Reviews by Eloquence

4 stars
A beautiful collection of sci-fi stories, biased towards the genre's Golden Age

Many sci-fi readers will recognize the name Brian Aldiss (1925–2017), both from his own stories and novels, and from the many anthologies he compiled. The first, for Penguin Science Fiction, was published in 1961. This one is the last, and it is also Aldiss’ final published work. It was published by the Folio Society, which specializes in expensive but beautiful editions of many classic and contemporary works, and which also publishes original anthologies such as this one.

The packaging

You won’t find this book on Amazon, and it is currently advertised at USD 53.95—a hefty price for a single volume. But that’s the Folio way—these are books for bibliophiles, whether that describes yourself or someone you care about. The cover, in this case, is block printed on buckram (cloth) and features a beautiful abstract illustration of a rocketship:


Cover for the Folio Society Science Fiction Anthology (Credit: Folio Society / own photograph. Fair use.)

It’s a pleasure to hold this book and to examine the detail of the print:


Detail of Folio Society Science Fiction Anthology book cover (Credit: Folio Society / own photograph. Fair use.)

The book comes with a slipcase cover, which looks more stylish than a typical dust cover, and doesn’t get in the way while reading. Like many Folio books, the anthology features commissioned illustrations for several of the stories in the anthology:


Pages from Folio Society Science Fiction Anthology. (Credit: Folio Society. Fair use.)

The stories

The stories are arranged in chronological order. They are:

  1. Micromégas by Voltaire (1752)

  2. The Star by H.G. Wells (1897)

  3. Bridle and Saddle by Isaac Asimov (1942)

  4. The Greater Thing by Tom Godwin (1954)

  5. Grandpa by James H. Schmitz (1955)

  6. Poor Little Warrior! by Brian Aldiss (1959)

  7. Recall Mechanism by Philip K. Dick (1959)

  8. An Alien Agony by Harry Harrison (1962)

  9. Searchlight by Robert Heinlein (1962)

  10. Clarita by Anna Kavan (1970)

  11. And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side by James Tiptree Jr., pen name of Alice Sheldon (1972)

  12. The Day They Raised the Titanic by Alice Wilson (2015)

As is evident from this list, there is only one recent story, and many are from around the Golden Age of sci-fi—don’t expect to find tales of posthuman existence or hard sci-fi grounded in our current knowledge of space travel and planetary exploration. That said, I found several of the stories quite stimulating:

  • Bridle and Saddle—this story is part of Asimov’s Foundation saga, but requires no familiarity with it. The administrator of a lightly populated planet that exercises centralized control over all knowledge on behalf of a multi-planetary society is faced with threats from the planet’s powerful neighbors, and from discontents at home. Will he be able to hold onto power without violence, which he calls “the last refuge of the incompetent”?

  • Grandpa—a kid who is part of a colonization team stewards a small expedition on a large lily-pad-shaped hybrid plant/animal called “Grandpa”. Grandpa, it turns out, is not quite as simplistic a creature as everyone thought, and our protagonist has to find a way out of an increasingly desperate situation. Although more than 60 years old, there’s nothing in this story that dates it to its era.

  • An Alien Agony—science and religion clash on a planet that has very little experience with either. A beautiful little “loss of innocence” story.

  • And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side—this story caught me by surprise in that I’ve never encountered its premise before: that humans are uniquely attracted to aliens (both sexually and in terms of pure curiosity), while other species find this behavior very amusing. A story that explores xenophobia and xenophilia, and makes you think about what alien encounters would actually be like.

The illustrations by Florian Schommer stylistically follow the books’s chronology (“as the stories move towards the modern age a palette of deep oranges and reds is gradually introduced”, to quote Folio’s description), and the polygons and circles that frame each picture make them look like windows into different worlds.

The Verdict

I quite enjoyed about half the stories in the volume, and some of them (like Grandpa) are true gems of the genre. As with every Folio Society book I have the pleasure to own, this is a beautifully made physical object. It is also a lovely gift for any sci-fi lover. 3.5 stars, rounded up because of the appreciation of the book as an object that endures in Folio’s publications.


5 stars
How a civilization was lost


Triumph of Christianity over Paganism. 16th century fresco by Tommaso Laureti decorating the ceiling of the Constantine Hall in the Vatican Palace. (Credit: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT. License: CC-BY-SA.)
From the comfortable distance of a privileged life in the 21st century, it is perhaps easy to see that the Roman Empire was doomed. Having replaced oligarchy with permanent dictatorship, the empire sustained its ambitious civilization-building effort through slave labor and the spoils of expansionist wars. Internal unrest and foreign invasions were sure to follow. What role did religion play in this collapse?

Catherine Nixey’s book, The Darkening Age, makes the case that Christianity added fuel to the fire: quite literally in the form of book burnings or the melting down of statues, and figuratively through its embrace of a fanatical, exclusionary belief system that made it impossible to re-build or preserve a crumbling society.

Nixey knows her stuff; she studied Classics at Cambridge and subsequently worked as a Classics teacher for several years, but she is first and foremost a journalist, and her book tells history much in the way a writer like Erik Larson does: as a story with characters, sometimes picking the source that best fits the narrative, rather than attempting a neutral presentation of all possibilities of what happened.

In evidence of her thesis, Nixey marshals both “pagan” and Christian primary sources and cites recent modern research, such as Eberhard Sauer’s The Archaeology of Religious Hatred (Tempus, 2003) and Dirk Rohmann’s Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity: Studies in Text Transmission (De Gruyter, 2016). The key themes of her book can be summarized as follows:

  • Early Christianity was a fanatical religion focused on martyrdom, suffering, and death.

  • While Christians were certainly persecuted at various times, the extent of that persecution was dramatically exaggerated.

  • As Christians gained power, they turned the tables and engaged in systematic destructions of temples, statues, and books, and forced conversion through acts of terror and murder.

  • The church did play an important role preserving what little ancient knowledge was preserved — but it did so extremely selectively (omitting materials considered too salacious, or those seen to contradict Christian doctrine). Effectively, much of the earlier culture was annihilated, including irreplaceable philosophical and scientific texts.

  • Rome’s polytheistic culture was sexually permissive and tolerant of argument and debate. Christian writers, in contrast, replaced debate with dogma. They railed against the “tyranny of joy” and laid the foundation for centuries of Christian sexual repression, associating pleasure with shame in ways that reverberate to this day.

You may think there is a consensus among modern historians about these claims, but there is not (this is, after all, a society still rooted in the very origins that are at issue). As Nixey acknowledges, many historians have painted a very different picture. Today you’re just as likely to read that polytheism simply grew out of fashion, or that the Dark Ages “weren’t really dark”, or that Christianity was a benign and civilizing influence during a chaotic time. Don’t even think to draw modern parallels!

Yet, as Nixey demonstrates, those parallels are all too obvious, and they are instructive, which is indeed why apologists prefer to ignore them. Nixey points out that Christian statue-smashers defaced the same beautiful statue of Athena at Palmyra that ISIS would completely obliterate more than a millennium and a half later, with similar “reasoning” (“The Prophet Muhammad commanded us to shatter and destroy statues.”).

Apologists claim that when early Christians burned books about “sorcery”, surely they contained just that—not science or philosophy! But we find no such nuance when we look to modern claims of “sorcery” by religious fanatics, such as when the Taliban sacked Afghanistan’s Meteorological Authority in 1996 because weather forecasting is, of course, sorcery. Christian fanatics who call Harry Potter “Witchcraft Repackaged” don’t draw the distinction between literature and religion.

Just as it did not in ancient Rome, tolerance rarely lasts long after religions gain political power. In the United States, where evangelical Christianity still has somewhat of an underdog status, religious extremists who oppose evolutionary theory merely ask that schools and universities “teach the controversy” (while funneling taxpayer funds to schools that teach only creationism). In Turkey, where Islamists have substantial political power, evolutionary theory was recently banned from textbooks.

In short, the counterarguments to Nixey’s thesis fall apart precisely when one observes and compares religious fanaticism in any of its modern manifestations that are more easily studied than texts from the 4th or 5th century (and less subject to manipulation, omission, and re-interpretation over the centuries). The fanaticism Nixey describes is, sadly, far from unique or remarkable, and its intellectual legacy is still with us today.

Learning from collapse

In The Queen of Spades, a short story with supernatural overtones, Alexander Pushkin wrote: “Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.“ By that standard, two ideas could not be more fixed than those of polytheism and monotheism. How does one tolerate the intolerant?

Christianity was not the only cult of its time that made singular claims to the truth; it was merely the one that ultimately prevailed. But far from being a force for peace or preservation, it added fuel to the fire of Rome’s—probably inevitable—collapse.

A fierce, hateful religion (and that is what this iteration of Christianity was) could never have gained such momentum in a healthy, stable society. But under conditions of instability and inequality, it accelerated and ultimately cemented the loss of a civilization. That is the key lesson to carry into the 21st century, and Nixey deserves much credit for writing an accessible book to do so.


5 stars
Lovingly told interactive story about change, death and friendship

Night in the Woods is an adventure game available for virtually all platforms (as of this writing: Windows, macOS, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, Switch). The game mostly takes place from the perspective of college drop-out Mae Borowski, whose return to her hometown of Possum Springs leads to reunions, conflicts, weird dreams, and a gradually unfolding mystery.

The town is inhabited by anthropomorphic animals (and, oddly, by some actual animals); Mae herself is a 20-year-old cat. The player controls Mae in a manner similar to a jump-and-run game, but with the sense of safety of a point-and-click adventure. While there are areas of the game world that can be a bit tricky to reach, there is very little puzzle-solving.

From time to time, a scene turns into a mini-game (playing the bass guitar, stealing an item from a shop, hitting objects with a baseball bat). You often only get one shot at these games, and whether you succeed or fail will reveal small variations in the story.

While the story is more or less on rails, the game’s characters keep you engaged. There’s Mae’s old friend Gregg, a fox whose short attention span doesn’t seem to get in the way of his employment at the “Snack Falcon”. As time goes on, the depth of his love for his boyfriend, a bear named Angus, is revealed, who seems to be Gregg’s best hope of growing up.


From left to right: Germ, Bea, Angus, Mae, and Gregg at band practice. (Credit: Infinite Fall. Fair use.)

There’s Beatrice “Bea” Santello, a goth who seems initially hostile but who opens up after Mae spends more time with her. And of course there are Mae’s parents, who struggle to get their daughter to tell them what exactly caused her to drop out of college.

When speaking with other characters, you are often given multiple dialog options, but what you can say is constrained by Mae’s perspective on the world as a 20-year-old with … issues. After many experiences, Mae automatically scribbles notes into her personal journal, which are observations like “GREGG RULZ OK” or “THOUGHT: THIS PLACE IS FALLING APART”, often accompanied by cartoons.


As the game progresses, Mae draws little notes in her journal. (Credit: Infinite Fall. Fair use.)

Over time, the mystery at the heart of the story gradually becomes apparent. Mae experiences weird dreams and a growing sense of anxiety, and she witnesses strange goings-on in Possum Springs. The ultimate “reveal” is less important than Mae’s struggle to come to terms with her own fragility. There are discussions of death and religion, but they are meditative, not proselytizing.

Night in the Woods is a gorgeous game: the characters, landscapes and animations are simple but beautiful, enriched by context-specific background music (listen to the soundtrack). The writing is terrific and the pacing is generally good; the early game can feel a bit drawn out.

The main controls are easy to master, though some of the mini-games can feel a bit unfair the first time around. You’ll probably get at least one replay out of the game, to discover hidden branches of the story you missed the first time around, and to master the various mini-games.

On the Nintendo Switch, which is the version we played, the load times can be a bit frustrating: going from one screen to another can trigger a five second “loading” animation, and it’s in the nature of the game’s controls that you might do so accidentally a few times.

The Verdict

I highly recommend giving this game a chance, unless you’re put off by some of the themes of young adult drama and prefer your games to be more challenging. Currently, the game goes for $20 on Steam, which is a decent price for the amount of content that’s packed in here. While the game is not without its minor frustrations, I would give it 4.5 out of 5 stars, rounded up.


4 stars
While "The Outsider" doesn't break any new ground, it's classic King

The crime at the center of Stephen King’s, The Outsider is gruesome even by the horror writer’s standards: the sadistic murder of a child. The suspect is Terry Maitland, a baseball coach in the fictional town of Flint City. Early on, it looks like the cops have this one in the bag: multiple witnesses and DNA evidence appear to tie Maitland to the crime. But then a single question threatens detective Ralph Anderson’s grip on reality: can a murderer be in two places at the same time?

The hardcover edition of The Outsider has 576 pages, but I found myself breezing through the book in a single weekend, thanks to King’s masterful pacing of the story. While the book ultimately follows a fairly genre-typical path, the entry of a beloved character from King’s recent Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch) keeps things interesting until the end. 4 out of 5 stars.


4 stars
Friendly and lively instance, great for free software users and developers

If you’ve been wondering whether you should make a Mastodon account, the answer is, yes, you should. (If you haven’t been wondering, you might want to start here to read more about the project.) While Mastodon has more in common with Twitter than with Facebook, it is also entirely its own thing, a living, growing, decentralized community of humans building a new social network from the bottom up, on the basis of open standards like ActivityPub and free software like Mastodon itself.

mastodon.technology, in spite of the “official-sounding” name, is just one of many instances in the Mastodon network. It is indeed focused on techy/nerdy topics, though of course you can follow people on other instances as usual. There is a code of conduct which is quite sensible, and which is enforced through a shared blocklist. Operations are funded through a Patreon account. The server code is up-to-date.

Right now the operation of the instance very much seems like one person’s passion. The “About” page is short on technical details (backup policy, monitoring, etc.), and most of the tech stuff seems to be sitting on the personal Patreon account. To continue scaling past 10,000 users or so, it may be time to think a bit more about how to grow the administrative side of the community.

(Update: The instance was shut down in late 2022.)


5 stars
Beautiful, playful compositions - great for focused listening, or for supporting "flow"

I’m generally a big fan of Kurzgesagt, a channel of animated explanations/explorations of various topics ranging from the Fermi paradox to fracking. But the videos would not be nearly as enticing without the Epic Mountain soundtrack. The music playfully blends piano with 8-bit beeps & boops and the occasional epic theme reminiscent of a Hans Zimmer soundtrack, or even a jazz detour.

I enjoy listening to this music for concentrated work where the goal is to attain a flow state, but also just for its own sake. As with many soundtracks, there are recurring themes in the different Kurzgesagt tracks, but this only enhances the feeling of being transported into a carefully crafted, interconnected soundscape. If you want to listen in, I suggest starting with some of their most popular tracks: Emergence, War, Optimistic Nihilism.


5 stars
A beautiful explanation of microbial life that shatters anthropocentric delusions of grandeur

Life at the Edge of Sight by Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter is one of those rare books that makes a complex subject — microscopic organisms including bacteria, fungi, protozoans, viruses, phages, archaea — genuinely exciting and wondrous, not by over-simplifying it, but by illuminating it through brilliant photographs and lucid explanations.

You may have seen the authors’ photographic and micrographic work before, for example, in this Quanta article: The Beautiful Intelligence of Bacteria and Other Microbes. If you find the images stunning, the book provides the additional context to understand what’s going on. How and why do bacteria form biofilms, and how do they communicate with each other? What are mycelial networks, and how do they interact with plants? What exactly is a slime mold, anyway, and what makes these brainless creatures so smart?


The slime mold Physarum polycephalum. (Credit: Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter. Fair use.)

The book succeeds in conveying a view of the “web of life” that makes humans seem less like a pinnacle and more like one element in an ever-changing, ever-adapting network that transforms our planet both at the smallest and the largest scales. Moreover, life we may consider to be purely microscopic or single-celled often goes through macroscopic or multi-cellular stages.

To drive this point home, the authors include a chart that show the “size ranges” of different organisms, from individuals to collectives. The largest single living organism on Earth may well be a humongous fungus in Oregon— while human spermatozoa exist at the microbial scale.

The Verdict

This is a great book for anyone curious about the smallest dimensions of life. The list price of the hardcover edition as of this writing is $35; you will likely be able to get it for less. That’s a very reasonable price for a gorgeous, 370 page science book that’s also—for the most part—a great read.

If I have one criticism, it’s that the book goes into jargon-heavy explanations early on, which might deter some readers before they have a chance to really dive in. Here’s a quote from page 19:

Archaea, like the gram-positive bacteria, have one cell membrane, but the archael membrane is composed of different lipids than those in the bacterial membrane. Archael cell envelopes often also have an outer crystalline lattice of proteins called an S-layer.

Judging by some of that early writing, you might think the entire book is going to be highly technical, but it isn’t. For example, there’s an extensive description of the microbial life inside a block of cheese; the description is given in the form of an imaginary journey of an explorer who shrinks herself to the microscopic scale and gets into a fight with a cheese mite. In other words, this is a book that allows itself to have a little fun with its explanations.

The bumpy beginning is a minor concern, and I highly recommend this book regardless. If you do pick it up and don’t already have the domain expertise to parse the above quote, don’t give up too quickly; the writing becomes a lot more accessible in later chapters.


4 stars
Intelligent podcast about the US Supreme Court's life-altering decisions

More Perfect is an spin-off of the popular Radiolab podcast that specifically focuses on US Supreme Court Decisions, from well-known cases like Citizens United vs. FEC to more obscure but highly consequential cases like Baker v. Carr. In the casual tone typical for Radiolab, each episode brings together many voices on a given case: plaintiffs, legal scholars, historians, activists, and so on. Jad Abumrad, the show’s host, tends to ask flippant questions along the lines of “How does this even make sense?”, channeling a bit of the everyman who knows little about the legal system.

If you’re thinking this premise makes for a dry program, you couldn’t be further from the truth. The court’s decisions have impacted the lives of millions, and the show succeeds in making that impact understandable, from parents fighting to keep their adopted daughter to civil rights activists mourning the loss of voting rights achievements through the landmark Shelby v. Holder case.

I have listened to a handful of episodes so far, and have very much enjoyed them. If I have one criticism, it is that the show can be a bit myopic at times, very much focused on looking at an issue from both sides (e.g., Edward Blum’s test case litigation, which is advancing a conservative agenda through the courts), without providing sufficient societal context: what is the likely impact of this litigation going to be? Who is driving this agenda? Who is benefiting from it? Naturally, some episodes do a better job at this than others.

Still, I recommend the podcast to anyone who cares about the US legal and political context; it provides valuable background about the court cases that made the news, the ones that made the history books, and the ones that didn’t (but should have).


3 stars
A light introduction to a complex thinker who challenged economics orthodoxy

Derek Wall is a British ecosocialist and academic; if you live in the UK you may also recognize him as the Green Party candidate in Theresa May’s Maidenhead constituency. His book, “Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals”, is a ~120 page overview of Elinor Ostrom’s work. Ostrom (d. 2012) was a political economist who focused extensively on the concept of the commons, a set of shared resources available to all members of a community. In 2009, she was co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for Economics.

Wall attempts to draw lessons from Ostrom’s work that may be useful to political activists. He describes Ostrom as a pragmatic problem-solver not drawn to a specific ideology, though committed to democratic and participatory co-creation of solutions. Ostrom specifically challenged the “tragedy of the commons”, a concept popularized by Garrett Hardin—the idea that common pool resources (such as grazing lands) are doomed to degradation due to overuse by selfishly motivated individuals.

Through broad, multi-disciplinary research Ostrom demonstrated that there are countless examples of successful commons. She derived from this a set of design principles for sustainable management of commons resources. Wall’s book motivated me to read Garrett Hardin’s original essay, and I find it frankly astonishing that the idea of a “tragedy” of the commons gained so much credence to begin with. Hardin’s 1968 essay is mostly about population control in line with the kind of neo-Malthusianism that was very fashionable at the time. It concludes:

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon.

Hardin’s ideas are so reductionist that I find it hard to take them seriously at all. My impression is that Ostrom deconstructed, through solid empirical and theoretical work, an argument that rested on very weak foundations to begin with.


Elinor Ostrom. Manitoulin Island, 1968. (Credit: Elinor Ostrom Collection, The Lilly Library. Fair use.)

But Wall’s book only dedicates one of ten chapters to the commons. His “rules for radicals” are a broader reflection on Ostrom’s work and approach. Wall reminds us repeatedly (to the point of tedium) that Ostrom herself a) was not a radical, b) was a pragmatist, c) was a problem-solver, d) was very collaborative. With this framing, he examines her approach to topics like climate change, or to economic activity that is not easily captured in the classical distinctions of market vs. state.

Interspersed are Wall’s own observations regarding contemporary politics, from the revival of right-wing populism to the experiment in democratic confederalism known as Rojava. He also contrasts Ostrom’s economic views with Marxist theory, and attempts to examine potential blind spots they share.

Unfortunately, the book does not stay with any subject long enough to convey deep insights. For instance, Wall mentions the intersection of Ostrom’s thinking about the commons with projects like Wikipedia. But he does not examine this topic closely, and indeed towards the end commits the faux pas of calling Uber an “open source transportation service” (Uber is no such thing).

The Verdict

Wall’s effort to make Ostrom’s work more accessible to a broad audience is commendable. However, this particular book only gives a very light introduction. It provides only a few quotes from Ostrom’s own work, perhaps enough to whet your appetite. While short, the book is a bit more tedious than it needs to be because the author repeats himself quite frequently.

That could have been avoided through more rigorous editing, along with smaller issues such as sentences with swallowed words or syllables. 3.5 out of 5 stars, rounded down.


5 stars
Gorgeous books that make chemistry accessible through powerful visual explanations and humor

In a previous life, Theodore Gray co-founded Wolfram Research and led the design of the user interface for Mathematica, a comprehensive technical computing software package used in many fields. Since leaving Wolfram Research, Gray has focused on conveying his own passion and excitement for science through books, iOS apps and artistic projects like a physical periodic table.

The Elements, Molecules and Reactions is a trilogy of richly illustrated books best enjoyed in their beautiful hardcover editions, written by Gray with photographer Nick Mann and other collaborators.

As you might expect, the first book, The Elements, takes the reader on a journey through the periodic table. I found this book the weakest of the trilogy; the structure forces the author several times to say that element so-and-so is just not very interesting, so why don’t we just move on. That said, the photographs are still gorgeous, and the book contains a good introduction to concepts like the atomic orbitals.

In contrast, Molecules and Reactions are much more substantive, offering powerful explanations for why atoms stick together in certain configurations—or come apart—while introducing just enough jargon to give you the foundation for learning more, if you want to. The explanation for entropy offered in Reactions is, by far, the best I’ve ever come across.


The Elements, Molecules and Reactions opened up to a random page (Credit: Theodore Gray and Nick Mann. Fair use.)

A Cabinet of Curiosities

The books rely heavily on Gray’s vast personal collection of objects that represent different elements and molecules, including rare and dangerous ones. Opening up a few random pages, I find photographs of opium boxes, a Kevlar glove, trombone oil, and an antique tin of saccharin.

Rather than lots of text with smaller photos, the images take center stage. In The Elements, each element in the periodic table gets at least one full photo page (you can preview the pages here). In addition to photos, Molecules and Reactions also make frequent use of chemical drawings in a simplified style that is easy to understand.

The text and images are presented in an unusual free-flowing layout that doesn’t always work perfectly if you’re reading in one sitting, but which makes the books a pleasure to pick up and open to a random page, even after you’ve finished them. Gray writes in an informal, casual style, for example (from Molecules):

“Undecane—a straight-chain hydrocarbon with eleven carbons—is, I swear, a moth pheromone. They use it to attract mates, in much the same way the human male uses it in sports carts (it’s one of the higher-numbered hydrocarbons in gasoline).”

The books also use lots of humor and personal anecdotes, but unlike a book like “We Have No Idea”, it’s on the whole more focused on explaining things than delivering puns or jokes. Reading any book in the trilogy feels a bit like visiting a museum (or a cabinet of curiosities) with your personal tour guide who explains everything with a wink and a half-smile.

The Verdict

I personally started with Molecules; if I had begun with The Elements, I’m not sure I would have kept going. It’s not a bad book, it’s just not nearly as gripping as the other two. As it is, I finished all three books within a few weeks (there’s not that much text).

I was neither especially good nor especially bad at chemistry in school, but I never felt that the explanations I got out of it actually helped me understand the “why”. Why do atoms prefer certain configurations over others? Why do chemical reactions release energy? Why can small changes in a chemical formula represent such massive changes in a molecule’s appearance or behavior?

Gray’s books help any reader to at least grapple with these questions in a more informed and intuitive way. They make a great gift for curious teenagers, but I would also recommend them to any lifelong learner. If you can, you’ll want to buy or borrow the whole set, but if you just want to check out one book, I suggest making it Molecules or Reactions.