The Big Time is a novel of ambitious ideas held back by a flimsy plot, and frankly terrible characters.

The epynomymous 'Big Time' is a cosmological war between Snakes and Spiders, fought using time travel across billions of years of history. The two sides recruit human beings as soldiers and agents, snipping their timelines to turn them into Demons, Ghosts, and Dopplegangers. Anachronistic teams of warriors alter history at critical points, trying to ensure the Change Winds lead to the "right" future, even as a the law of Conversation of Reality pushes against any truly dramatic changes in events.

There is a really neat philosophical background, but the actual plot is far less interesting. The story takes place in a Recuperation Station, a smallish bubble of spacetime where soldiers recover between operations. The permanent staff picks up a group of three soldiers who were on the losing side of a battle to capture and guide Einstein's development, then make an emergency pick-up of another trio who were at a battle near ancient Crete. There's an argument, the group decides that their side (the Spiders) is losing, one person declares they should mutiny and declare peace, someone sabotages the Maintainer and Introverts the Place, cutting off all contact between it and the universe. One of the soldiers triggers an atomic bomb with a 30 minute timer, our narrator figures out how to unsabotage The Place, they deactivate the timebomb, and there's a little philosophizing about how the Change War isn't a war at all, but some kind of cosmological evolution.

So as it related to the story, the Big Time setting is almost irrelevant, and what we have is a bottle episode set in the Place. Bottle episodes live and die by their characters, and the cast of 12 (6 Entertainment staff, two trios of soldiers) is too many people to treat each one in detail in the page count. They're all crude stereotypes of their eras. Our narrator is decent enough; she seems to genuinely like her job and has some talent at putting psychologically scarred soldiers together, but the only other one with any real flair is Erich the Nazi, and that's simply because he's an absolutely vile person presented as an ally. The characters fight, fall in love, betray each other, like they're dolls pushed around by some outside force. And in the end, it doesn't matter, not even on local subjective time.

I think the most telling bit is that it's less than 24 hours since I finished the book, and I can barely remember what happened, or why.

"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, steal the most advanced spaceship in the galaxy!"

Space pirates massacring entire planets made a fatal mistake when they hit a planet home to ex-Drop Commando and ultimate badass Alicia DeVries. They kill her family, she kills an entire squad, and is left bleeding out when a voice in her head offers her vengeance, for a price. That voice belongs to Tisiphone, last of the furies of ancient Greece. She survives, whisked away in a pocket dimension, but her rescuers aren't going to believe in demons from some mythological past, or let a mad Drop Commando run around, and so she has to break out of the hospital, steal an Alpha Synth, a hyper-advanced AI driven warship, and then embark on a bloody trail of investigation and revenge to get the pirates who killed her family. Of course, these pirates are in it for a lot more than money, and Alicia reveals High Treason that could shake the Empire, if only she can stop her kamikaze rampage long enough to bring in the law.

I really love this book, and it's hard to exactly why, but basically every part is good, and works together to be more than the simple sum of its parts. Alicia, Tisiphone, and Megarea (their ship) have neatly similar but distinct voices, and the same is true of the supporting cast. The pacing is damn near perfect; lots of action with just enough room to breath and appreciate it. The writing has just enough flourish and sparkle to it. The military technology is well-thought out and coherent, and not a direct adaptation of any historical era. The setting is roughly based on the Roman Empire, which gives the "pirates" plan to get a big chunk of the military in hand and then declare themselves independent a nice bit of resonance. Finally, this book has a strong ethical core, and while 'justice good, vengeance bad' isn't particularly sophisticated, it believes in something and explores the consequences of its characters actions, without the soldier-worshiping stereotype common to the genre.

The story ends with a great set up for a sequel. Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Weber followed up with Fury instead of the Honor Harrington novels. Of course, I'm not sure what could actually challenge our heroes at the end of the book: a one woman army, a demon who can read minds and hack computers, and a warship capable of taking on a small fleet, make for quite the overpowered protagonist. But it's okay that this is all there is, because what we have is some damn near perfect space opera and milSF.

((And, yes I know they released a new edition with a book's worth prequel material about Alicia's early life. I don't care--we don't really need to know more about her origins. Story should begin at the beginning.))

When most gamers sit down and decide to write 'D&D but better', we call it a fantasy heartbreaker. When Rob Heinsoo and Johnathan Tweet (lead designers of D&D 4e and D&D 3rd respectively) decide to do that, the result is an elegant and exciting roleplaying game that combines the best features of many D&D versions.

At the core of 13th Age are the Icons, 13 powerful mortal archetypes who shake the world and whom the player characters have a relationship. The Icons are a mechanical realization of the big NPCs in many settings, but in 13th Age they're divided against each other in tangled alliances and enmities, stretched to the limits of their abilities, and poised on the edge of catastrophe. The whole setting feels like Europe circa 1914, in a good way. The game is structured for thing to fall apart and the players to decide how the rubble will land.

Character classes are another highlight of 13th Age. Classes have been compressed into 10 levels, and are made nicely distinct from each other. For example, Fighters can pick what power they use after they attack, Bards sing songs where the final verse has an escalating effect, and Sorcerers charge their spells before attacking. Within classes there's plenty of room for diversity by picking Talents and attacks individually from a list, and enhancing them with Feats. Characters will only master three skills by the end of the game, which makes for satisfying but reasonable choices.

Combat is no longer tied to the grid as it was in 4e, with a more flexible system of engaged/disengaged replacing detailed movement rules. Much of the built in complexity of 3rd is removed, such as rules for Grapples, Trips, and Disarms. Hitpoints as the sole measure of combat endurance along with a Helaing Surge style mechanism (resurgance) are welcome 4e carryovers. Spells and weapons remain competitive through the level, with a 10th level warrior doing 10d8+3*Str damage with their longsword and 10th level wizard unleashing similar spell damage damage. Save-or-suck only works on creature with low hitpoints, so powerful enemies have to be whittled down first.

The GMing section provides a basic stock of monsters and magic items, and some useful guidelines on how to create your own, although as a single source book, there's definitely room for expansion. The default setting is some of the most gameable generic fantasy I've seen, but there are plenty of blank spots on the map and it's easy enough to swap out one to all of the Icons to change up the setting.

That said, there are some weak spots. The full page illustrations are gorgeous, the monster art less so. I'm not sure how well rolling firstful of dice will work in combat, and some groups may rebel at the entire idea of having to have relationships with the Icons. That said, these are minor gripes, and 13th Age is my next go-to game.

Game Design Workshop is a pragmatic textbook on how to make games, with a plethora of useful exercises in analysis and design for helping rookies turn their game design dreams into reality. There isn't much in the way of theory here; a brief nod towards Huizinga's magic circle and the flow state, and then the game delves into the meat of prototype, iteration, and improvement. As a gamer, it's interesting to see the small number of games which people at the top of the field consider their inspirations (ever heard of M.U.L.E?) As a teacher, there are tons of good exercises that could be adapted into homework.

Game Design Workshop is deliberately agnostic towards what type of games its reader will make, although there is a slight trend bias towards cardboard prototypes of computer games, a practice followed by many major studios. The advice on using playtesters was particularly good. Compared to Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses this book is much less theoretical, preferring a lose concept of 'play' to stricter ideas about storytelling, simulation, and balance.

I read the second edition, which in 2015 is slightly outdated, but I have faith that the 2013 3rd edition is a worthy upgrade. If I were teaching a class on game design, I'd definitely consider this book a central resource.

A Case of Conscience is part of that odd subgenre of Catholic Theological Science Fiction. Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is a Jesuit, a biologist, and one of four members of a human commission evaluating the planet Lithia for interstellar colonization. Lithia is home to an intelligent alien race, 12 foot tall reptiloids with advanced mastery of genetics, microbiology, ceramics, and semiconductors, but rudimentary knowledge of chemistry and atomics physics. More curiosly, their culture can only be described as Edenic. There is no war, no politics, a single planetary language, ecological balance between the verdant jungle and the Lithians. The problem is that this perfection may hide a deadly sin.

The first section of this book concerns the expedition's final days on Lithia, following Father Ramon as he cares for partner and wanders around the city. The drama is the four-sided debate between the expedition members. Physicist Cleaver has a plan to turn the planet into an interstellar arsenal, using the natives as slave labor in hydrogen bomb factories. Michaelis and Agronski believe in a moderate position that the planet could be a useful waystation for trade in complex biological molecules. Father Ramon, however, has arrived at the radical position that the Lithian society too closely matches Christian precepts to exist by accident, and that the planet must be an elaborate trap created by Satan. The sinless Lithians lack souls, and would tempt mankind towards an evil path. The commission deadlocks on whether Lithia should be opened or closed, with the matter referred to higher authorities on Earth. As Father Ramon leaves, a Lithian that he has grown close to gives him a present: a jar containing a Lithian embryo which will grow to maturity by the time it reaches Earth.

The second half of the book follows events on Earth, where all is not well. As a reaction to the threat of atomic annhiliation, humanity has retreated to vast underground Shelters. Nationstates have collapsed as such, replaced by local Shelter authorities and a barely capable UN. Living in the tunnels has induced a kind of species-wide madness, with a third of the population near schizophrenic. Into this tinderpile is dumped the young Lithian, Egtverchi. A voracious reader, he masters every human form of rhetoric without any ethical center whatsover, and becomes a planetary TV personality popular with children and the insane masses. Egtverchi attends a wildly decadent party hosted by a corrupt aristocrat, and then proceeds to announce that he is a citizen of no country but his own mind, and that his followers should join him in passive resistance. This prompts the largest riots in the history of Earth, and Egtverchi escapes back to Lithia. Meanwhile, Ramon is defrocked for the Manichean heresy, Michaelis gets married to the biologist Liu Meid, and Cleaver's plan to turn Lithia into a hydrogen bomb factory is approved. In final chapter, Ramon exorcises the entire planet of Lithia through an experimental FTL telescope as Cleaver turns on the first components of his factory. The entire planet is engulfed in an explosion, but whether it was Ramon's faith or an error in Cleaver's equations is unclear.

On the plus side, this novel takes its ethical stances seriously, and does a great job at distinguishing them. In particular, faith is treated with a great deal of respect, with the Jesuit tradition of scientist-explorer-missionary carried out into space. Cleaver's militarism is coherent within its limits. In all cases, the ethics of belief are contrasted strongly against various forms of nihilism; the ultimate ends of quantum physics of 'holes inside nothing', and Egtverchi's de Sadian individualism and mass delusions. The status of alien souls is something that the Catholic Church has actually thought about, and it's up to the reader to decide if the Lithia are sinless, fallen, or soulless. The first half of the novel (originally published as a novella) is incredibly tight and interesting. Unfortunately, the second half doesn;t quite have the same focus or heft. Blish was well-read, and Finnegan's Wake is used as a repeated motif, but he may have taken the ambiguity too far.

An encounter with aliens is both a judgment on them, and a judgment on humanity. Egtverchi clearly judges humanity unworthy, and he may be right about the Shelter society depicted. But Earth endures, and it is Lithia that is wiped out in a blaze of divine wrath/thermonuclear fire, which seems somehow unfair. The second half of this book is a dissapointment, but the strong first half and opening of ethical and theological questions makes it a solid serious read.

Complexity provides a very interesting, very readable overview of several areas of science, looking at the underlying principles behind emergent behavior in computer networks, biology, ecology, economics, and neuroscience. The basic premise is that much of what human beings find important about the universe cannot be reduced down to simple laws, or built up from elementary explanations. Rather, chaotic dependence on initial conditions and the behavior of small elements 'seeing' only their immediate neighborhood can create wildly divergent and unpredictable macroscale effects, yet effects which exhibit a different kind of order.

This is pop science at it's best, with a solid text backed up by deep footnotes. Mitchell's area of expertise is genetic algorithms. Her graduate thesis was a genetic algorithm for discovering analogical rules under Douglas Hofstadter (which reminds me that I really need to reread GEB when I have the time), and they're the main subject area of the book, but lots of other topic, chaos, power laws, cellular automata, get explanations as well. Mitchell is optimistic and undogmatic about complexity. She acknowledges the deep divides between different definitions of terms, and a lack of really earthshattering applications, but hopes that complexity and information processing might prove a common language for 21st century science, in the way that calculus was a common language for 18th century science.

A Canticle for Liebowitz is the enduring masterpiece of the post-apocalyptic genre, a dark and atmospheric meditation on endurance, knowledge, vanity, and evil, that follows the monks of the Albertine Order of Saint Liebowitz through the centuries.

At some point in the 20th century, the Cold War goes hot, and the Great Princes of the day trigger nuclear war. The irradiated and mutated survivors of the apocalypse decide to finish the job, as mobs of 'Simpletons' kill the learned and literate for their complicity in the war. In these harsh times, I.E. Liebowitz, an electronics technician and Catholic convert, is permitted to hide away what scraps of knowledge can be maintained in a monastery in the Southwest US. The bookleggers, memorizers, and monks of Liebowitz maintain the records, copying without understanding until civilization can benefit from their precious Memorabilia again. Civilization eventually rebuilds, but mastery of technology does not bring mastery of wisdom, and the new rulers of the world trigger another war as a handful of monks escape in a starship to the colony on Centaurus.

These days nuclear war is kitsch, a rocking atomic 50s that never happened. Our apocalypses are slower and less personal: climate change, plague, economic collapse. At the time this novel was written, nuclear war was very much on the table. This book came out between the Missile Gap Presidential campaign of 1960 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we came as close to annihilation as we ever did. The new H-bombs and ICBMs had made civilization ending wars much more possible than they had been in the early Cold War, and the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction had not yet solidified. I can't imagine what it was like to think that you could be among the dead, to think of what would endure. Catholicism is an interesting choice, having survived the rise and fall of multiple empires before. It's not hard to believe that religions could endure where science and technology lose their way, even for an atheist like myself. The whole setting is great, the slow time and spiritual concerns of the monastery made real in a way only matched by The Name of the Rose, the future history drawing from the Middle Ages but not aping it directly.

A Canticle for Liebowitz simply oozes style and devotion to the subject. This is the most literary book in my Hugo read so far. Miller was a man struggling with demons, a tailgunner who participated in the destruction of the abbey at Monte Casino during WW2. Though he wrote short stories, and won a Hugo for one, this was the only novel he published. There's a recurring theme in A Canticle for Liebowitz of things that survive, exemplified by a wooden carving of the saint crafted in the first few chapters, which survives centuries later, it's creator in the monastery forgotten. The book itself feels a lot like that, an icon crafted with near infinite care.

For one of the previous books, I asked "when will Miles mess up?" A Civil Campaign is when he screws the pooch. Miles wants to marry Ekaterina, and goes about it in much the same way that he'd go about assembling a mercenary fleet: a lot of fancy footwork, a little deception, and careful winnowing of options to force the opponent to submit to your will without conflict (Miles follows Sun Tzu and Liddell Hart on strategy). Of course a relationship is not a battle, and after the Worst Dinner Party of All Time, Miles finds his life in ruins-with vomiting, and has to rebuild everything.

'Comedy of manners' is not really my genre, but A Civil Campaign seems like a worthy part of the canon of Austen and Bronte. The genre as whole rests on the absurdity of elaborate social mores; of which there are plenty on Barrayar, and the necessity of the two protagonists getting over themselves so they can fall in love; also true of Miles and Ekaterina. The thoughts on reputation and honor are quite nice, and Miles' apology letter is simply epic.

There are also some good sideplots: The best one was the interactions of the trans Lord Dono Vorrutyer and the arcana of primogeniture inheritance law. Mark Vorkosign pursues a relation with Kareen Koudelka while trying to start a new business founded on insect-produced food, with a lot of of comedy. There are weddings aplenty by the end.

But where this book drops is the lowness of the stakes. Even at the worst points of the courtship, I never doubted that they'd end up together. Bujold's characters are just too fundamentally decent and right for each other. The threat is slander that Miles had Ekaterina's husband killed, which lacks credibility since we all know (along with the important characters) the real story of what happened. Even the worst slander couldn't damage Miles' career or stick to Ekaterina and her son. The foes are just so petty and incompetent compared to the galactic spies of the rest of the series that Miles and co. barely slow down running them over. Well, maybe you can't have everything.

War is as good as combat reporting gets. This is the account of 15 months with Battle Company in the Korengal Valley between 2007 and 2008,a supremely tough 10x10 km patch of mountains, and the love and courage of a few hundred men. This book is the Dispatches of the Global War on Terror, a moving and lyrical account of the terror and excitement of combat that transcends little things like politics and morality and objectivity to get at some sort of Truth.

Part of this book is about strategy and tactics: Leaving an isolated outpost in the unimportant and distant Korengal to protect the important and populated Pech valley; human terrain and Taliban fighters and villagers caught in between, desperate firefights to survive long enough for the Apaches and A-10s to arrive, Prophet-the American intel unit listening to enemy radios. But mostly this book is about courage; about acting under fire so that the unit will survive, even if it means you might die. About brotherhood and love, and the fact that in 20 minutes in a firefight a man can live a lifetime. In a combat platoon, friendship and who you were before doesn't matter. All that matters is your dedicated to the unit and your ability to fight.

Junger's thesis, which is an important corrective in our post-modern age of detachment, is that defense of the group is a profoundly basic and moving action. It's like a powerful drug (although he writes directly against this metaphor towards the end of the book, I think it's an important one. Drugs obliterate reality and sensation, they can be used for good or abused.) Soldiers fight for each other, their entire universe closes down to the platoon, and all the advanced technology or clever counter-insurgency theory in the world, cannot replace this primal bond. Invoke it only with great seriousness.

For media types, it's also interesting to compare this book to Restrepo, a documentary filmed and directed by Junger and Tim Hetherington, covering the exact same events. It's been a while since I've seen Restrepo, but I remember it being far more bleak and nihilistic than the book. What's true? The beautiful words, or the ugly images? Can the same people interpret the same sources differently in different mediums?

Know Thine Enemy is really three books in one, and all of them mis-titled.

The 'present' of the book is the mid-90s, as Shirley (psuedonym of Reuel Marc Gerecht, former CIA case officer specializing in the Middle East and presently a moderately hawkish DC policy type) goes on a long dreamed of trip into Iran. I can only describe this as the worst idea ever, as it involves smuggling himself over the border in an excruciatingly small hidden compartment in a truck. Shirley will get to see the land-at night, illuminated by headlights, a few cement cities much like any other in West Asia, truckstop tearooms, small apartments, one trip to the bazaar, and a few ancient tombs and citadels. The penalty for being discovered by a wandering patrol of the Revolutionary Guard would be horrific, but Iran is far from an Iron Curtain police state, and Shirley makes it in and out safely--obviously, or else this would be a very different book.

The second part is a kind of anthropological study of the Iranian national character, and the progress of the Islamic Revolution. Shirley describes himself as someone who fell in love with Persia in college, his love comes through in his description of the language, the poetry, and the history of Iran. This, however, is not a textbook and the cultural study is somewhat haphazard and disorganized. Summing up an entire nation is an exercise in futile generalizations, although it is probably fair to say that though the Iranians may chant "Death to America" sincerely, it is not the only thing that they believe about America, and that Persian culture is shot through with contradictions, sudden reversals of Good and Evil, and conspiracy theories. The Iranians are, in Shirley's estimation, a people with martyrdom in their blood. They have been betrayed by their rulers for centuries: Ottoman and British colonial powers, the corruption and brutality of the Shah, the senseless bloodshed of the revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. They love Islam, they hate the Mullahs. They despise the Shah, and want him restored. They are more afraid of American intervention than anything else, and hope America will save them. Do not enter the Middle East expecting simple answers.

The third, best, and sadly briefest parts of the book are when Shirley talks about his career as a spy and gripes about the CIA. Some parts of it are as expected, bemoaning the rise of mediocre bureaucrats instead of culturally sensitive field officers. Some of it is quite insightful, like when Shirley dissects his own thought process on encountering an Iranian businessman in a consulate in Berlin, and goes about probing his opinions as a prelude to recruiting him as an agent.

This book is more than the sum of its parts, but the sum depends on how much you believe the Iran soul can be "known", and whether that knowledge is still relevant. I'd say no, and there's just too much filler about being in that damn coffin in the truck for me to recommend this book.