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8:50am on Sunday, 28th September, 2025:
Anecdote
At the IGGI conference a couple of weeks ago, I chatted with one of the keynote speakers, Stefano Gualeni, and he mentioned a book he'd written, What we Owe the Dead. I really liked its experimental approach, so wrote a review.
I did an experiment of my own. I knew that Amazon held back reviews before releasing them, so it could review them itself. Did it, however, actually review the reviews?
I decided to add a minor grammatical error ("it's" instead of "its") to see if whoever or whatever did the reviews would pick it up.
They didn't. Maybe I'll insert a random "release the Epstein files" in my next review, to see if they pick that up. It could all be a bluff, of course, and they don't perform any reviewing at all.
Whatever, as a result, my review reads as follows:
"This is a superb experimental-format Science Fiction novel that really delivers on its promise. It somehow manages to draw the reader in through it's multi-level narrative, telling a detective story in an indirect fashion that nails the pacing and demands that you keep reading. Set in a flooded-Earth of the future, where people live in vast towers, the world-building is subtly expressed but powerfully realised. It treats the reader as an intelligent being. There are philosophical questions raised about (as the title suggests) what the living owe the dead, but they're not in-your-face. You're guaranteed to think about them, though, even if you disagree with the characters' opinions! It's not a book for people who like neat-and-tidy whodunnits, but it is a book for people who like their SF with a dash of philosophy. My one criticism is that the text is printed in a tiny typeface (the vertical on a lower-case p is 1.5mm), so if your eyesight isn't great you're going to need a magnifying glass. Well worth a read."
I guess if you bought the Kindle version, the text would be more readable.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).