Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents (by Octavia Butler, 1993 & 1998)

Butler’s vision of a future America sadly seems closer today than it may have in the 1990s. The two books are examinations of how faiths and beliefs might change in a decaying nation, and the beginning of Trump’s second term has made it clear that fundamental societal values can indeed shift with surprising rapidity. Butler’s unflinching approach to the violence and death in her story also makes many other dystopian tales seem far too kind to their protagonists in comparison. These are excellent novels. ★★★★★

Vaxxers: A Pioneering Moment in Scientific History (by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, 2021)

Written by two of the lead scientists working on the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine, this is full of interesting detail about how the vaccine was developed and tested at record speed. ★★★★☆

Your Life is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better (by Tim Minshall, 2025)

Some of the examples here felt familiar to me, but others, like Strix in the Isle Man (maker of kettle “blades”) or the tree-harvesting machines (YouTube video here) were fascinating. ★★★☆☆

Careless People: A story of where I used to work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025)

This exposé by the former Facebook Directory of Global Public Policy reveals the social media giant’s leadership is even worse than you imagined. It is the degree of ignorance of the wider world and the lack of attention to anything apart from the company’s growth that was most damning to me, although Sheryl Sandberg’s sexual harassment of her staff and Zuckerberg needing others to explain to him how Facebook helped Trump get elected (the first time) are equally dispiriting. ★★★★☆

House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company (by Eva Dou, 2025)

The subtitle made it seem this would be a China-panic book about the evils of Chinese companies, but Eva Dou writes a much more nuanced book investigating how Huawei went from selling then manufacturing telephone branch exchange switches in the early 1990s to the leading suppliers of telecommunications equipment in the world by 2012–and then to target of Western sanctions and prosecutions.

There is a slight disappointment in the fact that, despite Dou’s excellent reporting, founder Ren Zhengfei 任正非 and his family remain somewhat opaque characters. Ren believes in hard work and undercutting his competitors, but there is little evidence of him being an ultra-nationalist plotter for Chinese global dominance. He is more likely, it seems to me, to be a keen capitalist who has managed to thread the needle of running of globally-successful private company headquartered in a country firmly controlled by the CCP. The European-style Ox Horn Campus in Dongguan and his younger daughter’s (Annabel Yao 姚安娜) Harvard education and attendance at a Parisian debutante ball point only to a tawdry ultra-wealthy cosmopolitanism.

Nevertheless, this book lays out all the evidence available for you to make your own decision about whether Huawei is friend, foe, or just another big tech company simply looking for profit. ★★★★☆

Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World by Kelly Clancy (Penguin, 2024)

This is a well-written book examining the rise of game theory and how it has been used across different fields. The central argument is that what started as narrow mathematical models of game strategy have been widely applied in often unsuitable contexts. Reality is not a game, but we have created systems where, for example, war, economic markets, or even social interactions can be gamified and ’explained’ by reductive winner-takes-all theorizing. As she concludes:

Any consequences too subtle to measure–environmental costs, civic discord, troubled diplomatic relations–are simply omitted from the score.

If our systems are built around assumptions that we are all rational (“greedy” would be Clancy’s preferred term) agents seeking only to win, then we should not be surprised when people begin to act that way. I hope she is correct when she writes the “average person is more empathetic than Machiavellian” and would like to think that co-operation, not conflict, is humanity’s optimal strategy. ★★★★☆

(by Gene Wolfe, published 1980-1983)

I read the four main volumes of the series: The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch. Particularly impressive is that the four novels are quite different, and that the Severian of Citadel feels a long way from the protagonist of Shadow.

Wolfe’s use of first-person narration to control what we understand about “Urth” of the far future is excellent, with Severian at points taking things we do not understand for granted, and at others not understanding things that seem obvious to a reader. This creates a constant interpretative puzzle for the reader–and even with the help of the sleuths of the Internet I’m afraid you will still have to make decisions about what you think is happening (or has happened, or will happen) to this world.

I don’t generally much enjoy fantasy, so when I give this only four stars it is a testament to how much better I think it is then most in the genre (Pullman’s celebrated His Dark Materials would get three stars from me, for example). I’ll admit to being a bit baffled by those who hold it as literary masterpiece of the twentieth century, though. ★★★★☆