Review: Fate Stay Night

After having read favorable reviews, getting positive comments from acquaintances, and discovering it's popular enough to have manga and an anime made from it, I decided to try the visual novel Fate Stay Night by Type Moon. Like all visual novels it plays like a choose-your-own-adventure book with special effects and a mostly linear path. Despite the limited game side of it, as many options are A or B and B gets you killed or false choices where your choice makes no difference, it made a pretty interesting if long winded story for the first third to half of the game. I was beginning to really enjoy the story and characters. And then the game went H. It totally blindsided me. I should of paid more attention to those reviews I suppose. Sadly, this is also the point the game finally veered too far into typical anime tropes that I dislike, such as an over-important useless male lead, absurd gender roles, and stupid heroism without an accompanying price. I went ahead and pushed though to the end having to endure the increasing standardization of the plot. It's too bad too, I enjoyed the tantalizing subversion suggested in the early plot. Overall it makes the equivalent of a decent manga which already exists.

The British Industrial Revolution by Robert C Allen

This book tries to explain in explicit detail why the industrial revolution started in Great Britain and how it happened. In a nutshell Britian had relatively high wages with very cheap energy; coal. This created a demand for labor saving devices. On the supply side Britian had a highly educated population with a large population hub in London to disperse the knowledge. Now the book itself takes nearly 300 pages to make this argument and all the supporting details really strengthen the case and there are thorough deconstructions of other major theories. Overall Allen does an excellent job of making his case. I highly recommend this book if you want to know more on how the industrial revolution started.

Science a Four Thousand Year History

I recently finished reading this title by Patricia Fara. It appears the point of the work's goal is to deconstruct the story of Science. For example it takes big names in science such as Newton, Einstein, and Copernicus and discusses how they did things in a way no longer considered scientific, self promoting, or were one of many discovering something. It goes a to great detail into the importance and process of selling scientific memes and the great battles between ideas such as heat being motion or a fluid that flowed into or out of things. The roots of modern science in the now rejected fields such as alchemy and astrology are also discussed at length. A lot of time is spent on illustrating the biases of science towards, upper-class European males.
It is surprising that the scientific method was more or less ignored as its adoption is critical in how current science works, evolves, and self-corrects.

I found the book unsatisfying perhaps because I've never felt science can answer everything; science is great for how thing work but flounders with why which philosophy and religion seem better suited. It just appears similar to perspective of religious adherent who discovered their organization is like any other; imperfect. The conclusion feels a tad incomplete. After deconstructiong the weakness of science and the woldview, not mentioning any other potential viewpoints or calling for reform seems well uninspiring especially after discussing in depth the importance of selling ones ideas.

Transience

Greater North America, The Combine, UCAS, USoNC, The Union,

By many names and many iterations it's common in Science Fiction to have the USA annex Canada in the least through the western hemisphere completely. Never mind that annexing even Canada would be prohibitively expensive to synchronize. My theory is USA size is increased to be representative of how big the country looms in the imagination and to show how much more powerful this future form is. It also allows for narrowing the players in the story. Major nations such as Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia and Argentina can be safely ignored despite the sizable power they represent, and greater potential, on the world stage. On the other hand these worlds usually have the EU as a unified nation and often a pan-African or Arabian Superstate as well so it may just be an attempt to keep the USA up to speed with it's rivals.