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Reviews for Toby Weston’s Books

I have been writing — or rather publishing my writing — for three years now. Things are still far from routine, but so far I am very pleased with how it’s are going!

I checked recently on Amazon to read some of my new reviews. Firstly, they are wonderful! I’m super grateful to all the readers who go to the trouble of giving such great and visible feedback!

Secondly, I was amazed at the numbers. You may not know, but reviews between countries are not shared. So all the reviews on the US or UK are unique to that country’s ‘instance’ of Amazon. Interestingly, I have very similar numbers of reviews for each book in both the UK and US; though I sell twice as many books in the US. Based on history, I seem to be getting just under one review per book per month.

Here are some highlights:

Exceptional indie
Two great books thus far…looking forward to the third with considerable expectation. Weston does a great job balancing tech detail with well-developed characters and a smoothly flowing plot. There is the occasional typo, which rather than annoying me, reminds me that this is an indie author writing raw, exciting hard SF without an army of supporting cast. Well worth the purchase. With all of the (welcome) self-publishing going on, I have to do a lot of sampling, often finding myself incapable of finishing drivel. Weston, like Andy Weir, is a welcome exception.
Interesting characters set in a dark, but hopeful, near future
Toby Weston skillfully performs a literary high-wire act in his Singularity’s Children series by creating fully realized, interesting characters and placing them amid a landscape of high concept, highly disturbing near-future scenarios. His writing style is clean and casual, which makes his occasional descriptions of complex concepts both accessible and enjoyable–he doesn’t talk down to his readers, but rather lifts them up and helps them see how easily his characters’ world could soon be ours.
Weston repeatedly exhibits his enviable ability to shift the story’s focus, and our rapt attention, from a single character’s innermost thoughts to the collective mind of a global network, all the while infusing the narrative with moments of high-tension and high-comedy.
I’m looking forward to book 3, but not to finishing it, because I know that afterward I’ll have to wait for book 4.
Thank you, Toby Weston, for treating scifi readers like adults.

Best SF I’ve read in years!
This is the first of a four novel series that takes place in the near future. The world building is brilliant, the characters quite interesting. Given it is four novels in length, not surprising that it takes a while to see the big picture, but well worth it. If you like William Gibson or Neal Stephenson I think you will very much enjoy this. I can’t wait for the fourth and final book!

Great near future plotlines
Great near future plotlines, well developed characters, super pace and writing skills…. challenging perceptions, thoughtful as well as just a fun read. Highly recommend this for Sci-fi fans.

Great second book in the series
The second instalment of Singularity’s Children is fully delivering on the expectations the excellent first book set. Brilliantly written, the characters are further developed and storylines cross path. There is more action and again new aspects of the technological setup the books play in.
I particularly enjoyed that the not-so-distant future the plot is set in was at times scaringly reminding me of our current reality…
And as before, despite the slightly depressing background of this possible future, the surprising plot and cleverly sprinkled humour make this a thoroughly enjoyable read in the best tradition of authors such as Iain M Banks.
Looking very much forward to the release of the next book in the series!

With each book in the series, the story gets better!
Conflict (Singularity’s Children, Book 3) by Toby Weston
With each book in the series, the story gets better! I do hope that the author is pounding away on his keyboard, furiously completing the next book. You *are* doing that, right Toby Weston?! I hope so as after finishing this one, I really need to know what’s next.
The character drive the plot, and in this book they drive it right off a nuclear cliff! So to speak. The stakes get higher, and the relationships get both clearer, and also more fuzzy. The technology is increasingly intelligent, which also has some interesting side effects. But hey, it’s not like it’s the end of the world… Is it?

Shockingly good!
I have no idea why this series doesn’t have hundreds of reviews, because this is the best SF I’ve read in a couple of years. If you like Hertling or Gibson, you’ll love this!

Writing this feeling pretty good 🙂
Many thanks to everybody who left a review already!

Culture Knife Missile escapes to the Real

An Iain M Banks’ Knife Missile, coming soon to a battlefield near you!

Car of former al Qaeda number two…

“The secret R9X missile is designed to destroy individual terrorist targets without harming surrounding civilians and could potentially kill a car’s front seat passenger without harming the driver.”

These belong in fiction, but I do love IMB’s nasty, aggressive little Knife Missiles, they are a big inspiration for my ‘Torches’.

When world building for the Singularity’s Children universe, a not-too-derivative way of getting Knife Missiles into my tech tree was a top priority!

The Emperor’s New Trolls

Listening recently to the Sam Harris podcast, I understood for the first time the full audacity of Putin’s psych-ops program. In the podcast, Renée DiResta lays bare how the Russian troll-farm operatives systematically trawl social-media oceans looking for hot-button ideas to amplify and exploit. Her data shows how a single fake account might jump from religion to politics, to race, before eliciting a suitable response; but once the troll locks onto something promising, it works to prise open that dormant social fissure, drafting in armies of allied bots and trolls to tweak the minds of their unsuspecting followers and eventually send rivers of hot hate erupting to the surface.

Anything will do. The only common theme: it must be divisive.

National Pride, Gay Pride, Trans Pride, Geek Pride; every Conspiracy theory you have heard of, and many you won’t have; Anti Vaxxers, Flat Earthists, Nibiru Millenarianists; Feminists vs Incels; Immigrants vs Nazis…

You name it. It’s not only Trump or Brexit here. If people are prone to argue about something down the pub, or over their Thanksgiving tables, then it qualifies for artificial inflation.

Take the Anti-Vaxxer phenomenon. Although the majority of parents have always understood the importance of vaccinating their children; starting in about 2013 the vast majority of Facebook posts talking about vaccination began promoting the Anti-Vaxxer agenda — we now know that many of these posts came from bot-farms and troll-centers posing as concerned parents.

“We started looking at the Russian trolls, because that data set became available. One of the first things that came out was they tweet about vaccines way more often than the average Twitter user. Broniatowski said trolls tweeted about vaccines about 22 times more often than regular Twitter users.”

To anybody looking in—unaware; believing they are part of an organic swell of concerned activism—it can be hard to resist. Overwhelmed, their herd mentality sub-routines are spoofed by an environment saturated with the cognitive chaff. Betrayed by their own evolutionary psychology, the individual now accepts the once ridiculous conclusion and shifts their opinion towards the herd consensus.

What was once crazy becomes the norm. The small number of people predisposed to think for themselves become confused and increasingly alienated…
…sound familiar?

Bad faith actors are exploiting a psychological heuristic intended to calibrate an individual’s point of view with the wisdom of the herd.

This may explain the sudden shift across multiple apparently unrelated domains: bad faith actors are exploiting a psychological heuristic intended to calibrate an individual’s point of view with the wisdom of the herd. They are able to take fringe views from a few genuine nutters / visionaries and amplify them to the point that they became irresistible. In this way, the trolls can establish a new social center of gravity.

Once this happens, society’s own socio-cognitive immune system jumps into life and flash mobs of outrage spring up to shout-down any remaining legitimate objections.

At least forewarned is forearmed. Knowing the troll’s modus-operandi, it is vital that we pay attention. When unfathomable, illogical, but frequently espoused positions suddenly appear, we must examine them for traces of trollish manipulation… even if we agree with the sentiment.

I have always considered myself pro-diversity and pro-social justice, but recently feel utterly left behind by the progressive-narrative of the ‘snowflake’ social-justice-warriors. How much of this is because well-intentioned, but naive and impressionable, individuals have been hypnotized by squads of Trolls into contorted extreme positions they would never have gotten into on their own?

Societies are already prone to ‘emperors new clothes’ style excursions; evidence of reality can be ignored if enough people reinforce a common counterfactual position.

This happens organically with fashion (believe me, beards, rolled-up trousers, and lumberjack shirts never looked cool) and with the slow shifting tides of social taboo; but clearly, it can also be gamed, cynically exploited, and weaponized by skilled actors.

Knowing this, we must seek out and examine these once harmless embers of fringe opinion so skillfully coaxed and fanned into conflagrations of artificial outrage.

Trolling may turn out to be a positive influence; a constant perturbation of society, preventing it from settling down prematurely into false local minima.

Briefly, on a brighter note, the best deceptions always contain some grain of truth, and the trolls seem indiscriminate about which conflicts they amplify. This implies that some of the fringe ideas they take up will be valid, and if accepted by a broader slice of society, may actually take us to a better place. Trolling eventually may turn out to be a positive influence; a constant perturbation of society, preventing it from settling down prematurely into false local minima.

Unacknowledged though, this verbose flood of disinformation is becoming an existentially problematic predicament.

We are facing rafts of very real, very immediate problems and both a naive preoccupation with wishful thinking and the equal and opposite reaction of radical, nationalist, traditionalist, status-quo dogma, will bog us down in cognitive red-tape while the forests burn and the ice-caps melt.

Who would have thought that #gamergate might be the tremor that announces the coming of our Fermi-Paradox filter?

This essay is also on Medium. You can support my writing by ‘clapping’ for it: https://medium.com/@tobyweston/the-emperors-new-trolls-cb6edf88f4a7

#maga #trump #sadpuppies #metoo #antivaxxer #blacklivesmatter #ReasonsToLeaveEU #fandamentalism