Censorship, Wikipedia and manga online links

I have a few posts that link to various sites that provide free online viewing of manga. Recently, I've been getting DMCA notifications about "copyright infringement", therefore I am replacing them with Wikipedia links. I am aware that whoever sent those notifications is wrong, since they can't possible have copy rights for links of sites they do not control, but I am not going down that rabbit hole. Google still works, after all.

And speaking of Wikipedia, I've recently been to Turkey where I was shocked to see that the entire Wikipedia site is blocked. According to Wikipedia, the site is or was censored in one way or another in China, France, Germany, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan and Venezuela. Hmm, France, Germany and the UK, huh? I wish you'd have said something, visitors from those countries... assuming my blog is not censored as well, [intense stare into the future, horizon and the wall in front] as the shining beacon of freedom it is for the entire world [snapping out of it].

Anyway, seems that only China and Turkey are seriously banning the Wikipedia articles, so I've added a way to "Fix" the links by replacing them with Google queries *if* you are in Turkey, China or Taiwan, thanks to ipapi for the user location detection service.

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Istanbul, not Constantinopole

Intro

Istanbul is a beautiful lie. You are being served, begged of, you can haggle any price and no one will get upset, you are a king among serfs, everything is ancient, colorful and traditional. But as you walk around in the high but pleasant sea-side heat you can't help but wonder: how high was that initial price if you can lower it again and again and again? How are you a king while walking in the most populous city of one of the most powerful countries in the region? Why are there armored cars here and there, watching you while you unsuccessfully try to reach Wikipedia on your cell phone in Democracy Park? How can all these traditional shops sell the exact same thing all over the city? Why are there so many types of tea in the bazaar, but when you go to a cafe they only serve one?

Now, I enjoyed my visit to Istanbul. My hotel was sub par, but I didn't care about it too much because the staff was doing their best to be accommodating. Yet there are some things I would have liked to know before going there. Here are my thoughts.

Prerequisites

The first thing to consider when going to Istanbul is if you want to rent a car. The answer to this is "I do not want to rent a car, because I want to survive this vacation". The driving is chaotic and the roads are steep and crowded. Most of the time you don't even want to take cabs. People cross the street randomly and there are scooters that speed onto any temporarily free surface. Yet, except a motorcycle guy that probably died on the freeway, I have not seen even a car bump in this mess. To be a driver in Istanbul is both a badge of honor and skill and a psychiatric condition. You've been warned!

The second thing you need is select the part of Istanbul you want to be based in, because the city is vast and split by the sea into three parts: two in Europe and one in Asia. If you are a touristy kind of person, go to the Sultanahmet, Eminonu side. If you want more authenticity, real people living their lives, go to the Asian side, while the other European side is more for the city lifestyle and shopping, like in Taksim square. I haven't been to the modern part of the city, but from afar the buildings there look tall and beautiful and I am told it's great, too.

You've got to be careful choosing your hotel. Istanbul is so chocked with them that when you look at the map you feel that you have not zoomed in enough. In fact every building in some areas is a hotel and all that separates them are small windy one car streets: no side walk, no parking spaces, no green space. You have to pay attention to the pictures of the hotel, to how may rows of windows they have, for example. It will tell you how tall they really are and how many windows your room will have. A lot of these places have large lobbies and terraces, but it's where you enter the hotel and where you get breakfast in the morning, while your room might have just a window overlooking a fence. I've seen rooms that had no windows. So it is vital you speak directly to the hotel and discuss the conditions of your rooms (do not trust they will get the information from Booking or act on it). It's not that they want to cheat you, but everything in Istanbul is negotiable. You need to speak to an actual person. The city abhors algorithms.

One more important thing is your infrastructure. You need information and transportation. In Istanbul a lot of transportation works with an IstanbulKart, an electronic card you can put money on and then pay for trams, buses, ferries, etc. Cabs, of course, are different. Careful with the cabs: you might get a perfectly good one from the airport, with a meter and a credit card reader, then get another that only accepts cash and you must negotiate the price. Now, it might feel like a waste, but I recommend you get one kart for each person. While you can very well use only one for an entire group, I got into the situation where my wife passed and I didn't, so she had to wait until I found a recharging station and had to negotiate with the Turkish only interface.

That gets me to the information portion: Turkey is not in the EU. That means that calls and SMS messages are very expensive and probably mobile Internet as well. While most shops have WiFi, when you are on the road you need Internet. If you have a dual SIM phone (and even if you don't) I recommend you buy a prepaid Turkish card for your Internet and local calls. I didn't do that, so I got stuck a lot of times. As so many translation systems work online, too, I think it's a good idea. Everything in Istanbul is in Turkish, with occasional afterthoughts about other languages. People there know very little English and when they do, you are not sure if they understood what you told them or they simply don't want to appear stupid.

The fun

The fun is all on you! I won't tell you what is good and what is not, because not one of the people that prepared me for my trip had an experience even close to mine. It's not that I am special, but people really are different and Istanbul provides differently depending on your style. What I can tell you is that it is a city worth visiting, but perhaps not for the usual reasons. It feels different. It's not a clone of all the other cities I've been to. It really has its own culture, it's not overwhelmed with the same multinational corporations, it doesn't have banks and pharmacies everywhere, and the lack of rules (or the difference in them) opens the mind to possibilities.

For me the mosques were all the same, the palaces were just buildings with old furniture in them, the museums collections of objects with little life to them. For example I went to the Royal Kitchens in Topkapi; there was nothing to reflect the life that went on there. Just random kitchen implements nicely ordered inside transparent cages. I didn't find the haggling with shop owners pleasant or the ice cream seller antics entertaining. The food was nice, but not extraordinary. The bazaars were full of shops that sold the exact same things. I couldn't get close to a shop without someone harassing me about buying or entering. These are not the reasons why I enjoyed Istanbul.

Instead, it was the weird combination of new and old, of people living their lives differently, the all present sea breeze which made the heat bearable. It was the way people did all of these annoying things and yet I felt no malice from or toward them. It all felt viscerally eternal, like this city had the power to survive the world encroaching on it.

I don't know, maybe you just need to have played Quest for Glory II to feel this way. Or maybe it's just me. I don't think I would want to return soon, but it's an experience I recommend. And now, try to get this out of your head:

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Vita Nostra (Метаморфозы #1), by Marina Dyachenko, Sergey Dyachenko

Imagine Harry Potter were a Russian girl named Sasha Samokhina. Instead of an Oliver Twist childhood followed by the happy admission to a place of high learning, she starts off within a happy family and then is forcefully inducted into a village institution apparently bent on making people crazy upon punishment of hurting said family. Instead of a loyal gaggle of friends to help the hero through random quests, it's a bunch of normal kids that either hate her, ignore her or get infatuated with her for their own random reasons. Instead of a nasty revenant with superpowers, she has only her own weakness and her insane teachers to fight against. And most of all, everything she achieves she does through effort, not by being lucky, getting powerful items from mysterious friends or being helped by previously unknown actors.

This is Vita Nostra - and not a book about Italian mobsters as the title made me believe, a book written by two married writers, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, who wrote 26 other books before this you probably have never heard of because they are in Russian and no one bothered to translate them to English. I wonder if I would have ever heard of them if there weren't currently living in California. There are, of course, similarities to Harry Potter: the same idea that teachers perceive pupils as incompetent infants that cannot be trusted with information and power, for example. The same underestimation of children leads to both the successes of Potter and Samokhina (if hers can be called successes, it's a Russian book after all). There is also the isolation of children, away from family, friends and the rest of the world, a typical indoctrination move. Will our hero keep her morals or succumb to the ideas forced upon her by cruel educators? Will the teachers be proven right and their methods validated, or are they just assholes? Is this really a Hogwarts thing or more the Stanford Experiments meet 120 Days of Sodom? Well, that is for the reader to find out, as they go through the three books (yes, Russians are affected by trilogiopathy as well).

Warning, though, the book starts very slowly and with a style reminiscent of a lot of stories I disliked profusely: the dream sequence, where you cannot be certain that what the character perceives is real or not. Also, the ending is abrupt and says almost nothing. Oh, yes, I can speculate, but would be the point of that? In order to understand what is going on, you just have to read at least the second book as well.

Bottom line is that I liked the book after I got through the slow beginning, I was captivated by the lead character and I found it hard to put the book down, but it's not always easy to empathize with Sasha and the rest of the characters are not deeply explored.

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Quakeland: On the Road to America's Next Devastating Earthquake, by Kathryn Miles

We trust the ground beneath our feet as something solid that can take our weight, keep our structures straight, holds fast. Yes, we read things, we know about tectonics, but other than that, everything is stable. In the very beginning of Quakeland, Kathryn Miles thoroughly debunks that idea: Earth is an ocean of lava upon which very thin amalgamations of sand and rubble float precariously. What we call faults are just the largest of cracks, stable and classifiable; there are many more that we have no idea exist, fragile enough to be affected or even created by human activity. At this point, I was expecting an exciting journey through the center of the Earth. If the book would have continued as it started, it would have been a solid five stars, an educational tool to teach what most of the people have no idea about: the fragility of the thin crust we call solid ground. Alas, it was not to be.

The rest of Quakeland, let's say the last 80%, was a very US-centric analysis of how neglected earthquakes are when constructing and maintaining American infrastructure and a fear inducing series of "what-ifs" and possible disasters affecting that one country. I shouldn't have expected anything else, I mean the subtitle is pretty clear, but how can someone switch registers from talking about the very structure of the planet to the measly issues of one country and its weird measuring units? And maybe she did not use the almost ubiquitous bus size, but Miles did use the swimming pool together with the M-scale (do not let any "serious" seismologist hear you talk about Richter), the miles, the feet, the pounds, etc. The writing is competent and almost formulaic in structure, but I can't say I had any issues with it.

The bottom line is that the beginning was brilliant, the information that fracking (and mining in general) - regardless if it is toxic, damages the ground water or anything else activists throw at it - causes long series of earthquakes that affect whole areas while and even after operations cease, as powerful political and economic forces deny and actively fight the science that demonstrates this was new and important. Yet other than that it was just a normal reporter speculating about the possibilities of quakes - man made or not - causing serious harm. A lot of terribilism and fear mongering. That is why I can't really recommend this book and I will rate it as average only.

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Installing emacs on Windows 10 linux subsystem and Android

Here are the steps for installing Emacs on Windows 10:

• First enable the Linux subsystem:
  • Start Powershell as administrator
  • Type 'Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux' and confirm
  • Restart computer
  • Go to Windows Store and search for 'Linux'
  • Install Ubuntu, SUSE or anything you like from there and run it
• Second, install Emacs:
  • Type 'sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelleyk/emacs'
  • Type 'sudo apt update'
  • Type 'sudo apt install emacs25'

At this time you should have Emacs running in the Linux subsystem on Windows 10.

You can also install it on Android:

• Install the Termux app
• Type 'apt update'
• Type 'apt install emacs'

But why would you need to install Emacs at all? Because now you can run 'emacs -batch -l dunnet'. Don't forget to 'save'! :D

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Timers that capture the execution context, evil AsyncLocal and the quick and ugly solution used by Microsoft devs

It all started with the source code for NonCapturingTimer, a static factory class that was creating a System.Threading.Timer without capturing the execution context and was described as "A convenience API for interacting with System.Threading.Timer in a way that doesn't capture the ExecutionContext. We should be using this (or equivalent) everywhere we use timers to avoid rooting any values stored in asynclocals.". What did that even mean?

An issue opened by David Fowler sheds some light on this: "Any lazy activation of timers will capture the ExecutionContext. Combining this with a lazy initialization of the HttpClient and the handler graph may end up holding onto AsyncLocals for longer than expected. This could end up looking like a memory leak". This follows a Twitter thread from Fowler declaring AsyncLocal as evil.

There are also multiple issues that have crystallized into a proposal for a future version of .NET: "Timer static Create methods that make rooting behavior explicit".

And if you look at the ASP.Net sources on GitHub, they do use the class mostly for one time timer calls and periodic cleanup calls. I should mention that Ben Adams from Microsoft calls this way of creating timers ugly.

I don't have the time to go down further on this rabbit hole, but maybe people will find answers here when looking into this and comment on their findings.

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The Ten Thousand (The Macht #1), by Paul Kearney

The Macht series is not related to anything Germanic, as the name might imply, but is instead inspired by the Greek Hoplites. Even if The Ten Thousand happens on another planet that has different continents and two moons and three intelligent races, Paul Kearney could have written it just as well as a historical novel set in ancient Greece, with Greek mercenaries getting hired by Persians as weapons in a civil war that went awry. In fact, the story really is inspired by an actual historical group called the Ten Thousand and the main character, with the unfortunate name of Rictus, seems to be inspired by that of real life Xenophon. The book seems to be a retelling of Anabasis.

Now, the story is well written and short. I read the whole thing in a day. It's like a 300 novel, with the courageous and lethal Macht force finding itself on a foreign continent, surrounded by overwhelming hostile forces and having to march through rough and deadly terrain in order to get home. There is a lot of fighting, technical and military, some romance, bro-mance and feudal politics, but it's essentially the story of a huge march seen through the eyes of an experienced soldier, but young and new to the mercenary troupe.

Bottom line: I don't know if I am going to read any other Macht book. This one felt self contained and I am not that much into ancient fights in the Bronze Age. I liked The Ten Thousand, though, and I recommend it as a short and captivating read.

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The Luminous Dead, by Caitlin Starling

The Luminous Dead has only two active characters: a cave diver, covered in a special suit that enhances her strength and completely isolates her from the environment, and her handler, the person who guides and provides support remotely. At first glance it's a sci-fi story, as it happens on another planet, with futuristic technology, different rules, alien lifeforms, etc. However, it starts to itch at you that with the tech that was described, the tasks at hand could have been completed a lot more efficiently and safely, so what gives?

Turns out the story is more of a metaphor than a fantastic cave adventure on another planet. Probably inspired by the death of Caitlin Starling's mother, it explores the damage done by losing your parents, the obsessions that drive the affected, the extent to which someone will go to quiet those voices in their heads. But I liked it. It's got just enough action and adrenaline to keep you going while it touches the painful emotional bits that the book was really about.

Bottom line: I urge you to ignore all technical aspects of the story. It's not that the author did not made the effort to make them believable, it's that they are irrelevant to the moral of the book. Also ignore the wild emotional fluctuations of the characters: they are supposed to behave that way. The book feels as if following a personal journal with the events of the story being just sci-fi versions of the items there.

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The giant house spider

While being hosted in a small house in the Arges county, I found myself face to... err... hairy body to hairy body with a large spider, at least 10 cm from the tips of the front legs to the tips of the hind legs. The body itself was about 2 cm in length. I tried to catch it, but it ran away and I didn't exactly feel safe handling it. However, from my standpoint, the adventure was just beginning. It starts with a picture:


In a previous post, I was telling you about a web site that recognized plants from blurry pictures I had taken. I assumed that somewhere there was something similar for spiders. Alas, it doesn't seem to be the case, so I reverted to the classic Google search with descriptive words: a European spider 10 cm in length. I found it almost immediately, clearly a member of the genus Tegenaria in the family Agelenidae. Or is it?

Funny enough, most of the spiders assigned to Tegenaria were recently (2013) moved to another genus, Eratigena, based on DNA and molecular analysis. So my spider, likely a "giant house spider", can be found either as Tegenaria atrica or Eratigena atrica (not to mention Tegenaria duellica, Tegenaria gigantea and Tegenaria saeva). I also can't be completely sure of the identification. As far as I can tell, it's a male, based on the large (pedi)palps, used not only to hold on to prey, but also to deposit sperm in the females. But while I think it looks most like an atrica, based on the pictures I found online, it could also be an Agelena labyrinthica or a Tegenaria parietina, even if the first is found in Denmark and should be smaller and the second is rare and native to Central Asia.

Considering it's a giant spider I found in a house, I will go with Eratigena atrica, but one has to wonder how active biology as a science is to have species of common arthropods reassigned from one genus to another just a few years ago. So yeah, a nice little story, for me at least, all starting from a picture of a spider in a bathroom.

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Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari, or Rise of the Shield Hero. A ridiculous, but fun anime.

Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari is one of those isekai animes where a normal Japanese boy is summoned in a magical realm to fight monsters. Once there, he realizes that the world and his character work exactly as in a fantasy video game, complete with items with upgradeable stats, waves of monsters and revealing female armor. He is summoned there with three other heroes, also from Japan, only from alternate universes, each of the heroes having their own magical item that defines their style. His item is a shield and immediately he notices that he is treated differently, with all honors given to the other three and only disgust for him. Long story short, he is forced to hone his skills through his will and efforts alone, while the others, spoiled by their environment, make no effort and therefore level up less.

I liked this anime and I will continue to watch it, although it's a bit ridiculous. I've read the manga as well, which is also new, and there are slight differences in the sense that the anime is a little more serious. If you want a mindless game like experience in anime form, go for it. Here is a trailer:

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Violet Evergarden, a really nice anime, with an uncertain future

Violet Evergarden is set in a steampunk universe in which technology, other than metal prosthetics, is at the 19th century level, and the main character is a girl that was used as an elite child soldier in a terrible war who now has to find a purpose in a civilian life. She takes on the job of a "auto memory doll", a person who needs to put into words the feelings of others. That's a bit of a stretch, because she doesn't know how to feel herself... it's like me taking on a job in psychology or artistic design so as to learn a new skill. Certainly great for me, but kind of sucks for my employer!

Anyway, the animation is really well done and the acting is top notch. The story itself is beautiful, even if at times inconsistent. After watching the 14 episodes of the first season, I was itching for more, only to hear from a colleague that the studio responsible for the animation, Kyoto Animation, was destroyed in a terrible arson attack. That doesn't bode well for a sequel, yet a spin-off film had already been announced, so who knows?

Bottom line: it's not for everyone. PTSD romance, I would call it. But it nicely animated and I liked the story. I felt that the characters were a bit off, but not annoyingly so. Here is a trailer, in English:

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The Binding, by Bridget Collins

There is a trope in fantasy writing that goes like this: young person is uprooted from their life as they learn a new skill or gain a new power, while people in authority teach them things so slowly and inefficiently that the young person needs to make efforts to learn by themselves. Harry Potter had it. The Binding has it. Only in the case of this book, the young person is someone who is always sick without knowing why, is suddenly sent off from home to be an apprentice for someone he doesn't know and while he understands nothing of what he is supposed to do. Months later and 25% of the book in, he still hasn't learnt anything, although he is always tired and exhausted for no good reason whenever he is about to. If he doesn't collapse, his mentor will! And, spoilers ahead, his mentor then dies.

So after a quarter of the book, absolutely nothing happened while I had to suffer a depressed weak and barely teenage boy who didn't want, know, or want to know anything. Bridget Collins' writing is competent and I am sure things are going to get better from here (I mean, they can hardly get worse), but I just won't continue to read the book.

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Magic for Liars, by Sarah Gailey

Magic for Liars is one of those stories where magic exists in a hidden layer of our world, yet it doesn't bring any happiness. People are still people, regardless of their power. And what better way to explore human nature than writing a detective story in a high school for magical kids?

Sarah Gailey writes the story from the viewpoint of the detective, a woman who's greatest frustrations stem from her sister being a magician, while she is just "normal". Yet when she is tasked to find out the circumstances of the death of one of the teachers in the magic school, she jumps on it, making her realize more about herself and the relationships with family and other people.

Yes, the magic is quite incidental and the detective part quite secondary and it could just as well been written in a space academy or science lab or anywhere where flawed people have to manage each other and the balance of power between them. And while I feel the main character was compelling and the story well written, I can't quite shake the feeling I've been duped into reading a touchy-feely type of drama that I didn't really intend to read. You will not read about the specifics of magic in any kind of way; it is quite bluntly used as a tool that the reader needs not understand. You will not be amazed by the amazing feats of deduction of a fascinating detective; the main character is by definition a very normal person with a penchant for introspection and focusing on her own messed up feelings.

In the end you know the spouse did it, or the butler, or the person who flirts with the detective, or the god-like magician, or the weird kid. The culprit isn't even that important for the plot. It's all about the theoretical dynamics between the people and what makes them tick.

Bottom line: a fine investigation into the core motivations of people, woven in a rather short and bland story which purely incidentally features detectives and magic.

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When is efficiency bad? TED talk: The human skills we need in an unpredictable world, from Margaret Heffernan

The talk is a bit overreaching, doing more things than it should have tried to do, in other words not very efficient, but it contains some really interesting ideas and it's extremely well articulated. As a software developer, I always thrive for efficiency, but what Margaret Heffernan says is that efficiency is good only when the future is predictable. In a fast changing world (and getting faster), efficiency doesn't just not help, it makes things worse. Sometimes you can't plan, but you can prepare.

As expected, I wasn't as interested in the humanistic part of the talk as I was in the technical aspects: algorithmic efficiency is only good with things that can be measured. If you want to innovate or to adapt, it's trial and error that works best. I got that giddiness I get when people tell me "you can't do THAT in software!". Oh, ye of little faith! But there is something there, something extremely useful, a tool that I can use whenever I get stuck in logic loops or some manager tells me that he needs data in order to make a decision about the project that would generate the data.


Margaret Heffernan: The human skills we need in an unpredictable world

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.NET Core: Cannot resolve scoped service 'Microsoft.Extensions.Options.IOptionsSnapshot...' from root provider

I was trying to create an instance of an object from a service provider to resolve any dependencies, using ActivatorUtilities.CreateInstance<MyObject>(_serviceProvider) and I was getting the exception:

System.InvalidOperationException
  HResult=0x80131509
  Message=Cannot resolve scoped service 'Microsoft.Extensions.Options.IOptionsSnapshot`1[ExternalConfiguration]' from root provider.

My object was receiving a parameter of type IOptionsSnapshot<ExternalConfiguration> and upon further investigation, my service provider (which came as a resolution from the dependency injection for IServiceProvider) was actually a ServiceProviderEngineScope which just refused to resolve any IOptionsSnapshot! Funny enough, if I replaced IOptionsSnapshot with IOptionsMonitor, which in my mind is a heavier interface, it worked without issues. Further still, the problem appeared only inside an IHostedService (a BackgroundService hooked up with services.AddHostedService<T>); if I wrote the same code in a controller action, for instance, it worked fine.

The .NET 2+ implementation of IOptionsSnapshot<T> is OptionsManager<T>. If I manually resolved an instance of OptionsManager before my object, then added it as a parameter, the code worked:

var optionsSnapshot = ActivatorUtilities.CreateInstance<OptionsManager<TestOptions>>(_serviceProvider);
var myObject = ActivatorUtilities.CreateInstance<MyObject>(_serviceProvider, optionsSnapshot);

So, specifically, the issue is that in .NET Core, the service provider implementation cannot resolve IOptionsSnapshot interfaces in worker services. You can still do that manually, but I suspect it is a bug, since there is no problem using an IOptionsMonitor instead of IOptionsSnapshot.

A possible solution is to use an additional service provider only for IOptionsSnapshot. Warning, this will not work in a general situation if the dependencies from the additional service provider also need parameters that would be found in the original service provider:

// initialization code
var serviceCollection = new ServiceCollection();
serviceCollection.AddSingleton(
  typeof(IOptionsSnapshot<>), 
  typeof(OptionsManager<>)
);
serviceCollection.AddSingleton(
  typeof(IOptionsFactory<>),
  typeof(OptionsFactory<>)
);
_additionalServiceProvider = serviceCollection.BuildServiceProvider();
 
// resolution code
var constructor = typeof(MyObject).GetConstructors()
  .Where(ci=>ci.IsPublic)
  .Single();
var args = constructor.GetParameters()
    .Select(p =>
    {
        try
        {
            return _serviceProvider.GetService(p.ParameterType);
        }
        catch
        {
            return _additionalServiceProvider.GetService(p.ParameterType);
        }
    })
    .ToArray();
return ActivatorUtilities.CreateInstance<MyObject>(_serviceProvider, args);

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Blackfish City, by Sam J. Miller

There are writers like Steven Erikson, describing worlds so vast that characters seem to drown in them, there are writers like William Gibson or Charles Stross, who go so far into the future that people seem to lose their relevance, yet none of them dare to ignore their characters or fail to make them interesting. Yet, that's what Sam J. Miller does in Blackfish City.

10% in and I couldn't bare reading any more of this book. I couldn't care less about the asexual person that is whining about his life, I couldn't care less about the orphan girl whining about her life, I couldn't care less about the sick homosexual boy who is whining about his life and I couldn't care less about the anonymous radio show that narrated what the city was instead of the action showing me. Should I care about all the world getting sunk under the water until the only livable places are floating megacities reminiscent of Waterworld and run by semi abandoned AIs? Should I care about the artificial drama, weird futuristic disease or the grey whining world that Miller describes? No. I refuse!

Bottom line: a poor man's cyberpunk story, with the mechanical "woke", but irrelevant to anything else, sexual and cultural references, with boring characters and a story that I had to make an effort to wade through and still didn't seem to go anywhere.

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City of Miracles (The Divine Cities #3), by Robert Jackson Bennett

It takes the third book to see that the "hero's journey" is actually Sigrud's, even if he is the lead character only in this final book of the Divine Cities series. And yes, it is the final book, with a satisfying and very permanent ending, with no hope of dragging it on. Hell, if you consider there are three books and two cities and no gods left, you could wonder how would anyone continue the story if pressured by publishing companies.

Robert Jackson Bennett did not disappoint with City of Miracles, switching registers a little by turning the usual steampunk-noir detective story into more of a chase and revenge thriller. The villain is revealed quite soon, the mystery split into multiple little quirks that nag at you until the end of the book and a massive divine battle to top it all up. Yet I was a little disappointed with the ending. I know, rationally, that it is a great ending, but emotionally I didn't get what I needed from it, especially as I was still fired up on the penultimate chapter only to get an "aftermath" chapter for last.

Maybe it was that one of the options they employed at the end could have easily been the first and solved a lot of problems to boot. Or the fact that a lot of the grief in the final third of the book came from Sigrud not checking his kills, which is something he would never ever do. It felt a little stretched and tired compared to the other stories.

Sometimes I wonder, is it easier or harder for a writer to just abandon a world that he so carefully crafted? Is it a burden that everything that is successful needs to be turned into a trilogy or a series, or is it like coming home, writing about good friends living in your head? Either way, I am kind of grateful to Bennett for ending it all. I would have read more and more books like these if he wrote them, because I am an addict at heart, but I believe both of us can do better.

Bottom line: It's kind of difficult to compare the three books in the series. The first one was the most captivating, but also first, the second one was darker, yet in the same vein, while the last felt philosophical and like the writer wanted to get it done with. You can read either as standalone, although it makes more sense to read the whole trilogy from first to last. I recommend it and I will read more from the author.

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