books - Faz Business | فاز الأعمال

When the world spins out of control

Posted on July 20, 2025 by faz_business

I’m still chipping away at my summer reading backlog over here, and this week finally made it to Alex Foster’s Circular Motion, which came out in May. And, wow, I wasn’t quite ready for the emotional journey this one took me on. It’s set in a near future — people ride OneWheels and going viral on social media is still a thing some strive for — where the megacompany CWC has created an extreme form of high-speed travel that allows people to zip across the world in no time flat. But, it soon becomes pretty clear that there’s a consequence for this. Earth is spinning faster and faster… and faster, and protestors blame CWC and the orbital circuit its travel system relies on.

The days grow shorter, the climate events become more extreme and everything is hurtling toward disaster. Circular Motion follows Tanner, a kid from smalltown Alaska who lands a job at CWC, Winnie, a girl who has truly been through it, and Columbia professor Victor Bickle, who shot to viral fame after predicting a public infrastructure catastrophe. They’re all connected, as we piece together through multiple POVs. This is a book that very blatantly has something to say about capitalism, climate change and everything in between, and a beautiful exploration of human connection in a crumbling world.

What to read this weekend: Vampires and more vampires

Posted on June 15, 2025 by faz_business

I was pretty late in getting to this one, as it’s been on my list for a good while now, but I really can’t think of a better time to have finally picked up this retelling of the original sapphic vampire story, Carmilla, than during Pride Month. And what a treat it is. Hungerstone is a gothic novel that follows Lenore, a woman who has been uprooted from London and moved to the British moorlands by her husband, Henry, to fulfill his career ambitions. Henry is… not the best, and Lenore could definitely do with some companionship. Then, in walks Carmilla. Cue the yearning and craving.

Carmilla is actually brought in after a carriage accident to recover and overstays her welcome, making everyone in the house uncomfortable with her strange behaviors (wandering at night, forgoing food at mealtimes, etc). From the moment she arrives, Lenore can’t stop thinking about her. Lenore is also having strange dreams, and girls in a nearby village soon begin catching a strange illness. This is all pretty familiar. There are some big differences between Hungerstone and the novella it’s based on, though. Hungerstone further explores industrialization and the expectations and treatment of women in this time period. It delivers feminine rage and some really satisfying moments.

Brandon Sanderson’s list of favorite games makes perfect sense

Posted on March 17, 2025 by faz_business

First thing’s first, here is Sanderson’s top 10:

10. Katamari Damacy
9. Undertale
8. Fallout: New Vegas
7. Super Mario World
6. The Curse of Monkey Island
5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
4. Halo 2
3. Final Fantasy X
2. Bloodborne
1. Civilization VI

You can go to Sanderson’s original blog post to read a few of his thoughts on each game, but we have a few thoughts on this list (and how it ties into his work) that you won’t get from Brandon himself.

Before we even get into the individual games, one thing that stands out right away is just how diverse it is. There’s practically a game for every genre in here — 4X strategy, first-person shooters, action games, RPGs, and even Katamari — which, it’s fair to say, is a genre unto itself. No one would have expected Sanderson’s list to stay beholden to his chosen literary genres of fantasy and science fiction, but it’s fun to image the ways that games like Undertale or Super Mario World have seeped into his work.

There are, of course, a few entries on this list that seem a lot more related to his literary work, and even a few that help explain his worlds and writing. Games like Bloodborne and Breath of the Wild seem like natural companions for Sanderson’s fantasy worlds and work, fraternal twins tied together by the thoroughness of vision in their settings and the sense of adventure and experimental challenge they offer players. Meanwhile, games like Curse of Monkey Island and Fallout: New Vegas seem like perfect indicators of Sanderson’s sense of humor and the kind of irreverence he occasionally brings to his books as well.

But the real skeleton keys to his work on this list are Final Fantasy X and Civilization VI. Anyone who’s read Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives series and encountered the way he blends together dozens of cultures and countries in its world should recognize the fact that it comes from someone who’s clearly spent hundreds of hours in Civilization, pushing the borders of their country’s influence through trade, culture, or simple warfare. Meanwhile, the blog post mentions that Sanderson is a lifelong fan of the Final Fantasy series, and it’s clearly shaped the way he views magic in his written worlds. It would take hundreds of pages to fully unpack the relationship between his Cosmere and the worlds of Final Fantasy, but for now, it’s enough to know that X is his favorite entry.

Sanderson has never been particularly private about the art he loves, or the ways it’s influenced his writing. But with this list of favorite games as a starting point, let’s hope he delves more into how these games have influenced him sometime in the future.

A show based on Philip K. Dick’s The Variable Man is in the works

Posted on March 16, 2025 by faz_business

According to , Humans writers Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent are working on an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1953 novella, The Variable Man. The show is being produced by Motive Pictures in a partnership with Electric Shepherd Productions, which is run by the late author’s daughter, Isa Dick Hackett. The Variable Man follows a tinkerer turned accidental time traveler named Thomas Cole, who is transported from 1913 into the future and suddenly finds himself a reluctant player in an interplanetary conflict.

It’s being written for a UK broadcaster, according to Deadline, but there may be hope for a US release. “When you’ve got Sam and John doing what they did so brilliantly with Humans and exploring the modern world through a genre lens, it is something that can absolutely attract broadcasters in the US,” Motive CEO Simon Maxwell told the publication. I really enjoyed The Variable Man back when I read it and I’ll give any PKD adaptation a chance, so here’s hoping we get another good one in this series.

The Ultimate RPG Humble Bundle has a trove of GM skills for under $20

Posted on December 19, 2024 by faz_business

For Humble Bundle’s Very Humble Holiday, Adams Media is having a flash bundle sale that will give you all the skills and knowledge you need to be a great dungeon master. Raising money for Worldreader, the bundle includes 22 books collected from the Ultimate RPG series, Teri Litorco’s Civilized Guide to Tabletop Gaming, the Düngeonmeister food and drink recipe books, and a collection of mythology books to inspire your worldbuilding.

One of the only major publishers to venture into tabletop roleplaying games, Simon & Schuster imprint Adams media began publishing books about tabletop games in 2016, with Litorco’s guide that included 100 gaming etiquette rules “every gamer must live by.” In 2018, it published the Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide by James D’Amato, Polygon contributor and founder of the One Shot actual play network. The book offers prompts and exercises to flesh out player character backstories, creating a more fully fleshed persona for players to embody once they sat down at the table.

The success of D’Amato’s guide launched the line of guides featured in this bundle. Other books by D’Amato in this series include the Ultimate RPG Game Masters Worldbuilding Guide, the Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide, and The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book, which includes 40 rules-lite tabletop games.

Other books in the series include the Ultimate Random Encounters Book by Travis Wheeler (which offers hundreds of encounters to incorporate into any fantasy game of your choice) and The Everything Tabletop Games Book by Bebo. The latter promises to introduce the uninitiated into the world of tabletop, explaining different genres of games while teaching strategies for winning them. Also included in the bundle are three books by Jef Aldrich and Jon Taylor: the A Dragon Walks Into A Bar joke book, the Düngeonmeister Drink Master’s Guide cocktail recipe book, and the Düngeonmeister Cookbook, which has 75 RPG-inspired recipes geared toward game-night snacks.

The final genre of books in this bundle are less specific to tabletop gaming, but are meant to provide a wealth of inspiration for dungeonmasters to pull from. That includes mythology anthologies covering specific creatures like mermaids, fairies, unicorns, dragons, vampires, and wizards, as well as culture-specific lore from Viking, Celtic, and Greek mythology. One book, by Jenny Williamson and Genn McMenemy, focuses specifically on the role of women in mythology around the world. To round it out, the final book in this bundle is A Dictionary of Made-Up Languages by Stephen D. Rogers — which is exactly what it says on the tin, and covers Klingon, Elvish, and other conlangs.

Until Dec. 19, all of that is available for less than $20. A portion of the proceeds raised from this bundle go to Worldreader, a global nonprofit organization that has donated millions of digital books to children in more than 100 countries.

Jeff VanderMeer returns to Area X

Posted on October 27, 2024 by faz_business

One thing I did not foresee happening this year was us getting a new entry in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. But the author announced exactly that back in April, and I’ve pretty much been counting down the days until the book’s release ever since. Absolution, the fourth novel in what previously stood as a trilogy, hit the shelves this week and it takes us back to the beginning of Area X and the ill-fated first expeditions to explore it.

For the uninitiated, the series deals with a strange coastal region in the US that’s inexplicably been shut off behind an invisible border and has returned to a wild state. A shady government agency has been tasked with studying it, but the people who set out on those exploration missions either never come back out, or come back different. The series includes Annihilation (which inspired the 2018 movie starring Natalie Portman), Authority and Acceptance.

Ten years after the series was originally released, a prequel feels like the perfect way to dive back into the mysteries of Area X and the Southern Reach. The trilogy concluded in a way that answered some questions but also left so much else up in the air. And while you probably shouldn’t expect Absolution to neatly wrap it all up, it does give us more insight on the early days of the anomaly and the perspective of key characters in that timeline, like Lowry. Absolution is hefty — it’s structured so there are three novella-like parts, and is nearly 500 pages long in all. Which is great, because I can’t get enough of Area X.

‘Absolution’ Excerpt: Read the Beginning of Jeff VanderMeer’s Newest Southern Reach Book

Posted on October 22, 2024 by faz_business

But then, too, there was the assurance, the confidence, in the accounts of the biologists as remedy to allay suspicion. Because Sergeant Rocker, too, had then taken to the waters and disappeared, the biologists using their tracking equipment to make sure they could follow the alligators in their new lives.

The Tyrant kept to herself, while the others remained in close proximity, for a while. None, at least overnight, seemed inclined to leave the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 put the most junior member of their party on the task of monitoring moments that might include a full day of basking in the same stretch of mud.

On day six they found Firestorm’s front leg, bobber wire wrapped around it, the whole prominently displayed on a mudbank with deep boot prints suggesting poachers. There was, one biologist wrote, “a bathetic or pathetic quality to the paleness of the leg, enraptured in the evidence of our experiment, lost so far from her home. I wept for an hour, but do not know if this was an appropriate response.”

(No, Old Jim did not believe it was an appropriate response, even as he himself wept at odd hours, for his own reasons, down in Central’s archives.)

Battlebee turned up dead and bloated and white, with a chunk ripped out of him postmortem by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, speculation being that stress and the anesthetic had been too hard on him. Postmortem examination revealed stomach contents that included fish, a turtle, mud, and, inexplicably, a broken teacup.

She had also been pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “given her credentials identified her as a male,” amid some general confusion: “To be honest, I cannot now remember when we first took this project on, when we first encountered these subjects. The heat here is abysmal.”

Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by shedding his harness in the water near the tent of Team Leader 1, indicating, as she absurdly put it, “A politeness on the part of Sergeant Rocker in keeping with his personality when I knew him best. I felt this loss much more deeply than expected.”

This sentimentality toward an alligator seen as an obligation just days before weighed on Old Jim, although he could not put a finger on why. Nor did he understand why the alligator experiment registered with the biologists in their reports as a great success, and they would even reference it with a kind of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia when the mission began to sour. The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.

Perhaps, both he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker had turned into an escape artist, for the harness was intact and still latched, with no tears anywhere. So how had the alligator possibly gotten free? Old Jim kept seeing the biologists by a trick of faulty video running away from the release site, only to re-form in their drinking circle.

He replayed the video so often that it became a disconcerting mess of light and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs and shapes that leapt out and sharpened, only to become subsumed into the past.

“All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”

Or had the outcome been exactly as intended?

‘Escaping Gravity’ Takes a Brutally Honest Look at NASA

Posted on October 11, 2024 by faz_business

Lori Garver served as deputy administrator of NASA from 2009-2013. Her new memoir Escaping Gravity, about the struggle to get her colleagues to embrace space entrepreneurs like SpaceX and Blue Origin, paints a deeply unflattering picture of the inner workings of NASA.

“I did tell an honest—some would say brutally honest—story about an agency that I do love,” Garver says in Episode 522 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “NASA has a clubby atmosphere. It’s a bit of a ‘the first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club.’ I’m breaking the rules, for sure, by speaking out—the unwritten rules.”

In recent decades NASA has been plagued by missed deadlines and cost overruns. Garver says that in many cases the people who promoted those programs knew that their budgets were unrealistic. “I just don’t believe that the people who designed those programs believed that they could do them within those amounts,” she says. “I think they sold something that they thought someone else would buy, and that got their contracts flowing, and then no one wants to cancel contracts, because these are jobs in your district. It’s all a very cozy operation.”

Garver also describes an attitude of entitlement at NASA, with many in the organization being unwilling to ask hard questions about whether or not their costly programs serve the public interest. “People come to NASA who are engineers and scientists,” she says. “They don’t have any kind of background in public policy or economics, and they don’t really see why that matters. They’re like, ‘We want to walk on the moon. I grew up wanting to walk on the moon.’ OK, but does the public owe you that? Not questions they were used to hearing, nor did they like to hear them.”

Garver’s proposal to partner with SpaceX was eventually adopted, saving taxpayers billions of dollars, but she says that a lot of hard work still needs to be done. “We have done this thing at NASA, they were able to embrace change, which is very hard in a government system,” she says. “Not all of NASA is yet changed, and there are many programs in the government that could benefit from some of this tough love.”

Listen to the complete interview with Lori Garver in Episode 522 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Dungeons & Dragons books discounted at Amazon

Posted on May 7, 2024 by faz_business

Amazon is currently discounting a handsome collection of core curriculum and supplementary adventures for Dungeons & Dragons. Whether you’re trying to rope your friends into your next tabletop session or need an ample supply of one-shot adventures to kill time while we all wait for D&D’s revised fifth edition, you’ll want to check out this modest selection of discounted tomes.

For instance, if you or a small band of adventurers are looking to test the waters of Dungeons & Dragons, the D&D Essentials Kit is currently discounted to $20.31 (was $24.99). However, if you need a more substantial introduction to the world of D&D, you can also find the Player’s Handbook on sale for $37.21, and the Monster Manual discounted to $28.86.

Dungeons & Dragons Essentials Kit

Prices taken at time of publishing.

An abridged rulebook, modestly-sized one-shot adventure, six character sheets, 11 dice, and a wealth of supplementary material round out the D&D Essentials Kit.

Dungeons & Dragons: Player’s Handbook

Prices taken at time of publishing.

The essential rulebook for playing Dungeons & Dragons 5e. Includes rules and errata for players to create their own characters and also features references for spells, equipment, and other items.

Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual

Prices taken at time of publishing.

A guide detailing D&D monsters from Aarakocra to Zombie. The essential Monster Manual for D&D 5e includes over 150 creatures, complete with lore, illustrations, and stat blocks to populate your next campaign.

Amazon also has discounts on an impressive selection of one-shot adventures and campaign settings to spice up your next tabletop session. Become a space pirate with the Spelljammer: Adventures in Space bundle for just $34.99 (was $69.99). Or, perhaps you’d like to mull over a collection of 17 mystery-themed adventures in one of our personal favorites, Candlekeep Mysteries, which is on sale for $26.10 (was $49.95).

Regardless of your level of experience with the legendary tabletop franchise, you’re bound to find at least one tome that would make a fine addition to your armory of D&D texts.