This is a review for Rosie’s Book Review Team, and I thank the author for providing me with a copy of his book in exchange for a fair and honest review. The Signal is modern sci-fi, and it’s a humdinger. The story, which follows the effect of an AI system called ARIA on the workings of Nexus Technologies, a company that creates marketing campaigns, couldn’t be more topical. And for this reader, a little unnerving. AI presents a challenge to all of us, regardless of what we do for a living. Can AI duplicate humanity? Can it replace us as the driver of the future? Can we limit its power? Luke Voss looked at these questions and ran with them. The main character, Maya Chen, is a content strategist at Nexus. She has worked there for many years and has been promoted on the basis of her creativity and determination. She’s also a good mother and a good leader to her working group. Nexus has hired Elena, someone who ran an AI program at another company and firmly believes AI is the future and can do anything, to manage ARIA. Through a misdirected email, Maya learns of a project called Lighthouse, which plans to quietly and legally replace seventy percent of the company’s workforce. Maya attempts to block this takeover by assembling a working group with the expertise to do that: Marcus, the engineer that originally created ARIA; Donna, the head of HR who knows everything about the employees and becomes aware of the multiple and secret firings; and data analyst Raj, a reluctant partner, fearful of losing his job because he would lose his sick mother’s health insurance. Their opponent is not really Elena, but ARIA itself, more than just a common AI program. It is sentient and is always watching, analyzing each employee’s job, learning their weaknesses, and already knows how to do those jobs incredibly faster and better.   I leave it to the audience to find out how these few people, determined to keep the company’s humanity, manage to do it. What Voss has created is not a good vs evil plot, or even a rage against a machine. It really confronts the question of the preservation of what makes humans, well, human. The author knows a lot about the corporate world and AI technology, and it imbues the book with authenticity. He allows the tension to grow from chapter to chapter, which made the book hard to put down and left this reader even more wary of the future of AI and us. If I had any reservations, it would be that of all the characters, only Maya is well-fleshed out, and there were parts where the story bogged down in information. Also I found one serious error in the time line, which caused me to go back to reread several times. The book is very well-written, with some places that were definitely quotable. I’m glad I’m retired, because I might worry that I’d become replaceable. I highly recommend this book to sci-fi fans and also anyone who’s thought seriously about the future of AI. You’re in for a ride. 0 0

I haven’t read any historical fiction since Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series, which I thoroughly enjoyed. This novel is an action thriller set toward the end of Nero’s reign, and I liked it as much. How appropriate that the book should open on the Ides of March, AD 65! Lucius Decimius owes a good sum of money to Julius Lupus, a Gaul who procures slaves for the Emperor’s house. When Lucius can’t pay, he gives Julius his ten year old daughter, Lucilla, in exchange for his own life. When his son, fifteen-year-old Marcus, returns from Ostea with his sister to meet his father, he discovers him with Julius and two of his thugs. He is choked to unconsciousness by Julius and awakes to discover Lucilla gone. When his father tells him what he did, Marcus beats his father to death in a rage and then runs to Rome, to find a place to hide and to find his sister. Rome is part ash from the Great Fire and part the overwhelmingly costly rebuild of Nero’s complex, which is bleeding the empire dry. Lucilla is sold into slavery to the Domus Aurea, the golden house of the Emperor himself. While looking unsuccessfully for Lucilla, Marcus discovers the only way he can survive is to join a gang of cutthroats in the alleys of Rome. He learns to fight, to kill, spends time in the city’s dungeons, and is eventually sold into slavery himself to work in the household of Senator Valens. I will leave the reader to discover how Marcus develops in the household as the slave of the Senator’s teenage son, Brutus, who is preparing to be recognized as a man of Rome by donning the toga virilis. Rome at the time is a viper’s nest of conspiracy to eliminate Nero, whose whim dictates life and death and who is becoming more irrational by the day. The tentacles of Roman politics ensnare even the Senator’s house. In the midst of all this and his life as a slave, can  Marcus ever discover where Lucilla was taken? I loved the historical context of the book, well researched, with a glossary at the beginning to explain the Latin terms used. The author has created a colorful picture of Rome, both its filth and its beauty, and uses sounds, scents and color to create the background. The author’s writing style is engaging, smoothly blending historical context into the fictional narrative. The narrative explores themes of oppression and resilience through the characters of both Marcus and Lucilla. The development of all the main characters is evident, showing both their physical and emotional growth, along with some of Marcus’s hot-headed and dangerous moments. I found the plot gripping. It maintained my interest through unexpected twists and the realism of the characters, and demonstrated the consequences of slavery and revenge in Nero’s Rome. I highly recommend this for readers of historical fiction with a lot of action, and I look forward to the next two books in this series! About the author: Hailing from York, Marc Flanagan has been a fan of historical fiction since the age of fourteen. His love of Ancient Rome began with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in English class. ​Until his teenage years, he mostly read fantasy authors, but a birthday gift of Simon Scarrow’s Centurion changed everything. These days, audiobooks are Marc’s medium of choice, allowing him to absorb far more stories while balancing a busy schedule. ​He loves traveling in Italy, and film and television based on Roman times. Marc writes fast-paced, character-driven action thrillers designed to pull you right into the dirt and glory of the ancient world, hoping to infuse theatrical intensity and epic scale into his writing. You can find the author at https://www.marcflanagan.co.uk/blog https://www.facebook.com/marc.flanagan.author 0 0

It’s been a while since the Sunshine Blogger Award has been in the spotlight. Sally Cronin (found at Smorgasbord Blog Magazine), a much-deserved nominee, nominated me, along with some other bloggers who are downright amazing. I am honored to be in their company. The Sunshine Blogger Award as peer-to-peer recognition given by fellow bloggers who bring positivity, creativity, and inspiration to the blogging community. Anyone nominated has a set of guidelines to follow: There are so many deserving fellow bloggers out there that I had a hard time selecting. Here are my nominees for this award and I hope they will pass the award on to some other of the many deserving writers out there:              Janice Spina              Diana Peach              Teagan Geneviene               Jemima Pett               Bruce Goodman               Nicholas Rossi Here are the questions Sally asked me.             1 Where is your favorite place in the world? The  beach! Any beach. I grew up on the ocean, listening to its rhythmic waves and hearing the sound of the fog horn from Gurnett lighthouse on foggy nights. I find a great sense of peace walking in the water and feeling the waves break over my feet, and searching tide pools for intertidal animals is really enjoyable. I can watch waves breaking on rocks for hours, the up and down and spray of the water. It has been calculated that adult humans are 60% water, while children are 75-78%. I think I never lost the childhood water! Probably an octopus. They are incredibly smart and adaptive, which most people don’t realize. You can even make friends with them. It would be fun to have a conversation about their lives, which are regrettably short. I do not eat octopus. 3 If you only had two minutes to get out of your house, what would you grab? Assuming my husband could get out on his own, my two cats and my computer’s external hard drive. He would grab his own drive and as many photographs as he could carry! Memories are so important! And my cats would never forgive me if I left them behind.        4)   What place you’ve lived or visited has remained special to you? Prague is probably the once place I love that is never far from my mind.  My husband and I lived there for a year with a Czech family while doing research, and we have visited the city many times. Sadly, we’ve have lost many of our Czech friends in recent years. But the beauty and grandeur of the city remains, and I do love good Czech food. I never tire of traversing the Charles Bridge or meandering through Kampa, an island just off the bridge with lovely parks and old buildings.      5) If you were invisible, what three things would you like to do?     6)   If you could pass two new laws, what would they be?        7)   What two people would you like to invite for lunch (famous, dead or alive). Excluding Jesus, which might be a stretch, I would choose Leonard da Vinci and the first Queen Elizabeth.       8) What would you wish for if you could have ANYTHING? A longer life. I don’t want to miss my grandchildren’s’ growing up, and when you reach my age, each day is a gift and a jewel.       9) Apart from reading and writing, what other ways do you like to relax? Nothing out of the ordinary, I’m afraid. Swimming, of course. And sailing when I get the chance. I also like to cook and bake and use my writer’s group as a test kitchen for new recipes. I like to knit — children always need sweaters. I love watching mysteries and documentaries of historical events. I’m definitely a life-long learner, having taken a course in Gaelic at the University of North Carolina a few years back. What a difficult language! I would like to include travel, but our last trips were rather stressful, especially a tour of Scotland led by an energizer bunny on a run.       10) Do you have a phobia and do you remember how it started? My son tried to instill a phobia in me with his selection of pets when he was young: various snakes, lizards, iguanas, turtles, and a tarantula. Unfortunately for him, I liked all of them. I even learned how to inject our iguana with antibiotics when it got sick. It loved being stroked and would climb out of its terrarium when I came with the needle, looking for some loving! Heights are also not a problem. I also went sky-diving several years ago. What a thrill!   So no real phobias!             11) You have  24 hours left on the planet! How would you spend them? That’s easy, with my family, with a lot of comfort food! Never mind the calories! Here are my questions for my nominees: I’m looking forward to the answers! 1 0

This is a review for Rosie’s Book Review Team, and I thank the author for providing me with a copy of his book in exchange for a fair and honest review. The Signal is modern sci-fi, and it’s a humdinger. The story, which follows the effect of an AI system called ARIA on the workings of Nexus Technologies, a company that creates marketing campaigns, couldn’t be more topical. And for this reader, a little unnerving. AI presents a challenge to all of us, regardless of what we do for a living. Can AI duplicate humanity? Can it replace us as the driver of the future? Can we limit its power? Luke Voss looked at these questions and ran with them. The main character, Maya Chen, is a content strategist at Nexus. She has worked there for many years and has been promoted on the basis of her creativity and determination. She’s also a good mother and a good leader to her working group. Nexus has hired Elena, someone who ran an AI program at another company and firmly believes AI is the future and can do anything, to manage ARIA. Through a misdirected email, Maya learns of a project called Lighthouse, which plans to quietly and legally replace seventy percent of the company’s workforce. Maya attempts to block this takeover by assembling a working group with the expertise to do that: Marcus, the engineer that originally created ARIA; Donna, the head of HR who knows everything about the employees and becomes aware of the multiple and secret firings; and data analyst Raj, a reluctant partner, fearful of losing his job because he would lose his sick mother’s health insurance. Their opponent is not really Elena, but ARIA itself, more than just a common AI program. It is sentient and is always watching, analyzing each employee’s job, learning their weaknesses, and already knows how to do those jobs incredibly faster and better.   I leave it to the audience to find out how these few people, determined to keep the company’s humanity, manage to do it. What Voss has created is not a good vs evil plot, or even a rage against a machine. It really confronts the question of the preservation of what makes humans, well, human. The author knows a lot about the corporate world and AI technology, and it imbues the book with authenticity. He allows the tension to grow from chapter to chapter, which made the book hard to put down and left this reader even more wary of the future of AI and us. If I had any reservations, it would be that of all the characters, only Maya is well-fleshed out, and there were parts where the story bogged down in information. Also I found one serious error in the time line, which caused me to go back to reread several times. The book is very well-written, with some places that were definitely quotable. I’m glad I’m retired, because I might worry that I’d become replaceable. I highly recommend this book to sci-fi fans and also anyone who’s thought seriously about the future of AI. You’re in for a ride. If you wish to learn more about the author, I will tell you in advance I could find nothing when I searched! 0 0

This has been a very tough month. It started when a neighbor from across the street died right after a successful heart surgery. There followed in quick succession, the death of a friend of more than 50 years from Parkinson’s and another friend of more than 40 years from Alzheimer’s. The latter two deaths were expected. I had watched my friend, Francie, battle Parkinson’s for 15 years. The last two years were especially painful as she descended into a world of her own and eventually failed to respond to anyone, even her husband. She was bedridden and had to be coaxed to eat. The last time I saw her, she opened her eyes for the first time in days and smiled when my husband said what he said to her every time we met up, “Hello, Beautiful.” We rented an apartment in California from Francie and her husband in the 70s – it was a duplex, and they lived upstairs with their dogs – and we had so many adventures together. Every time we ventured out to see something in the state, we invariably ran into some problems that turned into big laughs. My friend Billie started showing mental issues about two years ago and very rapidly declined. Within a year, she did not recognize anyone and had to live in a care facility. The last time I saw her, she did not know me, but she and I were the greatest of chocoholics, and I’d brought her a chocolate doughnut. When I asked her if she would like it, she replied, “Yes, I would like that,” even though she never spoke. Billie and I met when we sent our sons to daycare after they were born. We both worked at UNC, and I worked in her lab to learn various techniques for my own research from time to time. She was a brilliant scientist. She, her husband, my husband, and I and our children went to the beach together for a week every year for 16 years. Lots of history there. This is a downer to write about, but I am not feeling myself lately, and getting my feelings out there helps. I write this to mourn their passing and celebrate their lives. – two warm and wonderful women who added so much to my life. 0 0