Isaac Asimov published the novella “The Mule” in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1945. A few years later it became the second half of Foundation and Empire, the second book of the Foundation trilogy. Asimov’s Foundation books are among the most celebrated works in science fiction, crowned with a special Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series. There’s a lesson…
Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince was massively popular when it was published in 2018 – New York Times bestseller, millions of copies sold. It became a sensation in the romantasy world of BookTok, the short videos that galvanized the publishing industry after 2020. So recently the publisher released a “collector’s edition” with a velvet cover,…
Philip K Dick’s first published novel was Solar Lottery in 1955. It was a thirty five cent Ace paperback. If you flip the book over, there’s no back cover, there’s a different front cover, and it’s upside down. When you turn it right side up, it’s a novel by Leigh Brackett, The Big Jump. Solar Lottery and The Big Jump –…
Everything is getting worse. Cory Doctorow gave it a name three years ago: enshittification. Now he has written the best business book of the year, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. It will help you understand many things, oh so many things, about how and why the massive platforms are breaking…