Casinos have always fed on the greed of people who don't understand statistics, but black jack is the one game that can be beaten. Basic card counting a la Rain Man won't cut it. Most people lose money, and the distinctive changes in bets draws attention from the pit bosses. But a group of MIT students figured out how to combine statistical wizardry with team work, signalling a Big Player to sweep in on a hot table and bet the bank. Kevin Lewis and his friends had a good run, raking in close to $100,000 in a weekend. But nothing lasts forever, and the most important lesson for any card counter is knowing when to walk away. Enjoyable light non-fiction of the true thriller variety, Bringing Down the House is exactly what it says on the cover.

I've read On Basilisk Station to pieces, so I decided to start my Honorverse reread with the second book. In The Honor of the Queen, Honor has to secure an alliance with the backwards but strategically important planet of Grayson. This book has Weber's milSF at the top of the game, with rapid deep-space ambushes, Space Marine assaults, and the required slugging match between Honor and a more powerful ship. Fortunately, it avoids the 'war of large numbers' excess that characterizes that later books (a combined broadside of 8000 missiles, 63% of which were fooled by ECM, point defense shot down 2500, which left 460 missile to detonate against the Manticorean battle wall...).

What elevates this book is the surprisingly good gender politics. Honor is one of the stronger female characters in fiction (aside from her disastrous love life), and she's deals with the chauvinistic Space Mormons of Grayson sternly but fairly. There's a little bit of "bless their hearts" kindness towards Grayson society in Weber's writing, but their sexism is obviously an anomaly in the setting, and one which will be corrected. They come off positively good looking next to the Space Taliban of Masada, who are a simply delightful enemy to crush. Finally, on the politics side, Weber is a little bit pro-Authoritarian and anti-Democratic for my tastes, with a fair amount of 'we could just fix everything if this stupid political process got out of the way of our wise leaders', but his liberals are such pathetic strawmen that it's hard to feel insulted.

Honorverse #3 sees the Big Show kick off, as Manticore and the People's Republic of Haven finally start the war that they've been dancing around-and as always Honor is right in the center, commanding the state-of-the-art Battlecruiser Nike in defense of critical forward base. Good intelligence on the part of the peeps and command errors above leave Honor's squadron badly outgunned by Dreadnoughts, and it's up to her tactical brilliance and guts to save the day.

That said, this is where the series starts to bloat. The main action is short, almost too short, and the narrative wanders between Honor commanding starships, falling in love, and facing down old enemies, and 'big picture' strategy discussions on Manticore and Haven. The Haven perspective, with it's tottering regime halfway between Communism and ancien regime France is pretty good, but Weber goes right for the obvious historical parallels, including one of the worst pun names in all of scifi.

Hey, you got character development in my military scifi, and it's actually pretty good!

Fresh from the victory at Hancock Station, things couldn't be going better for Honor. She's a hero, she's in love, and her nemesis is finally getting what's due to him, with a court-martial for cowardice and desertion in the face of the enemy. But being a protagonist comes with a heavy price. Honor's love Paul is killed in a duel arranged by the villanous Pavel Young, and Honor sacrifices everything to get her revenge.

Several things make this book stand out. First is Honor's very real grief. Weber might not be the best at intimacy, but he does loss like a champion. Second, Honor's friends really come through for her, and it's no surprise that such an exceptional woman draws those kinds of people too her. And finally, Pavel Young is disgusting scum; sexist, corrupt, and cowardly, and we get to watch him squirm.

Field of Dishonor is tense and tightly plotted, and better than it has any right to be.

Rewired is a self-conscious anthology of early 21st century science fiction. Kelly and Kessel want to put the very best stories on display-and they succeed with 16 excellent stories including pioneers like Gibson, Sterling, and Cadigan, and rising talents like Stross and Bacigalupi. The stories are all smart, provocative, well written. Virtual realities dominate as a technological theme, but the personal moves are way more diverse, and the stories that get away from computers are all the better for it.

This book is like a brick-a dozen or so papers assembled by Adele Clarke and her old sociology reading group to explain and describe biomedicalization as a tool for theoretical critique. As a positive, if I were teaching a graduate seminar on the topic I might just assign this book. As a negative, two days after reading it, I can't even remember what biomedicalization is clearly enough to explain it to you.

Sometimes things are too subtly.

"War is hell."
- William Tecumseh Sherman

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

Most brutal armies: The Mongol Horde. The Nazi Wehrmacht. Military Assistance Command Vietnam? Yes, it was that bad.

This book fills a vital gap in the literature. According to Turse, roughly 30,000 non-fiction books have been written about Vietnam (I have quite a few to go. *gulp*). Those that concern war crimes tend to focus on specific incidents, particularly My Lai. None look synopticly at how America fought the war. Drawing on the files of the US military Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (those that haven't mysterious disappeared), and interviews with veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse has compile a chilling account of the routine occurrence and sanctioning of war crimes.

An estimated million civilians were killed in South Vietnam during the American war. Some of these were the collateral of the American juggernaut: victims of aerial bombardment, Agent Orange, and random shellings. Many more were callously personal: village bunkers cleared with grenades, children run over by convoys, girls on bicycles knocked down by passing troops. And a final category is chillingly inhumane: torture and execution of prisoners, buzzing farmers with helicopters until they ran in terror and then machine gunning them as Viet Cong, hours long gang rapes of teenage girls by combat patrols. Day after day for years on end, in every province of the country, American soldiers mistreated Vietnamese civilians in ways that violated every law of war.

Turse admits that this book is not a complete story, but he tells enough to show a clear pattern of abuse starting at the highest echelons of command. Body count-driven strategy meant that commanders were encourage to manufacture kills by any means necessary. Higher echelons didn't bother to check that the bodies were accompanied by weapons. Similarly, nobody was sanctioned for war crimes. Lt. Calley became the fall man for 40 more senior officers, and suffered only a few months of house arrest and the loss of his reputation. The Mere Gook Rule, which started that American lives were precious, firepower was cheap, and Vietnamese lives worth nothing at all, was applied at every level-from shooting 'escaping' prisoners to flattening villages and relocating the population to squalid strategic hamlets.

I believe strongly that war is a moral enterprise, and in Vietnam those in command showed the utmost moral cowardice and disregard for the honor of their uniforms and the American flag. In seven years of war, Vietnam experienced something equivalent to the My Lai massacre every week. What happened there was just as bad as anything on the Eastern Front in WW2, my previous gold standard for man's inhumanity to man.

Writing from the perspective a career Air Force officer and fighter pilot, Riza ably summarizes the literature on the laws of wars and autonomous systems (primarily Michael Ignatieff and Ron Arkin, but also Patrick Lin, Peter Singer, and many others). His twist is based on the existential credo of Sartre that "to kill one must be willing to die", and a warrior ethos that is vital both to the ability of officers to command and the legitimacy of winning wars against technologically inferior enemies. As Riza argues, the immunity that autonomous weapons platforms provides against harm may make wars easier to start and dialog leading to peace more difficult to develop. The overall thrust is that while autonomous weapons certainly *can* kill people, and may even be able to kill people in accordance with the laws of war, the use of autonomous lethal robots undermines the moral foundation which makes war and peace possible.

There are several moments in this book that are quite interesting. Riza's comments on the changes in air force manning and potential loss of tactical skill development in junior officers are a new take on the issue. However, I think that several major points are not addressed by this book.

First is the American orientation of < href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlespace>Battlespace Dominance. Since WW2, American military superiority has been based on the ability to bring overwhelming fire to bear on vital parts of the battlefield, while monitoring areas around strategic assets and allowing the whole system to manuever freely. Battlespace is a technocratic doctrine of making lists of target coordinates and knocking them down as efficiently as possible. How does this practice of war comport with warrior codes?

Second is a romanticization of air combat. Fighter pilots surely do have The Right Stuff and go in harm's way, but conversely air tactics are not about dueling but about clobbering the other guy as fast as possible, ideally getting a kill shot before they even know they're dead. And in the long occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, American pilots faced essentially no opposition in the air.

And third is an under examination of robot vs robot combat. Al Qaeda doesn't have any robotic capability (unless you count IEDs), but a nation like China or Russia might. While losing an autonomous platform might not be the same as suffering human casualties, these systems aren't free, and are in fact quite expensive. I've heard that recent military exercises have involved trying to run down the enemy's inventory of precision guided munitions by offering bait targets at the edges of effective engagement envelops. Robot vs robot combat brings in the tricky issues of procurement policy and economic warfare, but it is substantially under theorized and could be addressed by someone with Riza's background.

I know it's a little unfair to criticize a book for what's not in, but I wanted a lot more. This is an area of emerging concern, and compared to Singer's Wired for War, Riza's book is less tied to specific programs and evolving robots, and more towards the big picture moral and legal issues in warfare.

Reynolds always has big ideas. In this case, Earth has been devastated by rogue nanotechnology, humanity is divided between preservations Thresholders around Earth and exotic nano-using radical Slashers deep in the system, and is on the brink of war over access to Earth and the galactic hypernetwork, which mostly leads to empty stars and dead planets. But somewhere, out there, is an Earth where it is 1959, World War II did not happen, and an American tourist in Paris has been murdered. And when these two words meet--we'll, I'm not going to spoil the book, but I stayed up all night reading it.

Immediately following the events of The Darwin Elevator, Exodus Towers tracks the preparations of the Belem exiles for the arrival of the next alien ship, as well as more changes in Darwin as arch-douchebad Russel Blackfort loses his grip on power. I can only describe this book as 'workman-like'. The action scenes aren't as gripping as the first book, the villains agenda less fleshed out, and the mysterious builders continue to be enigmatic, launching something between an invasion and Myst-style puzzle quest. I guess it's a decent bridge to book 3, but I'm not sure that anything important happens.