Tag: ethics

Fire Must Burn Allison Montclair (Historical Mystery)

Book 8 of the Sparks and Bainbridge historical mystery series, and definitely my favorite so far. London, 1947, and the co-owners of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau are being asked to do a “favor” for British Intelligence by using their matching services to determine whether one Anthony Danforth is or is not a Soviet agent. The catch is that Iris Sparks — once in British Intelligence herself — had been a good friend of Danforth’s back in their Cambridge days, though it has been over a decade since they had seen each other. The plot thickens further with an “almost” body, some clashing secrets, and ongoing doubts as to the ethics of their subterfuge.

I like the series for the snappy writing, the deep and personal historical contexts, and the two main characters — each unusual for their time, but also squarely OF their time. Both serve as exemplars of how times were changing for women, and some of the means by which women were bringing that change about. In this particular installment, I particularly enjoyed the slowly elaborated 1935 Cambridge story that set the stage for the present day mystery. This was full of details — both political and cultural — that helped me understand what life was like in that era. I also liked the various (and plentiful) ethical dilemmas that peppered the plot — presented thoughtfully and resolved (as one often must when one lives in reality) in practical, rather than wholly principled ways.

Intellectually engaging, little to no filler, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Thank you to Severn House and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on January 6th, 2026.

The Winds from Further West by Alexander McCall Smith (Literary Fiction)

In this new, standalone novel, McCall Smith takes on the ethics and responsibilities of those caught up in cancel culture — including the perspectives and calculations of those willing to play along (on either side) for personal gain. We follow Neil, a University of Edinburgh public health lecturer and researcher, as he is accused of making an “insensitive” comment and is asked by an unscrupulous dean to apologize regardless of guilt. I’ll hasten to say that McCall Smith does not allow the book to slide into a Kafkaesque nightmare from which our hero cannot emerge unscathed (I almost stopped reading when I thought it was going in that direction). Instead, he focuses on how people react to “life experiences” such as these and how they can be used to further self (and world-at-large) awareness and growth. I found it insightful and inspiring.

I love that McCall Smith always brings the ethics of big social trends into how they play out in individuals. The book is full of pithy commentary as to the state of the world (or one’s university!) and one’s role within it. His characters are always interesting — one is caught reading a book called “A Brief History of the Smile.” Others contemplate and discuss such random (but IMO engaging) topics such as a recent theory about Neanderthals, people vs. microbes, the use of shaming in society, and as always, a lovely collection of quotations from (mostly Scottish) poets (my favorite is Auden’s line: “If equally affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” It made me cry. I also loved the discussion (minor argument?) about the democratization of science — while Neil’s girlfriend feels teachers should be less didactic, Neil points out that Bernoullis equation is not an opinion.

Honestly, I have loved almost all of McCall Smith’s books and really can’t believe he hasn’t run out of philosophical musings and expositions after all this time. Every book seems to cleanly dissect complex problems into clear and concise points to help you thread through them.

Some of my favorite quotes:
“One had to become indifferent to the things you could not do anything about, unless you were prepared to let them hurt you indefinitely.”

“He, and people like him, might do a little to change the basic rules of engagement between human beings and microbes, but here and there, in small corners of the battlefield, they achieve their largely unsung victories. And in the background, their research, sometimes painfully slow and seemingly entirely theoretical, built up the human armory against microbial defeat.”

“People say that the thing about poetry is its power to haunt.“

“The world’s in a sorry mess. People put so much energy into finding fault with others, with attacking them, with calculating personal advantage, with … with all of those things. We’ve broken the bonds that exist between us, with the result that we are all potential enemies of one another, locked in mutual suspicion and distrust. And do you know what? I’ve had enough of it, I can’t bear to be part of that any longer.”

Thank you to Pantheon and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this audio book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on July 29th, 2025.

Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear (SF)

World building: 4/5 Plot: 3/5 Characters: 4/5 Writing: good but too long for me…

Space opera with an emphasis on how society has evolved across the millenia. A small salvage operation finds aeons old technology and evidence of a terrible crime at the outer edges of the galaxy and have to battle space pirates and corrupt outpost bureaucrats to see justice done. A well-developed, quirky crew: our narrator Haimey — an engineer escaped from the human female isolationist Clade which simultaneously gave one a sense of belonging and an utter inability to disagree; Connla the pilot — born and bred on Spartacus where everyone seems to look and behave like Kirk Douglas; Singer — the endlessly curious ship mind (easily my favorite character); and a couple of cats who … behave just as you’d expect cats acclimated to space to behave!

The best part for me was the many discussions about the interplay between society, government and the individual — freedom vs social controls, right-minding vs brainwashing, human control of AIs vs slave intelligences, etc.  I loved the ability (and sometime reluctance to use) the crew had to tune their own chemistry on the fly and the ensuing discussion about what made a person who they were and how personality was formed.

For me the book was way too long — I liked the world building, the ethics discussions, and the character development, but I got tired of all the science / engineering talk and the action. Which means that if you’re a hard science fiction fan you’ll like this book a lot more than I did. I would say the book breaks down into 25% action, 35% science / engineering / surviving by your wits and tools, 20% discussions about right, wrong, and how to live, and 20% character development. I like her writing style — plenty of insight, good banter, clear descriptions — there was just too much repetition, and I realize that I have simply gotten bored with action! Chase scenes, battles, blah, blah, blah — give me a good discussion on what makes us human any day over that 🙂

Great for fans of The Martian!

Some good quotes:
“The thing picked out in iridescence on my skin looked like renderings of the intergalactic structure of dark gravity.”

“Bureaucracy is the supermassive black hole at the center of the Synarche that makes the whole galaxy revolve.”

“In the face of the unthinkable, there wasn’t much else to do except think about it obsessively.”

“He gazed at me with the sort of interest one reserves for reprieves from the guillotine and similarly refocusing events”

“But where’s the line between right-minding and brainwashing? Or, in the case of an AI, programming for adequate social controls versus creating slave intelligences.”

“If they could, cats would invent full-time full-sensorium VR for all humans everywhere so they could sleep on our immobile bodies eternally. And probably eat our extremities , too.”

“…I got a string of programming jargon that was so far beyond me it might as well have been one of those twelve-tone semi-ultrasonic methane-breather languages that shatter ice crystals and sound like a glass harmonica having a bad dia at work.”

“Maybe I was a nice, safe little puppet of the Synarche, or Justice. Or maybe I was a person who valued community and well-being of the mass of sentient life over the individual right to be selfish.”

“Total freedom for the ones who can enforce it, until somebody comes along and murders them to take their stuff. Slavery for everybody else. Pretty typical warlord behavior in any society, and one of the reasons we have societies in the first place.”

“I was floating near a viewport with my screen and Jane Eyre. It’s kind of horrifying to think of an era when people were so constrained to and by gender, in which the externals you were born with were something you would be stuck with your whole life, could never alter, and it would determine your entire social role and your potential for emotional fulfillment and intellectual achievement.”

The Department of Sensitive Crimes by Alexander McCall Smith (Fiction / Mystery)

I’m a big McCall Smith fan — I like the ethical foundations of and philosophical ruminations in all of his books. This book marks the beginning of a new series which differs from his other three in two primary ways: the action takes place in Sweden (as opposed to Botswana and Scotland) and features a male protagonist.

In general, I don’t like the result when a writer chooses to write a main character of a gender opposite the writer’s own — it’s a personal thing — but for some reason I love McCall Smith’s female leads. Isabelle Dalhousie and Mma Ramotswe are the kind of women I like — perhaps because they blend an emotional sensitivity with a strong rational thought process that resonates strongly with me. Ulf Varg — the senior policeman of the titular Sensitive Crimes Department of the Malmö Criminal Investigation Authority — has a very similar personality, albeit clothed in a man’s body.

Ostensibly about “sensitive” crimes (a knife attack on the back of a victim’s knee, the disappearance of an imaginary boyfriend, a spa owner subject to apparent werewolf fits…) the stories primarily revolve around the ethical dilemmas we all face in everyday life. The characters have arcane interests (such as Nordic Art) which in typical McCall Smith style are presented in ways that spark an interest where none was present before, and the action is propelled forward by the intriguing and detailed flow between their rich interior worlds and the physical world around them.

A good read — I don’t know that the Swedish environment has been presented with the same depth as the Botswana and Scotland environments had previously, but then this is only book one. On the other hand, nice to read a Swedish mystery that isn’t steeped in horrifying scenes (e.g. the Dragon Tattoo books — yuck!)