In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025
And pick out some ideas you could put in a game
Part one: Non-fiction
I read a medley of materials.
The modern melange of media blurs the line between traditional and web publishing. Most books are available online; many bloggers edit their writing into self-published volumes; plenty of web texts are book-length or longer. News and commentary and user content and blog posts and tutorials and metafiction all start blurring together.
For the sake of a clean division, I'm only going to look at the physical books I read in the first six months of 2025. It's Review[i]n[g] June!
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| I externalise my memory by writing reviews every so often. |
Games and decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey. R. Duncan Luce & Howard Raiffa (1985)
A game theory textbook.
Do you ever dive into something thinking you'll be able to hack the technical writing because you have semi-relevant education? One of my majors was in formal logic, but I still couldn't really parse large chunks of this book.
Game-ready ideas: Any sufficiently technical work can be a good source of esoteric jargon to cram into a wildly different domain, like wizardry or mythos occultism or sci-fi engineering. By the way, a dryad and their tree are a dyad: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dyad
A brief history of mathematical thought. Luke Heaton (2015)
An introduction to maths through a history lens.
Brilliant, but dense going in parts. The rare book where I wish it had been twice as long so that some of the inferences and arguments could be laid out in more depth.
Game-ready ideas: Everything is weirder than you thought. 'Non-Euclidean' has a specific meaning which is not just synonymous with 'unknowably eldritch'. Geometry was useful to ancient societies for e.g. recalculating field boundaries after seasonal flooding moves markers. Mathematics has historically intersected massively with religion and spirituality.
Paradoxes from A to Z: Second Edition. Michael Clark (2007)
An encyclopedia of paradoxes with a weird design.
The gimmick is that the paradoxes are arranged in alphabetical order; this makes it almost impossible to read. The introductory entry on 'paradox' is under P, more than halfway through. The implication is you should be using this as a reference work, but the audience for that has to be miniscule! Reading it cover to cover, I was told constantly to flip elsewhere to get necessary background information, because of course all the formal approaches to paradoxes are interlinked. There are no page references. 😡
Seriously, why not just present the paradox in a sensible, mostly-chronological order? Introduce concepts as needed and build from there? Luke Heaton's book may have spoiled me.
Aside: It's interesting that many famous paradoxes are either resolved by the things mathematicians do to make mathematics useful (define countable and enumerable infinities, specify axioms of set theory, etc), or become trivial once you understand that human language isn't and can't be some perfect mirror of reality.
Game-ready ideas: I'm not a 'riddles' guy when it comes to puzzles. Don't use paradoxes for that. You could reskin some paradoxes as challenges that academics in a fantasy world are working on. Preference intransitivity might be turned into an interesting game challenge, e.g. some group prefers A > B > C > A under certain circumstances.
Zeus grants stupid wishes. Cory O'Brien (2013)
Myths from various cultural traditions, retold.
Absolutely redolent with early 2000s internet era writing style, down to ending with an insufferable take on science and religion. There's a line break after almost every sentence clause, like a text conversation or a certain type of free verse.
The author admits to having two orthogonal premises, and vacillates between them. Paraphrasing:
- "Modern retellings of myths are bowdlerised; I will tell you the weird nasty original bits [implied: and lean into the troubling stuff by making unpleasant jokes]"
- "I will just make stuff up to make myths more exciting"
Can't recommend it. I counted seven jokes that actually got a grin, out of (~20 'funny' lines × 275 pages) maybe 5500 stabs at humour. (Lots of typos, too.)
Game-ready ideas: When a cultural tradition is admired, it can end up reflected through massive gulfs of history into art, scholarship, etc. I also like (a) a more adversarial relationship with one's pantheon; (b) living in a magical gourd; (c) a sun that's capable of making mistakes and suffering retaliation for them.
Battle castles: 500 years of knights and siege warfare. Dan Snow (2012)
The story of a set of specific castles.
This was written in the wake of a TV series, and reads like television travelogue narration. The prose is sort of breathless and sometimes borders on legitimising tyranny (letting all the 'divine right of kings' slash 'conquering warlords should have a monopoly on violence so that they can govern' stuff go unexamined).
A useful primer on castles. The actual history content is decent, e.g., addressing the common misconception that a fight goes until you're dead or the enemy is wiped out. But I noticed a few absolute howlers too, old debunked canards like: "Beer was then a basic necessity of life because, unlike the water supply, it could be trusted not to cause disease."
Game-ready ideas: Castles are a specific response to a specific kind of socio-military-economic situation, and might not plausibly crop up in your fantasy world. If they do, there's enough info here you could just lift out a castle and its context entirely.
How to. Randall Munroe (2019)
Pop science with a twist: silly ideas taken seriously.
'The xkcd guy' has written some books, and now I think I've read them all. Pretty light reading until the physics gets heavy. Covers how to play tag (against champion sprinters and marathon runners), how to power your house, how to decorate the world's tallest tree, how to land a plane on various surfaces, etc.
Fairly interesting stuff, but not the sort of thing that geared my mind up to go down some research rabbit hole. If I had any criticism, it's that it's a little America-centric.
Game-ready ideas: A lava moat is surprisingly near-feasible in real life, so in fantasy it should be even more of a staple.
AI Morality. Edited by David Edmonds (2024)
A modern collection of philosophical essays looking at AI and its implications.
The essays are about AI in the broad sense, not just 'generative AI' or 'LLMs', as people are increasingly misapplying the term (which is bewildering to me, like if some specific advancement in orthopedy for hockey injuries led to an explosion in popularity and people just started using the umbrella term 'medical care' to mean 'orthopedy for hockey injuries').
The book's anchors – philosophy, computer science, and writing – are at the intersection of my university study and brief academic career. I picked up a few places where a writer just obviously didn't know what they were talking about, but those were few and far between, so it didn't sap my respect for established academics too much. The book covers a lot of interesting topics, but I found myself skimming a lot due to the curse of existing familiarity with them.
Game ready-ideas: Nothing specific, but lots of inspiration for near-future science fiction. The ethics of insurance denial, cyberattacks, and Asimov's Laws. The chapters on faceless algorithms might be good for Cyberpunk / Shadowrun.
Tune in for Reviewn June parts 2 (fiction I've read) and 3 (game books I've read).
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