A speculative mind

  I suppose it is time to do a wrap-up for 2024. These are my favorite books of the past 12 months. These are books that I read in 2024. That does not mean they came out in 2024 (most of them didn’t). I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but I read other things too, so these are the best books I read in 2024 in no particular genre and in no particular order. Again, these are just the books that I liked. You may have hated some of these books and that’s okay. This is my list. I had difficulty narrowing it down to five. That is why this top five list inexplicably contains six.   It is also why there are honorable mentions afterward.   Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky Comic existentialism in robot form. Who could imagine such a thing? Well, the brilliant Adrian Tchaikovsky, that’s who. Don’t let the “E” word scare you off. I promise, it’s funny.   The Dog Stars by Peter Heller A post-apocalyptic story about an airplane pilot and his dog who par...

  I never expected existentialism to be so funny. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is about a robot’s search for meaning. Or maybe it is about a robot who doesn’t know he is searching for meaning, but he is nonetheless. He also doesn’t know he is going on a quest, but he is as sure as if his name were Bilbo. His name is not Bilbo. His name is Uncharles (long story). Uncharles is a is a robot valet. A gentleman’s gentleman (or rather a gentleman’s gentlerobot). The human society is crumbling and does not have much need for valets anymore. But Uncharles only knows what his programming is telling him, and that is that he needs to serve, and specifically to serve humans. That is going to be rather difficult as there aren’t many humans left alive in this broken world. Being a robot, he has to follow his instructions, his task list. If those tasks are now impossible to do now, then he has to get creative about fulfilling his tasks. The first task is to find out what is wrong wi...

  William of Occam or Ockham was a 14 th Century philosopher and theologian. He is credited with coming up with a concept which has come to be known as “Occam’s razor.” Simply put, Occam’s razor states that when you are trying to find an explanation to something you observe, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. For example: you walk into a room that is supposed to have a dog and a bird in it. The dog is there, but not the bird, though pasted to the dog’s mouth are some bloody feathers. Now, you could come up with all kinds of theories about what happened to the bird. Matter displacement, some spy came in and stole the bird, you were lied to about the bird in the first place, or maybe it is the first case of an object turning invisible. But the simplest explanation (the dog ate the bird) is the most likely to be correct. Scientists and mathematicians use Occam’s razor as part of their basic guidelines (No, I am not sure where the "razor" part comes from) . ...