This is where Heinlein starting getting heavy and weird. The story of the book is pretty simple. Valentine Michael Smith is the last survivor of an expedition to Mars, raised by Martians and brought back to Earth. He learns the absurdity of being human, and then teaches humans how to be Martian in a freaky-deeky free love cult that apparently served as the basis for at least one real life religion.

This book shines in its depiction of Martian philosophy. I don’t think there’s ever been a depiction of an alien mind as coherent as the flashes we get from the Martians. They are patient, logical, relentless; practically a geological force. The essence of the Martian philosophy is the word “grok”, which entered mainstream language for a while, and literally means “to drink”, but implies “understand”, “merge with”, “love/hate” and hundreds of other concepts. Once a Martian (or a human trained in Martian thought) groks something, they have incredible powers: telekinesis, teleportation, telepathy, the ability to banish people and things from this universe. With Martian thinking comes a newfound ethical awareness, the understanding that “Thou art God”, and are responsible for the shape of the universe. Jealousy, greed, illness, all the traditional deadly and venal sins are banished in the light of Martian enlightenment.

Heinlein uses this Martian philosophy to take a shotgun to traditional pillars of morality. The church, the state, marriage and monogamy are all mocked and revealed as hollow shells before the absolutely moral innocence of the Man from Mars. Religion is the main target, with Michael Smith using the legal shield of religious freedom to shelter his illuminated cult. A secondary religious target are the Fosterites, a new church founded on the pleasure principle and a hefty dose of violence against heretics. To me, the Fosterites look most like the rock-and-roll Christianity of American megachurches, but there are shades of Mormonism and Scientology as well. The free love advocacy towards the end was apparently immensely scandalous at the time. And of course, the ritual cannibalism that Michael Smith’s church follows is distasteful in a lot of places more exotic than Kansas.

Of course, some stuff seems oddly retro, and not in a good way. For a free love cult, Smith’s people are resolutely straight; no homo here. Everything is grounded in the male-female duality, not person-to-person intimacy. Mad Men style sexual harassment is played straight up, as delightful and pleasant and of no great concern, rather than as the front-line of patriarchal oppression. Female characters were never Heinlein’s strong suit, and the fact that there are so many just gives the book more time to fall flat on their presentation. A Greek Chorus of literal angels appear once in a while to comment on events to no real purpose. There’s new technology, with 3D television and flying cars, but the story doesn’t feel particularly grounded in any particular extrapolation of events. It’s just the 1960s, but moreso.

Where this book really annoyed me was the character of Jubal Harshaw. I don’t mind a lecture, if it’s intelligent and says something new. Harshaw is a Heinlein self-insert character: octogenarian superstar author, rugged individualist, pessimist, universal expert, father to Michael Smith’s humanity, and waited on hand and foot by three beautiful secretaries. Harshaw is supposed to be common-sense wisdom, as opposed to the expert lunacy of the modern world and the alien mindset of the Martians, but he just strikes me as a cranky coot uplifted to Mary Sue status through the undeserving love of the author.

Stranger in a Strange Land has attracted a lot of flack, much of it undeservedly (the one star reviews I’ve seen make me wonder if those reviewers have ever read a truly awful book). I cannot help but love what it’s selling: the idea that if human beings might learn to think straight, we might transcend our ape pasts and become truly luminous beings. You don’t need to believe this, and I don’t think Heinlein did either, but it’s a wonderful idea perfectly presented.

I really don’t know how or what to say about The Man in the High Castle, except that it truly a wonderful, richly imagined book.

The year is 1962, and the Axis won World War II. The United States is divided between Nazi puppet states on the East Coast, and Japanese occupied territory on the West Coast, with a slim buffer in between in the Rocky Mountains. The main characters go about their lives under fascism, several of them guided by the I Ching, and linked together in strange and obscure ways.

The little drip of details, the divergence between our world and Dick’s, is simply incredible. Yes, of course the British committed terrible atrocities as they were dragged down by the Reich (see Operation Vegetarian for what Churchill might have ordered if the war had gone differently). Sure, Nazis are colonizing Mars after draining the Mediterranean Sea and exterminating Africa. The depictions of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”, and the idealistic cynicism and internecine nihilism of the resurgent Third Reich, feel terrifyingly authentic.

The novel plays with metatextuality, as one of the key threads is the fictional novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an alternative history within the alternative history where the Allies won the war. One of my favorite bits is a mediation on historicity by a purveyor of fake Americana (the Japanese are obsessed with American artifacts). One lighter was in FDR’s pocket when he was assassinated; the other is a worthless reproduction. Is there any difference between the two? Is there aura of history that surrounds the authentic artifact? How do we know the difference between the truth and a pack of lies?

Philip K Dick is the premier paranoid author of science fiction. Everything is connected, everything you know is a lie. He was incredibly prolific (121 short stories, 44 novels), but I think this is best work. He gives the story enough time to breath, and the voice of the I Ching adds some necessary philosophical weight.

Way Station is a novel of big ideas wrapped in a very small plot. The story is centered around the life of Enoch Wallace, a human keeper of a Galactic Waystation. The exterior of the way station is a 19th century house in rural Wisconsin, but the interior is locked away behind impenetrable walls and strange devices. Enoch himself is over 100 years old, aging only an hour a day on his regular walks to collect the mail. The rest of the time, he reads the newspapers and swaps stories with the aliens who stop-over in his home. Over the course of a few weeks in the early 1960s, events converge on the Way Station and it's humble keeper, with the fate of Earth and the Galaxy hanging in the balance.

The strength of this novel is in the descriptive writing; there's a grandeur and melancholic beauty to Simak. His style isn't to my taste, but others might find it more enjoyable. It reminds me a little of Bradbury, although without Bradbury's interest in liminal experiences. Enoch feels very real as a man without a world: a Civil War veteran alive in the 20th century, an Earthman serving the Galactic Community, but as a non-member species judged too violent and dangerous to be admitted to the interstellar brotherhood.

However, on almost every other basis, this novel is adequate at best. For all the great descriptions, there are passages of solipsistic musing. The main technology of the Way Station is a destructive teleporter, one that explicitly leaves behind a corpse in the basement. Of course, the theological problems are avoided since spirituality and souls have an objective basis in the setting, as real as electromagnetism or gravity. Much of the tension centers around the lost Talisman, an artifact that lets a sensitive person tap into the universal spiritual force and bind all the races together in goodwill. A subset of the problem is the looming threat of nuclear war on Earth, which Enoch has divined as certain using alien social science. And this is finally echoed again in the violent hatred of the Fishers family, Enoch's backwards neighbors.

There are big questions here: the nature of superior beings, where a man's loyalties lie, if peace is possible between radically difference species. Unfortunately, at almost every turn Simak picks the most treacly answer. This is a better book than They'd Rather Be Right, or The Big Time, because Simak knows how words fit together, but it's rather a letdown from the previous grand slams in the Hugo Awards.

The basic premise of Notes from a Small Island is the third most idiotic travelogue I've read: a solo walking and train tour across England in Autumn, when the holiday attractions are closed, the primary weather condition is wet, and since it's 1996, you don't even have the internet as a distraction (Above it are River of Doubt and one where an ex-CIA agent smuggles himself into Iran to look at some shrines). What happens is a long wander through the minor towns of England, a meditation on the character of the English, and a display of their small pleasures, infinite patience, and sheer density of heritage. There are some wonderful little passages, like the suggestion that Communism would've fared much better when done by the English, who naturally love pulling together, standing in lines, bland diets, and faceless bureaucracies. Or everything about W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland (google him). But Bryson aptly notes that all English towns are pretty much alike; same Marks & Spencers, same curry shops, same ugly cement shopping bunkers and officeplexes crouching over the decaying Victorian buildings. This book feels maybe 30% too long. The best parts compare the England of the late 70s that Bryson arrived in to the England of the mid 90s that he leaving, but there's too little human interest for someone interested in humans, too little organization for someone interested in places. Bryson loves England very very much, and that loves shines through, but the overall impression that I got was really "Her? Egg?"

The Wanderer is not not a good book by any means, but it's fun enough disaster fiction and cosmological speculation, if you can overlook some real groaners in the writing.

The story follows a cast of dozens as a garishly decorated planet appears from hyperspace near the orbit of the moon. While at first people stare in wonder at their new purple and gold neighbor, wonder turns to horror as the 80-fold increased gravity of the Wanderer shreds the moon and starts a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, super-tides, volcanoes, and immense storms all over the Earth. Infrastructure, both physical and social, collapses under the immense weight of the unnatural disaster, as the mostly littoral human species flees to any high ground. There are scenes of destruction to rival a Roland Emmerich movie, and one advantage of the large cast is that Leiber can kill some to show he's serious.

Unfortunately, those deaths don't come soon enough, and the basic problem with the book is that it's mostly people in different places reacting to the same events in the same way. The only truly novel situations are two humans rescued/kipnapped by the aliens of the Wanderer. The planet is an artificial battlestation, designed for speed and escape in hyperspace, and crewed by rebels against a stultifying immortal galactic government that seeks to remember as much as possible against the heat-death of the universe. That is a grand idea, but one that appears much too late in the story, and presented in a giant expository monologue by a sexy alien catlady. The A plot of the book follows a group of 'Saucer Students', who happened to be attending a lecture on UFOs when the Wanderer appeared, trying to get an alien Momentum Gun to Vandenberg AFB and the world's best physicist. Though they pass for main characters, they're easily the most boring part of the book. While everybody is cardboard, the other characters are more brightly painted.

So about those groaners: Pointless sex and sadism, racial stereotypes, the hilariously dated 'weed-brothers' wandering Manhattan high on the devil dope while the world ends. This book is also panders to SF fans like crazy: all the smart people drop Heinlein and E.E. 'Doc' Smith references when discussing alien phenomena. I've read worse books, but I've also read better.

This Immortal follows an episode in the long and danger-filled life of Konstantin Karaghiosis, among other names (but call him Conrad). Seat-filling commissioner of Arts, Monuments, and Archives; expert lover, deadly fighter, degenerate sybarite, retired terrorist, and possible demigod, Conrad is called away from his Greek island refuge to serve as a tour-guide for a very important Vegan journalist, a representative of the alien race that now owns most of Earth. This journalist, Cort Mystigo, is writing a report that will determine the fate of Earth, and it is up to Conrad to keep him safe from myriad dangers of Earth, ranging from radioactive monsters to political radicals who want Mystigo dead.

The novel does a great job showing and not telling the dismal future earth. The population has been reduced to a mere 4 million, clinging to islands and a few small resort towns that the organized and aesthetic Vegans use as bases for atrocity tourism, since their species never experienced a nuclear war. With a population this small, it seems plausible that Conrad would know everyone of importance on Earth. The monsters and mutant cannibal tribes are both real threats and psychological markers of the sin of nuclear war. The characters are quite good, if you like them on the hyper-competent side.

But somehow, this book just didn't match my tastes. It was a fine enough dark adventure romp, with humanity stumbling along the verge of extinction and all of earth reduced to a mausoleum. There were a couple of great moments, like dismantling the pyramids to show how they were constructed by playing the film in reverse, and an anthropologist from New Harvard who becomes the witchdoctor of a mutant cannibal tribe, but the moments never really added up to more.

On reading this book, a lot of the advice strikes me as common sense in communication and getting your thoughts in order. On the other hand, having read policy documents before, most of us are manifestly terrible writers. Smith's advice is general, on thinking about an issue in a way that you can honestly present an accurate and evidenced backed policy proposal to people who will need to support or enact it. It's somewhat dry and short on detail, but the general method checklist in chapter 2 covers everything that a successful policy document must have, while the rest of the book covers different forms of policy communication, from position papers to legislative histories to public testimony.

As a short book, it's a solid read and reference for anyone working in public policy.

Most Vietnam memoirs have the same structure based on the year long tour of duty: bootcamp, cherry, old salt, short, home. 364 days and a wakeup. What we forget is that going home after a year was a luxury only afforded to American troops. For the Vietnamese, far more of whom fought and died, the war ended when it ended. Their stories have mostly not been told.

Ben Cam Lai is the exception, and this is his memoir. He spoke a little English, and when he turned 18 in 1965 he volunteered to be a military translator because he'd be safer with an American unit than with the ARVN. Cam served for 6 years with the 101st Airborne, where he met the author Thomas Taylor (Taylor, by the way, is a fascinating figure in his own right. He was a Captain with the 502nd Infantry Regiment in 65 and 66, left the army and earned a Masters in Sociology at Berkeley in 68 and 69, and then went on to write books and run triathalons. His father is General Maxwell Taylor, who was Ambassador to Vietnam immediately prior to the introduction of American ground forces). Cam spent time in the field, dodging bullets on hot LZs, and then commanding the small army of intelligence translators back at base. When the Americans left, he was commissioned as an officer in ARVN and assigned to the Delta, where he was gravely wounded while commanding an infantry company. The surrender of South Vietnam brought a decade of horror and misery for Cam. He spent 5 years in Reeducation Camps, doing hard labor on a starvation diet as the Communist government exacted its revenge. Cam escaped, and spent 4 more years as an outlaw, undertaking 18 failed escapes before finally sailing a boat to Malaysia. Then it was another year or so in refugee camps, and with the help of a officer from the 101st, General Hank Emerson, ret, Cam and his son made it to America.

The human story is incredible. I cannot even begin to contemplate the strength of character it took to survive the war, reeducation camps, and years on the run. Communist Vietnam ran a program of extermination by starvation in its reeducation camps and New Economic Zone villages, which is not widely known only because of America's collective amnesia over the war, and the historical accident of being overshadowed by the Great Leap Forward and Khmer Rogue. Merely starving a few hundred thousand people on the losing side of a civil war and turning millions into refugees kinda gets lost in the clutter of people being horrific to each other.

I do have some quibbles with this book from a literary standpoint. Taylor injects his own opinions too much, rather than providing historical context. As might be expected from a memoir covering two decades and emotionally raw experiences, the thread of the story is sometimes dropped. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good book. I just feel that there's a great book in the vein of A Bright Shining Lie in the material, which doesn't quite make it through.

There was one moment in the Vietnam War FUBAR-fractal that stood out. As an officer in the Delta, Cam's unit captured Viet Cong prisoners on multiple occasions. His commander back at headquarters would order Cam to interrogate the prisoners for tactical intel and then 'convert' them--illegal executions in the field. Cam did so, since disobeying orders like that was a good way to have your commander assassinate you. Much later, he ran into his former commander in a reeducation camp and ask why he'd been ordered to execute the prisoners. The commander replied that he'd been selling his mens' weapons on the black market to these very same Viet Cong, and he was afraid if they were sent to a prison they'd inform on him. Extrajudicial killings to cover up a criminal conspiracy to sell weapons to the enemy! Welcome to ARVN in 1973.

"Some people had to bleed so other people could drink. Simple as that."

The Water Knife continues Bacigalupi's ecological collapse stories, this time in an American Southwest running chronically short on water. California, Nevada, and Arizona are at each others throats for what remains of the Colorado River. Texas is already gone, 'Merry Perry' refugees trying to filter north and west while they pray for rain to bring their lives back. The Feds don't care, as long as the violence stays below a plausible level of deniability, but that level of deniability is pretty high. Legal action can deny a whole city water, well over a hundred people are murdered in an average week in Phoenix, and the book opens with the Nevada National Guard carrying out a helicopter assault on an Arizona pumping station (cue ride of the Valkeries).

The plot follows the interlocking stories of three people caught up a fatal game over some very very valuable water rights. Angel is the top water knife for Nevada's Catherine Case; a cold-blooded Mexican ex-gangster willing to cut anybody out so Las Vegas can keep drinking. Luck Monroe is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist riding #PhoenixDowntheTubes, knowing that Phoenix will kill her but unable to let go of the story. Maria is a teenage Texan refugee just trying to survive.

The setting is top-notch. The rich live in Chinese arcologies with perfect recycling and guarded and sealed entrances; the poor cluster around Red Cross wells in decaying suburbs. Apocalyptic dust storms roll across the sky, burying solar farms in drifts of Inland Empire topsoil. Bacigalupi nails the carnival-of-death atmosphere of a longterm refugee camp, the idea that the apocalypse might happen so slowly that we won't notice, until it all happens to fast to stop. There's a tension between Old Eyes and New Eyes, between seeing the world as it used to be (the United States of America, green lawns, law and order) and how it has become (drone strikes in cities, dust storms, plata o plomo for whole cities.)

This is some of the best, and most compelling near future ecological fiction being written. My main problem is that the character beats track too closely Bacigalupi's own The Windup Girl: Here's the corporate hatchet man with his last scruple of humanity; here's the idealist who should run but can't; here's the innocent whore; this is when they fall in love despite themselves; this is when Murphy's Law proves supreme and social tension breaks; and fin. And unlike his last novel, in this one Bacigalupi goes with the Old Eyes. Who cares which side of a line in the desert you're from, or what Arizona promised some Indians 150 years ago. This is the now, and what matters is where your next sip of water is coming from, and who has to get cut so you can get it.

The sad coda to Arthur Conan Doyle’s great career was his belief in spiritualism. The man responsible for the famous line “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” spent his final years clinging to every impossibility that he found. This book is his account of Cottingley Fairies incident, including his article in The Strand Magazine, and the work of Doyle and his partner Edward Gardner in investigating the claims.

As a primary source, it’s an interesting look inside the mind of man desperately trying to prove the truth of something ignored by science. It’s rather interesting to see the focus on various forms of darkroom trickery, and not the obvious explanation that the fairies are painted cardstock cleverly posed. There are some interesting glimpses of English theosophy, but mostly the impression that they’re willing to believe in anything other than mundane reality; etheric matter, phasic vibrations, auras, and of course tiny dancing woodland elves in rich taxonomy. The saddest chapter is one where Doyle sends another friend, a “Sergeant Tank” with the gift of clairvoyance to Cottingley, and he reports tons of fairies in great detail without a single photograph.

This is an important book, for say an academic studying cryptozoology, or cultural research on belief in the supernatural, but there’s little pleasure and less information in reading it.