the bottom of the gravitational well, and found- the Ring. A torusa thousand light year in diameter, constructed of an unknown substance, rotating at a large fraction of lightspeed. The Qax goes on to speculate that the torus created a Kerr metric, and that it allowed egress from the current universe, that it was in effect an escape route for the Xeelee. Before Parz, the Spline warship, and the Qax exit the wormhole, the Qax asks, "What do Xeelee fear, do you suppose?". Regardless, Bolder escaped the Great Attractor and returned to the Qax home system, where he was supposed to be taken into custody by dozens of Spline warships wielding gravity-wave based "starbreakers" and his priceless data on the god-like Xeelee's ultimate project secured. Bolder either did not, or somehow escaped; in the ensuing fight, the starbreakers were accidentally fired at the Qax system primary star, and true to their name, destabilized it, causing it to go nova.

The Qax were forced to hurriedly evacuate. Many died, and the power of the Qax trading empire (and by extension, their Occupation of Earth) ended.

Ring, by Stephen Baxter

Ring, Stephen Baxter







Absolutately flew through this book! It was amazing. The story seems predictable at first, but you quickly find that this is not true. I read this book although it is part of a series, it stands alone just fine. All relative information needed is rehashed for the reader quickly. The imagination this guy has is truly humbling, though I wish I had paid more attention at physics classes to seperate the bs from the science ;-)

Ring tells the story of the end of the universe and the
saving of mankind from its destruction. Two parallel plots are followed
throughout the novel: that of Lieserl, an AI exploring the interior of the sun for millions of years, and that of the Great Northern, a generation ship of humans sent on a five-million-year journey (though only a thousand years will elapse onboard, due to relativistic time dilation effects).

Lieserl is abandoned for five million years leaving her to observe the sun's interior. She discovers dark matter based life, which she names photino birds. These birds gradually drain the energy from the core of a star, ending fusion and causing premature aging into a stable red giants—the birds' preferred habitat, as it has no risk of going supernova and destroying them.

A generation ship is sent with one end of a wormhole to explore the future and investigate the whereabouts of Michael Poole. The crew is broken into three factions—the primitives, the virtuals, and a survivalist
faction Superet. Their journey is a round trip taking them to the
future of our solar system through relativistic time dilation.

Between the factions, the primitives are a eugenics
project for Garry Uvarov who hopes to lengthen the lives of humanity
without the use of anti-senescence technology. The Superet rely heavily
on failing technology and maintain a totalitarian goverment which refuses to acknowledge the existence of other decks on the ship; the virtuals remain aloof.

Upon their arrival, the entire universe is full of red stars. The Northern makes contact with Lieserl, named after Einstein’s
daughter, who explains her observations of the photino birds. The
photino birds don’t just exist in our sun but every sun, helioforming
them to an amenable habitat. The Xelee, masters of baryonic matter, have known about the photino birds and have been striving to
thwart them. The baryonic universe is doomed but the Xeelee create a big dumb object which is an escape hatch. A cosmic string is made into a loop and creates the phenomena of the Great atractor. The function of the Ring is to create a Kerr metricat its centre, which, in this fictional universe, creates a portal to
other universes; the rotating Ring is somewhat similar to a tipler cylinder.
Whenever humans have met up with the Xeelee and pursued war, this was
merely an annoyance since the Xeelee were thinking on a larger scale
about more potent enemies. The crew of The Northern and Lieserl discover the folly of their species.

A Xeelee nightfighter is discovered in Callisto and it is rigged to piggyback The Northern
to the Great Attractor. Fifty days later they discover that the
Xeelee’s project has been destroyed but a recently awakened virtual of
Michael Poole shows Spinner-of-Rope, a primitive, how to pilot around
the fragmented cosmic strings and travel into the past using a closed time-like path; this method of time travel was first suggesed by J. Richard gott.

These last humans return to the Ring, in an era in which it was not
destroyed; the Xeelee allow them through, and they briefly attempt to
pick universes (rejecting the high-gravity universe depicted in Raft) and find sanctuary in another younger universe, after passing through the Ring, and get to work on starting a new world.

Michael Poole remains in our universe and witnesses the deaths of the last stars, and the decay of the last protons-
the final victory of the dark matter lifeforms over the baryonic Xeelee
and lesser races. Eventually, his consciousness disperses, and history
ends.