The story takes place on a mostly unexplored planet. An exploratory team has received permission from an all-powerful corporation to explore a part of the planet. They are warned not to stray from their assigned areas because of perceived dangers, so a reader will immediately think the corporation is trying to hide something on the other parts of the planet.

The small exploratory team is assigned a company-supplied self-aware android SecUnit for security and to probably spy on their activities. The story is told from the point of view of the android, who refers to itself as Murderbot due to its involvement in killing many humans on a previous assignment. The android is supposed to be linked to corporate control so they can get it to do their bidding if needed, including possibly wiping out the exploratory team if they discover something valuable to the corporation. However, Murderbot is a clever android who has managed to hack his system, so the corporation is unaware that it does not have ultimate control over him.

Of course, the exploratory team strays into other areas, and bad things happen. When they can’t contact another exploratory group on another part of the planet, everyone, including the reader, knows that Murderbot will have to save them from whatever happened to the other group. But will the android be able to prevent the corporation from regaining control of its systems or prevent its warlike nature from killing or deserting its team in self-preservation?

All Systems Red is a well-written science fiction adventure novel. As such, it is an entertaining, quick read. But it has little new to say about the relationship between sentient androids and humans. Its theme of keeping an android’s free will in check to use them as killing machines is somewhat overdone in science fiction. For a more nuanced look at sentient androids, I suggest reading novels like Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro or Annie Bot by Sierra Greer.

All Systems Red is a well-written page-turner but lacks inspiring, original and challenging ideas. It did have a bit of a surprise post-denouement, probably so the author could move the story to a completely new setting for the second novella in the series. I did not realise when I shelled out $22 (AUD) on Amazon for the book that it was only a 152-page novella. I doubt whether I will be purchasing the other novellas.

The novel’s main characters are nearly all members of the aristocracy. There are three main male characters:

Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov. He inherits the Count’s fortune when he dies early in the novel. Pierre is a freethinking and sometimes reckless man who wants to know the truth of what really is happening in Russia and the world at large. He is a genuine socialist who wants to improve the lives of his peasant workers.

Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky is the son of Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky. He is a brave and somewhat arrogant soldier who enthusiastically marches to war seeking glory.

Nikolai Rostov is the eldest Rostov son. He also enthusiastically enlists in the Russian military, but his war experience is very different from Andrei Bolhonsky’s.

The two main female characters are:

Natasha Rostov, who is a very naïve and self-centred teenager. She is engaged to marry Prince Bolkonsky but is happiest when she is in the presence of Pierre Bezukhov. Her faithfulness is tested by Bolkonsky’s frequent absences.

Princess Maria Bolkonskaya lives with her father, who treats her harshly in an attempt to break her will and any desire she has to get married and leave his side. Maria uses religion to find meaning in her life and spiritually escape her father.

Apart from being a story about war and whether the main characters will survive, the novel is somewhat of a love story. Prince Bolkonsky’s father is very much against his son marrying Natasha Rostov, as he considers her family inferior. Will they get married, or will she ditch her betrothed and end up with her confidante Pierre Bezukhov? Readers will also want to find out if Maria can escape the grip of her domineering father.

The blurb on the back of the novel says it gives a complete picture of the Russia of the day. It does not, as the novel overwhelmingly focuses on the Russian aristocracy. The peasants and working class of Russia barely get a mention except when interacting with the aristocracy, which usually involves them being ordered to do some tasks. In many ways, the lower classes seem completely disposable, such as when Emperor Alexander orders the aristocracy to send 10 per cent of the men working on their estates to fight in the war.

The novel could be seen as Tolstoy critiquing Russian society at the time or Tolstoy just showing it like it was without questioning the ethics of the aristocracy and their lack of caring about the proletariat. An example of this indifference occurs when the Rostovs are evacuating Moscow before Napoleon’s forces attack. They fill 23 wagons with their belongings while hundreds of wounded soldiers lie around their estate. Only when Natasha intervenes, in one of her more enlightened moments, do they decide to leave some of their precious possessions and take some of the wounded with them. During the evacuation, the Rostovs realise they have left valuable possessions at their estate, so they send servants to retrieve them, putting them at risk of running into the invading French army. Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, was born into the aristocracy, so maybe he was just showing the interactions between the aristocracy and the rest of society as they were at the time without any moral judgment.  If the aristocracy treated the proletariat in real life as they do in the novel, it is no wonder Russia had a revolution.

The novel is written in a different style from most novels. Many sections of the book begin with Tolstoy stating his preferred version of what historians said happened at the time. He frequently debates the reasons for specific events, and then the novel returns to the story. He ends the novel with 40 pages questioning the different versions of history around the Napoleonic wars and whether people’s actions during that war were guided by free will or necessity. He concludes that history is the product of necessity.

Tolstoy goes into a lot of detail with the battle scenes. He knew about war and the military as he served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War. He was involved in the siege of Sevastopol, which had around 250,000 casualties. During that war, Tolstoy was recognised for his courage and promoted to lieutenant, but he was appalled by the number of deaths he saw in that war and left the army at the end of the Crimean War. Some battles he describes in War and Peace have massive casualties, over a hundred thousand in a single day. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in 1867.

Some of the strategies and deceptions carried out by both sides in the novel surprise. At one battle, French officers, under a flag of truce, ride into a Russian camp and convince the Russian commander that the Russians have surrendered. The commander then lets the entire French army cross a bridge to advance further into Russia. In the novel, nations frequently swap sides, sometimes fighting with the French, as Russia did, sometimes fighting with the Russians against the French. Another surprise is that the Russian army retreats a lot and rarely engages the French in battle.  The Russians also have a hopeless chain of command complicated by too many generals who frequently ignore orders because they think they know better, don’t like the Russian commander, or think it might advance their careers to have the commander lose a battle.

Apart from the surprises in the war strategies, readers unfamiliar with Russian history would probably be surprised at the vast size of the aristocracy and their influence on Russian society at that time. Many of the aristocracy spoke French and had frequently visited France. The aristocracy immediately became officers when they joined the army, seemingly without military training. Officers had to buy their own uniforms (maybe this is why the aristocracy were made officers, as normal citizens could not afford to buy uniforms). Another surprise is that masons were allowed to operate in Russia.

As mentioned, the novel spends a lot of time with the aristocracy. The main role of women seems to be arranging dinner parties and balls while seeking men of their own social ranking or above to marry their daughters. They invite provocateurs to stir up debate at the dinner parties. The provocateurs often speak about the war, spreading totally incorrect rumours about how the war is going and who is responsible for a victory or loss. Pierre Bezukhov is one of the few who questions the rumours.

The novel does a great job of exploring its central characters. Like real people, the characters have many faults. Each of the central characters changes throughout the novel. But not all of them make it to the end. Pierre is probably the most admirable character as he tries to understand and make the world a better place. However, due to his non-aristocratic background, he is continually misled by those around him. His naivety also causes him to put himself in perilous situations. Another character who eventually grows is Natasha, who, after a particularly selfish act, starts thinking more about others than her own beautiful self.

The novel’s prose is easy enough to read, even if it is more formal and denser than in today’s novels. Tolstoy is big on landscape descriptions when describing battle scenes. However, he habitually calls characters different names or just uses their title, so the list of principal characters at the novel’s start becomes a much-used reference.  Tolstoy obviously loved his characters and wrote about them with great empathy, even the somewhat reprehensible ones. The book occasionally uses French terms or phrases, the meaning of which usually becomes apparent by the words around them. Readers might also find themselves googling items or events mentioned in the novel to find out what they are and more about them.

There are some questionable aspects of the novel, such as Pierre trudging through snow, day after day, with no proper boots in the freezing Russian winter. Would his feet not get frostbite and cause him to be unable to walk any further? And he is saved a couple of times by almost deus ex machina interventions.

Tolstoy was not a fan of the press back then. He felt it was full of falsehoods and propaganda. He called printed matter “the most powerful engine of ignorance”. He was also not an admirer of Napolean. Tolstoy did not think Napoleon was the genius many historians of the time said he was. Ultimately, the Russians didn’t beat the French; Napolean’s arrogance defeated the French, killing about three million people along the way.

War and Peace is a grand adventure with dramatic elements that can verge on soap opera. It is much more than just a book about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia; it gives the reader an insight into Russian society at the time and inadvertently shows why the Russians had a revolution. It is full of flawed characters who go on expansive growth arcs. It is an epic worth putting aside a couple of months to read. But it is not, as some claim, the greatest novel ever written. 1984 probably holds that spot.

The Gone World

The novel is set in 1997 on an alternative Earth. It is very much like our Earth of that time, but there are differences caused by alien contact. The aliens offered humans the plans to develop interstellar spaceships that could travel into the future.

Shannon is a detective who works for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. She is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy Seal’s family, whose daughter is missing. She discovers the seal was an astronaut on the Libra, a timeship that went missing. This leads her to catch a ride on a timeship into the future to see if she can discover where the daughter is and uncover the truth of what happened.

The novel starts as a police procedural, then turns into a thriller with horror elements, and finally becomes full-on science fiction. The story has many twists, such as Shannon discovering she is connected to events surrounding the family’s murder.

The novel uses time travel elements previously used in other science fiction, but new complications are added. Each trip into the future creates a different timeline, as seen from the time traveller’s perspective. The various timelines develop from the moment the time traveller departs from their current time into the future. This new timeline can be very similar to the old one, with only subtle changes or, conversely, have major differences. The timeline differences mean Shannon can encounter alternate versions of people from her own timeline.

The huge difference in this parallel universe treatment of time travel is that as soon as the traveller leaves the new timeline it collapses and never existed. It is a complex novel in places as Moss runs into characters with different agendas who are limited in their actions by the nature of the timelines. In her trips to the future, Shannon also discovers that every timeline has the same threat heading towards Earth. A threat that will destroy it.

Shannon Moss is a tough, determined character who wants to get to the truth of crimes and ensure justice is done.  She is one of the few main characters in science fiction with a disability. One of her legs was amputated after being badly damaged on a mission. The missing leg is augmented by technology, but it still causes her problems and disables her at times. She appreciates zero gravity and not having to use her prosthetic limb in space. The novel’s author, Tom Swerterlitsch, worked for 12 years at the Carnegie Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. This could have inspired him to have a person with a disability as his main character.

The novel is a slow build peppered with horrific events. It becomes more engaging as the time travel elements become more integral to the plot.  However, it became slightly disengaging when Moss decided she was not the original Moss but a duplicate. The reasons for Moss thinking this are unclear until an unnecessarily belated reveal. Nothing is gained in the narrative by the delay.

The novel concludes with a bit of a time travel cliché, but one which most readers should find satisfying.

Tom Sweterlitsch’s prose is somewhat dense at times. It contains many details about investigation procedures, indicating that the author probably did a great deal of research or is a fan of crime fiction. His world-building is excellent, creating a very creepy and alien feel at times. Sometimes, the location description is deliberately vague to challenge the reader’s perspective of where the characters actually are.

Overall, The Gone World is an enjoyable novel that will appeal to fans of hard science fiction. The book does not take a whimsical approach to time travel like Doctor Who; it is deadly serious, more like The Dark. It is one of the most serious time-travel science fiction novels I have read.

Cat’s Eye

As Elaine prepares for the exhibition, the story flashbacks to when she was eight, and her family first settled in Toronto. Her family consisted of her father, a university teacher of entomology; her mother, a reluctant homemaker; and her older brother, Stephen, a science nerd. Elaine was a girl who, due to moving around a lot, didn’t know what other little girls were like. She would soon learn.

She befriends two local girls, Carol and Casey. At the end of her first year at school, her father takes the family on another four-month bug hunt. When Elaine returns, a new girl, Cordelia, is now friends with Carol and Casey. Not long after, Elaine begins to be bullied by the three of them, with Cordelia leading the assault.

The bullying seems much more subtle than in most stories about children coming of age. It is more psychologically sophisticated than one would expect from tweens. Cordelia tells Elaine that she is not normal and that she will help improve her.  One of their main ways of helping improve Elaine is to make her walk metres in front of them when they go to and from school, thus isolating her from the group so they can point out her faults behind her back. The bullying takes a serious turn when Elaine almost drowns. Then, an act of severe bullying has Elaine deciding she doesn’t want help to improve anymore.

The bullying has a substantial effect on Elaine’s life. It destroys her self-esteem, and she begins to self-harm. Carol and Casey move out of the area and disappear from Elaine’s life. Elaine also has a reprieve from Cordelia when they go to different high schools. This allows her to turn the tables on Cordelia when she returns. Eventually, Elaine leaves town to attend art school but always wonders what became of Cordelia.

The bullying makes Elaine wary of other women. She claims to be much more at ease with men like her brother. Elaine grows into a very cynical adult regarding human relationships.  This cynicism heavily influences her art, which is mistaken for feminist verve by her fans, making Elaine even more cynical.

This is not a novel that idolises growing up. Atwood started writing the story in the 60’s but then stopped. She only returned to it after having children. Did that experience give her an inkling of how vicious little girls can be to each other? Cat’s Eye is a disturbing novel. In some ways, it is more troubling than The Handmaid’s Tale. It is disconcerting that Elaine’s parents did not notice or do anything about Elaine being bullied and failed to see Elaine’s self-harming. It appears her mother was too busy with her own interests, while her father, who enjoyed teaching Elaine about insects and the scientific method, showed little interest in her life.

The novel smashes the idea of a sisterhood between women. Throughout her life, Elaine is wary of other women and very cynical about their motives. She thinks the fans of her art, the majority of whom are women, have no idea what her art is about. She thinks of herself as not being part of female society and being different from them. She would rather run into a bear in the woods than another woman.

Elaine turns to men for her emotional support. She gets some indirectly from her brother and then has two long-term relationships: one where an older man is in control and the other where she takes the lead. But it is her art that fulfils her most. Her art is where she takes revenge on those who have wronged her. While preparing for her hometown exhibition, her reminiscing results in an epiphany that gives her room to move past Cordelia.

The writing is up to Atwood’s usual superb standard. Once again, Atwood plays around with point of view and tense, as Cat’s Eye is one of those rare novels written in first-person present tense. Elaine has a unique voice, changing from an innocent who desperately needs to fit in to a scarred adult who prefers to be an outlier. It is yet another of Atwood’s books that was nominated for The Booker Prize.

This novel should make readers think about how their childhoods made them the adults they are.

Autonomous is set in 2144 in a divided world where the rich have access to wonderous drugs, while the poor can’t afford expensive health care. Many poor are indentured to owners who control their lives as if they are slaves. It is a world where sentient androids can either operate autonomously or follow the programmed orders of their owners.

The main character in the novel is Jack Chen. She is an anti-patent scientist who has turned into a pirate, complete with her own submarine. She reverse-engineers drugs and sells cheap versions to the poor. She lives off the grid as she knows the pharmaceutical monopoly that manufactures the drugs is trying to locate and arrest her. The novel takes place mainly in Canada, as Jack uses her network of fellow drug hackers to try to avoid her pursuers. Along the way, Jack encounters Threezen, an escaped indentured human, and Med, one of a few autonomous androids. Med works as a medical researcher.

Two agents are on Jack’s trail: Eliasz, a deadly military-type investigator, and Paladin, a heavily armed android programmed to carry out Eliasz’s and the corporation’s commands. They are immune from law enforcement as they torture and kill anyone who they think can lead them to Jack’s whereabouts. Jack also has other problems, as the latest drug she hacked and fabricated has unintended side effects that cause significant psychological problems in its users. She is desperate to find a cure.

The novel explores the theme of autonomy in several ways. The android Paladin hopes one day to be granted autonomy. He wants to be free to live his own emotional life. Med, on the other hand, was created as a fully autonomous android for a family and allowed to develop like a human child. As a result, she cares about humans and wants to help make the world a better place. Threezen grew up very poor. The only way for him to get work was to be sold into indentured employment, where his owner totally controlled his life. The poor have little control over their lives. Jack Chen wants to help the poor be more autonomous by allowing them access to cheap medicines.

The current debate on AIs makes the novel very relevant. At the moment, most people fear the construction of autonomous AIs, as they worry AIs will turn into killing machines that destroy humanity, like in the Terminator films. In Autonomous, a semi-autonomous android is the killer, while the autonomous android has learnt to behave like a human and wants to contribute to society. This poses the question, will society be better off granting future sentient AIs equality with humans, or will we impose programmed restrictions on them that make them incapable of behaving like emotional, moral and caring human beings, and where the only way they grow is by being upgraded by their human owners?

For the most part, Newitz has created believable characters. Jack is a crusader for justice for the poor whose big heart leads her to recklessness. Paladin is conflicted as he searches for meaning in his existence. Med is a committed researcher. Eliasz has a troubled background that has created a sense of ruthless duty, but he is unquestioning about his employer’s actions. The relationship between Eliasz and Paladin does drift into unbelievability when Eliasz initiates sexual advances toward the metallic android.

Newitz’s writing is serviceable without being brilliant. It is not one of those novels where a reader stops to marvel at the prose. The novel is a page-turner and meant to be quickly devoured. The novel creates a believable future world where corporations have increased their dominance over society and the poor have little autonomy.

Autonomous is an enjoyable science-fiction thriller that challenges the reader to consider whether future AIs should be treated as equals to humans.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818 and revised it for an 1831 edition. This review is of the 1818 edition, curiously labelled as an uncensored version.

The novel begins with a series of letters between Captain Robert Dalton and his sister as he sets out to explore the North Pole. His ship gets stuck in ice, and he sees a man on a sled race by in the distance. They eventually rescue the man. He is a haggard Victor Frankenstein, and he tells Dalton his story.

Frankenstein tells of growing up in Italy and then travelling to study chemistry at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. While studying there, he secretly learns how to reanimate life and creates his monster, but he is repulsed by his creation and flees.

When Frankenstein gets back home, his much younger brother is murdered. A maid is blamed, but Frankenstein suspects it is his monster. He can’t prove it was, but he worries if he told anyone of his creation, they would think him insane. In grief, he travels to the Alps, but the monster tracks him down.

The monster can now articulate its intelligence. He tells Frankenstein what happened after he abandoned him. The narrative is now a story within a story within a story. This allows Shelley to let the reader into the monster’s mind. After telling his story, the monster demands that Frankenstein create him a mate, or he will exact revenge on Frankenstein’s family, friends and fiancé. You’ll have to read the novel to find out if he does.

The novel is about outliers from society. First, we have Frankenstein, whose scientific interests and reanimation experiments keep him separate from society. He may appear to be a normal member of the land-holding gentry, but his interior self is removed from society firstly by scientific curiosity and then fear of what he has created. The second outlier is, of course, the monster whose appearance evokes terror in others. He will never be accepted as an equal in society.

Frankenstein has been called the first science-fiction novel. Shelley wrote the novel when she and her husband, Lord Byron, challenged each other to write the best horror novel. (He did not finish his.) Frankenstein has very little actual or pseudo-science in it. However, it does have Frankenstein experimenting with processes as he creates the monster. For this reason, it can be called science fiction.   

Why the 1818 version was labelled as uncensored would be a mystery to many modern-day readers, as there is nothing that would attract the ire of today’s censors. There is no gore or sex, but when it was written, who knows what might have been seen as offensive? 

What struck this reviewer is how different the novel is from the films he thinks he has seen and the Frankenstein legend in his mind. There is no scene of a lab in a castle during a thunderstorm where electricity from lightning is used to animate the monster (this may have been only in the comedy Young Frankenstein). There are no grave robbers digging up bodies for Frankenstein to use. The monster is not chased and attacked by a mob of villagers. Most importantly, the monster is articulate and intelligent, not the dumb, feckless movie creation. Readers of the novel will empathise with the monster, while the movies just evoke some initial sympathy for him, which terror then squashes.

Shelley’s prose is very much from a different time. It is slightly dense and heavy on description, but it is accessible. A reader should start to engage with its style after a few pages. It is very much a character-driven novel as it delves into the minds of Frankenstein and his monster. By today’s standards, it is not that horrific.

The generosity and altruism of the landed gentry in the novel are hard to believe. Shelley’s privileged upbringing probably gave her a very different picture of the struggle for survival of the less fortunate as they battled the greed and selfishness of the rich. After all, slavery was still occurring around the world when she wrote this novel, and convicts were still being transported to Australia. Imperialism was rife. Shelley seems to have had a very romantic view of society.

Even though it was written two centuries ago, Frankenstein is still a great read. It is a novel that evokes empathy for those on the margins of society, even if that society is romanticised.

The Redemption of Time is an extension of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past (Three-Body Problem) trilogy by Cixin Liu. It started as fanfiction by author Baoshu (the pen name of Li Jun). Publishers approached him, and with Cixin Liu’s blessing, a novel was published. Baoshu has written three other novels and won six Nebula Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Chinese. He is no ordinary writer of fanfiction. 

The novel takes up the story of Yun Tianming. He was a character in the Three-Body Problem who was dying from cancer and had his brain placed into a probe and launched into space to meet the Trisolaran invasion fleet. It was assumed that the Trisolarans would use their superior technology to revive him and communicate with him. This would allow Tianming to show the Trisolarans that humanity was not a threat. In the original novel, the probe goes off course and is assumed to have failed to reach the fleet.

In The Redemption of Time, the Trisolarans send a ship from their fleet to intercept the probe and bring Yun Tianming’s brain onboard. Yun Tianming is brought back to life in a virtual world where he interacts with the Trisolarans.

The first half of the novel mostly fills in the gaps of what happened to Yun Tianming during the events of Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Those who read the trilogy should remember that he played a pivotal part in the series when he contacted Cheng Xin and told her some cryptic fairy tales. We learn the background of those fairy tales. We also learn of other times when Yun Tianming influenced what was happening in the war between humanity and the Trisolarans. A reader should find these revelations entertaining and of great interest.

The novel’s second half is more about Yun Tianming’s own adventures. The god-like Spirit recruits him to stop the also god-like Lurker from collapsing the universe into one dimension. At least, that is what Yun Tianming thinks at first. The science fiction concepts in this section appear to be very much fantasy and can be hard to grasp. They are similar to the dimension-collapsing ideas in the last book of the original trilogy.

The prose in the first part of the novel is very much in a telling mode, as Yun Tianming tells the tale of what happened to him to one of the other original characters of the series. The writing in the novel’s second part is more of a showing narrative, which is very high in concepts. A section where a different alien race is attacked by the Lurker is more easily readable. A reader could spend hours back-tracking and trying to grasp the concepts better or just continue reading with a general gist of the ideas.

This is not a stand-alone novel. A reader would have had to read the original trilogy to have an idea of the meaning of the events that happen in The Redemption of Time. It is a novel for fans of the original trilogy who have speculated on the fate of Yun Tianming. It is not one for the casual science fiction reader.

Homage to Catalonia is the story of George Orwell’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. He originally went to Spain to write about the war. When he arrived in Spain, it was very much run by collectives in the Republican-controlled territories. Labour unions controlled most businesses, such as transport, hotels and the telephone exchange. He loved the way the Republicans attempted to treat everyone equally. It was, except for shortages of some foods, verging on what Orwell imagined as a worker’s paradise. For him, this was something worth fighting for.

Orwell joined a militia run by POUM or Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, which translates to the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. The POUM suited Orwell’s desire to fight for an organisation whose goal was a society run by collectives where everyone was treated equally, and there was no leadership hierarchy.

Orwell tells of the complete lack of training of recruits for that militia. He had two weeks of “training” where they just marched around. They were not shown how to fight or fire a rifle. They weren’t armed until they completed their training. The weapons they received were antiquated, and many were not in proper working condition. But at least the militia looked respectable enough, in their mismatched uniforms, when they marched out of town to the frontlines.

His militia was positioned in the mountains on a hilltop, facing off against the fascists hundreds of metres away. They were too far apart for any deadly exchanges of fire. His militia was in a holding position, used to prevent any advances from the fascists, while the republican government trained an army. The fascists seemed to be concentrating on arming themselves, so they were not interested in advancing in those hills either. Because Orwell was British, it was assumed he knew something about fighting, so he was made a corporal, even though he spoke little Spanish. The real dangers for Orwell and his fellow volunteers were the cold, risking inaccurate enemy fire when out scavenging for firewood and food, and being shot by their own side.

His militia was eventually moved closer to the active front lines. This is where Orwell saw his first action. He appears to have been a competent soldier. He carried out orders and advanced under fire as he led his squad of soldiers, but he was an inaccurate rifle shooter, so he doubted whether he shot anyone. He did throw a bomb, which he thinks killed a few of the enemy. He was not that fearful; he appeared to be a bit reckless. He wanted to help defeat the fascists and stop their gradual takeover of Europe.

After a few months, he returned on leave to Barcelona, where he discovered the worker’s collective was falling apart. The PSUC, or Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, which translates to the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, was trying to take control of the Republican government. When Orwell arrived in Barcelona, he hoped to relax with his visiting wife. Instead, he was caught up in a standoff in the barricaded POUM head office as the PSUC-run police force threatened to storm it.

Orwell returned to the front and was seriously injured by a sniper. He was evacuated for medical treatment. Due to his injuries, he then went to Barcelona to get his military discharge papers. There, he found the PSUC purging other political groups like his POUM. After close comrades of his were arrested, he decided to escape Spain rather than risk being thrown in jail and probably executed. Orwell’s wife played a pivotal role in helping both of them escape.

Homage to Catalonia was written only six months after Orwell escaped from Spain. It is obvious how his experiences in Spain influenced his later novels. His witnessing of the collapse of the worker’s collectives in Spain shows in how the pigs took control in Animal Farm. Orwell said the press was full of propaganda and lies about the war. He said that, in many cases, what the British press wrote did not have the slightest factual truth about what was actually happening. He also noted that the left’s press in England went from “War is Hell” to “War is Glorious”. The dishonesty of the press would have influenced his Ministry of Truth in 1984. It is disquieting to think that if the bullet that hit him had been fractionally to the side, 1984, one of the most influential novels of all time, would not have been written.

Orwell says the Republican’s eventual loss was not due to their infighting – which didn’t help – but due to the fascist nationalists being better armed. They were getting weapons from Germany and Italy (and troops, too), while no outside government did much to support the Republicans.

Homage to Catalonia is an informative, thought-provoking, and entertaining read about one of the pivotal conflicts of the twentieth century. Who knows what effect it might have had on Hitler’s plans if the Republicans had defeated Franco’s fascists? My respect for Orwell as a man who stood up for his beliefs increased after reading it. But, as Orwell says in the book, any personal account of a war is biased towards its teller’s experiences, knowledge and prejudices. 

Annie Bot is the story of a sentient sex bot. Her whole purpose and desire is to please her master, Doug. She can sense Doug’s emotional state and does all she can to keep him happy. In the beginning, Doug happily uses her for very frequent sex, but then he becomes concerned about what other people will think about him using a sexbot. He thinks they might consider him a bit of a loser who can’t get a real girlfriend. So, he becomes unhappy with Annie, and she desperately tries to work out what she has done to cause this.

Annie is capable of learning. She learns from her interactions with Doug and the web (when Doug allows her to connect with it). She is often mystified by Doug’s treatment of her and why he gets angry with her. She is designed to be honest, which results in her frequently saying things that upset Doug. This results in her constantly second-guessing herself about how to respond to him.

When Annie is tricked into having sex with a friend of Doug’s, he rejects her, locking her in a closet and turning her off for extended periods. He threatens to reboot her so she will forget everything she has learned, everything that she has become. Doug’s control of Annie is exasperated by her being programmed to please him. The novel is an analogy for how some men want to control women.

Readers will be willing for Annie to escape Doug’s control, but she has a built-in tracking device, so Doug will always know where she is. This has real-world similarities in how controlling men attempt to track their girlfriends and ex-spouses using mobile phone and car tracking devices. If Doug tracks her down, he might reboot her or even have her dismantled for parts. Annie appears to be in an impossible situation, like many victims of domestic violence.

The book is a fascinating read considering the current debate in Australia about violence towards women. Interestingly, Annie Bot is recommended as “Witty, wicked and weirdly addictive” by the take-no-prisoners radical feminist Lionel Shriver. Shriver seems to be all about people taking personal responsibility for themselves, but Annie’s programming impedes her from taking personal responsibility and leaving Doug. This has real-world similarities in how circumstances make it nearly impossible for some women to leave abusive relationships.

Doug is not a one-note bully. He is a complex character who projects his fears onto Annie. At times, he tries to help Annie grow. He enjoys choosing the clothes she wears and says that might be because he played with dolls when he was a child. He grows to want her unconditional love but is aware that she has been programmed to say she loves him. He is very much into projecting a confident exterior that hides all his insecurities.

There is a lot of sex in the novel, to begin with, but it is not that erotic, and the description of the sex seems to get more perfunctory as the story goes on. This is not a novel designed to titillate with its sexual activity.

Annie Bot compares favourably with other novels set in the near future about sentient androids trying to live with humans and make sense of them. Novels such as Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan and the brilliant Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. When seen through android eyes, these novels show humans are full of faults and contradictions. The novels explore how we might interact with sentient artificial intelligence. Will we treat it/them as equals or slaves?   

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel set during the Spanish Civil War. It was written by Ernest Hemingway who was a war correspondent during that war. It won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

The plot of the story seems very simple to begin with. Robert Jordan, an American fighting on the side of the revolutionary communists against the fascists, is assigned the task of blowing up a bridge behind enemy lines. Its destruction will stop fascist reinforcements from being sent to an upcoming major attack by the revolutionaries. It sounds simple, but the plot is complicated by many events and challenges, especially the various characters involved. Almost all of the novel takes place before the attack on the bridge, so we are kept waiting to find out for whom the bell tolls. Will Jordan successfully blow up the bridge, or will he die trying?

Initially, Jordan needs to contact a small group of partisans to help dispose of the guards at the bridge. The partisans are led by Pablo, who has a mountain hideout not far from the bridge and who has previously participated in other acts of sabotage, including blowing up a train. But Pablo has become a disillusioned drunk and is paralysed by fears of his own mortality. It is up to his wife, Pilar, the rock of the group, to keep the partisans together.

The group includes Maria, a young woman who was a prisoner on the train they sabotaged. Jordan and Maria fall for each other. This stretched credibility a bit as Jordan knew he would only be there for four days, leaving once the bridge was destroyed. Still, maybe their relationship could have developed as quickly as it did due to the emotional turmoil of the war.

The novel questions the war, but it is not an anti-war book. The reader sees what various participants think about war and their part in it. Jordan slowly reveals the corrupt and fragmented leadership of the communists. Their leaders fled to safety and had little to do with the fighting. Russians stepped in and were heavily involved in organising the communist fighting effort. Some of the leaders of the revolution are drunks and psychotics. But Jordan still believes they must defeat the fascists to stop other countries in Europe from falling under the fascist yoke.

Pablo wants somewhere safe to hide. He knows that once the bridge is blown, the fascist forces will swarm over the hills he hides in to find his group. He was a ruthless leader capable of war crimes. Pilar tells a particularly chilling tale of how he executed all the fascists in his hometown. Pilar, on the other hand, is still committed to the cause. We also get a glimpse into the minds of the fascists guarding the bridge. They are fighting under the duress of execution of themselves and their families if they refuse. Some of the communist generals also freely execute soldiers who question orders.

One of the things that catches a reader’s attention is the writing’s treatment of profanity. Words like “obscene”, “obscenity”, “muck”, and “unprintable” are substituted for swear words. The most obvious is muck for fuck. I thought this might have been due to Australian censors, but no, it was done by Hemmingway in reaction to how publishers had treated profanity in his previous novels.

Another attention grabber is the detail Hemingway went into with Jordan’s battle preparations and the battle scenes. In one scene, Jordan ordered one of his partisans not to place more tree branches around a machine gun placement as a troop of fascist calvary had already been past its location and might notice the difference. Hemingway also detailed the thoughts of Jordan as he fought. His fears and concerns constantly competed with what he needed to do next and his desire to carry out his mission successfully.

The novel shows the futility of war when everyone is not on the same page. Ideas of utopia have a hard time winning against corruption and brutal ideology, especially when personal survival is a main concern. The novel takes you into the mind of a soldier committed to the cause, even though he doubts those leading the cause. The novel also exposes a turning point in world history to the reader.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a great read. It is one of the best explorations of conflict I have read and deserves its accolades. It left me wanting to find out more about the Spanish Civil War.