Reviews and Comments

On the SF side, this is a story of people who know that Earth has only months left (an asteroid is on a collision course with the planet). What do you do? Go bucket list? Throw yourself in front of a bus? Carry on as if little has changed? The societal changes are perhaps less unique in SF, but this is still excellently done. It's not a complete collapse, but a lot of changes (rationing, corporate collapse) matter. There's cults and cabals and ... it's all great!

On the crime novel side, the apparent suicide that kicks off the novel is the kind of simple case that cops actually deal with, not the complicated serial killings of a Jo Nesbø novel or many people have motives Knives Out movie. The bad guys are not mustache-twirlers. The newly promoted detective actually investigates, somewhat amateurishly due to his lack of experience, but still investigation. It ticks all the boxes of what I like in a crime story.

I'm old and tired these days. It takes a very engaging book for me to stay up past my bedtime. With 20% left, I decided I had to finish last night. I couldn't put it off until after work today.

Despite my critical comments, I think this is a largely positive book detailing some techniques of good communication. However, it's really not a how-to. The rough outline for each technique goes: anecdote about a communication breakdown, review of research about a technique, anecdote about someone who is good at it (a supercommunicator), and a cursory, hand-wavey things you might want to try section. The overviews/reviews of research are the best part. The how-to is too general to be of real use.

And to repeat my comments in the review itself, the author tends to glorify good communication itself, rather than as a means toward an end. That is readily apparent in the sections on communicating about race & identity, where the author never really identifies that racism, sexism and other issues related to identity are the real problem, not just that communication about them is fraught.

His information on communication itself seems pretty solid though, from the bits I checked.

It gets worse. Current chapter covers internal and external controversies over "identity" at Netflix. One after an executive in charge of communications used the n-word, and the company embarked on a series of open internal communications. "Tough conversations." Yadda yadda. Then after praising Netflix for transforming itself into such a diverse company as a result/correlation, jumps into the Chappelle special controversy from 2021. That's the one where they published a Chappelle comedy special where he made fun of trans people. So more internal conversations were had, and the result was bupkis. But the author praises Netflix for having internal conversations where everyone got heard. It's the same thing as my last comment on the book, where the communication is the goal.

Maybe there's some tangible results that he doesn't go into or doesn't know about. I am not going to do a ton of research into changes made at Netflix. I'm just irritated at this pedestalling of the communication itself without going on to what the communication is supposed to enable.

Ugh. This book just presented a whole chapter on an experiment in communication designed to get opposing sides of guns/gun-control debates talking with each other. I could see where this was going, but I decided to give it a shot and the author failed.

Where did I see this going? The author presented the the experiment as successful because it showed that both sides didn't have to hate each other. Is that good? Yes. Is that good enough? No. As if both sides of this debate are equally moral sides. They are not. I get that it's probably not useful to hate people who want to enable killing kids, but there are other books out there explaining some of the research that goes beyond communicating to persuasion. This is the "why can't we all just get along" of chapters on communication.

I'd quote, but listening to the audiobook so I don't have an accurate transcription.

Preble Jefferson can see into the future, about 5 seconds. What happens when governments figure out what he can do? And what can such a person do against world superpowers? To illustrate his power, two of the few ways to defeat him are to get him in an elevator where the trip takes longer than 5 seconds, or to carpet bomb enough area that he can't escape and he can't see it coming until it's too late.

There's a few scenes of Preble Jefferson doing his thing. There's a middle section where Preble Jefferson and his friend & lawyer Fish, a paranoid anarchist, discuss ways to structure government power to protect against institutional despotism. That section is disconnected, slow, and ultimately not germane to the story. And a final section where Preble Jefferson becomes all right with being a monster in defense of his family and takes on everything and everybody.

There's a lot of game theory in the story that feels very amateur. Luckily Boldizar doesn't dwell long enough on any one instance where I wanted to stop and think about it.