THIS IS HOW YOU DO A SCHOLARLY ANTHOLOGY!

Biopolitics covers the major developments in the theory originally advanced by Foucault in the closing chapters of the The History of Sexuality, Vol I, that life itself had become the terrain of politics, and that power had transformed from an ancient sovereign power equipped with the sword, to a modern knowledge/power invisibly working its normalizing measures through every extremity of the population. Foucault never fully developed his theory, but it was taken up wide array of philosophers and political theoreticians, most notably Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire.

Campbell and Sitze have done an invaluable service collecting the various readings into one volume. I appreciate the inclusion of Hannah Arendt as a late humanist foundation to the most esoteric works later on, and the inclusion of pieces by Zizek, Deluze, and Badiou as the 'limits' of biopolitical thought. The introduction is in and of itself an impressive piece of synthesis, looking at the many definitions of biopolitics.

This book is invaluable for a newcomer to the field, could easily be used as the core of a graduate seminar, and even for someone familiar with the works, puts them in useful conversation.

Retief the character is a two-fisted interstellar diplomat. Think Captain Kirk by way of a Warren Zevon song. His stories are based in the experiences of Laumer as a junior State department attache in Burma in the 1950s, out on the wild and wooly frontier of US anti-communism.

I read the first story, which has Retief as an old man facing down a revanchist emperor planning to conquer the galaxy, and thought it was pretty good. So why the two stars--well, the stories go downhill fast. Not all science-fiction has to be deep, or compelling or have outstanding world-building or characters. But light adventure fiction has to pleasurable or exciting, and the Retief canon fail on that account. I found the stories a trudge, and mostly indistinguishable. Retief is so exceptional (the best fighter, a natural linguist, a perfect judge of culture and character, an encyclopedia-like memory for the law), and his opponents so cowardly and incompetent that there's no tension, no drama. It's just boozy wish fulfillment. I wish this stories were better, because we need more fiction about space diplomats as opposed to space marines, but Retief never meets a problem he can't punch his way out of.

Naomi Oreskes is *pissed*. She has a right to be, after writing of Merchants of Doubt and seeing the same damn thing happen again and again. The framing for this book is a Chinese historian writing about the collapse of Western civilization due to climate change from the year 2300, but the frame is really weak. What this essay actually about is recent events in climate change policies, such as the collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and a cold, clinical future history of ice sheets melting, mass migration, plague, famine, geoengineering disasters, and as the title would suggest, the end of Western civilization. The first part, about recent developments, is well-documented with footnotes. The speculation is backed up by scientific papers, but is distant and far from compelling as literature.

Oreskes takes out most of her ire on two groups. The first is the neoliberal carbon-combustion complex, a political, financial, and technological assemblage that profits off of burning fossil fuels, and uses it's ideological muscle to prevent even the slightest preparation for the oncoming disaster. The second group are Baconian reductionist scientists, who's cult-like love of objectivity prevented them from understanding human and planetary systems together, or speaking in the proper tone to alert the rest of humanity. For what it's worth, I think Oreskes is mostly right about the neoliberal carbon-combustion complex as dangerously short-sighted wreckers driving our political system, but Oreskes is a historian of science (and I'm one too, sorta), and slamming reductionism and specialization in science seems very abstruse. It's not even a particularly interesting or heated contribution to the never-ending argument on epistemology and scientific methods.

So yeah, this book is short, angry, oddly balanced, and not particularly literary. It's well researched, but unlikely to be enjoyable or interesting to anyone who doesn't already agree with Oreskes.

I've been contemplating a project to read all the Hugo winners for Best Novel, so let's start with the first, the intense and incredible Demolished Man.

Business tycoon Ben Reich needs to eliminate his greatest rival, but telepathic police make it impossible to have murder on your mind. Reich's plan is bold but full of holes, and it's up to psychic detective Lincoln Powell to unravel his scheme and collect damning physical evidence. What follows is an inverse mystery, a tense thriller, and a clear masterpiece of science fiction. Some stuff, female characters for example, are outdated to offensive, but the typographic conventionals used to illustrate telepathy feel surprisingly modern. Bester sketches rather than fleshes out his setting, with my favorite part being the creepy beneficent/eugenic long-term plan of the telepath guild to replace baseline humans. Of course, this is more than just a dumb adventure story, and the climax and conclusion get hyper-Freudian. It's an outdated theory, but one handled with verve and style.

Rumor (okay, other reviews on Goodreads) has it that this is the worst book ever to win the Hugo. I don't know if that's true-yet. I do know that this is not a good book from any kind of literary perspective, and one that buries its occasional good ideas under tedious essays.

The story begins with Joey, an 8 year old boy in a working class family who is a telepath. Unique in the world, a basic extrapolation of 1950s America, he discovers a sympathetic university psychiatrist who tells him to conceal his gift from the world. The plot then skips forward 14 years, with Joey as a college senior working in the lab of Dr. Billings, the great psychosomaticist, some sort of combination of behavioral therapist and neuroscientist. Dr. Billings is given a government grant to develop an automatic pilot for automobile and airplane that will avoid collisions. Billings decides the request is actually for a general purpose AI capable of moral reasoning, and with the help of Joey to coordinate an interdisciplinary research team, achieves the first genuine breakthrough in decades. The AI, named "Bossy" for its resemblance to a cow, prompts a public outcry, and Joey and Billings and another member of the research team are forced to go into hiding in San Francisco. They perfect Bossy in a warehouse owned by an Mable, an old retired prostitute, use the completed Bossy to psychosomatically rejuvenate Mable, opening a path to immortality. They then seek shelter with Kennedy, the last independent industrial titan, and then re-use a public outcry about the potential of immortality to get Bossy approved by the government and sold as a mass-market consumer device.

So yeah, as you can see, the plot has grand ideas, but does almost nothing to link them together. There are some really interesting ideas about the relationship between science and society, innovation being crushed by government dominance, the exigencies of the Cold War turning American into a totalitarian dictatorship more-or-less identical to the USSR, the next stage in human evolution and its relationship to artificial intelligence. The problem is that instead of demonstrating these ideas in plot, the story pauses for a character to have a long internal monologue. There's something here for say, a literary critic tracing the genealogy of certain Big Ideas in science-fiction, but this book isn't just old, it's positively musty--and not in a way that inspires any kind of nostalgia or imagination.

I don't think this was the first 'mind controlling alien invasion' story, but it's the best. Earth is attacked by slug-like creatures, who infiltrate important sectors of society, take over communications, and then expand at an exponential rate until the entire population has been parasitized. The midwest falls in weeks, Russia is taken over almost immediately, and it's up to super-spy 'Sam Cavanaugh' to foil the invasion.

There's a lot of action and excitement, as well those Heinleinian world-building moments, like the dense, post-nuclear war cities, or the 'not a sparrow-fall' radar network. The puppet masters are an appropriately horrifying enemy, and one as scary as anything short of a Berserker/Reaper-esque extinction machine. Sure, the gender politics are pretty retrograde, but that doesn't detract from a tight, terrifying, and damn near perfect scifi adventure story.

The Door into Summer is a cutesy, if somewhat alarming time-travel story. Daniel Boone Davis is a brilliant engineer who has his home automation company stolen out from under him by his greedier partner and even worse ex-fiance. In a fit of pique, he decides to have himself cryonically preserved and thawed out in the year 2000. While he tries to clear up loose ends in the future, he finds that several vital technologies were just as he was planning on inventing back in the 1970s, and that the designer was a mysterious 'D.B. Davis.' There's a rat loose, which turns out to be a classified-but-working method of time travel invented by a disgraced physicist. Davis goes back to 1970, sets everything right, and then returns to the future to live a perfect life.

What works is the paradox-less timetravel, although not to the sheer density of "All you zombies." Time travel to the future is a old story, and future shock of this sort was made standard by H.G. Wells in "The Sleeper Awakens", but on the plus side this story came out a good five years before Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality gave cryonics its first mainstream success. Some of the gadgets Heinlein predicted exist in some form; robotic vacuums and 3D drafting tools. Even wrong predictions about the future can be amusing. And while I am not a cat person at all, this is the best book about a cat that I know.

Where this goes wrong is hints of the weird 'late-phase Heinlein.' Much of Davis's character is driven by his love of his 11 year old "niece" Ricky (not a biological relationship), and the idea that her life might have gone terribly wrong when he had himself frozen. Well, there's lot to love about brave little girls, but proposing marriage to them and playing it as a positive emotional climax is just wrong even with various forms of time-travel. It's really moving, but the context of marrying an 11-year old who calls you "Uncle" is just too weird, and knocks this story down to three stars.

Sequels are always tricky, balancing what made the first book good while doing something different. Ancillary Sword is a much more generously paced book that Ancillary Justice, a diversion of force before the greater struggle we all know is coming. Torren/Breq is dispatched to distant Athoek Station to hold it for Anaander Mianaai, and finds herself trying to fix the troubles of an unhappy world.

The first part of the story, focusing on the new Lt. Tisarwat, and the lengths to which Anaander will go is quite interesting, if mostly prelude. However the middle sags and drags, as Breq investigates abandoned areas of the station, labor exploitation, racism, and abusive relationships. The Raach is an appropriately exotic and alien society, and one actually feels feudal as opposed to a veil of monarchy pasted over 21st century American sensibilities, but you don't need to sell the idea that a feudal empire ruled by a 3000 year old distributed intelligence with schizophrenia might be unjust, even if it nominally provides food, clothing, and shelter for all citizens. The plus side is that the conclusion is explosively tense and fulfilling, it just takes too long to get there.

Ancillary Justice was a race, every plot point building to the climatic attack on the palace, where this book wanders and pauses to enjoy the ornamental gardens. But I'd say that the biggest weakness is actually the psychology of our narrator. Torren/Breq is not human, and the first book did a great job showing how strange and traumatic it is to be the sole remaining part of a Ship in the universe. Here, she is camouflaged by her position as Fleet Captain and assumed House Name, people mostly treat her like she's human and she acts like one. There's a lot of anger and tight control, but only a few scenes that authentically reveal how strange our narrator is.

And I know that the Ancillary series is somewhat of a deconstruction of milSF, with it's David Weber style wanking over acceleration curves, beam coherence, and megaton missile salvos, but at some point there's going to be a war, and all this stuff matters. I wish that Leckie would sit down with a war nerd and figure out the tactical and operational limitations of her ships, because it'll make the posturing for planetary influence matter.

Newly minted Imperial Auditor Miles is sent to the conquered planet Komarr, the Barrayaran gateway to the galaxy, to investigate a catastrophe. One of the planetary terraforming mirrors has been destroyed by an out of control freighter. Accident, sabotage, or terrorism, Miles has to get to the bottom of the issue on a planet where his father earned the moniker 'the Butcher', while figuring out the limits of his power as an Imperial Auditor.

The A plot, mirrors, embezzlement, engineering investigations and high-stakes negotiations, is well done, although it lacks the dazzling footwork of previous outings in the series. Where this book shines in the character of Ekaterina, a Vor woman trapped in one of the most compelling and fleshed out emotionally abusive relationships I've seen. She's the real protagonist of the book, and Bujold does an incredible job making her, and her suffering real and compelling. Bujold doesn't pull her punches, or give Ekaterina and Miles the easy romantic escape from all their troubles, but it's yet another fascinating window on how Vor society works, and its high human costs.

This is one of those Vietnam War memoirs that rises above the rest. Ketwig was basically a kid when he enlisted in 1967, hoping to avoid getting drafted and sent to Vietnam the only way an ordinary kid from upstate New York could. The recruiter promised him he'd be fixing trucks in Germany, but he wound up at a military scrap yard near Pleiku, with 365 days of war to survive.

There are the standard scenes; ambushes, terror, dead bodies, Army brutality, whorehouses and drug-fueled benders. Ketwig witnessed a few truly atrocious things, including Green Berets executing a prisoner with a firehose, and truly bizarre, like getting stoned with NVA soldiers on the night Bobby Kennedy was shot. But what makes this book exceptional is the emotional honesty; Ketwig bleeds on the page, working out a decade of suppressed memories, and the cultural context. The boys who went to Vietnam, and they definitely went as boys, were a generation raised on TV, muscle cars, the Beatles and the Space Race. They were people with tremendous dreams, fed into a meat grinder of a war to justify lies. Ketwig has used this book as the foundation of a career speaking out against the military-industrial complex, and he is brave and right to do so.

Since I do read a lot of these, one thing that separates out Ketwig as a volunteer is that he had a second year in the Army, which he spent in Thailand. Thailand in 68 and 69 seems like a fascinating place, and Ketwig explored and appreciated the culture as much as is possible, while also getting his head in some kind of shape to come back to America. Too many of these books are just that one year, And a Hard Rain Fell explains how that year matters in the course of a life.

Music recommendation: The Electric Flag