Reviews / Books

This page is for tracking and talking about books I've read, because I am sick of Goodreads. I will probably not write a whole review for every one unless I feel inspired to.

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• The Unaccountability Machine
• In Ascension
• Mindbridge

5.29.25

The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies

University of Chicago Press, 2024

I really liked this book in the way you can like a political thriller or a Conner O'Malley bit, which is to say I was thinking "uh-oh" pretty much nonstop throughout. Davies leverages the midcentury school of cybernetic thinking—largely forgotten now after a brutal erasure by the profit-worship thinking of Friedman and Welch—and makes the argument that if emergent systems like corporations and states can be reasonably called "artificial intelligences," it might logically follow that they can become, in a sense, mentally ill.

The concept described in this book of the "accountability sink" (a name for the practice of making evil decisions but framing them as inevitable policy-following) is something I know will permanently inform the way I see the world. Human-built systems have broken the reins of human control; no single person can be satisfactorily put on trial when a corporation or other cybernetic organization causes death and suffering.

Overall I think this book is a great introduction to cybernetics (I understood it okay) and gives you some great references to read later. The middle chapters are basically a retelling of Stafford Beer and can get a little slippery, but the amount of real-world observation backing up Davies' claims keeps it from getting too abstract.

★★★☆☆

5.26.25

Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman

1976

A little while ago I read Haldeman's The Forever War and I thought it was pretty good. I found Mindbridge a little weirder and further-reaching and I liked it a lot more. Telling the story partially through future-dated excerpts of research papers and biographies is genuinely a fun idea, and the setup (a team of people with the hyper-hazardous job of exploring and terraforming alien planets by way of a matter-transmission technology) makes this sci-fi story totally devoid of spaceships, which I think is pretty interesting, as is the titular Mindbridge. For being 50 years old this one is refreshingly original.

★★★★☆

5.22.25

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

Atlantic, 2023

When I started this book I thought I would probably knock it out in a couple days, since it's only about 200 pages. Instead it took me about a week and I was constantly surprised at just how much plot had happened compared to the page count.

Really I think this could be three books: A literary novel about a Dutch woman's abusive childhood, a mystery set at sea, and a near-future sci-fi story about a deep-space mission. But managing to pack those all together in a way that fits takes a lot of talent. A huge variety of settings are made to feel increibly real and alive, and the characters you get to spend any time with feel just as vivid.

★★★☆☆