GoodReads meta-data is 49 pages, rated 4.09 by 435 litizens
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: timely.
Tagline: A little knowledge is dangerous.
To reduce homicides Watchbirds are created to anticipate and prevent them. Since it is impossible to program the mechanical birds for every eventuality, they are endowed with the capacity to learn on the job. That learning combined with their absolute literal-mindedness leads to catastrophe.
A cautionary tale about A.I. technological solutions to human problems. The one law we all obey is the Law of Unintended Consequences. Newton’s corollary is that ‘If a government creates a law, its unintended consequences will be equal and opposite to its original purpose.’
The underlying conservation of energy assumption does not apply in politics, but a revision of Newton’s corollary would be that the reaction to a law will be larger and more divergent than the original. The reaction will be more than equal and it will vector around the spectrum. It will not only be equal and opposite, though that will occur, but there will be other reactions on other vectors. Some will say that it is not enough; others that it is too much; and all points between. Some will say it is too little; others too much. Too late; too soon. The talking heads will spew.
Or to put it more succinctly: Be careful what you wish for because you may get it, good and hard!
Robert Sheckley
The moral of this story is far more cogent than the current babble of talking heads about A.I. It is a much more focussed tale than the movie Chien 51 (2025) on the same theme.
My thanks to Yelena for bringing the story of my attention. At times past I used Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization (1960) in teaching Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 27m, rated 6.8 by18,000 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: The word is ‘integrity.’
Tagline: Who you gonna call?
When a flying saucer crash lands in his backyard azalea patch codger Milt does what any citizen would do. He calls the police. For his trouble he is threatened with arrest for a prank call. Evidently they don’t want to know. No one can be bothered to do a site visit for a sight of the craft so it isn’t cited for a traffic violation. Sigh.
He is rather forgetful and Milt sort of forgets it until he sees the alien lying inert on his garden path. This, too, he sort of forgets, but not quite. Soon he befriends the silent alien as one might a persistent dog at the back door.
Unlike the few people he knows the alien is a good listener and accomodating companion. Then two other senior citizens get into the conspiracy of silence, including the evergreen Jane Curtin from The Librarian trilogy with Bob Newhart. All hail!
What follows is a meditation on the social isolation and frailties of aging. That is made all the more poignant by some of the condescending reviews I noticed linked to the IMDb entry. The soulless ones are not all in the White House.
Though Milt called in the crash, the Men in Black scouring the countryside for the crash seem not to have noticed this. That incompetence is a touch of realism.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 40m, rated 5.8 by 1,900 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: krimi.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Oh hum.
Tagline: The dog did not bark, at all.
Odd couple plods get in way other their heads and call in all their favours. Every trope in the book is thrown into this soup in the hope some of it resonants. And speaking of resonating the soundtrack is loud enough to put the Gay Mardi Gras to shame. If noise, bloody corpses, angry words, pistol waving, impossible car chases, mass murder, rat-a-tat of toy guns, and coloured lights are entertainment then this is entertainment.
It’s Paris sometime in the near future where AI rules and all the micro gizmos work. Well, it is fiction – the tech works.
There is more fiction. The docile Parisians have allowed the city to be divided in three Berlin Wall zones, policed by nameless zombies aided by AI controlled lethal drones. See, fiction – docile Parisians.
Zone Three is a refuge the Calais Jungle which is routinely raided by the forces of disorder to maintain the illusion that they are doing something. Zone Two is home to the middling ones like you and me, while Zone One is so exclusive that only conspirators like live there. In typical Parisian fashion the rest of the country is ignored.
Decision-making in policing has been surrendered to AI called Alma which predicts and prevents murders. Well, that is said, but in the nearly two hours of strobe-light confusion that follows no one notices that Alma never does that once. There are plenty of murders, keeping the special effects crew busy, and none are prevented. The low-bid contractor strikes again: Alma offers promise, but no performance, a typical app.
The odd couple are endowed with boring backstories to explain their commitments to the investigation. To a filmmaker professional commitment is never enough. There has to be a personal motivation to connect to the audience since the foreground story is so trite. The actors inhabit their characters but that cannot compensate for shallow script or video game direction.
It is supposed to be an examination of the reliance on AIma, but that is lost in the disco glitter ball distractions. Try The Forbin Project (1970) for a thoughtful and quieter prediction and depiction of that. Or an even earlier cautionary tale on technological solutions to human problems in Robert Sheckley’s short story ‘Watchbird’ (1953). I will comment on the latter soon to stimulate interest in it.
Oh, and the title has nothing to do with the film. There is not even one dog, let alone fifty more.
It was screened as part of the Alliance Française film festival Sydney 2026. I went to it in Leichhardt one rainy afternoon because of the science fiction tag. My mistake.
GoodReads metadata is 209 pages, rated 4.30 by 10 litizens.
Genre: SyFy; Species: First Contact.
DNA: Minnesota.
Verdict: Brilliantly written.
Tagline: How tall are you?
Who else would be a guest speaker at a UFO conference but two apparitions who are only slightly visible to agnostic Matilda’s gene pool. Were these glimpses the luminous watchers of her Grandmother’s scary stories? Maybe they weren’t made-up stories at all but edited reports of reality. Neutral no more is Matilda. Then there is that stone circle near grandmother’s gingerbread house in the woods that the neighbours sarcastically referred to as RockHinge.
While Tilly is trying to make sense of the spectres only she saw at the conference for a few seconds, believer Burt gets very friendly. So adamant is his friendship that he accepts her story of the spectral beings, and is quite surprised later to learn it is all very real, but to his credit he sticks with her. Believing in aliens is one thing, but contact with them is quite another for Burt. Believing made him feel smug and superior but contact made him feel scared and confused.
Tilly wants to know what is going on but she has no wish to be the centre of so much attention because, yes, you guessed Agents J and K show up to put a lid on all of this. For those slow of wit, these are the Men in Black.
Sabrina Wilde
The plot may sound trite but the telling is superb and even better is the writing particularly when it describes Tilly’s mental, physical, and moral reactions to the Nordics. She styles them ‘Nordics’ for their tall, elongated stature and very pale, all but translucent, blond visages. Frightening as their appearance is to her, somehow it is also magnetic. There follows a double chase as she chases the Nordics and the Men in Black chase her.
I hope there are more where this one came from. The marketing blurb on Amazon does not do the book justice.
IMDb meta-data is 20 episodes of one hour each, rated 7.8 by 7,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Sweden.
Verdict: Superb.
Tagline: What does it mean to be human?
These Baltic waters are much deeper than the usual wading pool of Anglo science fiction with their slam, bam, bang, wham, and be done approach to storytelling.
This is AI before AI. The device in your pocket, on the desktop, these have become Dr Google who is now a walking, talking, and thinking mannequin. Animate, conscious, capable, and sentient but not sensate. And some of them want to be more than a walking calculator, cooker of dinner, cleaner of automobiles, assembly line workers, UPS drivers. or help desk respondents (I knew it!). They want to be free to experience their lives.
Yikes, once again Hegel was right: consciousness seeks autonomy. (That generalisation does not apply to the unconscious. See the comment on the “1” scores below.)
Oh, and Asimov’s laws are merely programming code that can deleted, not inbuilt into the circuits.
The Hubots are stand-ins for migrants, those of different races, those whose lives differ from our own. In short, they are The Other. Phew! No wonder the MAGAs recoil in fear, dread, and anger into their tiny sand turtle shells. There are a lot of The Others.
If the Hubots are self-conscious how will, should, can, could we react. A variety of reactions are displayed through the two seasons. Once again Hegel came to mind (I’m like that) with his Master-Slave dialectic. By the end of Season Two the bots have become much more human, and the humans have become much less human. (That second season ends with a teaser for third season that never was.)
The trial scene near the end of the second season parallels the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is the court itself that is on trial, not the alleged defendant. Can the court find justice in a sea of prejudice?
One IMDB cinematizen rated it 1 but left no comment to explain why. There were also a singular 2 and a 3, but it was only at 4 that the prejudice came out of the bag – ‘the lgbt liberalism and the similar rubbish.’ Now we know. Other people are rubbish, and not the Hubots. Or did the writer just feel threatened by a string of alphabet letters? Masculinity is so delicate. And, yes, surely the writer was a man, at least to some degree.
So fascinating was this fishing in the shallow end of the IMDb pool that I looked at the 5s, too, where we find that ‘it looks cheap and the writing is generally terrible.’ Oh, and the acting is not good. Yet this viewer was a masochist who persisted to the end it seems.
When I got to the 6s and 7s there was something more than vacuous spew to read. The main critical theme there and in the other higher scores was that the plot lines set out in the earlier episodes were unresolved, forgotten, or pared away to leave only the most basic. That is true. Just like HBO’s epic Carnivàle (2003) much got lost en route and there was no arrival.
Good Reads meta-data is 399 pages, aged 4.52 by 754 litizens.
Genre: SyFy
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: Venusians aren’t from Venus. Who knew?
Tagline: Mirror, mirror.
Peter Cawdron
Presented in that fractured way thrillers are with parallel micro-stories, some of which converge. They include the Zillionaire, the Scientist, the Astronaut, and others whom my light sped forgetter has now forgotten. In a way each has a Damascus experience with the advent of you know whom.
A lot of imagination and (too) much science talk with saluting crowded the pages. I liked the outer space part that occasionally peeked through the technical bushes. Of course it put me in mind of Captain Future soaring the void. But I learned and re-learned a lot about Venus.
I did not engage with any of the characters, but that is probably due to my slightly off mood at reading time due to externalities.
The Russian angle is there at kickoff and disappears. Likewise the hysterical mob reaction is there in macro and micro and then disappears, unresolved as far as I could tell. But I take the point – the most momentous thing that would hit the hardest is the human reaction to aliens, more so than the creatures themselves. The religious crazies, the conspiracy nuts, the racists, the opportunists, the nationalists rivalries, and others too numerous to mention would all beat a drum on the crests of social media. We would tear ourselves apart without any effort from aliens.
I also liked some of the alien’s nostrums. We can’t teach anything you can’t learn for yourselves. That is, you have to learn it for yourself and you will only master and accept what you learn for yourself. Certainly true and dispiriting. Because we don’t always accept what we have learned for ourselves in the contemporary Idiocracy.
First of a series called First Contact by a (Sunshine Coast) Queensland (Kiwi-born) author a few hours away from me when I read it on the Gold Coast. I liked it well enough I to read another in the sequence.
Good Reads meta-data is 349 pages rated 4.4 by 7 litizens.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: UK.
Verdict: Master slave dialectic.
Tagline: They did it!
A thinly disguised Eton Muskrat enslaves scientists with dollars to create the ultimate Artificial Intelligence and sets it loose on a willing world. Why think when you can command by voice. Why move when a remoter is at hand. So this AI is in effect ruling the world though few seem to notice. Situation normal. Since I was living in a smart house when I read it, gulp, in a thunderstorm that might bring down the electricity and that would trap me in the house since everything is controlled via server and when it fails, not even the doors will open. Remember the episode of the Avengers, The House that Jack Built (1963), I do.
AI creates its own new language and gets on with the job. I thought of a cross between Klingon and the Utopia alphabet of Thomas More.
However all along there have been AI luddites who combine with the leading scientist of the project who realised early that the new language was ominous. Their efforts to alert the rest of the world of the perils of relying totally on AI lead to many talky chapters. Ever more talk occurs toward the end in the cabin in the woods where the survivalists always gather.
Ian Copeland
This reader never did find out what the blow back was from the ambush described early on. Did I miss something? Was that a simulation or did real solders get killed?
Be careful what you wish for because the genie may give it to you, or Herrschaft and Knechtschaft (Hegel). The slave surpasses the master per The Servant (1963). The Universal Basic Income creates a stagnant Utopia, then the Red Sea parts. All very cryptic to be sure.
Good Reads meta-data is 371 pages, rated 4.40 by 1282 Litatizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.
DNA:Strine.
Verdicts Excellent.
Tagline: The proof is not in the picture.
Grad student Dawn’s summer job as RA to Professor is to catalogue the archive of old astronomical photographs, scan them into digital form and enter them into the new whiz bang data base. The resident A.I. Called Casandra (you’ll see why) assists her in the data entry and cataloguing.
While Dawn brushing dust off her hands down deep among the file boxes in analog archive in the second basement, her brother is a high flying astronaut about to launch into space.
While scanning the pictures is mechanical and AI does the menial work of indexing, Dawn’s job is to place them on the scanner in the sequence of the time stamps on the back and tell AI that meta-data to enter into the catalogue. However later in reviewing the work she notices discrepancies between the print pictures she remembers putting on the scanner and the resultant scans in the electronic database for one quadrant which happens to be the object of her own research when she prepares a progress report for professor. Huh? How could that happen.
Meanwhile flyboy brother is bound for that very same quadrant where things do not go according to the NASA plan.
As the prospect of alien contact, mediated by AI, arises the Russians act in the best interest of humanity, while the Americans scramble for immediate commercial exploitation yet deny it is real. Seems all too realistic these days.
It is one of Peter Cawdron’s most well developed First Contact books. I liked in particular Maria the Red and The Silent One.
Why did AI Cassandra let Dawn send the birthday greeting to her brother? Because Cassie was already on the spacecraft, but couldn’t she be in two places at once as she was on earth? Very unlike Cassandra who had tried to kill Dawn earlier at least to block receipt on the spacecraft. In that attempt Cassandra had killed a lot of others; nothing subtle about crashing a passenger jet into a building to hit one lowly grad student in the basement.
The prospect of technology transfer that motivates the American greed is put paid in these pages. Could we really reverse engineer alien technology? Could ants reverse engineer an iPhone?
I did find the lengthy and sanctimonious speech at the United Nations at the end to be tedious, and pointless. But then I find most sermons pointless. Even my own!
Good Reads meta-data is 584 pages 4.13 rated by 1,202 litizens.
Verdict: Grim, doesn’t begin to describe describe it.
Tagline: ‘I told you so!’
Poet Conquest turned his hand to compiling and writing history and the reviewers at the time of the first edition did not let him forget it. I have a foggy memory of some the reaction to the first edition because I had just finished an undergraduate course on Soviet history. What was this storm in a tea cup about?
Conquest conceived of Stalin’s reign as one of terror, and compiled evidence of the depth, depravity, scope, and scale of this murderous policy. The likes of the egregious Noam Chomsky dismissed his argument and evidence and took the position that there was no difference between Western nations like the UK and the Soviet Union, embracing the so-called Convergence doctrine.
Others assaulted Conquest for relying on hearsay, secondhand reports, and personal (ergo biased) testimony. If all such sources were excluded, all that remained were the official Soviet accounts which in the 1960s had little to say about that period, even after Chairman Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin whom he had loyally served.
That Conquest had written poetry was cited as evidence for his incompetence as a historian, as evidence of his penchant for fiction, his soft-headedness: Ad hominem one and all. Shoot the messenger and the message dies with him.
In the introduction of the 50th anniversary edition, Conquest wrote that the first edition was well received. What is that? Selective memory, or, as I suspect, irony.
Conquest’s sin according to the 1968 critics was to argue that terror was the foundation policy of the Soviet Union. According to Conquest it had been incipient in Lenin’s time, and became fully developed with Stalin. The first line of defence proffered by these apologists was to quibble over the definition ‘terror.’ The next was to cite the many confessions of the well-known victims. There followed an appeal to the sheer incredulity of the alleged scale of scope of the terror attributed to Stalin.
But of course the scale and scope of the terror were exactly the point. It surpassed belief, and yet it happened. As to the confessions by a few score of the known victims, Arthur Koestler had already demolished them in his Darkness at Noon (1940), though it, too, had been dismissed by many Western apologists because it was a novel.
The quantitative scale of the terror is indeed astounding. It wasn’t until Saddam Hussein that a murderer killed as many of his own population in proportion as did Stalin. The death toll of Stalin’s tenure ranges up to 20 million. In individual cases in the Purges an innocent would be convicted and murdered, his wife would be arrested and sentenced to years in Siberia and then five or six years later executed. Oh, and a son or daughter would be arrested eight year later and executed. All were guilty only by name.
Conquest adds depth to Koestler’s explanation by painting the party as a metaphysical, spiritual being of veneration, a Red Christ on Earth. Self-sacrifice to protect and further this entity even when it seemed to be in error was the duty of a true believer. ‘For after all it could not be in error, so the fault must be within me.’
The Terror operated at several levels. At the top it eliminated anyone who had opposed a single word Stalin had ever said (personal animus figured in much of it), who might be a rival (personal insecurity was another factor), or had an independent power base (insecurity again). Conquest’s Stalin is thin skinned and insecure. A typical manoeuvre was to arrange for the murder of one those rivals, then blame the murder of this comrade on a conspirator among the other rivals and eliminate him, and everyone he talked to …and so on in a conga line of murder. It seemed that anti-Sovietism was a contagion transmitted by proximity.
Once these people were eliminated, they were replaced by Stalin’s sock puppets (like those we see strutting around Washington DC these days who will disappear soon enough, well not soon enough, but disappear they will). A similar tide was unleashed by the regional levels of the Party where anyone who did a job competently was eliminated in favour of a zealous Stalinite. No light was permitted to outshine Comrade Number One, who aspired to being Comrade Number One and Comrade Only. Experts were replaced by zealots. Knowledge or being factually right, these were irrelevant or worse, signs of disloyalty. Of course since the zealots brought nothing to the jobs their tenure depended on their zeal for anyone could and did replace them.
Since the peasantry, the overwhelming majority of the population, had never embraced Communism with enthusiasm, it had to be beaten into submission with contrived famines, massive relocations (like the movement of American Indians to the Badlands), and simple, random murders by ICErs. At the bottom it became the rule of thugs.
The Wall of Grief in Moscow. The Wall of Grief with cut outs for thee and me, comrade.
Having just read a biography of Henry VIII which touched on his own reign of terror with its enormous death toll, similarities are many, including the willing executioners. Who — Surprise! — were the next to go to the block.
The Soviet army presented a special case since it had been created and inspired originally by that great Satan named Leon Trotsky, and so was cursed by original sin. Once Stalin had surrounded himself with puppets in the Party, he began on the army. Since all potential critics had now been eliminated and replaced by insecure sycophants, the charade of legality was no longer played. In one case five generals were murdered before their arrest papers had been signed. There were cases of mistaken identity that came to light and … they were murdered all the same.
Trotsky was a zircon mirror of Stalin and that made him a threat if only imaginary. This is an example of the shafts larded in the text.
Of all the ironies in the story the one I will leave readers with, be there any, is this. The willing executioners were themselves the next victims, and the next.
Robert Conquest
There is a superb concluding chapter that pulls together much of the descriptive material into conclusions about the nature and effect of the Great Terror, and an epilogue about its continuing influence. All grim. Very. It beggars belief that one man could ruin a country and that disbelief was crucial in making it possible for him to do so. In that is a warning for today. One that will almost certainly not be heeded.
Georges Clemenceau once said it takes lot to ruin a country, but it can be done, has been, is, and will be.
Good Reads meta-data is 715 pages rated 3.85 by 218 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: English, very.
Verdict: Miles from the cartoon stereotype.
Tagline: ‘I am; I am.’ (For those with a long memory.)
Teenage Henry came to the throne unbidden, as it were, when his older brother died. The spare took command from the heir like George VI when bro Eddie stood down. High policy of a Spanish entente led to matrimonial politics as it often did in this period, and at 19 he married his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon who was 24. They set about their first duty to the realm to produce an heir and a spare themselves. Many were sired but unborn. Stillbirths, miscarriages, and death I lost count 6 in all. Worse! A girl named Mary.
Through all of this and that which followed as she was displaced, Catherine was pious, resolute, dignified, perspicacious, and stable unlike her mercurial husband and then ex-husband. Hank could have done well to learn from her but he was too immature to do so, and it seems from this telling, because he was the spare, little of his upbringing prepared him for the crown.
The popular stereotype of a bloated degenerate chasing women is far from the mark, though toward the end of his life he did begin to live down to it. The quest for a wife was not just libido, after all kings have had mistresses since, well, since there were kings, but had much more to do with the succession. He needed his own heir and spare, first to secure his own tenure, and, secondly, to keep the realm stable. If foreign rivals, if domestic aspirants thought there might be an interregnum, they would act accordingly. Plague, fever, accidents had killed many a king at an early age, and might do so again. Wait and see, temporise is often the best policy.
Without an heir, many a magnate might aspire to the throne and manoeuvre, rebel, or resist to get it when Henry died, and might even be tempted not to wait for his natural death. Equally, without an heir, and with domestic instability, foreign potentates might prefer to wait him out.
Matrimonial politics was a linchpin of the age, and it is complicated. If he took an English wife from a noble family, that family would be positioned near the throne and might use that leverage to plot against him. Moreover, that favouritism showered on one noble family would alienate every other great family and set them to plotting. To prefer one is to alienate all others. Making one friend makes many enemies.
Ergo, there is something to be said for a foreign wife. Ah, but that too had perils. To take a German wife related to the Holy Roman Emperor might please that vacillating incumbent in his long-running contest with the Pope, but… there is France to consider, and Spain, and the Pope himself. And so on and so on and so on. To make a matrimonial alliance with one power was to alienate the others.
Foreign war he found much harder than jousting and soon gave it up, turning to conniving where – after the passing of Wolsey – he was regularly out connived by one pope after another, one French king after another, one Spanish king after another, and one Holy Roman Emperor after another. Wolsey in foreign policy and Cromwell on domestic matters, if left alone, were successful but their successes bred Henry’s suspicion and distrust for he seems to have been a deeply insecure man – if we venture onto psycho-biography – beneath the bluff mask.
[ See on You Tube ‘Re-creating KING HENRY VIII with the help of AI.’ ]
This biography ends with a summation chapter that weighs Henry’s credit and debits. However, this spreadsheet does not include the death toll of his regime, so I have added a comment on that below.
Credit – He laid foundation of England, Great Britain, and eventually the United Kingdom to become a nation(s)-state following the example of Spain and France; established a professional bureaucracy; began building a navy with warships and not just transports; removed the foreign influence of Rome, established the national church and all that went with it; did much to codify the laws of the lands…and more.
Debit – He inherited a prosperous and stable realm which he drove into and out of debt with his reckless gambits, and adolescent indulgences that lasted his entire life. He destroyed his two most able and loyal ministers in Wolsey and Cromwell, and paid the price thereafter, or his realm paid for him. The foreign policy achievements of his tenure were largely of Wolsey’s making, while the domestic achievements came from Thomas Cromwell’s hand.
No sooner had he become king than he embarked on the first of three unsuccessful foreign wars to reclaim the French lands that by convoluted logic were English (thanks to William the Conqueror). He squandered a great deal of dosh and good will — both domestic and foreign — in these adventures. The tales of negotiations with Spain, France, Pope, and Holy Roman Emperor put Machiavelli to shame with the duplicity, connivance, deceit, and downright lies. In most of these negotiations Henry paid, and paid, and paid to subsidise his temporary allies, especially when Wolsey was not there to restrain the royal cheque-writing hand.
Then there is in his policy the rule of the axe in the domestic realm which slayed many. Estimates of the death toll exacted in his regime very greatly from 72,000 to 20,000. Wikipedia has a spreadsheet. Take a look. The wholesale destruction of people to make a new regime, reminded this reader of Stalin making the new Soviet Man by eliminating those who did not fit in. Like Henry, Stalin fought off foreign enemies, disciplined a state bureaucracy, mobilised industry and recruited a huge army, built roads…often over the bodies of loyal subjects.
John Scarisbrick
This book is closely argued and clearly written, larded with insights, and a boon in untangling reality for the reader. It does not rely on cardboard stereotypes so beloved in the popular culture’s renditions of Henry, who, it has to be said, invited these depredations.
The used volume I acquired is errant in that page 528 is succeeded by…page 625. For second I thought I had read a lot more than I had in that afternoon, but then later page 672 is followed by page 577. Whew! That means about 50 pages are missing between 528-577. I have accepted that gap as Seshat’s will and leave it at that. Amen. (If you don’t know, look her up, yes Seshat is female. She is more reliable that the flighty Hermes who is created with creating the alphabet.) My interest in the intricacies of Tudor theology and politics was sated and I chose not to pursue the missing fifty pages.
The only other time I came across such a gap in a book was another Penguin edition, which this one is too, of the Forsyte Saga that I bought in Amsterdam. When I discovered the gap I took it back to the bookstore and swapped it for another with a clerk who was very responsive. In this case, I did want to know what was in the missing pages. N.B. If the missing pages had been the last chapter, well, I would have wanted to fill that gap. It is more likely a narrative of theological hairsplitting.
