This is it. The only Bruce Sterling novel I haven't read. So how does my guru's second novel hold up?

Well, it's original, aggressively stylized, and full of provocative ideas. In the distant future people are effectively immortal, with ennui a leading cause of death. The titular Artificial Kid inhabits the body of of a deceased politician, making his living as a combat artist, beating up other artists with his nunchuks and selling the tapes. He stumbles into a massive historical/scientific conspiracy, and a whole bunch of crazy stuff happens.

This isn't a perfect book. If the characters are a little flat, or the writing drags a little, then that's the price of journeyman work. But Sterling's obvious talent and energy is on display, and its definitely a fun read.

Halberstam was one of the greatest war correspondents and political journalists of the 20th century, and his talents are on display in this massive history of the Korean War. Equally adept at describing the horrors of a battlefield and the political decisions leading up to that battle, Halberstam takes the reader through the major moments and decisions of the Korean War.

His framing device is simple. Douglas MacArthur versus: vs Communists, vs the Truman administration, vs his own soldiers and ultimately, vs reality. MacArthur and his cronies are given little respect. In Halberstam's account, it's his usurpation of political authority in declaring Korea no longer part of America's Pacific perimeter that gives Stalin and Mao permission to let Kim Il Sung attack. It's his arrogance that sends outnumbered and poorly trained GIs into Korea to fight and die. And above all, it is his sycophantic staff and immense ego that allowed UN forces to be sucker-punched not once, but twice in less than a year.

This MacArthur centric-framing is probably not the most historically evenhanded, but it makes for a fun read, and this book needs all fun it can get. There's little to delight in-mostly bloody defeats, political miscalculations, and a paranoia as enveloping as the Manchurian cold. Halberstam does an amazing job bringing the players of the Korean War to life, although Washington DC is the major focus, with the rest of the UN coalition and the South Koreans given short shrift. Still, this is a classic of modern military history, and probably the 'one book' on the Korean War.

There secret to writing is that there isn't one. To write, you need to sit down, make time, and do it.

The difference between Silva and Sgt. Slaughter (the imaginary Marine DI who lurks around my dissertation) is that Silva backs up this statement with practical, peer reviewed advice on how to turn writing into a habit. I'm not sure if this blessed short book is the magic bullet, but hell, it seems reasonable enough. The first thing to conquer is fear, then laziness, then the writing itself...

Mao's book is a classic on guerrilla warfare, ably translated and contextualized by General Samuel B Griffith. This book mainly covers the theoretical and strategic aspects of guerrilla warfare, the need for complete political clarity at all levels, strict ethical codes and internal discipline for the men, and the proposed use of guerrillas against a qualitatively superior but numerically inferior force tasked with occupation and pacification. This book won't teach you about how to set an ambush and not starving to death in the woods, but it will cover the basic steps between an isolated an ineffective movement and the fall of a government.

What does it take to make great software? A focus on quality boarding on obsession, brilliance, long hours, personal sacrifice, and a leaving of that intangible called leadership. Showstopper stands besides The Mythical Man Month and The Soul of a New Machine in it's depiction of programming and technology around the creation of The Last Great OS.

Lead Engineer David Cutler and his team had a ambitious job, to make the first 'platform-independent operating system', a piece of software which would revolutionize personal computing by adding reliability and backwards compatibility, and make Microsoft very very wealthy. Over 4 years, they transformed a vague idea into working software, at the cost of $150 million, many broken marriages, and constant abuse and bullying. The sense I got from this book is that Cutler was a maniac, but perhaps the only type of person who could make something like NT work. I can only hope that the massive stock options the team got compensated for the emotional trauma. The human side is paramount in this story, but able analogies explain the inner workings of the PC.

These days, post-Zune, Windows phone, and the resurgence of Apple it's easy to mock Microsoft as a has been-a dinosaur limping along on monopoly market power and tech lock-in. But it serves us to remember that they were agile and innovative once. Cutler's messianic vision may have been justified, because 20 years later his code is still at the heart of the versions of Windows that we use.

*Disclosure: Gregg Zachary is a friend and colleague.

Ian Hacking is a subtle, thoughtful, and often frustrating writer. In Rewriting the Soul, he takes a genealogical approach to Multiple Personality Disorder, epidemic at the time of writing in the early 1990s, and links it to political movements, 19th century French psychiatry, and the philosophy of self and memory. All science, particularly the human sciences like psychiatry, are informed by politics, but Multiple Personality Disorder is is more informed than most. The appearance of alters, personality fragments, is linked to recovered memories of abuse, either mundane child abuse at the hands of close relatives or esoteric (and entirely fictional) ritualized satanic abuse.

Hacking is n expert both in 19th century psychiatry and the intricacies of the modern multiple personality disorder movement, and ably shreds any commonplace notion of a singular self based on factual memory by showing all the ways in which this commonplace self breaks down at the fringes of medicine. To the question, "Is MPD real?" Hacking replies 'Yes. But it is a grave moral wound inflicted upon people by psychological entrepreneurs.' For a philosopher, a seeker after truth, the scanty evidentiary basis of MPD must be infuriating, especially given the way that it afflicts the lives and communities of people diagnosed with it. But I'm not sure that Hacking earns his normative critique, or an alternative formulation of the self not reliant on a fallible and fluid memory.

Going into the last of the Expanse trilogy, the question on my mind was "Will they change up the formula?" And they did, but at the expense of the tight plotting that made the first two books a joy.

This time, after an attempted assassination/smear job, Holden and co are floating beyond the Gate, surrounded by billion year old alien artifacts that can change the laws of physics. And of course, when faced with the inexplicable, humans beings do what they do best: get scared and try to murder each other.

I can't exactly say what's wrong with this book, but despite strong bones, it didn't quite gel. Holden and his allies are too saintly, their opponents too obviously foolish. Serious themes of sacrifice and redemption are gestured at, but not fully fleshed out. I mean, read it if you've gone this far, but Abaddon's Gate is a step down from the rest of the series.

Apparently WW2 + magic is a genre, of sorts. Bitter Seeds features a team of British warlocks going up against a squad of Nazi super-soldiers. The alt-history is pretty good, as the Nazis use their powers, especially precognition, to decisively win the Battle of Britain. British warlocks counter with a fimbulwinter, paid in a heavy blood price, and the battle escalates on both sides, with ever greater sacrifices.

Tregillis does a decent enough job with the alt-history, the points of departure, the horror and inefficiency of the Nazi war machine, and the lengths to which the Brits would be willing to go when pressed (See Operation Vegetarian). On the other hand, the mad science isn't as cool as the Cthulhu mathematics of Charles's Stross work, and the characters and writing are solid, but nothing to write home about.

Good if you're a fan of this kind of stuff and want something fun, but not really groundbreaking.

Cowboy Angels is a grim and paranoid book about world-hopping CIA operatives involved in a conspiracy to unite every America in the multiverse under the banner of Freedom and Empire. There's no glory here, and little redemption. Just lies, murder, and obligations from the grave. The language is hard and spare as befits the subject, and I think McAuley backed away from the Big Implications of his multiverse, but he kept me hooked all the way through.

It's hard to review a Culture novel, because there are few words capable of encompassing Iain Bank's vision. Needless to say, in a galactic utopia there are still crimes and ancient sins, and it is these that Bank's protagonists are concerned with; reparations for a civil war, the light of dying stars, and what remains when even memories are gone. Great aliens minds (and Minds), vistas to boggle the mind, and a characteristic Banksian cosmological bleakness that yet manages to carry a little hope for intelligence in a uncaring universe.