Snuff (Discworld Novels) by Kindle Edition

     The new Discworld novel from the master features the popular Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch.

 

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse.And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies and an ancient crime more terrible than murder.He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, and occasionally snookered and out of his mind, but never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a finding, there must be a chase and there must be a punishment. They say that in the end all sins are forgiven.But not quite all...

The Conjurer by Hieronymus Bosch

The Conjurer, by Hieronymus Bosch, depicts a medieval magician performing for a small crowd, while pickpockets steal the spectators' belongings. The painting, on display at the Musée Municipal in St.-Germain-en-Laye, France, illustrates that magicians have long known how to hack into our mental processes. The principles of magic, refined and perfected over the centuries, provide neuroscientists with new ways to study the brain and could help them in their quest to reveal how the organ performs the greatest trick of all - consciousness itself.
Studies of inattentional blindness show that focused attention can make us oblivious to sights that would otherwise be glaringly obvious, while studies of change blindness show that dramatic changes in a scene can go unnoticed if they occur during a brief interruption, even when we look directly at the scene.

Magicians take advantage of this to manipulate their spectators' attentional spotlight. They know, for example, that the eyes give off important social cues, and that people have a natural impulse to pay attention to the objects that others are attending to. They exploit this 'joint attention' by using their eye movements to divert the audience's attention away from the 'method' – the secret action behind the trick – and towards the magical effect.
They also know that the sudden appearance of a new and unusual object will immediately draw the audience's attention. Hence, producing a flying dove gives them an opportunity to perform other hidden manoeuvres.

"11th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness," Martinez-Conde explains. "Traditionally, this was a very academic conference that had no impact outside the specialist field. We wanted to reach the general public as well, but we weren't sure exactly what to do."

The wife-and-husband team went to Las Vegas, where the conference was to be held. It was then, while scouting for potential conference venues, that the idea first came to them. "We saw a lot of ads for magic shows and realized that was the connection we were looking for. We contacted a number of magicians, such as Penn and Teller, James Randi and Apollo Robbins and invited them to a special symposium [at the conference], to share their insights into what makes magic work in the mind of the spectator."

Fighting talk from the prophet of peace

Pinker's assault on the common reader began in 1994 with The Language Instinct, an accessible introduction to the idea that humans are "language animals", biologically wired for linguistic communication. In 1997 he published How the Mind Works, which went beyond language to offer a similar portrayal of the rest of the mind, from vision and reasoning to emotions, humour and art. In 1999 he returned to the question of language with Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, which drew on his research on regular and irregular verbs as a way of explaining how language works in general.

And in 2002 he published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which is basically an attack on what Pinker sees as three great misconceptions about human behaviour: the idea that the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate that is wholly shaped by one's environment; the notion of the "noble savage", the idea that humans are intrinsically good but get warped by society; and "ghost in the machine" theories that postulate the existence of a non-biological agent in the brain that can alter human nature at will.

This is a big idea if ever I saw one, and it requires a massive tome (700 pages plus footnotes) to deal with it. In the first place, Pinker has to locate, analyse and explain the empirical and other data that support his thesis: that, however you measure it, the past was not just a different country, but also a far more violent one. And then he has to provide some explanations for why the long-term reduction in violence happened. To do that he ranges far beyond his own professional territory – into forensic archaeology, political philosophy, intellectual and social history, population dynamics, statistics and international relations. He identifies a number of forces that were key factors in curbing mankind's capacity for inhumanity: the slow emergence of states capable of playing the role of Hobbes's "Leviathan"; the pacifying impact of commerce and trade on behaviour; the impact of the Enlightenment on the way people thought about others; the evolution of notions of etiquette over the centuries; the way print and literacy expanded the "circle of empathy" beyond people's immediate family; the importance of women in civilising men; and the "long peace" that followed the second world war.

Orson Scott Card's novel Enders Game

Lavie Tidhar explores one of those realities in his new novel from PS Publishing, Osama. Tidhar is not a writer to mess around with half measures when confronting a ticklish subject. The Israeli born novelist's short story collection Hebrew Punk features thrilling tales of Jewish vampires, while Jesus and the Eightfold Path argues that Christ was actually a Buddhist. His recent short story The School, a satire of Orson Scott Card's novel Enders Game, started a minor internet meme when it called out a number of Tidhar's fellow SF writers for their militaristic and homophobic attitudes.

And now Tidhar gives us an evil-eyed, turbaned silhouette, standing behind the smoking name of the world's most hated terrorist, as the cover of a novel featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante, even if only in an off-stage role. If this brief introduction to Osama brings to mind Philip K Dick's seminal science fiction novel The Man in the High Castle, that is because Tidhar has deliberately co-opted a number of trademark Dickian techniques in his latest work. PKD's most accomplished literary novel describes a world where the German and Japanese Axis Powers won the second world war, and dominate the North American continent between them. The novel's central characters are fascinated by and slowly drawn into the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel within a novel which describes an alternative history in which America and her allies won the war.

One common problem for all science fiction writers is reconciling the wondrous world we could have with the one we have negligently stumbled into. At this exact moment in time, in an alternate reality governed by the Grandmasters of Sci-Fi, there is a version of you living a life of luxury in a post-scarcity paradise where your every whim is met by your own robo-butler. Of course, that may already be your daily reality if you are a hedge-fund manager or MP on expenses, while the rest of us are simply grateful to avoid stacking shelves in Tesci. There are certainly worse realities, but there are also so many better ones.

PKD was at his best when happily tinkering with the constructed nature of modern reality, in which he believed "spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups and political groups" and "we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms". Today, the sophisticated people manufacturing our reality have more sophisticated ways to do it than ever, through the television and computer screens, smartphones, the internet and social media. The collapse of our financial system is exposing just how spurious and manufactured, even fictional, much of our reality is. From banks using mathematical algorithms to extract vast sums of non-existent money from an automated stock market, to a presidential candidate whose main claim to power is his ability to execute wrongdoers, little of our contemporary history would seem out of place in the fiction of a paranoid, acid-tripping, hack SF novelist.

Digested read, by James Corden

Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book. To be honest, I'm a bit all over the place.I've never written a book before and how do I begin to tell you about my life? Especially as I'm only 32 and haven't done very much. In fact, I've just realised you may not actually have purchased this book and are just reading the first page to see if you're interested. I'm guessing you're not overly impressed so far, but then I'm not that bothered as I've already banked more than £1m as an advance and there's no chance of the book earning out.

My gorgeous wife Jules, the most gorgeous talented wife in the world, was due to have a baby in a week's time and I had been planning to get the book knocked off before the birth but she's gone into labour early so I'm going to have to get a bit of a bend on and bash it out before they both come home from hospital. Have I told you I haven't written a book before? What shall I do? Hey, just had an email from my publisher that any old drivel will do as long as I make the word count. So is this OK? I really hope so, because I really, really want you to like me. Hey, that's one chapter down. This book writing is easier than I thought. So let me tell you a funny story. On second thoughts, let's just call it a story.

My parents were both in the Salvation Army and I knew from the first time I stood on a chair at my sister's christening that I was going to be a performer. Fascinating. So what else can I tell you? We lived near High Wycombe and we were the happiest family ever. It may surprise you to know that when I was 11 my parents sent me to secondary school. I wasn't the brightest kid on the block, but somehow I always had this faith in my acting talents and when I left school and got a part in the West End musical Martin Guerre – definitely up there as one of the best musicals ever written, in my opinion. I was the happiest person on the entire planet as I was working with some of the most talented people I have ever met.

The Church of Alan Darcy, starring Bob Hoskins. I don't suppose many of you saw the movie but it is definitely one of the best films ever made and Bob is one of the most iconic actors of his generation and taught me more about acting than anyone else apart from all the other extremely talented actors I went on to work with later. I should also mention that it was at this time I met Shelley, the most talented and beautiful girl in the world, and we stayed together for eight of the happiest years of my life. "Are you sitting down, James?" It was my agent on the phone. "Mike Leigh wants you to star in a film alongside Alison Steadman." Can you believe it? Me, working with Mike and Alison the two most talented people in the world. Ever. I was like, "Yes. When can I start?" it was just such a totally mind-blowing experience working with such talented people and I wondered if I would ever get to work with such talented people again, but luckily I got to work on Fat Friends and Teachers with some more of the most talented actors and directors in the world. Ever, ever.