The Ultimate Inferior Beings

by Mark Roman

About a year ago, we were visiting our friend, my former colleague and bandmate-turned-writer, Martina Munzittu. I’ve noticed the Pythonesque cover of the book laying on her table. The novel, it has to be added, is written by another former colleague of mine. I asked Martina if she read it and she said “not yet”. Yuri also got interested and while we were chatting and having lunch and chatting again, he read about a third of the book. Later that day, he asked me to order it from Amazon, which I did. I also got a Kindle version of it (for free, as it happens).

It was not until the last week of July though that I came to read it myself. We were busy packing and storing when Timur expressed a desire to take TUIB with us to Finland, because Yuri told him the book is very good. I told him it’s a bit of an overkill to carry a hardcopy in our luggage when we have it on Kindle. After that, I proceeded to read this very hardcopy while I could.

It turned out to be better than I expected. Actually, brilliant. If you like Douglas Adams, Monty Python and Red Dwarf, I am sure you will enjoy TUIB. Even if you hate all of those... you still should give TUIB a try. It is very user-friendly and even has a Glossary explaining, sometimes correctly, some of the scientific mumbo-jumbo.

anaX was hooking the extensible, spring-coil lead of the all-purpose, high internal impedance recharger to the brass-alloy nodal-anode batteries of emergency deep-space survival module No 3. And she was doing it a lot faster than it takes to say it. LEP was quietly singing “Daisy, Daisy” to himself. anaX took it to be a normal pastime for ship’s computers, as she had heard it somewhere before, but it wasn’t long before this pastime started to irritate her. She looked up from recharging the batteries and said, “LEP?” LEP stopped singing. “Yes?” “Tell me something about yourself,” she said. “Talk to me for a bit.” “There’s nothing to tell,” said LEP with uncharacteristic modesty. “I’m sure there is.” “Well, you’re quite right. There is. And every bit of it is phenomenally interesting.” “Go on, then.” She continued with her recharging. “I’m deeply flattered,” said LEP. “I hadn’t realized you were so interested in me.” “I’m not. But it’s got to be better than your singing.”