#Review of The Transcendent Tide by Doug Johnstone @doug_johnstone @OrendaBooks @RandomTTours #BlogTour

The Transcendent Tide
By Doug Johnstone

Review by Louise Cannon

For those following the Enceladons Trilogy, this is the grand finale, of what has been a rather urgently relevant, yet entertaining read that’s just got better and better, with this final one being one of the best. Even if you aren’t into sci-fi, which isn’t a huge genre read for me, it has much more than aliens. There’s humanity and eco-awareness too.
Discover the blurb and my review below. thanks to being on the Random T. Tours blog tour and Orenda for supplying the book. Please note, all opinions are my own.

Blurb

It’s been eighteen months since the Enceladons escaped the clutches of an American military determined to exterminate the peaceful alien creatures.

Lennox and Vonnie have been lying low in the Scottish Highlands, Ava has been caring for her young daughter Chloe, and Heather is adjusting to her new life with Sandy and the other Enceladons in the Arctic Ocean, off the coast of Greenland. But fate is about to bring them together again for one last battle.

When Lennox and Vonnie are visited by Karl Jensen, a Norwegian billionaire intent on making contact with the Encedalons again, they are wary of subjecting the aliens to further dangers. But when word arrives that Ava’s daughter has suffered an attack and might die without urgent help, they reluctantly make the trip to Greenland, where they enlist the vital help of local woman Niviaq.

It’s not long before they’re drawn into a complex web of lies, deceit and death. What is Karl’s company really up to? Why are sea creatures attacking boats? Why is Sandy acting so strangely, and why are polar bears getting involved?

Profound, ambitious and immensely moving, The Transcendent Tide is the epic conclusion to the Encedalons Trilogy – a final showdown between the best and worst of humanity, the animal kingdom and the Encedalons. The future of life on earth will be changed forever, but not everyone will survive to see it…

Review

The Transcendent Tide couldn’t be more timely, with a certain US President kicking off, greedily looking at Greenland, one of the most important and vital countries to save planet earth, if left virtually untouched. I’ve always reckoned that nature will always win-out, not humans in the end and this book is a fine example of nature vs humans and makes stark points of why we need to work with, not always against it. Who will win, can there be any winners, will anything turn out alright in the end?

What Doug Johnstone has created is a deeply profound trilogy, which has grown even deeper still come this final book. The way he gets the most important points across, mixed with a bit of entertainment, is done to a highly skilled quality. It’s thought-provoking and intelligently done, so that, if you’re worldly aware, you can join the dots between the events that are happening in the book to what’s happening in the world with the ideas of certain world politicians.

There are twists and turns, secrets and lies which forms some of the entertaining parts of the book, not that this dilutes any of the important points, it does however add to the readability of the plot.

I highly recommend The Transcendent Tide and the previous 2 books in the trilogy.

#BookReview By Lou of Sundae Driver – A Story of Dan and Stan, with Zelda and the Welder By Jack Barrow @JackBarrowUK #SundaeDriver #Novella #ReadingCommunity

Sundae Driver – A Story of Dan and Stan, with Zelda and the Welder
By Jack Barrow

Quirky/urban fantasy, Sundae Driver, set in Blackpool asks the question “Would You Sell Your Soul To An Ice Cream Van? Sundae Driver is a novella within the Hidden Masters Universe.
Thanks to Jack Barrow for the novella to review. The first book I reviewed by him was In Sat Nav We Trust? He has a great way of writing and mixing the everyday with the quirky.

Blurb

Would you sell your soul for an ice cream van?

As Danny struggles to keep his ice cream van on the road he meets Stan, a mysterious stranger, at a crossroads, at midnight. Spitting in his palm Stan shakes on a deal with Danny to fix up Nellie, Danny’s rusty, vintage, ice cream van, and so, Danny’s life improves dramatically. But a few years on, Danny cannot understand why he can no longer face the daily routine of endless cheerful customers and excellent profits. Seeking supernatural advice Danny learns he has paid a price he did not agree to, but there is a solution. Can he fulfil the task to free himself from Stan and break his contract?

If you like supernatural antics with thoroughly silly twists, and unlikely characters, then you’ll enjoy Jack Barrow’s magickal adventures in modern Britain.

Get Sundae Driver today as an introduction to Jack’s Hidden Masters series.

Review

Sundae Driver is perhaps not what you’d expect an ice cream seller’s job to be. You don’t usually end up selling your soul nor having to get supernatural advice…
Set in Blackpool, readers meet Danny in Stanley Park. It’s the turn of the century and it’s not a great start, but he really wants to keep going with selling ice creams from Nellie, his beloved van, which needs an MOT. There’s a lot of hope for it to be able to stay on the roads. He then meets a stranger whom he gets talking to. Things change from there with some intriguing events and the mysterious Madam Zelda and instructions to a magic circle with a contract with his name on it. The odd events continue with a strange zombie and time travel.

Sundae Driver has an air of the quirky and a certain atmosphere hanging about it that draws you in. It’s a strange journey that readers are taken on throughout that is well-knitted together with a fast flow with humour. There are twists and turns that ensure you want to read to the end to find out what happens if you sell your soul and if Nellie, the ice cream van and Danny survives everything.

At just 91 pages, Sundae Driver is definitely worth a read if you’re looking for an entertaining novella different from the norm.

Purchase Link:
Amazon

*Please note I am not affiliated with the author or Amazon or any bookshop.

#Review of The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries and other amazing cosmic facts @iconbooks #TheMilkyWaySmellsOfRumAndRaspberries #Space #NonFiction

The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries
By Dr. Jillian Scudder

The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries is packed full of fun facts, for a start, who knew that’s what its aroma is! Find out more in the blurb and my review below.

Blurb

An offbeat guided tour of the Universe, focusing on weird and wonderful facts.

Astrophysicist Dr Jillian Scudder knows more than most of us what a surreal place the Universe can be. In this light-hearted book she delves into some of the more arcane facts that her work has revealed, and tells us how we have actually managed to discover these amazing truths.

Did you know: the galaxy is flatter than a sheet of paper; supermassive black holes can sing a super-low B flat; it rains iron on a brown dwarf, and diamonds on Neptune; you could grow turnips on Mars if its soil weren’t full of rocket fuel; the Universe is beige, on average; Jupiter’s magnetic field will short-circuit your spacecraft – and, of course, the Milky Way smells of rum and raspberries.

Review

Jam packed full of entertaining and yet mysteriously true facts about the universe we live in, The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries is a must for anyone’s book shelf. There’s lots to be learnt from it as well as footnotes of added humour. The layout and writing style makes this book accessible, even with its facts of complex discoveries. It opens up the universe like never before in a weird, interesting way with what is demonstrated and explained through facts and notions.

#Interview By Lou with Piotr Mirowski about his AI and his family show – A.L.Ex and the ImpRobots: an AI Show for Kids #EdFringeReview #AI #DeepMind #EdFringe24 #WhatsonEdin #WhatsonEdinburgh Venue 24

A.L.Ex and the ImpRobots: an AI Show for Kids

Interview By Lou with Piotr Mirowski from Deep Mind

What an honour it is to interview Piotr Mirowski, a scientist who works with A.I. for Deep Mind, a scientific company that is becoming increasingly known. I had not expected that! Here, we talk about the show and also some of the more burning questions of the day about AI, such as when it comes to jobs etc. I feel the answers are fascinating and important.

Let’s welcome to Bookmarks and Stages Piotr Mirowski

1. What can people expect from Artificial Intelligence Improvisation and from A.L.Ex and the ImpRobots: an AI Show for Kids?

Artificial Intelligence Improvisation and A.L.Ex and the ImpRobots! are two interactive live experiences featuring professional actors, cute real robots (an Aldebaran Nao), and various flavours of artificial intelligence on stage.

Artificial Intelligence Improvisation is our pioneering improv comedy show with AI: it is for a general audience and addresses conversations about human agency (some actors wear augmented reality glasses and are controlled by AI that sends them lines) or about deep fakes, and at the same it time showcases the ingenuity of human improvisers.

A.L.Ex and the Improbots! is a show for kids and the whole family where fellow young audience members learn fun facts about science and are invited on stage to co-create stories with robots.

In both our shows, Artificial Intelligence Improvisation, and A.L.Ex and the ImpRobots, language models give strange suggestions to human improvisers, giving them an opportunity to react, to incorporate the strange material and then to shine and to demonstrate their talents and sense of humour.

2. Why did you decide to cross science with comedy with an AI robot and what challenges did you have in setting this up?

Our primary aim is to leave audiences, and the younger generations, feeling empowered to critically engage with AI, and to directly explore for themselves through co-creation with the tool, rather than passively.

The show’s creators, Piotr Mirowski (that’s me!), Boyd Branch and Kory Mathewson are academics who are passionately engaged in communicating about science. We are also theatre actors who want to bridge disciplines. Their challenge is to explain, succinctly, the complexity of a fairly complex topic to the audiences, to give them back control over a key technology in their lives. When we started the shows, back in 2016, everything sounded new, from machine learning, to patterns, to biases in data. Today, most people have already tried experimenting with text and image generation via various apps.

The real challenges now, in a way, are to manage the very high expectations about what AI can do! In our very fast paced show, AI tries to react, live and in a fraction of a second, to the mayhem on the stage, and speech recognition and large language models really struggle to keep up!

3. How does it feel bringing a groundbreaking AI Improv show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival?

Kory and I actually brought Artificial intelligence Improvisation to Edinburgh in 2017. Kory (at the time studying for a PhD in robotics at the University of Alberta) and I were doing a duet with a twelve-inch robot and performed for a week at Surgeons’ Hall. The show was very experimental and very rough around the edges, but our friend Colin Mochrie (from Whose Line Is It Anyway?) came to see our show and had some good words about us.

We came back to Edinburgh last year and this year, to perform in a larger space at the Gilded Balloon. We encountered extremely supportive production and tech that made our tech-heavy show a (relative) breeze to get in and get out each day.

As a personification of the AI, our new robot is a bit larger this year, but it is extremely cute and gets lots of enthusiastic reactions from audiences or even from crowds when we take it out to flyer with us.

We’ve also seen amazing productions in Edinburgh that involved robots and AI. Shows that really marked us were the production of Spillikin at the Pleasance in 2015, of Siri by Laurence Dauphinais at Summerhall in 2017, or Robo Bingo by Foxdog Studios last year at Underbelly.

4. How much of an influence do you think AI will have on humans in the future?

I see AI primarily as a tool for search and discovery. We have seen inspiring examples of AI tools that can make predictions about the structure of proteins, predictions which can then be verified experimentally by chemists and biologists. I have worked on using AI for making weather predictions, helping expert meteorologists refine weather forecasts, with weather agencies now evaluating how AI can help predict the trajectory of hurricanes. We know artists who have been experimenting with AI tools and exploring the glitch aesthetic of their input to integrate this strange instrument in their process and create unique art.

5. Since working in the field of epileptic seizure predictions, mapping on smartphones and more for the likes of Bing etc, what made you decide to now join Deep Mind to work with AI in the artistic field in co-creations on stages?

The work of co-creation with AI for live theatre performance is done in my spare time and through my theatre troupe, Improbotics.

In my current job, I have worked on navigation, and in recent years, on weather forecasting and applications to climate modelling. However, my exposure to the theatre world inspired me to also focus on the ethical concerns when using AI in the context of the arts, and to evaluate the usefulness of language models as a tool for creative writing. Two years ago (before large language models became so popular), I ran workshops with screenwriters and playwrights trying to write with AI tools: their contrasting reviews were published at a conference on human-computer interaction. At the previous Fringe Festival, I took advantage of my presence in Edinburgh to interview comedians who had been using AI, to understand if large language models are aligned with the cultural values of comedians, and published findings at an AI ethics conference (spoiler alert: the comedians were not impressed).

6. Perhaps the question everyone really wants to know, since everyone talks about it, is: Many people in most industries are worried about their jobs as AI advances ever forwards, how does that make you feel and do you ever worry about your own job in this context?

I believe in the need for empathy and dialogue between developers and the rest of the civil society, in order for us to realise AI’s potential as a tool that benefits everyone.

My personal belief is that we all tend to underestimate the complexity of human activities (in particular when we are talking about other people’s jobs…) and that we forget the need for human connection and for sharing our lived experiences – which simply cannot be automated. The latter point was apparent when we interviewed comedians who had tried using AI for comedy writing.

For these reasons, I do not see AI as a substitute for work or for the process of writing, thinking and creation. I know that there is more to writing than merely putting words on a page, and there is more to computer science and engineering than merely writing lines of code. I believe there are better uses of AI than for the “automation of mediocrity” and am confident we can build a future where AI tools are used to help, not replace human activity.

Tickets here via The Edinburgh Fringe website: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/a-l-ex-and-the-improbots-present-an-ai-show-for-kids

#Interview By Lou with Piotr Mirowski about his AI and his family show – A.L.Ex and the ImpRobots: an AI Show for Kids #EdFringeReview #AI #DeepMind #EdFringe24 #WhatsonEdin #WhatsonEdinburgh Venue 24

A.L.Ex and the ImpRobots: an AI Show for Kids

Interview By Lou with Piotr Mirowski from Deep Mind

Let’s welcome to Bookmarks and Stages Piotr Mirowski

1. What can people expect from Artificial Intelligence Improvisation and from A.L.Ex and the ImpRobots: an AI Show for Kids?

A.L.Ex and the Improbots! is a show for kids and the whole family where fellow young audience members learn fun facts about science and are invited on stage to co-create stories with robots.

2. Why did you decide to cross science with comedy with an AI robot and what challenges did you have in setting this up?

3. How does it feel bringing a groundbreaking AI Improv show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival?

4. How much of an influence do you think AI will have on humans in the future?

The work of co-creation with AI for live theatre performance is done in my spare time and through my theatre troupe, Improbotics.

I believe in the need for empathy and dialogue between developers and the rest of the civil society, in order for us to realise AI’s potential as a tool that benefits everyone.

Tickets here via The Edinburgh Fringe website: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/a-l-ex-and-the-improbots-present-an-ai-show-for-kids

#Review by Lou of The Space Between Us By Doug Johnstone @doug_ johnstone @OrendaBooks @RandomTTours #MeetSandy #SF #HopePunk

The Space Between
By Doug Johnstone

The Space Between Us by Doug Johnstone (author of the much-loved series – The Skelfs) featured recently on BBC Between The Covers, presented By Sara Cox and I am delighted to be part of the blog tour with the blurb and review, thanks to Orenda Books and Random T. Tours. Today, I have the pleasure of closing the blog tour with a review.

Blurb

Lennox is a troubled teenager with no family.

Ava is eight months pregnant and fleeing her abusive husband.

Heather is a grieving mother and cancer sufferer. They don’t know each other, but when a meteor streaks over Edinburgh, all three suffer instant, catastrophic strokes …

…only to wake up the following day in hospital, miraculously recovered.

When news reaches them of an octopus-like creature washed up on the shore near where the meteor came to earth, Lennox senses that some extra-terrestrial force is at play.

With the help of Ava, Heather and a journalist, Ewan, he rescues the creature they call ‘Sandy’ and goes on the run.

But they aren’t the only ones with an interest in the alien … close behind are Ava’s husband, the police and a government unit who wants to capture the creature, at all costs. And Sandy’s arrival may have implications beyond anything anyone could imagine…

Review

The Space Between Us is rather different from The Skelf’s series, where my reading of Doug Johnstone’s books began. This is a bit sci-fi, rather than crime, which The Skelfs is. I have to say though, for someone, like me, who only dips in and out of sci-fi, like me, this is a very good and compelling book. It is more than just sci-fi. It is more about what connects people and their lives.

The Space Between Us is set in Edinburgh and what links 3 people is that that they suffer some strange after effects after a meteor hits and an odd creature emerges. There is Lennox, a troubled teenager with no family. He is 16 and of mixed-race and is being brought up in a home. You find him around Portobello. Ava is in Longniddrey, is pregnant and trying to escape an abusive husband and Heather is grieving and has cancer. Strange streaks occur in the sky and everyone is affected and then the next day, it is as though the strokes they suffered from didn’t happen.

It is an intriguing tale that also has readers sweeping across Scotland, around and out of Edinburgh and the city centre’s surrounding areas.
It also seems to be a premise of bringing “Sandy” the alien to earth and creating compassion to those who arrive in your country, wherever they come from seems to be one of the overarching messages. It becomes a story about community and an idea that there are perhaps bigger things than humans and bigger things that you’re living through right now. It seems that in the space between us is connections and that need for connections, however they are made and communicated, as well as place that is safe and to have a sense of belonging. Each character is seems to be desiring and needing this in what is a book full of different emotions. So, as much as it is sci-fi, there is also a human story running through it.

Having read The Space Between Us for review, thanks to Orenda Books and Random T. Tours who invited me to and provided a book, I was pleasantly surprised at how good this was, even though it is not my usual genre, more a genre I dip in and out of here and there. So, ultimately it is a book I recommend to both sci-fi fans and non-sci-fi fans alike.

About the Author

Doug Johnstone is the author of fourteen previous novels, most recently Black Hearts (2022). The Big Chill (2020) was longlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year and three of his books, A Dark Matter (2020), Breakers (2019) and The Jump (2015), have been shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year. He’s taught creative writing and been writer in residence at various institutions over the last decade, and has been an arts journalist for over twenty years.

Doug is a songwriter and musician with six albums and three EPs released, and he plays drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of writers. He’s also co-founder of the Scotland Writers Football Club, and has a PhD in nuclear physics.