Chasing a Ghost: Reflections on The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto

Benjamin Wallace’s The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto promises an investigation into one of the great modern enigmas: the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Having finished the book, I cannot honestly say that I am any closer to knowing who Nakamoto really was—or is. But perhaps that is the point. The mystery itself may be as essential to Bitcoin’s mythology as the technology that underpins it.

Rather than delivering a definitive answer, Wallace offers something more diffuse but still compelling: a guided tour through the early history of Bitcoin and the many people who orbited its creation. The book introduces a wide cast of characters—developers, cryptographers, entrepreneurs, ideologues—many of whom are fascinating figures in their own right. Along the way, it also provides a vivid look at the cypherpunk movement, whose blend of idealism, paranoia, technical brilliance, and political radicalism forms much of the ideological soil from which Bitcoin emerged.

Reading the book stirred a strong sense of déjà vu. It took me back to the early days when cryptography was far from ubiquitous and often treated as something suspicious or even dangerous. I still remember the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography, which limited key lengths in software like Netscape and effectively weakened security for users outside the United States. I even had a friend who wore one of those infamous T-shirts printed with RSA source code—classified, at the time, as a munition. I was never quite that cool.

Bitcoin itself remains a deeply complex system. Even with a background in cryptography and some academic exposure to blockchain concepts—though no hands-on implementation experience—I still find many aspects of it difficult to fully internalize. Wallace does a reasonable job of explaining the basics without drowning the reader in math, but the underlying reality remains: Bitcoin is not simple, and its consequences are even less so.

It is not hard to see why Bitcoin appeals to such a broad range of fringe or outsider movements. Libertarians, privacy advocates, anti-statists, and those deeply distrustful of institutions all find something to admire in a currency that exists outside government control. Unfortunately, the same properties that attract idealists also attract illicit actors. This is hardly unique to Bitcoin; every major technological advance has been used for both constructive and destructive ends.

In many respects, Bitcoin is not fundamentally different from fiat currency. Its value ultimately rests on collective belief and trust. The crucial distinction lies in what that trust is anchored to. Fiat currencies rely on governments, central banks, and legal systems. Bitcoin relies on cryptography, code, and decentralized consensus. Neither is inherently immune to failure; they simply fail in different ways.

One of Bitcoin’s most significant economic properties is its fixed supply, capped at 21 million coins. This makes it deflationary by design, unlike most fiat currencies, which are inflationary. As a result, adjustment happens almost entirely through price rather than supply. By most estimates, the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin activity—well over 90% by value—remains speculative or financial rather than transactional. From that perspective, Bitcoin still has a long way to go before it functions as a broadly used currency in the everyday sense.

It is also striking how dominant Bitcoin remains, despite being technically inferior in many respects to later cryptocurrencies. Platforms like Ethereum offer programmability via smart contracts; others provide faster transactions, lower fees, or better energy efficiency. Yet Bitcoin retains an enormous advantage as the first mover. Perhaps more importantly, it lacks a controlling company, foundation, or visible founder. That absence of ongoing authority is a feature, not a bug.

Which brings us back to Nakamoto. It is widely believed that Satoshi mined roughly one million bitcoins in the early days of the network—an amount that would make them unimaginably wealthy today. And yet those coins remain untouched. If Nakamoto is still alive, that restraint suggests either extraordinary principle or an equally extraordinary desire to remain invisible. Wallace explores many theories, but none feel conclusive.

In the end, I closed the book no wiser about Nakamoto’s identity than when I began. What I did gain, however, was a renewed engagement with questions about money, trust, privacy, and the political dimensions of technology. The book also rekindled memories of a time when cryptography felt like a subversive act rather than an invisible layer of everyday life.

And perhaps that is enough. A book does not need to provide answers to be worthwhile. Sometimes it succeeds simply by sharpening the questions and ensuring they linger long after the last page is turned.

Solium Infernum - Better to Reign in Hell than Serve in Heaven

In Solium Infernum you take on the role of a scheming archfiend in Hell, vying to become its next ruler. Originally released in an earlier incarnation many years ago, the 2024 release finally gave me an excuse to dive in, and it is a game I have been curious about for quite some time.

At its core, Solium Infernum sits somewhere between a 4X game and grand strategy, mixing warfare, sorcery, and political intrigue as the main tools for advancement. It is not a game about rapid expansion or overwhelming force, but about positioning, timing, and outmaneuvering your rivals. In that sense it immediately sets itself apart from most of the genre.

The game is wonderfully atmospheric, with a very distinct visual style and art direction that fits its infernal setting perfectly. It does a solid job of onboarding new players: the tutorial is competent, the in-game Codex is excellent and explains every system in detail, and there is also a healthy supply of community-made guides and videos for those who want to dig deeper.

The map is a hex grid that wraps around on all sides, effectively forming a globe. Everything is visible from the start, which neatly removes the “explore” part of the traditional 4X formula. What remains is a game far more focused on diplomacy, intrigue, and careful planning than on discovery or raw expansion.

Warfare exists, but it is deliberately constrained. Before declaring a full blood feud—essentially open war—you must first succeed in vendettas, smaller and more limited conflicts. Only blood feuds allow you to assault an opponent’s stronghold and eliminate them entirely. This structure makes open conflict costly and deliberate, rather than something you fall into by default.

The emphasis on diplomacy and intrigue is one of the game’s strongest features. Schemes, threats, favors, and sorcery often matter more than armies, and neglecting these systems can leave even a militarily powerful archfiend dangerously exposed. Focusing too heavily on Wrath, for example, may make you strong on the battlefield, but vulnerable to manipulation, curses, or political isolation.

Victory is determined by prestige at the end of a fixed number of turns. Almost everything you do—warfare, plotting, diplomacy, sorcery—can generate prestige, but it is also a finite resource with competing uses. You can spend prestige to acquire greater titles and ranks, each conferring powerful bonuses, but the same prestige is also what ultimately decides the winner. Go too far in one direction, and you risk weakening your final position.

Another important constraint is the action economy. Each turn gives you only a limited number of actions, and the main way to expand that is by raising one of the core powers—Wrath, Deceit, Prophecy, Destruction, or Charisma—to level four. Since you usually start with modest values across the board, choosing which powers to invest in becomes a key strategic decision.

The game vaguely reminds me of an old Swedish board game, The Hell Game, where you also played a devil competing for dominance in Hell. Solium Infernum, however, feels far more balanced and refined, with its systems tightly interlocking rather than pulling in different directions.

So far I have mostly experimented with a more war-focused archfiend, and even there the game has consistently pushed back, forcing me to engage with intrigue and diplomacy whether I wanted to or not. That balancing act is part of what makes the game compelling, and I am very much looking forward to trying other archfiends and playstyles.

Solium Infernum is not a game about conquest for its own sake. It is about manipulation, restraint, and choosing the right moment to act. In a genre often dominated by expansion and optimization, that alone makes it feel refreshingly infernal.

The Singularity Is Nearer — Acceleration, Optimism, and Uneasy Futures

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer is an easy book to misread before even opening it. One could be tempted to dismiss it as the wishful thinking of an aging technologist doubling down on ideas he has championed for decades. Yet that would be unfair. Whatever one thinks of Kurzweil’s conclusions, his arguments are not built on vague optimism but on long-running trends in technology, economics, and human development.

At the heart of Kurzweil’s worldview lies what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns: the idea that technological progress does not advance linearly, but exponentially. Each generation of technology provides the tools to develop the next one faster, leading to a compounding effect. This is not a fringe idea. Variations of it have been articulated by others, such as Lars Tvede in Supertrends, and it has historical support across multiple industrial revolutions.

Moore’s Law is the most familiar expression of this phenomenon. While transistor density on chips is no longer doubling as predictably as it once did, the more relevant metric—computing power per dollar—continues to improve at an exponential pace. Advances in specialized hardware, parallel computing, cloud infrastructure, and software efficiency have kept the broader trend alive. This sustained acceleration is one of the key enablers behind today’s rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

A Broader Book Than Expected

Although the singularity—Kurzweil’s projected moment when machine intelligence surpasses and merges with human intelligence—is the book’s central thesis, it is not the book’s sole focus. In fact, much of The Singularity Is Nearer reads as a wide-ranging survey of technological and societal progress. Artificial intelligence serves as the connective tissue, touching nearly every domain Kurzweil discusses: medicine, energy, manufacturing, education, and cognition itself.

In that sense, the book revisits familiar territory explored in works like Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus and Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s Soonish. Kurzweil’s approach, however, is more explicitly cumulative: each chapter stacks evidence to support the claim that progress is not only continuing, but accelerating.

The early sections focus heavily on empirical trends meant to counter widespread pessimism. Kurzweil draws extensively on Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and research associated with Daniel Kahneman to argue that, by almost any long-term measurable metric—life expectancy, poverty, literacy, violence—the world has improved dramatically over the last two centuries.

Why, then, does it feel to many as though things are getting worse?

Kurzweil points to well-known cognitive biases. Human perception is tuned to detect sudden changes rather than slow, incremental improvements, because abrupt changes historically posed the greatest survival risks. We are also prone to extrapolating broad conclusions from vivid individual events. A single disaster, or a string of emotionally charged news stories, can outweigh years of gradual improvement in our mental accounting.

Modern media ecosystems amplify this effect. News and social platforms are optimized for attention and engagement, not statistical context. With global coverage, there is always a catastrophe somewhere, ready to be framed as evidence of decline. The result is a persistent mismatch between subjective perception and objective trends. Life may feel more chaotic, even as it becomes safer, healthier, and more prosperous in aggregate.

Automation, Work, and Disruption

Kurzweil is clear-eyed about the disruptions ahead. Automation and AI will render many existing professions obsolete, just as previous waves of industrialization did. Historically, machines often replaced skilled labor with lower-skilled labor augmented by tools. What may be different this time is that many newly created roles could demand higher levels of abstraction, adaptability, and technical literacy.

This raises serious questions about reskilling. It is one thing to say that new jobs will appear; it is another to expect displaced workers to transition smoothly into them, especially when the required skills differ radically from what came before. From the perspective of someone losing their livelihood, abstract assurances about future job creation offer limited comfort.

Kurzweil acknowledges that such transitions generate political tension and uncertainty. Technological change does not occur in a social vacuum. Even if the long-term outcome is positive, the short- and medium-term disruptions can be painful and destabilizing.

Measuring Progress in a Digital Economy

One of the more interesting arguments in the book concerns our metrics for economic success. As automation and digitalization increase, traditional measures like GDP and productivity become less informative. Many digital services generate enormous value while contributing almost nothing to GDP—Wikipedia being the canonical example.

Digital goods can be replicated at near-zero marginal cost, breaking the traditional link between production cost and price. As a result, economic growth increasingly manifests as improved quality, accessibility, and abundance rather than monetary exchange. This complicates policy decisions and public debates that still rely on 20th-century economic indicators.

Kurzweil briefly touches on containerization as an earlier example of invisible but transformative infrastructure. That aside immediately reminded me of Marc Levinson’s The Box, a book that has been sitting unread on my shelf for far too long. It is a useful parallel: some of the most impactful innovations reshape the world quietly, without capturing public imagination at the time.

Extending the Mind

Ultimately, Kurzweil’s path to the singularity runs through the extension of human cognition. First via external tools—AI assistants, neural interfaces, and cognitive augmentation—and eventually, perhaps, through fully digital or simulated minds. These ideas are no longer confined to science fiction. Robin Hanson’s The Age of Em explores similar territory with unsettling rigor.

Kurzweil includes several thought experiments around identity, continuity, and consciousness. While fascinating, they deserve deeper treatment than a single post can provide. I suspect I will return to these questions in the future, especially as they intersect with debates around AI alignment and digital personhood.

Cautious Optimism

I do not fully share Kurzweil’s confidence in timelines or inevitability. But I do find his general direction persuasive. The world is improving in measurable ways, even as it faces profound challenges. Kurzweil does not deny those challenges; he emphasizes that outcomes depend as much on social and political choices as on technology itself. Progress is not automatic, and it is certainly not evenly distributed.

There are also broader risks that Kurzweil touches on only lightly—issues explored in greater depth by authors like Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence) and Olle Häggström (Here Be Dragons). These concerns are real, and they complicate any straightforward narrative of technological salvation.

Still, The Singularity Is Nearer paints a compelling picture: not of an inevitable utopia, but of a future shaped by accelerating capability and human decision-making. I remain uncertain about the destination, but increasingly convinced that the trajectory Kurzweil describes is broadly correct. Whether it leads somewhere hopeful—or somewhere catastrophic—will depend less on the machines than on us.

The Icepick Surgeon – Sam Kean

Sam Kean’s The Icepick Surgeon is a collection of loosely connected stories from the history of science, focusing on figures whose work sits somewhere between ambition, moral blindness, and outright harm. In tone and structure it is reminiscent of books like John Gribbin’s Science: A History or Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, though Kean’s approach is far more narrative-driven and character-focused. Like those books, it broadly moves forward in time, but with a much narrower scope.

Kean frames the book around twelve themes, each anchored by a “mad scientist” or morally questionable figure. That framing immediately invites certain expectations. Who doesn’t enjoy the mad scientist trope—megalomaniacal brilliance, dangerous ideas, intellect unrestrained by ethics? What the book mostly delivers instead are far more mundane characters: often mediocre, self-serving, and convinced—at least outwardly—that they were doing good. In that sense, the book becomes less about brilliance run amok and more about how ordinary human flaws, combined with authority and weak oversight, can lead to horrifying outcomes. The road to hell and good intentions, and all that.

The narrative style is one of the book’s strengths. Kean is a good storyteller, and he does an admirable job of weaving the different lives and topics together, giving the book a clear red thread despite its episodic structure. That same accessibility, however, may also explain why I found myself preferring Gribbin or Bryson overall. Readers without a strong background or interest in science may well find Kean’s approach more engaging.

One recurring issue is tone. At times the book almost reeks of moral indignation, which can become tiresome. Kean explicitly acknowledges, in at least one chapter, that people should be judged by the standards of their own time—and even notes that practices we consider acceptable today will likely horrify future generations. Yet in many other chapters he seems to do precisely the opposite, judging historical figures against modern ethical standards. While some of the material is genuinely horrifying—especially considering that much of it took place less than a century ago—the inconsistency is noticeable. It leaves you wondering whether humanity has meaningfully improved, or whether we have merely polished a thin veneer of civilization over the same underlying savagery.

The individual chapters vary significantly in how well they align with the book’s stated theme. The opening chapter on piracy, centered on William Dampier—buccaneer, explorer, and early biologist—is among the most interesting, precisely because it shows how scientific curiosity and moral ambiguity can coexist in the same individual.

Other chapters are less successful. The chapter on slavery, for example, adds little that is new, focusing narrowly on the horrors of the triangular trade without placing it in a broader historical context or meaningfully connecting it to modern forms of near-slavery. It also feels more indirect in its connection to science, making it less compelling than most other entries.

The chapter on murder, while engaging, reads more like true crime than an exploration of ethical failure in science. Similarly, the espionage chapter—centered on Harry Gold and the Manhattan Project—is fascinating in its own right but feels only loosely connected to the “mad scientist” framing. A brief but sharp detour into Lysenkoism momentarily brings the theme back into focus before the chapter returns to Gold’s tragic personal fate.

The chapter on lobotomy is perhaps the most chilling of the book, especially in light of recent reading on consciousness and materialism. The brain’s resilience is remarkable, but the casual certainty with which irreversible damage was inflicted in the name of progress is deeply unsettling.

The torture chapter, focusing on Henry Murray and Ted Kaczynski, also feels somewhat misaligned. Kaczynski is clearly the more compelling figure, which shifts the focus away from scientific malpractice and toward biography and consequence.

The final chapters on malpractice and fraud move into much more recent history and will likely feel familiar to most readers, unlike some of the more obscure figures earlier in the book. Their proximity in time makes them easier to relate to, but also less surprising.

Overall, The Icepick Surgeon is an engaging and often disturbing read, held together by strong storytelling and a clear narrative voice. Its thematic focus wavers at times, and the moral framing can feel uneven, but it succeeds in reminding the reader how easily science, ambition, and ethical failure can become entangled. Even when it doesn’t fully work, it remains interesting—and perhaps that is its greatest strength.

Reading in 2025: A Year of Cyberwar, Consciousness, and Familiar Comforts

As the year draws to a close, it feels like a good moment to look back at what I’ve been reading. As usual, the list is a mix of fiction and non-fiction, comfort rereads and long-overdue titles finally crossed off the list. Nothing this year was truly life-changing, but several books were quietly excellent—and a few were notable for less flattering reasons.

In total, I read 39 books in 2025, split almost evenly between fiction and non-fiction:

• Fiction: 19

• Non-fiction: 20

The balance felt right, even if the non-fiction titles ended up leaving the strongest overall impression.

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Highlights and Lowlights

Best Non-Fiction

Andy Greenberg – Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

This was the standout book of the year. Sandworm is both gripping and unsettling, and it genuinely made me rethink how fragile modern society is. Reading it in the aftermath of events like the 2024 CrowdStrike outage—and the Cloudflare outage in November—only reinforced how vulnerable critical infrastructure has become, even without malicious intent.

Closely behind was Bryan Burrough’s Barbarians at the Gate, which remains a masterclass in business journalism and corporate absurdity.

Worst Non-Fiction

Sam Parnia – Lucid Dying

Not a terrible book, but deeply frustrating. The topic is fascinating, yet the scientific rigor just isn’t there. It leans too heavily on speculation and anecdote, which makes it hard to take seriously.

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Best Fiction

Steven Brust – Tsalmoth

Nothing in fiction this year truly blew me away, but Tsalmoth was consistently strong and rewarding. That said, it shared the podium with Steven Brust’s Lyorn and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric novellas, which were equally enjoyable in quieter, more understated ways.

Worst Fiction

Laurell K. Hamilton – Circus of the Damned

This one stood out for the wrong reasons. While some of the earlier Anita Blake novels still have some charm, this entry mostly felt like a slog.

Best Re-read

William Gibson – Neuromancer

Returning to Neuromancer was a reminder of just how sharp and influential it still is. Even decades later, it feels more modern than many books written long after it.

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Oddities, Influences, and Reading Chains

The oddest book of the year was probably Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Not bad—just deeply strange. It didn’t linger with me the way UBIK (which I read last year) did, but it’s unmistakably PKD in all the right and wrong ways.

Several books this year also acted as gateways to further reading. John Strausbaugh’s The Wrong Stuff was excellent and directly responsible for me picking up both Ignition! by John Drury Clark and A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith. It also pushed Eric Berger’s Liftoff higher up my to-read list.

On the non-fiction side, Sandworm made me add Kim Zetter’s Countdown to Zero Day to my reading list—though I haven’t quite gotten there yet.

I’d also strongly recommend Yuval Noah Harari’s books to almost anyone. Reading Sapiens and Homo Deus reminded me of the sense of wide-eyed curiosity I had when first reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything years ago.

Finally, the book that had been on my reading list the longest was Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine. It’s been there since I read Snow Crash roughly a decade ago, and it felt oddly satisfying to finally get to it.

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Complete Reading List (Alphabetical by Author)

Dan Abnett

• Xenos

• Malleus

• Hereticus

Susan Blackmore

• The Meme Machine

Steven Brust

• Tsalmoth

• Lyorn

• Agyar

Lois McMaster Bujold

• The Physicians of Vilnoc

• Masquerade in Lodi

Jim Butcher

• Death Masks

Bryan Burrough

• Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

Bryan Caplan

• The Case Against Education

Harry Cliff

• Space Oddities

Aubrey Clayton

• Bernoulli’s Fallacy

John Drury Clark

• Ignition!

Daniel C. Dennett

• Consciousness Explained

Philip K. Dick

• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

William Gibson

• Neuromancer

Andy Greenberg

• Sandworm

Dashiell Hammett

• The Maltese Falcon

Yuval Noah Harari

• Sapiens

• Homo Deus

Laurell K. Hamilton

• The Laughing Corpse

• Circus of the Damned

Sabine Hossenfelder

• Lost in Math

Erik Hoel

• The World Behind the World

Sam Kean

• The Icepick Surgeon

Sarah Monette

• A Theory of Haunting

Thomas Nagel

• What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Sam Parnia

• Lucid Dying

Anthony Price

• The Alamut Ambush

M.R. Sellars

• Harm None

Anil Seth

• Being You

Ola Skogäng

• Mumiens blod

• De förlorade sidornas bok

• I dödsskuggans dal

John Strausbaugh

• The Wrong Stuff

Kelly Weinersmith

• Soonish

• A City on Mars

Martha Wells

• Queen Demon

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Closing Thoughts

2025 wasn’t a year of dramatic literary revelations, but it was a solid, thoughtful reading year. The non-fiction in particular stood out, often leaving me with more questions than answers—which is usually a good sign. If nothing else, this year reinforced how much I enjoy following threads from one book to the next, letting curiosity rather than novelty guide what I read next.

If next year manages to surprise me a bit more, all the better—but this was time well spent.

Rereading The Wheel of Time Alongside the TV Adaptation

With the release of the Wheel of Time TV adaptation, I’ve tried to reread each book before its corresponding season airs—not just to spot divergences from the source material, but also to notice where the show genuinely improves on the original. And in many ways, it does. If there’s one thing the adaptation has highlighted for me, it’s just how uneven the pacing of the novels can be. On reread, the series often twists and loops without really moving forward, especially in the later middle volumes.

First Encounters: 1992 and the Swedish Editions

My first experience with The Wheel of Time was the Swedish translation of The Eye of the World back in 1992. Like many translated fantasy series of the time, each book was split into two volumes—something that may have made sense commercially or logistically, but from a reader’s perspective felt awkward. The breaks weren’t always at natural points in the narrative.

By the time I reached The Dragon Reborn, I grew tired of waiting for translations and switched to English around 1995. I quickly caught up, and A Crown of Swords became the first book I bought in English hardcover upon release.

Peaks and Valleys in the Early Books

Even then, I felt The Eye of the World stood above both The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn. I enjoyed the Battle of Falme and the climax in Tear, but much of the journey to those moments dragged. It’s interesting how strongly those impressions remain today.

Right now, I’m rereading The Shadow Rising—clearly I didn’t manage to finish it before the show’s third season arrived. But this book, together with The Fires of Heaven and Lord of Chaos, has always represented the high-water mark of the series for me. A Crown of Swords was still enjoyable, but unmistakably a step down. And from A Path of Daggers onward, the momentum slows to a crawl. By that point the magic had faded; I mostly continued because I wanted to see how it all ended.

Characters and Plotlines: What Still Works (and What Doesn't)

Rand’s chapters have always been the most engaging for me, followed by the Tanchico storyline—though even that is slow on the page. It compensates with moments of brilliance, such as Nynaeve’s confrontation with Moghedien late in The Shadow Rising. Perrin and the Two Rivers plotline, however, tested my patience more and more as the series progressed. That part of the narrative simply sprawled.

The TV adaptation made significant changes to the Tanchico arc, but the alterations generally tightened the pacing and improved the flow, even if I sometimes missed the texture of the books.

The Forsaken: Mystery Lost in Translation?

One of the biggest differences between the novels and the show is the portrayal of the Forsaken. On the page, they feel shadowy, ancient, and terrifying. On screen, some of that mystique is inevitably lost. Plotting in the shadows is difficult to convey visually without resorting to endless exposition, and the show understandably moves faster than Jordan’s prose allows.

The most jarring example for me has been the portrayal of Lanfear, especially in her interactions with Moiraine. Their dynamic on the show feels markedly different from the books. Still, the changes led to a striking confrontation in the season finale, which makes me suspect the writers may have had alternate plans for Moiraine’s arc. Considering how central she has become compared with her trajectory in The Fires of Heaven, that could have been intriguing. I never liked how that storyline played out in the books, especially how long it took to resolve.

Closing Thoughts

Rereading The Wheel of Time alongside the TV adaptation has been a surprising experience—part nostalgia, part reevaluation. The series remains a cornerstone of modern fantasy, but the show has, at times, exposed its weaknesses as much as it celebrates its strengths. Still, returning to these books after so many years has reminded me why they mattered in the first place, even if I now see them with clearer eyes.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? – Thomas Nagel

Having read several books on consciousness this year, I kept running into references to Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And really, who wouldn’t want to read something with a title like that? The piece itself is quite short, originally published as an article in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, but its influence far outweighs its length.

At its core, Nagel’s essay asks a deceptively simple question: even if we knew everything there is to know about a bat’s biology, neurology, and behavior, would that tell us what it is actually like to be a bat? His answer is essentially no. Bats experience the world through echolocation, a sensory mode so alien to us that we cannot meaningfully imagine it. We can describe the mechanisms, but the subjective experience—the what-it-is-like aspect—remains inaccessible.

Nagel uses this example to argue that consciousness has an irreducibly subjective component. No amount of objective, third-person description can fully capture first-person experience. This poses a serious challenge to reductive materialism, or at least to the idea that consciousness can be completely explained in purely physical terms.

The essay is important well beyond academic philosophy. It has played a significant role in discussions about animal consciousness, animal welfare, and the moral implications that follow from acknowledging subjective experience in non-human creatures. Judging by works like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, we still have a long way to go in taking those implications seriously. While those ethical questions matter, my own curiosity is mainly focused on the problem of consciousness itself—perhaps the biggest question of them all, and one that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember.

Ever since I first became seriously interested in science, and consciousness in particular, I have leaned toward materialism, even if I lacked the vocabulary to describe that position early on. The idea that the mind arises from physical processes has always seemed compelling to me, intuitive even. Reading Nagel, however, feels like encountering a carefully constructed obstacle in that path—one that cannot simply be waved away.

Looking back, I think part of my fascination with science and the mind came from science fiction. Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (L’Île mystérieuse) and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books were early favorites. Ideas like Mulan’s mind-reading abilities and the apparent inner lives of Asimov’s robots planted early questions about how minds work, what counts as thinking, and whether subjective experience could exist in non-human entities.

Nagel does not claim that materialism is false. Rather, he argues that our current physical theories may be fundamentally unsuited to explaining subjective experience. The problem, he suggests, may not be with consciousness itself, but with the conceptual tools we are using to approach it. That restraint—posing a problem without pretending to solve it—is part of what makes the essay so enduring.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? is not an easy or comforting read, despite its brevity. It leaves you with an unresolved tension: a recognition that consciousness is real, vivid, and central to our existence, and a simultaneous awareness that our best scientific explanations may never fully capture it. For anyone interested in consciousness, philosophy of mind, or the limits of scientific explanation, it remains essential reading—even fifty years on.

Agyar – Steven Brust

Agyar is something as unusual—and quietly impressive—as a vampire novel that never once uses the word vampire. Every hint is indirect, every clue oblique. Instead of being told what Agyar is, the reader is left to piece it together through small, carefully concealed references. That alone makes the novel intriguing: it reads like a mystery, where the truth slowly emerges through implication rather than exposition.

But Agyar is not just a mystery, nor merely an unconventional vampire novel. At its heart, it is also a love story—one that digs into ideas of redemption, the possibility of goodness in something fundamentally monstrous, and the question of whether love can redeem evil, or at least restrain it.

I find myself wondering how the book was originally marketed, because it would be fascinating to read it entirely cold, without knowing its genre in advance. That said, knowing that this is a vampire novel does not really diminish the experience. The pleasure lies in the journey—spotting the clues, appreciating the restraint, and watching Brust trust the reader to keep up.

As ever, Brust’s prose is a delight. Even when the story itself did not fully grip me, I found myself smiling at turns of phrase and enjoying the act of reading. With Brust, the telling is often as important as the tale being told, and Agyar is no exception.

Agyar himself is clearly not a nice man. He does horrible things, and Brust never really lets the reader forget that. Yet his constant fight against his own animal instincts—his attempts at restraint and self-control—does engender sympathy. He is not redeemed by denial of what he is, but by resistance to it. The final scenes of the book, in particular, do a great deal to redeem him in the eyes of the reader, even if they do not absolve him.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is following Agyar’s internal journey. He begins in a kind of weary indifference—to his fate, to the trap that has been set for him, and perhaps even to himself. Slowly, that indifference gives way to a need to act, fueled largely by love. Even though he is ultimately unable to fully change what is coming, the Agyar who faces his fate at the end of the book is not the same one we meet at the beginning.

Structurally, the book has a diary-like format, with each chapter presented as typed recollections of recent events. The narrative jumps around, as diaries tend to do, which adds to the slightly aimless feel of the story and mirrors Agyar’s own drifting existence. It works well thematically, even if it occasionally makes the story feel meandering.

That said, I did not find Agyar as compelling as Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels or his other Dragaeran books. I enjoyed those more overall. Still, it is always interesting to see Brust stretch himself, demonstrating the breadth of his talent and his willingness to try something different.

This does make it a difficult book to recommend. It is far from an ideal entry point for readers new to Brust, and it is probably not a great choice for someone actively seeking traditional vampire fiction. Agyar sits somewhat awkwardly between categories.

Thematically, the novel explores familiar territory: what it means to be human, questions of morality, and the blurred lines between good and evil. These are staples of good horror. While Brust does not necessarily break new ground here, the way he approaches these ideas—quietly, indirectly, and with a surprising tenderness—keeps them interesting.

As is often the case when Brust experiments, the results are mixed—at least for me. The book is unlike almost anything else I have read, which I admire, even if it does not always work. I can easily see how some readers might find it slow or even boring. Much depends on what expectations one brings into the book.

In the end, Agyar is an interesting and thoughtful experiment. It may not be my favourite Brust novel, but it is a compelling meditation on restraint, love, and redemption—and a reminder that even monsters can change, if only a little, before the end.

Reading for the Kids

Most of the reading I do for the kids happens during the school year. Once summer rolls around, routines dissolve and bedtime becomes more of a suggestion than a rule. During term time, though, reading is firmly embedded in the bedtime ritual, and these days it mainly revolves around the two youngest. The oldest can read on his own now, and finding a book that would genuinely work for all three would be a herculean task. It is hard enough to find something that both a soon-to-be six-year-old and a nine-year-old will enjoy.

Reading aloud comes with its own set of challenges.

There is the constant stream of questions. Some of them are about words they do not understand, which is good and something I actively want to encourage, even if it breaks the rhythm of the story. Others come from drifting focus, or from a need to comment on everything. It can be frustrating, but it is also part of the experience.

Then there is the difficulty of following the story when reading for two very different listeners. One has a tendency to fall asleep within five seconds, the other can produce an impressive list of reasons why sleep is impossible tonight. Some evenings we barely make it through a couple of pages. Other nights we push on despite someone clearly being asleep, because the other is still listening intently. Given that, I can understand if the story sometimes feels hard to keep track of from their perspective.

I also remember from my own childhood that listening to someone read can actually be harder than reading yourself. Attention wanders more easily. I have very vivid memories of reading as a kid, where a sentence would spark the imagination, and suddenly you would find yourself half a page further down with no idea what you had just read. I suspect the same thing happens now, just in a different form.

We recently finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which means I have now reread it for the third time, but this time for the benefit of the youngest. To try something that would appeal more to her—she has been a bit lukewarm about Harry Potter—we moved on to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They have seen the Wonka movie, but not Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We have read Matilda and Boy: Tales of Childhood, and they have seen The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, so Roald Dahl felt like a safe bet.

So far it seems to be working, even if the book is noticeably bleaker than I remembered. Children in poverty, miserable circumstances, and neglect, who somehow triumph anyway, is a recurring theme. It is not subtle, but it is powerful, and I can see why it resonates.

We will probably finish Charlie and the Chocolate Factory before the school holidays. After that, the plan is to return to Astrid Lindgren in January. Emil was a clear hit when we read it earlier, and we have dipped into Pippi Longstocking now and then with reasonable success. Revisiting Pippi feels like a good idea. I am also toying with the thought of introducing them to Just William, though I am not entirely sure how well it will land.

As with most things when it comes to reading for kids, the real challenge is not the books themselves, but timing, attention, and finding the right story at the right moment. When it works, though, it is still very much worth the effort.

Revisiting Anita Blake – Urban Fantasy’s Early Pulse and Why the Magic Faded

I started reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series sometime in the late 90s. My memory is fuzzy on the exact year, but I clearly remember hitting Obsidian Butterfly (2000) when it was only available in hardcover—always a sign that I’d caught up with a series that was still very much alive and kicking.

At the time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was arguably the coolest thing on TV, and I suspect it nudged me toward picking up Anita Blake. Long before “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” became marketing categories, Hamilton was quietly shaping both genres. In hindsight, Anita Blake was probably the seed that later pushed me to try Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files—a series that ended up being much more my style.

From Gritty Detective Horror to Paranormal Romance

What initially drew me into the Anita Blake books was the blend of detective fiction, horror, and a touch of supernatural noir. Anita worked crime scenes. She raised the dead. She hunted monsters. It felt like a gritty cousin of Buffy’s monster-of-the-week formula, but darker and more adult.

Somewhere along the line, the tone shifted. Or perhaps it was always there, simmering under the surface and I just didn’t notice until it spilled over. But by the time Narcissus in Chains rolled around, the series had fully transformed into something else—something much more romance-first and, to my tastes, far less compelling. The shift felt sudden from my perspective, even if the breadcrumbs had been there all along.

Hamilton clearly discovered her core audience and leaned into it. No shame in that, but it was no longer the series I had signed up for, and I drifted away shortly after.

Returning to Where It Started

I reread Guilty Pleasures about a decade ago, but the experience didn’t stick. More recently, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I picked up books two and three again. Maybe I wanted to see whether the early spark I remembered was still there.

The short answer: not really.

The dialogue was far more stilted than I remembered, the characters thinner, and the pace frantic enough that I occasionally felt the pages were trying to outrun me. That said, the action and horror elements still hold up remarkably well, and the violence is much more graphic than I recalled—which makes the later pivot to paranormal romance feel all the more jarring.

Book three, Circus of the Damned, also introduces Richard Zeeman, kicking off the love triangle that would eventually swallow the series whole. Perhaps I was reading these books for the wrong reasons, but that trope always grated on me.

A Curious Absence From the Screen

Given how foundational Anita Blake was to shaping early 2000s urban fantasy, it’s genuinely surprising the series never made it to TV. Had it come out ten years later, during the boom of streaming-first supernatural shows, I think it would’ve been a prime candidate for adaptation.

And honestly, I suspect a TV version would have diverged heavily from the later romance-heavy arcs and stayed closer to the early crime/horror tone—much like how The Expanse, The Witcher, and Game of Thrones were reshaped for broader audiences.

Will I Keep Rereading?

I’m not feeling the old magic, but I may still push on with another couple of books to see where the reread takes me. Even flawed rereads have a certain nostalgic gravity. And there’s something oddly comforting in revisiting the stories that shaped our reading habits, even if they land differently decades later.

Maybe that’s worth a future post in itself—why we reread, and what we expect to find when we go back.

Rediscovering Hard Science Fiction – and Why “Fantasy in Space” Doesn’t Quite Scratch the Same Itch

For a long time I drifted away from hard science fiction—at least the kind of SF driven by ideas rather than space wizards, space empires, or fantasy tropes wearing chrome-plated armour. Then last year I picked up Greg Egan’s Permutation City, and something clicked back into place. The same part of my brain that lit up as a kid reading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 or Rendezvous with Rama suddenly woke up again.

There’s nothing quite like that particular flavour of SF: the big-idea, mind-bending, concept-driven storytelling where the central engine of wonder is thought itself. And yet, over the past decade, only a handful of books scratched that itch. Charles Stross’s Glasshouse did it. Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief did it. But many other “SF” titles I picked up turned out to be… something else entirely.

Fantasy in Space – And Why It Sometimes Works (and Sometimes Doesn’t)

A lot of modern speculative fiction marketed as science fiction is essentially fantasy with spaceships. I don’t say this as criticism; some of these books are among my favourites. Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series? Brilliant. C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy? Atmospheric, dark, and compelling.

But both could easily be rewritten without a single starship and they would still work just fine. Their core mechanics, worldbuilding, and themes operate independently of scientific logic. They rely on magic—explicit or implicit—not on speculative extrapolation of technology or physics.

And honestly, I often find “fantasy in space” more palatable than hybrids that try to blend the two directly. Works where magic and science operate side by side tend to break my suspension of disbelief, not because I’m a purist, but because the rules start to contradict each other. Magic that violates fundamental physics is hard to reconcile with a world that simultaneously wants me to take its science seriously.

Yes, Clarke’s Third Law tells us that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But that only helps if the magic is technology, or at least behaves like technology. If it’s just magic labeled as science, the illusion falls apart quickly.

When Magic Is Science After All

There are brilliant exceptions where the boundary between science and magic becomes the point. Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and Jack Vance’s Dying Earth both present decaying far-future worlds where what looks like magic is revealed (or strongly implied) to be technology forgotten by time.

This “magic-as-misunderstood-science” feels more honest, in a way. It leans into Clarke’s Law while preserving internal logic. And it’s far more satisfying than pretending that gravity-manipulating sorcery or soul-binding rituals somehow coexist with real-world physics.

A Personal Contradiction: Why I Still Prefer Star Wars to Star Trek

Given all this, it’s always been ironic that I prefer Star Wars over Star Trek. If anything violates the science/magic separation, it’s Star Wars. The Force is magic, plain and simple. Hyperspace travel has no scientific grounding whatsoever. And the midichlorian detour in the prequels—an attempt to rationalise the irrational—only made things worse.

And yet… I’m far more forgiving with films. Different medium, different expectations. Movies aren’t trying to build rigorous speculative frameworks. They thrive on myth, archetype, image, and emotion. Books invite slow thinking; films ask for fast feeling. So I let Star Wars be a fairy tale in space, and I don’t demand the same internal logic from it that I expect from a science-fiction novel.

Returning to the Big Ideas

Maybe this is why Permutation City hit me so hard when I picked it up last year. It reminded me how powerful idea-driven SF can be when it takes itself seriously enough to follow its implications all the way down. And how rare that experience has become.

It also reminded me that there’s space—pun unavoidable—for all of it: the hard SF that bends your brain, the fantasy that hides in a spacesuit, and even the space operas that don’t care about physics at all. But every once in a while, it’s nice to return to the works that treat science and thought experiments as their true protagonists.

Wheel of Time, Season One – Looking Back Now That the Wheel Has Stopped Turning

Back in the late 90s, long before streaming giants ruled the world, fans of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time spent countless hours dream-casting our hypothetical TV series. I imagine it was a fun exercise precisely because no one genuinely believed it would happen. The sheer scale of the world, the sprawling cast, and a plot that twisted and meandered for fourteen books made it seem almost impossible to adapt in any satisfying way.

Then A Game of Thrones arrived and rewrote the rules. Suddenly every fantasy property with even a hint of brand recognition was being eyed for adaptation. The Witcher, Shannara Chronicles, and The Wheel of Time all rode that wave—each one an attempt, to varying degrees, to capture their own version of HBO’s lightning in a bottle.

Now, with the Wheel of Time show apparently dead after its third season, I find myself revisiting that first season with mixed feelings. The show had started to find its footing—even while diverging more and more from the source material—and it’s a strange thing to see it end just as it was beginning to feel like its own creation.

The Mountain of Expectations

I’ve always approached adaptations as separate works. Even the best ones—The Expanse being a rare exception—tend to fall short when compared page-to-screen. Still, somewhere deep down I hoped the series might recapture a bit of the wonder I felt when I first read The Eye of the World now close to thirty-five years ago. Not because the books were flawless (they were absolutely not great literature, even teenage me knew that), but because they were formative.

So when Season One arrived in 2021, I watched with cautious optimism.

Early Choices: Some Sensible, Some Strange

Some adaptation choices made perfect sense. Aging up the main cast was understandable, if only to avoid continuity nightmares when young actors age faster than their characters.

But other changes were harder to swallow. Perrin being married—and then killing his wife in the first episode—felt like manufactured drama rather than meaningful storytelling. It was jarring, unnecessary, and added nothing to his character beyond shock value.

The Mat situation didn’t help either. With Barney Harris leaving mid-production, the show rewrote his arc on the fly, and it showed. I don’t envy the writers here; there was likely no good solution available, but the result was messy and fans noticed.

On the positive side, I agreed with the need to streamline. Cutting travel bloat and simplifying subplots helped the pacing considerably. The books were notoriously uneven in places, especially early on, and trimming the fat made sense.

What Season One Got Right

Up until the finale, I was genuinely enjoying the season. It balanced nostalgia with a more modern pace, and it kept enough of the spirit of the books to feel familiar. The decision to merge The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn later (in Season Two) was also smart—those novels dragged in ways that didn’t add much to the core narrative. If only we could have seen the Stone of Tear on screen.

But for the first season specifically, the show’s strongest achievement was unquestionably the Children of the Light. The books often portrayed them as cartoonishly rigid; the show gave them nuance, menace, and presence in a way Jordan never quite did.

And yes, I’m happy to say goodbye to certain things: the incessant braid-tugging, the battle-of-the-sexes banter that aged badly, and the trio of boys endlessly assuming the others understood women better. None of that needed to survive the transition.

The Finale: The Wheel Stumbles

Then came the last episode.

The pacing collapsed, major plot beats were rushed, and the internal logic seemed to evaporate. After a surprisingly strong run, the finale felt like a patchwork of ideas forced together without enough time or clarity. It wasn’t unwatchable, but it was deeply unsatisfying—and it overshadowed much of the careful work that led up to it.

Now That the Wheel Has Stopped Turning

Knowing now that the series won’t continue past Season Three adds a bittersweet layer to the whole experience. Just as the show was beginning to carve out its own identity—separate from the books but increasingly confident—it seems we won’t see where that path was leading.

I’m left with mixed feelings. Season One was uneven but promising. It stumbled at the end, but there was enough there to give me hope. And now, with the show’s turning cut short, that hope will have to remain unresolved.

Maybe I’ll revisit Seasons Two and Three in future posts. For now, Season One stands as a reminder of how difficult it is to bring a world like the Wheel of Time to screen—and how, even when the result isn’t perfect, part of me is still glad someone tried.

Five Nights at Freddy’s and a Bit of Trend Spotting

I watched Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 with my oldest son today—mostly because he’s not quite old enough to watch it alone. Sitting there in the cinema, half following the film and half keeping an eye on his reactions, I found my mind drifting toward a few broader trends I’ve been noticing. To keep this post from sprawling into a book of its own, I’ll focus on one topic in particular: kids and reading. (Perhaps the other reflections will turn into future posts.)

Growing Up with Books vs. Growing Up with Screens

We put a lot of emphasis on getting our kids to read. With Luxembourgish schools exposing them to several languages, we don’t limit reading to only one. At home, for reasons too long to unpack here (but maybe worth a post at some point), English has become the primary family language—despite neither me nor my wife being native speakers. Unsurprisingly, English has also become the main language of reading.

When I was young, you could hardly pry books out of my hands. My wife was the same. There were long stretches of childhood when I’d spend entire afternoons—and sometimes evenings—devouring anything from fantasy novels to history books. Two or three hundred pages a day wasn’t unusual, and more on weekends.

I do think the pace of life has changed. It feels harder now for anyone—adult or child—to settle into hours of uninterrupted reading. Screens compete for attention on every front: streaming, games, phones, tablets, you name it. I had computers early on, but games were limited at first. Even later, when I had full access to Diablo, Civilization II, and anything else that would run on my trusty old PC, I kept reading. Gaming influenced my time, but it never replaced books.

Reading Aloud, Reading Together… but Not Reading Alone?

My own love of books was shaped very directly by my mother reading to me and my brother every single day. That ritual sparked the desire to read on my own, and once the spark was lit, it burned wildly. I now read to my younger kids almost every night. My youngest son constantly begs for “just one more chapter,” even when I strongly suspect it’s an elaborate bedtime-stalling tactic.

But unlike my childhood experience, the nightly reading didn’t automatically translate into them wanting to read solo. My brother never developed a love for reading either, so clearly environment isn’t everything.

The encouraging part is that my oldest son finally seems to have found his own rhythm. Completely unprompted, he’s now working his way through Sanderson’s Mistborn books—hardly the lightest material to start with. Watching that shift has made me reflect on how cyclical some of these concerns really are.

The Eternal Complaint About “Kids These Days”

Which brings me to a quote often attributed to Socrates:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority… They contradict their parents, chatter before company… and tyrannize their teachers.”

Whether or not Socrates actually said this (historians have their doubts), it perfectly captures a timeless truth: every generation is convinced the next one is doomed.

Maybe nothing fundamental has really changed. Maybe kids today aren’t less patient, less focused, or less book-inclined—they’re just growing up in a different environment, the same way we did, and the same way people did thousands of years ago. And parents—me included—will always worry, observe, overthink, and compare.

Closing Thoughts

If Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 accomplished anything beyond entertaining my son, it was giving me an excuse to reflect on these things. And seeing him voluntarily pick up hefty fantasy novels on his own feels like a reminder that interests can bloom in their own time.

Perhaps the real trend isn’t that kids have changed.

Perhaps it’s simply that we all eventually reach the age where we start sounding suspiciously like ancient philosophers.