Military fiction written by veterans is an interesting genre. On the one hand, it frees the authors from the dryness of facts to make a more interesting and expressive story than their personal memories. On the other hand, it can leave you wondering what was left out, and what happened because it was true or merely because it made good literary sense. It's impossible to doubt General Simmons' credentials as a warrior and a historian. He was there, and his novel has the bronze gleam of truth. But truth alone does not make for a good war novel.

The basic literary flaw is the protagonist, Captain Bayard. He is a blank slate, overshadowed by the famous warriors around him-the Red Snapper, Sergeant Havac, even his platoon commanders. Command seems to be a reflex with him, as the company attacks or defends using the Quantico school solution, usually with a fair degree of effectiveness. He makes no human connections to the men in his unit, the lot of a company commander seems to be a lonely one. Flashbacks to his childhood in Ohio and early career in Washington DC are mere filler, despite romantic entanglements and class conflicts. And the descriptions of battle are adequate, but don't convey the desperation of conflict in the great retreat from Chosin.

The details in this book are absolutely spot on, but like a uniform on a mannikan, there's nothing beneath them. Meh.

I'm somewhat surprised that Stephen Ambrose was an actual historian, back before the plagiarism scandals and shoddy work that put the period on his career. This is the first of his WW2 oral histories, written fresh on the heels of 20 years of Eisenhower research and the 40th Anniversary of D-Day. The book covers the legendary assault on Pegasus bridge: the training of D company, a minute-by-minute account of the battle, and the aftermath.

The bridges over the Orne River and canal, which would later be named Pegasus and Horsa bridge in honor of the Paras, had a vital role. If the Germans held these bridges, their Panzers could attack directly into the flank of the landing, possibly defeating Overlord. If the bridges were destroyed, the 6th Paras would be stranded on the far side without armor or heavy weapons, and would be destroyed in force. The only option was a daring coup de main, sailing in silently on gliders to 'prang' almost on the bridge itself, to seize it by storm in seconds, and then hold it at all costs. Ambrose recovers the battle through careful oral histories, and brings all his talents as a writer to describe the terror of close range firefights, the heroism of the soldiers, the glory of tracers and tanks burning up, and the moments of hilarity--such as a German soldier who had slept through the assault being discovered in his bunker by Paras, woken, and believing that it was an elaborate prank telling them to get lost and going back to sleep.

This is an elegant and excellent little book. Best of all, while Ambrose likes, respects, and admires the Brits, he doesn't worship them like he does with American GIs. The men who defeated the Nazis were pretty amazing, but a historian can't rightfully worship his subjects.

Not nearly as good as Footfall or Turtledove's Worldwar, more serious than Live Free or Die, and more credibly thought out than The Darwin Elevator, A Sword Into Darkness is a fun bit of action with some serious flaws as a novel.

Mays really really wanted to tell a story where a Guided Missile Destroyer saves Earth from an alien invasion, and that's what you get here. The action sequences are top notch, with the authenticity and rapid-fire jargon that comes with 18+ years of experience as an surface warfare officer in the US Navy. He makes guided missile combat exciting, and manages a few neat developments on standard scifi space warfare with 'tactical lag' and 'oblique intercept trajectories.' As an applied physicist, Mays also manages to make the technobabble decent-assuming you buy his superalloys and magic photon drive, the engineering seems to hold up. After those high points, the quality descends sharply. The Deltans wind up having surprisingly good reasons to attack Earth in the manner that they do, but act in ways that let the protagonists be awesome, rather than according to an internal logic. I disagree with some of his political choices: there's no way NASA and the astrophysics community would sit on a visible drive flare, even if it was ridiculous, and as lousy as the military industrial complex is, I doubt they'd mess up a clear and present danger like an alien battlecruiser coming in system just because of interservice rivalry. Most fatally, anything in the book not directly related to the battles is not good at all: characterization, description, sentences. I don't have any quotes to hand, but the writing was ham-handed, even by the standards of mil-SF.* I almost shut the book on the first page, and while it did improve, I have a pretty high tolerance for schlock. Definitely at the lower end of its genre.

*Mays, if you ever read this review, I am genuinely sorry. Criticism is easy, writing is hard, and you've done more publishing a novel than I ever have. That said, you gotta work on the literary qualities--do some non-genre workshops, try some short character sketches, maybe try a collaboration. Ideas this good deserve better sentences.

Miles is off to a state funeral on Cetaganda, the generational enemy of Barrayar, but this being a Bujold book, nothing can be easy. He and his cousin Ivan arrive only to find themselves patsies in an epic Cetaganda treason; one which if it succeeds, will see war spill across the galaxy. As usual, it's up to Miles to discover the truth and set things right in the midst of murders, conspiracy, and war.

Bujold knows how to tell a story and keep the plot tense, but by far the most interesting character in this story is Cetagandan society itself. Though it has the trappings of Imperial China, it is actually an immense post-human genetic experiment, with power delicately balanced between genomic breeder matriarchs, the political-cultural contests of the Emperor, and the ghem-Lords who hold the guns. It's a unique and imaginative culture, and while I have no idea how it could evolve, it's plausible enough.

That said, these books are starting to fall into a pattern. Not that patterns are bad, and there are only a handful of major plots, but I'm looking for Bujold to mix it up in the next one. Maybe Miles will get credit for saving the day, maybe he'll be on the attack instead of the defensive, maybe he'll totally fuck it up. Still fun, still reading.

I want to give Bujold chops for writing a book that reverses the hoary old 'planet of women' trope with a planet of men trope, and then manages to treat a culture of gay misogynistic reactionaries with humor and care. But aside from the set-up (which was done to better effect in Cordwainer Smith's "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal"), there's not much to recommend this Vorkosigan-without-Miles book.

Ethan is a doctor with a problem: His male-only refuge planet of Athos is entirely dependent on reproductive medicine to survive, their centuries-old ovary samples are dying, and the new shipment was replaced with random biological junk. Ethan is sent into the sinful women-filled Galaxy to find out what happened and get a replacement. His first stop, Klein station, lands him in a mess of interstellar espionage with mad Cetagandan scientists, humorless station security quarantine personnel, and a freelance spy from the Dendarii Mercenaries, the lovely Elli Quinn from the first Miles novel, who is back with a new face, a promotion, and tendency to ask 'what would Admiral Naismith do?'. Ethan and Elli fall in with the telepathic (and most wanted) Terrence Cee, and run around the station dodging assassins to figure out where a top secret Cetagandan research project has gone, who has Ethan's ovaries, and who is trying to get them all killed. There's some interesting stuff about the importance of biological control on a space station, and how that effects the way you'd go about committing a crime, and some digressions on the very weird planet of Athos, but mostly this book is just running for its own sake.

Unless Terrence Cee plays a major part in future stories, this is probably the most skippable Vorkosigan book so far.

Kaag and Kreps provide a solid introduction to the interactions between drones and Just War Theory, using a philosophical perspective to illuminate the moral costs of armed drones, particularly as used by the United States during the past decade of the War on Terror. This book is good for what it is-but it's a conventional reading that is in my opinion (as somebody who has written on this extensively) hobbled by the built-in blinders of Just War Theory: that military actions should be restricted in the name of universal ethics and justice, that States are responsible to the will of their population, that ethical deliberation informs and improves policy. Their argument is moderate, reasonable, pragmatic, and impotent compared to, say John Oliver's argument that "drones are making people afraid of the sky."

The Obama and Bush Administrations have been very careful in making sure that their policies adhere to Just War legal principles, and as such arguments centered on the ethics of Just War basically mirror the political positions of opposing camps on the validity of recent American military adventurism.

The book that I'd like to see would discuss the operations, tactics, and power of drone warfare. This is not that book.

Normal Accidents is a momument in the field of research into sociotechnial systems, but while eminently readable and enjoyable, it is dangerously under-theorized. Perrow introduces the idea of the 'Normal Accident', the idea that within complex and tightly coupled sociotechnical systems, catastrophe is inevitable. The addition of more oversight and more safety devices merely adds new failure modes and encourages the operation of existing systems with thinner margins for error. Perrow provides numerous examples from areas of technology like nuclear power, maritime transport, chemical processing, spaceflight and mining. What he does not do adequately explain why some systems are to be regarded as inherently unsafe (nuclear power) and others have achieved such dramatic increases in safety (air travel).

Perrow defines complexity as the ability of a single component in a system to affect many other components, and tight coupling as a characteristic of having close and rapid associations between changes in one part of the system and changes in another part. The basic idea is that errors in a single component cascade rapidly to other parts of the system faster than operators can detect and correct them, leading to disaster. In some cases, this is incontrovertible: A nuclear reactor has millisecond relationships between pressure, temperature, and activity in the core, all controlled by a plumbers nightmare of coolant pipes-and there's little operators can do in an emergency that doesn't potentially vent radioactive material to the environment. However, it seems to me that complexity and tight coupling are a matter of analytic frames rather than facts: complexity and coupling can be increased or reduced by zooming in or out. The choice of where the boundaries of a system exist can always be debated. My STS reading group is looking at alternative axis for analyzing systems, but I'd note that the systems that seem particularly accident prone are distinctly high energy (usually thermal or kinetic, or the potential forms of either). When something that's heated to several hundred degrees, could catch fire and explode, is moving at hundreds of miles per hour, or is the size of a city block, does something unexpected it's no surprise that the results are disastrous. And whatever Perrow might recommend, there is no industrial civilization without high energy systems.

One major problem is that Perrow's predictions of many nuclear disaster simply haven't come true. Three Mile Island aside, there hasn't been another major American nuclear disaster. Chernobyl could be fairly described as management error: while an inherently unsafe design, the reactor was pushed beyond its limits by an untrained crew as part of an ill-planned experiment before the disaster. Fukushima was hardly 'normal', in that it took a major earthquake, tsunami, and a series of hydrogen explosions to destroy the plant. The 1999 afterward on Y2K is mostly hilarious in retrospect.

Perrow rightly rails against operator error as the most frequent cause of accidents. Blaming operators shields the more powerful and wealthy owners and designers of technological systems from responsibility, while operators are often conveniently dead and unable to defend themselves in court. The problem is that his alternative is the normal accident-a paralyzing realization that we must simply live with an incredible amount of danger and risk all around us. Normal accidents offers some useful, if frequently impractical advice for creating systems that are not dangerous, but more often it tends to encourage apathy and complacency.

After all, if accidents are "normal", we should get used to glowing in the dark.

Sun of Suns is a perfect alignment of plot and setting. Schroeder wanted to write something in the vein of steampunk or space opera: sword fights on exploding battlecruisers, glittering 'civilized' cities and dank pirate hideaways, heroics and sacrifice and revenge written across the sky. A lesser author would just say 'screw realism' and do it: Schroeder actually does the world building to make it work.

Enter Virga, a 5000 mile bubble of air orbiting Vega, hemmed in by a shell of ice and light from within by artificial suns. Zero-G forests hide shoals of fish and birds Towns rotate to generate gravity, lest their inhabitants become enfeebled weightless spiders. Immense floating seas and fogbanks conceal pirate armadas, while jet-propelled men-of-war launch rocket barrages before closing to board. There are rumors that the whole thing is sustained by/protecting itself against post-human high technology. I'm not a meterologist, but the incredible weather of Virga and the ships that ply its sky are both awesome and pass my smell test.

After all that praise for the setting, it pains me to do anything less for the plot and characters, but they're merely good as opposed to great. Revenge is a major motivation, and contrasted against friendship, human decency, and the possibility to make something new. There are a lot more Virga books, which I'll read when I get the chance, but Sun of Suns stands on its own and then some.

At first glance, there isn't much that connects Disability Studies and Science Fiction Studies, but this book makes a valuable contribution to scholarship. By combining the two, Allan advances justice in fiction and futures, and provides a fresh set of examples for disability studies, a field which is riven between the punk adversarial stylings of "crip theory" and outdated "victim & hero" tales. The 12 chapters take a new lens on such favorites of academic scifi like Delany and Stapledone, modern hard scifi like Peter Watts, and popular works such as Star Wars and Avatar. I'd particularly like to note Antonio Cascais's chapter on metaphmorphic bodies, prosthetics, and human enhancement as particularly well theorized and provocative.

These essays are not for the novice, and a basic familiarity with the prior literature is assumed, but they're clear and readable (at least, for an academic paper. We kinda suck as writers generally), and I could see using some of them in a class-possibly paired with "FIXED: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement."