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I received this biography of a living person as an Advanced Reader's Copy from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

The author is a science communicator working primarily in television, but with some non-fiction books to his credit. He reports spending six years working on this biography based on his interviews with the subject and written and verbal communications from those who knew in the course of his life. It is interesting to see how Roger Penrose was raised by parents who had unusual emotional relations which happened to coincide with a kind of mental gift at an early age. He came across his love of geometry and a talent for visualization that stayed with him as his greatest strength over his career. There were also rivalries among his siblings and schoolmates that spurred him to apply himself to abstract thought in ways he might not have pursued all on his own. When his father happened to take an interest in his son's passion for geometry it left an impression on the boy. He learned about physics through popularizations but only came to follow it instead of medicine in an almost offhand way because of rules at the schools he attended.

The middle of this book covers Penrose's rise in theroretical interest using his geometrical insights which were unconventional among his peers. He also married an American he met, Joan, despite their deep differences in personality and career interest. When she experienced a series of depressions he was personally unequipped to help, immersed in his own life of the mind. At one point he remembered with a friend of his younger sister's, Judith, and transferred his emotional investment to her as a muse. Though the relationship was not primarily sexual as he thought of it, the secrecy and obsessive aspects led him away from this marriage with three young children when he left to take a job at Oxford and live on his own. This enabled him to spend time with Judith who helped him put together his books. He would repeat this pattern three more times after the two of them broke off their relationship, each time with much younger unattached women. One of them termed this a "Gaugin complex" in which a talented creative man feels he can only produce his work only through the companionship of a young woman. He married one of these companions for three decades, but tried to return to it afterwards. I was troubled by the psychology that led to this, which never seems to have been resolved or completely understood by Penrose. In the end, he also alienated many professional physicists by devising interpretations of physics that went far beyond the mainstream. He was the only one on his level talking about cyclic cosmology and how microtubules underlie consciousness. This pattern towards conflict was as though he could not control what the emotional poverty of his upbringing caused him to do. By the end of the book we see Penrose as a solitary, infirm man in his 90s clinging to a hope that some of these later preoccupations would outlive him. It is an odd trajectory for a life that seemed as though it had been destined to achieve so much distinction in mathematical physics, with numerous medals besides the Nobel Prize, but went down a fringe path no one else wanted to follow. This is what makes his story one of the "impossible" man of the title.

This book had been on my To Be Read list for many years waiting for me to devote some time to the artistic mindset. It pits artistic creativity against the demands of the capitalist market and looks at what accommodations art needs to continue being lively. In past societies organized around gift exchange as a marker of prestige, those who produced art were often seen as channeling a gift to the entire community, not judged by how much price they could command. The gift economy connected people and affirmed relationships. The book takes an in depth look at the thoughts of two American poets, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, to see how they fared in the 19th and 20th centuries as our present day economy was being set in place. What is pretty clear is how neither one really did well by market standards, even while they were lauded by peers. Art still semes to come from a different place that doesn't translate into a living unless one can take advantage of patronage and sponsorships explicitly outside of the market for creative work. I did not know about Pound's ideas for an alternative system of money which decays as it goes unused, one which never had a chance at adoption.

In the end, the book returns to the idea that some gift relationship which fosters creativity can in some way coexist with the market economy. It would have been interesting to know what the author would think of crowdsourcing and patronage using the internet as a medium as ways to support art outside of the market.

An artist who does not need to live off of their art can create art today. I count myself among these in this stage of my life. I am still concerned for fellow creatives who do need to come up with a living in a heavily capitalistic economy, who likely have to find alternative funding as these dwindle.

This anthology dates back to 1979. It is a shared-world fantasy, one of the first, set in the city of Sanctuary where swordplay and sorcery are not unknown. this first book in the series has stories written by eight prominent fantasy writers with overlapping settings and characters, though quite different styles. There was no attempt to construct a single narrative arc from these, so it reads as an anthology of related short stories. The conflict is interpersonal, not human vs. nature or human vs. monster.

Like many tales from the 1970s, there are alements that take a modern reader aback because of changes in societal norms. There is a lot of violence, but not as much as a person raised on rough videogames might expect. There are allusions to gender roles which were acceptable then that many might find offensive or demeaning now. In particular the last story in the book aged poorly because of the objectification of underage female characters and by the posthumous revelations concerning child abuse on the part of its author, Marion Zimmer Bradley. That one really put me off, but there were glimpses of similar treatment in a couple of the others too. Still the grittiness probably wouldn't come as a total surprise to any reader coming this collection simply because of the title and introduction. This is no high fantasy romance, pretty obviously. the writing was generally rather well executed by professionals, constrained necessarily by word-length limitations.

There are another elven books in the series. I don't think I will be soon tackling any others. I think they might be interesting to a reader interested in the fantasy noir genre's origins or nostalgic for the time before, when conventions were established.

This book feels a lot different from the author's other works. The majority of the story is told by Antonio Moro, an illiterate laborer who fled his home country at an early age and is first seen working as a worker on a recycling ship which is attacked by raiders. This is a piratical organization that takes what it can from places with insufficient military force to defend themselves. He is injured and left on the share of Thule island, an engineered community in the cold North Atlantic. While convalescing at the hospital he gets to know the social structure there while secretly watching for raider infiltration, the last order his captain had given him. The social order requires all to have employment so he takes a contract as an artist for a wealthy couple. Their wealth and social status depend on how well he can do in an art project for a competition.

The other chapters take the point of view of machine intelligence Par Augustus which has somehow achieved a level of self-awareness and autonomy only a very few other machine minds have attained. Far from unemotional, Par has ambitions and biases, a brassy attitude, and ambiguous motives. Before long it links up with Moro and is able to feed him information using an inner ear implant. They become friends and conspirators as the raider problem butts up against certain aspects of Thule society in ways neither one likes. Towards the end of the novel, the raiders come to Thule, there is bloodshed and subterfuge, and Moro is at the center of everything.

The story was entertaining if I could suspend a certain amount of disbelief regarding some of the story elements. Late in the book a long-lost relation of Moro's turns up to confuse things in a way that felt somewhat forced. It was pretty clear who the reader was to sympathize with and who was outright evil, with not much nuance among the major players. These were machines and people, and I thought the former were the more intriguing actors by quite a bit. As long as these entities were the focus I had little trouble sustaining my interest. I felt that the Antonio Moro character was not as compelling a personality as I would have liked, but it may be that he has a strong role to play in a future story set in this story universe.

This author is known not just for this Booker prize winning book but also for his poetry. That comes through over and over in this book where you have dreamlike images presented in evocative prose. There's a heightened mood throughout for each of the main characters. Their behavior is not naturalistic but intense. The story is best known for having been made it to a film some decades ago. That makes sense because so many of the little passages there so many of the bits of dialogue and action are clearly cinematic feel.

If someone is looking for a tightly plotted novel of a conventional sort they're probably going to be disappointed with this, however. It doesn't try to be a an accurate history of World War II but is more of a rumination on philosophical issues about humanity. Setting it alongside the conflict allows the author to increase the stakes dramatically with life and death issues and decisions where each main character's soul is in the balance. They are each damaged in one way or another due to guilt, loss, or trauma. While there are scenes of high drama notably the bomb defusing section and the thieving sections, much of the tension is maintained through the clash of personalities as they talk and make love.

There is the title character depicted as an enigmatic burn patient injured during a plane crash and almost completely confined to bed, his nurse Hana who waits upon him and administers the morphine he needs to kill the pain, the young Indian sapper Kip who becomes Hana's lover while he goes about his daily works detecting and defusing gigantic bombs left by the departing Axis armies, and the thief David Caravaggio who used to know Hana as a girl in Canada years before. Somehow by arrangement they come together to live in this little house in Italy and tell one another their stories out of a deep range of emotions. The armies have moved to the north so they no longer were able to rely upon them for support. That's where Caravaggio's scavenging skills come in to support the household.

There are really only two significant female characters in the novel: besides Hana there's Katherine, the love interest of the "English" patient prior to the events of the novel. In both cases these women are portrayed as beautiful objects of adoration but they do have qualities beyond that making them more than one dimensional. There's a host of secondary characters separate from the house members whether seen through flashbacks or in the world outside the house. It wasn't easy for me to keep these other characters straight as information about each one was doled out bit by bit. It helps the reader to be willing to abandon the expectations one usually has in reading fiction and experience it as an extended poetic drama.

The character of the bedridden English patient is interesting in that partway through you find out that he is probably not English at all and probably not working for the Allies either. And it seems that giving up on the English patient would be like giving up on the classical western civilization that he represents, his book by Herodotus standing for the entire canon of Western civilization. Lying in bed he is able to draw on encyclopedic knowledge of the past, which everyone else in that house feels has worth. You question the motives of everyone in the story. It is as though during wartime nothing could be clean and simple. And now in the aftermath of war people are searching frantically for an answer to the question of what is to happen next.

The bombs that Kip is tasked with defusing have an additional function beyond that of actual explosive devices as a kind of metaphor I think of the damaging acts that people can perform in their lives acts of deceit, of betrayal, of obsession, and of violence. Defusing enemy explosives is on the one hand a rigorous engineering discipline but also a crazy gamble, frequently lethal, as one has to detect slight changes in the bombs' designs placed there by the unseen enemy.

In the end, the book takes a sudden turn when the characters discover what led to Japan's capitulation to the Allies and they start to consider what this means for human civilization. Hana refuses to abandon her patient because for her it would be like abandoning her own father who died in a similar horrific fashion earlier.

I listened to an audiobook version of the book narrated by Jennifer Ehle who is best known from the 1990s BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. It might have been easier to read the text myself but this did lend its own sort of pleasure to the experience.