Month: August 2026

Revelation Space

I first read Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space over 20 years ago on paperback (it is still up in my attic). Although I’d forgotten much of the plot, the ideas, scientific rigor of the author, rich characterisation and atmospheric scenes really resonated. I recently re-read it on Kindle and loved the worn, practical descriptions of the environments and ship interiors in the story. Very much in the vein of the “industrial gothic” / “used future” set designs from the Alien movies.

The plot line contained an element of archaeological mystery which I always find enjoyable. I’ll re-read the rest of the series as it has stood the test of time well and still feels original and fresh.

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin the writer of Earthsea was a recent holiday read for me. Although in the Sci-Fi genre the story was really focused on Politics, disinformation, and discrimination. I found similarities with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. With today’s controversies about transgender rights, the book was ahead of its time in describing a society where genders and roles change over time. The growing closeness under adversity between the two main protagonists was moving and convincing. This is an important book and should be on the reading list for anyone interested in the politics of repression.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the world’s most coveted microchip

Stephen Witt’s biography of Jensen Huang the founder of the graphics card company Nvidia which has become the market leader in the creation of GPUs used to power the modern world of AI. Earlier in my career, a colleague invested some time in learning CUDA, the capability provided on Nvidia graphics cards for performing more generic mathematical calculations that went beyond traditional 3D polygonal operations and ray tracing needed for games rendering.

Until reading this book, I’d no idea how packaging CUDA was such a big bet for Nvidia as it didn’t directly feed into their core gaming business at the time. Nvidia had to work hard to advocate with scientific researchers to start leveraging the capability for scientific research. Ultimately this positioned Nvidia to be at the vanguard of AI and LLM training. Good book, well worth a read.