Today Boyle is considered the forefather of the experimental method, and Hobbes a titan of political philosophy. This is an artifact of history, as the two were contemporaries and competitors in that strange space called 'Natural Philosophy.' One of the most important books in the history of science and in STS, Leviathan and the Air-Pump looks at the early days of the Royal Society as a constitutional moment. In the controversy over the air experiments, the integrity of the machine, the nature of the substances contained within, and the practices of witnessing used to attest to its results, Shapin and Schaffer find the start of both science and liberalism.

This is an immense and deeply researched work of scholarship, that vividly imagines the politics and practices of the time; a very difference world where technological dissension could imply the chaos of civil war, and the idea of perfect philosophical system was still attainable. My only quibbles are that this book is denser than the subject warrants, and despite protestations to the contrary, has just the small whiff of whiggishness, as the authors are descendants of Boyle's cultural tradition rather than Hobbes, and Boyle is described as 'speaking for nature' whereas Hobbes is merely 'social'.

This book is a lot like Dinotopia-one of my beloved childhood classics-but with a lot of the charm scooped out and replaced with weirdness. Two authors with checkered credentials: Chaing worked on the Star Wars prequels as a lead designer and artist (though to be fair the movies did look quite good, if lacking the iconic force of the Original Trilogy) and Orson Scott Card, who has gone from beloved scifi author to religious weirdo and homophobic hate-group leader.

The illustrations are full of stark ruins: overgrown cities, immense machines rusting on a beach, tall ships and flying saucers. The animal and robotic inhabitants of the world are elegant, colorful, appropriately horrifying. The human characters, lack this richness, and most of the drawings are static: concept art rather than comix art.

The less said about the story, the better. An amnesiac hero awakes, meets enemies and gathers allies, and overcomes obstacles while journeying towards the secret knowledge that he can use to end a great war. But while this book promises something unique, what we get is the usual archetypes shuffled through a particularly poorly done heroes journey. Maybe I'm being nitpicky because its OSC, but the style reminded me Mark Twain's thoughts on the clunky Bible-fanfic nature of the Book of Mormon. And is it so hard to have fewer than 100% of the female characters betray the protagonist because of their fickle and sin-cursed femininity? This attitude isn't in the whole book, but it shows up hard at the end. I picked this up for $6, which seems more than fair for just a few of the better painting and the overall quality of the book as an object, but if I paid full price I'd be pissed.

I love love love the paranoid fringe. Every Friday is FriDDEEEES!!! on Facebook, where I post one of the delightfully insane artworks of paranoid antisemitic David Dees. So this book is a natural fit.

Ronson spent a long time hanging out with figures on the extremist fringe, Thom Robb of the KKK, Rachel Weaver-survivor of Ruby Ridge, Omar Bakri-Osama bin Laden's man in London, Alex Jones of Infowars and many others. The idea was simple, hang out with lunatics, let them explain how the world is controlled by a shadowy conspiracy, and then try and find the conspiracy. After all, the New World Order might be powerful, but they have to meet somewhere. Ronson plays the extremists up for laughs, and they're mostly pathetic and humorous in their sadness and confusion. But he doesn't shy away from the very real truths coming out of the conspiracy movement. Yes, the Bilderberg Group is real, and yeah, a hundred-odd business men and politicians meeting in private every year isn't very democratic, but these people rule the world because they're already rich and powerful, not because they're Secret Masters of the Illuminati. Bohemian Grove is legitimately weird and gross, but more because it's the ultimate boy's club with people like Kissinger and Nixon dressing up in drag and drinking till unconsciousness, rather than some kind of Satanic Cult. The Conspiracy is real, but rather banal.

Conversely, while groups like the Anti-Defamation League keep tabs on the extremists and try and hamper their activities, you don't need to scratch a conspiracy theorist to see that the International Bankers or Giant Space Lizards or whatever are actually The Jews. There's some sort of subtle difference between the Conspiracy Jews, and actual practicing members of Judaism and/or people descended from practicing Jews, but given the history of antisemitism, this isn't an area where people get the benefit of the doubt.

Can you have conspiracy theories and extremism without hate? I doubt it. Thom Robb's attempt to reinvent the KKK as some sort of self-actualization support group are some of the funniest chapters, because this Grand Dragon totally misses the point. Hate is fun; hate binds people together. I just wish "they" didn't hate people like me.

Most of the major players in the storygames movement have contributed to this volume. When it's on, it's very on: Vincent Baker, Robin Laws, Ken Hite, and Jason Morningstar have some great essays on conversations, shared imaginations, and making it work. The other contributors also have lots of advice on listening, saying "Yes, and...", and getting weird in a game. The weakness in this collection is a lot of repetition-too many intros defining improvisation and its use in RPGS, which could have been worked through by a stronger editorial vision (but yeah, then some people might not have contributed...), and some odd gaps in practice. Saying that you should listen is easy, actually listening is hard. And one of the most promising ideas, asking questions of your players to draw out their hooks and story elements, isn't explored in depth. Overall, an inspiring collection but one that might be hard to use.

The Marines get all the credit for Guadalcanal, but the campaign shaped the United States Navy as well. The Navy lost almost 3 sailors for every infantryman killed ashore, with 24 ships sunk in the waters that would come to be known as Ironbottom Sound. The grinding campaign in the seas around the Solomon Island taught the Navy painful lessons, and eventually wore down the highly elite Imperial Japanese Navy.

Hornfischer is too much of a historian to pass judgement, but one of the key themes is the incompetence of American commanders and their inability to press their advantages. Most of the naval battles were night actions; sudden knife fights in close quarters by cruisers and destroyers. While both forces were operating at the very limits of their logistics, the Japanese had trained for night fighting, and had effective doctrine that prioritized their excellent Long Lance torpedoes and individual aggressiveness. Conversely, few American officers understood how to best use the absolute technological advantage of rader-guided gunnery. There were errors that would be funny if they weren't so tragic, like using "R for Roger" as code to open fire, just like Roger Over Victor from Airplane. Patrolling ships were set to Condition 2, a false alertness that had sailors scrabbling to their duty stations in the critical first minutes of battle. There were similar failures of supply, intelligence, and command all through the fleet, and American sailors paid the price.

As with Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, Hornfischer's greatest talent is humanizing the men of the fleet: sailors and junior officers who did their duty even as their ships turned to flaming charnel houses. However, with 82 ships and 7 major battles, there's less time to get to know the participants, and the bigger picture erodes some of his talents compared to his other book. I also wished that there was more of the Japanese perspective, as with Shattered Sword, but I understand why this book would be mostly American. It's very very good military history, but not quite great.

Shards was the first of Bujold's novels, and while it's not bad, the rough edges do show. According to one her explanatory essays I read in a prior collection, she wrote it as a romance with science-fiction trapping rather than the other way around, and it shows in the basic plot structure. Girl gets stranded on uncharted planet with boy. Girl takes long walk back to civilization and falls in love. Girl gets captured by monster and rescued by boy. Girl finds that she can't really go home and marries boy.

Okay, maybe it's little more exotic than your typical Nora Roberts fare, and there's more than a dash of action and space politics, but a book of this sort hangs on the characters, and Cordelia is very much a blank slate until she goes home and finds out that her own government wants to use her for propaganda purposes and is willing to brainwash her 'for her own good.' I don't quite buy the romance between Cordelia and the elder Vorkosigan. They're both good, intelligent, career-minded, honorable people, and in the course of the book they're bound together by common crimes, but that doesn't necessarily mean love. And while the rape scene is (thankfully) portrayed as a terrible act by a monster, it isn't nearly as horrifying as it should be. Cordelia may be freaking awesome, but trading witty repartee with a man who is planning to rape and torture you to death is not something that should ever be put to page.

Anyway, Shards is mostly middle-of-the-road, with a few standout moments and one very very dark one. If you're reading the Vorkosigan books you might as well read them all, but The Warrior's Apprentice is definitely the right place to start.

I haven't read Don Quixote, so maybe I'm not getting the full depth of the references, but this seemed like a joke that got extended way past the point of being funny-a literary SNL skit that had about 20 seconds of humor tops. Father Quixote is a simple Spanish priest with a famous last name. He gets promoted to Monsignor through a chance encounter with a bishop and decides to go on a trip around Spain in his old car "Rocinante' with his friend the Communist ex-Mayor, who he calls Sancho. They drive, drink wine, argue about Catholicism and Marxist, drink some more, argue about the state of Franco's soul, get in trouble with the law, and drink more. It's bleak in a Greene-ian way, but out of habit rather than any good reason. Greene seems to be having a conversation trying to square his Roman Catholicism and his Leftist, but I'm not sure anybody should listen. Read The Quiet American instead.

I've got a fondness for airport reading, and when he's on, Clancy is as good as any. Cardinal of the Kremlin centers around the CIA's top source in Moscow, three time Hero of the Soviet Union Colonel Misha Filitov, who's been passing secrets to for 30 years. But bad luck blows his courier chain, and Jack Ryan and friends have to break every unwritten rule in the CIA-KGB game to get him out. There's lots of tradecraft and spy versus spy. Meanwhile on the tech side of the technothriller, American and Russian missile defense programs are working themselves up--the Russian have the laser, the Americans the mirror. As usual, Clancy writes a great yarn, and this is actually a decent layman's primer on nuclear war strategy and why missile defense could be destabilizing, although Clancy is strongly pro-Star Wars, against the professional consensus.

Some parts have not aged well. Our heroic allies the Afghan Mujaheddin is sadly ironic in a Rambo 3 kind of way. But this book is way more homophobic than I remember. Not that I expect 80s era Clancy to be progressive or anything, but the most evil character is a traitorous lesbian mole out to seduce her best friend by any means necessary, including having the KGB kidnap her husband. A thinly veiled version of Representative Barney Frank shows up just so Ryan can call him a queer. Super awkward, but still better than anything Clancy wrote after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

KSR is one of the acknowledged masters of contemporary science fiction. His Mars trilogy stands like a monument to ambition and understanding. That said, the short story is not his natural format. These stories feel cramped, hemmed in and ended before they reach their conclusion. Repetitions in themes and more annoyingly pacing become apparent: mountains, climate change, baseball, dreams, science, history-each story punctuated by a leaden last line. There are a few standouts, the award winning "Black Air", and goofy and enjoyable "Arthur Sternback Brings the Curveball to Mars", the paired ruinpunk stories of "Venice Drowned" and "Glacier", and the eerie dream-horror of "Before I Wake", but on the whole, the volume is puffed out with filler that sadly illuminates the limits of KSR's talents rather than his strengths.

Back in 2011, a chance encounter between Michael Crow and Neal Stephenson lead to a discussion about who was to blame for the sorry state of our collective imaginations: the best minds of our generation who spend their time design spam filters and social media apps, or science fiction writers who churn out endless dystopias and apocalypses. From this chance encounter was born the Center for Science and Imagination and Project Hieroglyph, with the goal of bringing scientist fiction writers in contact with actual scientists with a mandate to imagine a world where problems could be solved, as an inspiration to solving them. Now, three years later this is the book, and trust a guy who has read 117 science fiction books since 2010, it is GOOD.

The stories in this collection cover topics including space exploration, entrepreneurship, drones, civil liberties, education, climate change, and more, book-ended by Stephenson's Tall Tower, a 20 km steel structure that could cut space launch costs in half-for starters. Stephenson opens with a classically Heinleinian engineering epic of how the Tower is built--think "The Roads Must Roll" or "Blowups Happen". Bruce Sterling closes with the same tower 200 years in the future, inhabited by the decadent and wicked religious dreamers of an Earth that is being abandoned by the Ascended Masters, and the quixotic quest of a cowboy to ride his old horse to the very top. My two very favorite stories were "By the time we get to Arizona" by Madeline Ashby, who provides a The Prisoner inspired take on reforming American's Kafkaesque immigration system with a six week panopticon trial period in a model border town, and "Degrees of Freedom" Karl Schroeder, who uses augmented reality to provide a fascinating and inspiration lens on democracy, legitimacy, and collective decision making. Not everyone manages to hit as solidly, but there's no filler here, and very few reused ideas.

I've rarely seen such a creative, energetic, and yet solidly themed collection. The tent-poles are pieces from masters of the genre, names that you should recognize like Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin and Cory Doctorow. All these major talents bring their A game, and fans of any of them should check out the collection. This might just be some of the best science fiction you'll read in a long time: Retro without being old-fashioned, optimistic without being panglossian.

Disclosure notice: While I am a grad student at ASU and have been following Hieroglyph's progress eagerly since it's inception, I have no financial or institutional connection to it. I just think it's super cool.

((Addendum: And Lawrence Krauss is a blowhard. Skip the introduction))