"PIERCING THE CELESTIAL OCEAN: The Saga of the Cerulean Universe Begins" Is A Solid Piece Of Science Fiction

Thank you Kip Koelsch and Goodreads for a free copy and the opportunity to review it.

"Piercing The Celestial Ocean" by Kip Koelsch is pure old fashion science fiction for the most part. It has a very "Star Trek" feel, even down to borrowing Captain Picard's catch phrase, "Make it so" with the captain in this novel. What I think was a unique angle to the story was more of an island setting than a space one and a religion vs science angle.

The book opens with a scientist on a ship coming upon a body of a human he suspects may be a humanoid of some kind coming through a wormhole, and after that brief opening chapter, we are immediately thrown back 600 years earlier.

We first went on a short religious journey which felt more fantasy than science fiction, then later on in another period of time to a crew of scientists coming upon the remains of that journey. The crew finds out there may be a scientific basis to long standing religious beliefs, and tries to set up a mission to go underwater and prove the heavenly beings this religion believes in are actually organic beings.

The two main characters on the mission are , A’zra and G’regor, with a hinted romantic relationship,  and with A'Zra taking charge and being the one to go down in the depths of the ocean.

This novel is hard science fiction, and very well imagined, but more dense than your run of the mill popular science fiction so don't expect a straight page turner, yet it is also an adventure novel so it has that going for it too. There were some times in the book I got a bit confused with the plot, and who was who, and who was dating who, when it came to the little parts with the personal lives of the crew.  I've read dense science fiction before, but can tell you, they make for very thoughtful and detailed reads  but not for page turning reads with a ton of emotional asides. This is true for this book too.

Overall, I liked the novel a lot and it was an overall solid science fiction novel that poses questions about science vs spirituality, and how far one should go for their ideals. It felt a little disjointed in parts, but overall, at the end, it ties together really well. Three stars.

Three stars

If Lisa Jobs Reads This, I'm So Sorry And I Promise To Get To Your Memoir. Your Dad Sounded Awful. You Have My Total Sympathy

I picked up this book from a free little library in hardcover no less. 

Interesting if a somewhat lacking overview of Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson, who's written other biographies including a critically acclaimed bestseller on Albert Einstein in 2007. This was also the only authorized biography of Steve Jobs by Jobs himself before he passed, and became a bestseller right away that year, which makes the fact he comes off like a totally horrible person seem more accurate. 

Jobs himself comes with a big sense of immaturity that he see in modern day tech billionaires like Elon Musk. Jobs seemed to be so arrogant to everyone around him, even the people made rich want him to go away. At one point, Apple kicked him out of the company because he refused to hand off management to experienced business folks, citing examples even down to the smallest details like Jobs asking dumb and inappropriate questions during job interviews, like if the person was a virgin and if they ever did drugs and acting like a little kid in board meetings. He even refused when they asked him to stop wearing sandals with his feet up on the board table. He even flew to a factory somewhere in middle America making packaging to yell at some poor factory workers that they didn't understand his vision. He's lucky some working guy didn't just punch him.

He also spends his life making excuses for his personal failures, and seeing being a genius as a excuse to  be arrogant to everyone around him. He treats his first daughter like total trash. He wasn't involved in his daughter's and mother's life, but when he did become involved, he took her in with his new family, only to use her as a babysitter service, and ditch her to go on vacation with his new wife and family and LEAVE HER THERE. Who does that?  His excuse that he was adopted as a reason he couldn't be involved in his daughter's life doesn't hold up, because he was adopted very young and talks about a wonderful childhood with adoptive parents who supported him a lot. He even says they are his true parents and he wouldn't hear of anything else, yet he couldn't be a parent to his kid? What?

Not really a tech genius as much as a marketing one, the real credit for the technology of Apple goes to Steve Wozniak, who seems like a delight. Even Bill Gates also comes off like a good person who can turn off his business persona. Jobs also, like Musk today, would pay off inventors to go away so he can total credit for things he didn't invent.

I did not know Steve Jobs had much to do with Pixar as much as he did. However it takes a strain on his duties at Apple at one point he is kicked out of the company. As he was overstressing himself out, his wife asked him to pick one company and sell the other but he refused. 

The problem mainly with this book is it often comes off like a biography more of Apple than Steve Jobs himself, but every time we get a look at Steve Jobs as a person, he comes off not very good. Not he wasn't a bad man in the way he see bad rich man today. There seemed to be no Me Too stories about him, but he set the stage for society choosing bullies we can celebrate and bullies we can condemn. Job was immature and a bully, but because he was quirky and put on a great show, we excuse it even today.

That being said, Jobs did have a women problem and while it wasn't sexual, he was a male chauvinist. It's hinted at a lot his constant refusal to change his diet from anything beyond pure foods combined with his stress level led to his cancer, and it was because he refused to listen to his wife. And what happened when his wife begged him to change his diet to get strength and even the doctors where brought in to give him a intervention, telling him that his refusal to not eat anything but leave based food without anything else might of helped lead to this? He said he knew better and refused to listen to them. Then he refused to spend time with his daughters, showering all his attention on his son. As I mentioned earlier, he treated his first daughter like trash. She even released a memoir last year called "Small Fry" about how he basically emotionally abused her.

That all being said, Isaacson as a writer is stuck trying to fill the book with titbits about Apple because the actual subject is awful.

I know he's a tech icon, but he seemed like a horrible person. Though I want to read his daughter's memoir which came out last year. Two stars.