Book Club 2025: Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken MacLeod

This is the third and final book in MacLeod’s space opera trilogy, and it’s so good that I wish the series went on for at least half a dozen more books.

We’re talking proper space opera — huge space ships, political intrigue, mysterious aliens, funny aliens, faster than light travel and all that good stuff. It’s MacLeod’s best books since his first few when he arrived on the scene and everybody went “WHOA”. They’re also quite old fashioned in a way: The emphasis is definitely on the science fiction and not so much on, well, the rest.

As much as I enjoy the Expanse novels — they also had all the good stuff on the list above — they spent a lot of time on delineating how every character had their own separate traumas to get through, and we also spend an entire novel on a dirt planet listening to farmers squabble, and we had important plot developments that were about a teenager being mad at his mom, and… What I’m saying is that that series had a lot of boring stuff mixed in with the fun stuff.

These three books are just the fun stuff. There’s not a single page that’s boring, and the universe presented is so interesting that you just want to spend more time in it to explore it.

That’s not so say that it’s without its problems. The main problem is that there’s a lot of… how to put this… incredibly stupid things happening. It doesn’t matter when you’re reading the books, because they’re so much fun to read, but if you sit down and start thinking about “uhm… why did they have an unstable habitat over Venus powered by a nuclear engine that had a ‘fail safe’ mode that meant that it just shut down and couldn’t be restarted and everybody dies?” then there really is no other explanation other than “they had to be stupid for the plot to happen, so there”. That one happened in the first book, and the third book was perhaps the least stupid one?

But these books are really well written on a page-to-page basis; very exciting reads.

Beyond the Light Horizon (2024) by Ken MacLeod (buy new, buy used, 4 on Goodreads)

Old Man Shouts At Phone

So I was complaining about how stupid the Calendar app on Android is, and somebody (reasonably enough) asked me “but are you using Google Calendar or Samsung Calendar”?

I have no idea. I’ve got a Samsung phone, and I’ve done my best to get rid of all the Samsung apps that are installed instead of the Google apps, but it’s just difficult to say sometimes.

I long-pressed on the icon, and chose “Information”, and I got the above. As we can see, the app is called “Calendar”, and… er… that’s it. Nothing about who made it.

Scrolling down, I get a version number, and “App details in store”, which is a button I can’t press.

Isn’t that… insane? You can’t see anything about who made the app, or what the app’s “actual” name is (i.e., the Java classpath)? (The latter is allegedly possible if you install third party software.)

So I went to the Play app and typed in “google calendar”, and I saw “Google Calendar”… and pressed the first “Install” button there, because I’m a moron.

(Ignore that it says “Installed” on “Google Calendar” — I took this screenshot afterwards.)

Eeek! I didn’t mean to install that “sponsored” Calendar app! How do I get rid of it! There’s no “I didn’t mean to do that” button (that I could see, at least). So I though “hm, perhaps if I long-press that ‘open’ button, it’ll change to ‘remove’ or something”… Yes, you guessed right — that started the app.

EEEEEEEK

Presumably my entire calendar has now been uploaded to nefarious hackers in Minnesota. Hope you find it illuminating!

Anyway, I have to go to the “app search” thing by swiping upwards from not-the-bottom of the screen, and choose one of the three apps named “Calendar”, long-tap it, and remove it.

If you wanted to create a more user-hostile environment for these things, I don’t think you could have? I mean, I understand why they’re hiding the real identity of the apps — it’s so that Samsung can gaslight you on what apps you have installed, right? But man…

The whole thing is just disgusting, isn’t it?