Nine-tenths of everything is teachable, but it is that last irrational tenth that is the test of genius; flashing like a kingfisher across a pool (with apologies for mangling the quote). T.E. Lawrence ws undoubtedly possessed of genius, that kind of madness which extended the British Empire across the globe in the absence of rational plans or mechanisms. In this book, a kind of modernist Illiad Lawrence writes about the creation of the Arab Revolt as a nearly perfect guerrilla war. He helped organize bandit tribes into an army, negotiating between the stolid Near East Imperial bureaucracy and the welter of feuds and desire for glory and plunder that characterized the multifaceted and undisciplined Arab army. This force was like a gas, its front everywhere and nowhere as it bled the Turks dry through constant raiding and demolitions.

Lawrence guides us on camel treks across thousands of miles of desert, into tense battles with Turkish armored trains, rolling charges by armored car and bombings by airplane. He has some gifts as a describer of place and landscape, but the people all seem blandly interchangable, aside from a few standouts like Sheikh Feisal and Auda the bandit-warrior. Pain and deprivation are like food to Lawrence, who learned to do more with less, but his ultimate acts would be to betray his Arabs to the forces of Empire, dividing a free people into the nations of the Sykes-Picot agreement.

This is not a playtest review. Apocalypse World is a brutally elegant post-apocalyptic RPG, with a basic system of 5 stats, and 2d6+Stat vs a static DC of 7 or 10. What makes it great are the characters, and the concreteness of the Moves that each character makes to define the world and what they do. These Moves are partially descriptive, partially emotional, always awesome and tension-ratcheting. This basic system, combined with some hard-headed GM advice about putting things that you love in the crosshairs and making every blow count, make Apocalypse World more than the sum of its parts. My only worries are the tone, which might be too edgy for some readers, and the Wounds system, which seems both a little limiting for a game where Bad Things happen all the time, and too Simulationist for the rest of the game. Damn stylish, and lots of mine for ideas. Hope to run it soon!

The Laundry series has always been good, put a little uneven as it bounces it between absurdist comedy and cosmic horror. In book 5, Stross stops running and straps on some kind of literary rocket-skates, with a tightly plotted thriller about Laundry-verse vampires, which of course everybody knows don't exist. Bob is growing into a mature protagonist and potential Deeply Scary Sorcerer, against a background of dreary British bureaucracy and the unholy genetic mashup of finance and tech culture. Great book, even if I miss Pinky and Brains a little.

Ah, the end of a trilogy, with spoilers ahead. The good news is that things happen, mysteries are resolved, the heroes win, and all sorts of good things happen. With higher stakes, I actually started caring about the action scenes again. The bad news is that the big reveal is not all that great. SUBS, the purge, the alien artifacts, all of them are revealed to by a test administered by immense machines trying to find a biological species capable of breaking through an even more insane series of death traps created by yet another vanished alien species.

I'd have been happier stopping with the first one :(

I seem to have trouble hitting 'enter' on reviews of Heinlein novels, but who cares, cause there's only two types of Heinlein novels: Weird as hell, and totally awesome.

This is the second, with lots of smart 1950s space science about interplanetary travel with flying saucer drives, some really fascinating aliens, brave and capable characters (including a girl. Yay Peewee!). You just have to love how Kip and Peewee never give up, even when kidnapped by horrible bug-eyed monsters, running out of air on the Moon, freezing on Pluto, or representing all of humanity in a mortal trial before the intergalactic UN.

The Mismeasure of Man is a truly magnificent and detailed work in the history of science. Gould chronicles the influence of hereditarian and heirarchial ideology on scientific research and public policy, tracing the pernicious ideas that distinct groups of people or races could be ranked from primitive to civilized and that a single innate factor of intelligence determined personal success in life. In reanalysis of the original working papers of scientists like Broca, Morton, and Yerkes, Gould finds circular arguments (these people are advance therefore they must be intelligence, these people are intelligent therefore they are most advanced), as well as a multitude of sins in changing data, ignoring contradictory interpretations, and justifying prejudice and eugenics. Some of the later part of the book, about factor analysis and the like, is a little inside baseball, but for the complete demolition of the Army Alpha IQ test and the stunning "fact" that WW1 soldiers had an average mental age of 13 are the best parts of the book.

Laundry series: James Bond, Cthulhu, and Dilbert walk into a showing of Monty Python and the Knights of the Holy Grail. You know the drill.

In this case, Bob is investigating top-secret Squadron 666 (nuclear armed Concordes and extra-dimensional reconnaissance) on behalf of his strange and terrifying boss Angleton when everything goes pear-shaped. A bystander is killed, Angleton disappears, and cultists and Russian Occult Intelligence agencies are chasing after something called The Eater of Souls, which might be the key to unlocking CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN and the end of the world. Meanwhile, Mo is taking her (human bone, soul-eating, pure evil) violin for a tune up, and Bob is exploring the wonders of matrix management in the aftermath of a major fuck up. And the the dark workings of the (very real) Baron Roman von Urgern-Sternberg might be the key to solving it all, before Bob finds himself as Victim #1 in an act of black magic.

There's nothing wrong with this book, and it's a fun read, but somehow even less than 24 hours after finishing it I can't really remember anything in it that happened, or mattered. It's a very transitional novel, and Stross hits its themes better in The Atrocity Archives and The Rhesus Chart. Not saying that you should pass, but if you wanted to, this wouldn't be a bad Laundry book to skip.

Modern Social Imaginaries makes a decent backdrop to other works describing the modern constitution, such as Latour's We Have Never Been Modern and Foucault's Discipline and Punish, but simply doesn't have the imagination or the rigor that I seek in my grand theories. On the plus side, this book is accessible and easy to read, which is not always true for works of philosophy and social theory. The problem is that it seems like a mostly facile re-inscription of conventional wisdom and political mythology: ground well trodden by Marx and Weber and Habermas.

Taylor traces the dawn of the modern social imaginary, the basic ordering of social into free individuals interacting under a framework of equality under a tripartite free market economy, public political sphere, and private self-governance, to Locke and Grotius and a moral order of natural human rights as the foundation of sovereign democratic states. This equality stands in contrast to the older order of hierarchical relationships of submission and protection, the the Three Estates of feudal society (those who pray, those who fight, those who work). However, the comparative analysis is merely between the Anglo-American changes and the French Revolution. Two examples stand in for all the diversities of history, and worse, the centuries of work required to evolve from a feudal structure to recognizably modern market-state-society is simply elided.

I've always had mixed feeling about cryonics: on the one hand they're the oldest and most established Transhumanist branch; on the other, I can't believe that the unfreezing process will ever work, and that if it does the post-Singularity 25th century (or whenever) will be a friendly place for 21st century primates. That said, Nelson's book gave me a lot more sympathy for the movement.

It was not science, it was bunch of 1960s lunatics and optimists who had read a book (The Prespect of Immortality-Robert Ettinger) and thought that they might stave off death. Nelson, a 30 year old TV repairman without even a high-school education, but with plenty of charisma, was elected President of the California Society for Cryonics. It was his optimism that lead to disaster, as his ramshackle organization froze several people that they could not keep on ice. Nelson ran himself ragged filling jury-rigged capsuls with dry ice and liquid nitrogen, depleting his bank account and destroying his marriage. Finally, in the early 70s the capsules failed entirely and Nelson abandoned the business, only to be dragged through a torturous lawsuit by the children of some of his former clients.

Nelson's book is obviously favorable to his side of the lawsuit, and much of the 'he-said-she' back and forth has been documented elsewhere, particularly on a recent episode of This American Life. Personally, I don't judge Nelson too harshly: he was operating at the frontiers of knowledge (and financial organization), and I believe his claim that his participants signed over their bodies under medical donation laws which should've protected him from liability with a competent lawyer. That said, terrible mistakes were made.

Man was not meant to fly.

No, seriously. Planes just want to fall out of the sky and kill us all, and yet we still go up.

Gann chronicles his experiences as a pilot in the early days of airline travel (late 1930s), through air transit command during WW2, and the travails of starting a new airline to Hawaii. He writes lyrically about the beauty of flight, the recalcitrance of machines, and the cruelties of fate that separate one man's survival from the deaths of dozens of his comrades-crashed into mountains, iced up and brought down, slain by unexplained mechanical failure. Gann fly everywhere from the high arctic to the jungles of Brazil, at the controls of good-natured DC-3 and C-87 liberators that seemed to have a will to kill their crews. Overall, an indescribably fascinating book.