Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is a languid and melancholy story about the end of the world, and what happens afterwards. At some point in the late 20th century, a rising crescendo of environmental crisis topples humanity. Disease, plagues, resource shortages, and political instability ravage society. The large and prosperous Sumner family is prepared to do whatever is necessary to survive, and David, a biologist with Harvard, collects a hospital’s worth of cloning equipment, just before the end arise. Whether it’s luck or foresight, the cloning tanks are necessary to ensure the Sumner’s survival, since every higher creature is rendered infertile by the environmental crisis. Cloned humans perpetuate the family, but drive the older generation away, since clones and born humans think in fundamentally different ways.

The second and much larger chunk of the book concerns the clones, and their struggle for survival. No stockpile is infinite, and the vital materials necessary to maintain the complex apparatus of the cloning tanks are running out. The problem is that the clones need each other to stay sane. Brother or sister groups of six to ten individuals must stay in constant contact. The clones are hopeless in the woods, unable to make the long journeys to ruined Washington DC and Philadelphia. Even worse, there seems to be some sort of flaw in the cloning system, which leads to complete organic degeneration after four generations. A few natural births serve to replenish the numbers of the clones, but each subsequent generation is less capable of independent and creative thought, more stuck in rote habits.

Against all this is our protagonist, Mark, renegade child of renegade clones. Mark is an artist, explorer, prankster, individualist, who learns woodcraft and builds canoes to explore the Shenandoah river the East Coast. Mark try to guide, protect, and stimulate the dying clone society, but some things are beyond saving. In the end, he breaks away with a handful of women and founds a new simple and honest agricultural community on the Gulf of Mexico. Civilization dies, but mankind survives.

On the plus side, Wilhelm has obvious talents as a prose stylist. But this a book that is hampered by its Big Ideas, rather than enhancing them. Things that are artificial are bound to die and fall. Only the natural grace of the woods survives. The brittle society of the clones isn’t worth saving, but Mark’s heroic individualist is granted rather than earned. The bucolic and melancholic are not my favorite themes, and that’s about all there is to Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. It does do this much better than Atwood's Oryx & Crake series, and stands as an interesting early example of environmental science fiction.

Warlords Inc. is a disappointing edited volume on an important and major trend that deserves more attention. As anybody who looks at the news these days knows, the New World Disorder is a growing force. Hybrids of criminal gangs, terrorist cells, and business entrepreneurs, groups like the Cali Cartel and ISIL rule increasingly large swaths of territory, and threaten the stability of national-states and the international order. A well researched and theorized book about how these hybrids operate, what living in their proximity is like, and how democracies can combat that, would be fantastic.

This is not that book. Instead we get mushy ideals about governance and violence, undergrad level of sourcing, and no clear narrative linking the hard edges of “warlord entrepreneurialism” to its business-suited counterparts in neoliberal capitalism and spook country.

I would like to give some credit to Tuesday Reitano’s chapter on corruption in Africa, where he has at least illuminated a continent that is too often stereotyped and ignored, and Paul Hilder’s section on citizen diplomacy, which while TEDtalk level balderdash is at least interesting. Otherwise, pass.

Crazy huge epic fantasy inspired by Chinese history. Dara is an archipelago about as big as France, traditionally divided into seven kingdoms but now united under a harsh emperor. When he dies, it's every ambitious man for himself in a massive war of clever tactics and political betrayal. The story follows the friendship and rivalry of Kuni Garu and Mata Zyndu, two men who rise from the ashes to represent respectively new and old ways of doing things.

Liu has an easy and familiar way of writing that puts you right inside the action. The setting nicely adapts and updates tired fantasy tropes, using airships and the arguments of gods to good effect. You'll want to see what Kuni Garu does next.

The Lost Fleet series continues in much the same fashion, with Geary developing his relationships with his fleet commanders and Rione, and finally getting in over his head in the Lakota system. If you liked the first two, you'll like this one.

A fascinating bit of imperial history, The Man Who Would Be King traces the true story of Josiah Harlan, a Quaker from Pennsylvania, who in the 1820s journeyed to British India to make his fortune as a military surgeon. Harlan decided he wanted more, and became a self-made player in the Great Game, using his natural talents and self-taught skills in medicine, diplomacy, and warfare, to serve the last great Oriental potentates (Shah Shujah al-Moolk, Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, Maharaja Ranjit Singh) and make his fortune.

Harlan is a fascinating character: a man of great energy and ambition who climbs to power remarkably quickly, in an environment where making a mistake in your choice of friends or words can lead to painful death. Macintyre also does a great job depicting the richness of the Afghan courts and their colorful life, as contrasted against the harsh lives of the peasants. In a period when Europe and the US are spinning up an industrial revolution and basics of the modern state, the Afghans as consumed in politics and feuds from an early time; an empire collapsed into warring microstates. Harlan does become King, for barely a few weeks, climbing the ladder of Oriental nobility to rule a small valley on a putative expedition against Uzbek slavers. In the end, Harlan returned to the US, wrote a poorly received book on the British, and died in relative obscurity, but he lived a life that was heroic.

There are parts that I wish were a little clearer, on the geography and politics of the era, but overall this is a fun and colorful examination of strange and forgotten era.

You know the drill. Still Lost Fleet, still good.

Fewer battles in Valiant, as Geary returns to a Lakota system that's taken more of a pounding than he thought. However, the fleet is a mess, with an unknown saboteur introducing deadly computer viruses into systems, and more hard fights against the Syndic enemy. The political situation is getting more and more fraught, but home is little more than a dim light in the distance.

Maybe it's all the classic scifi I've been reading, or maybe it's just me, but the 2016 Twelve Tomorrows feels a bit weaker than the last installment. The crazy idea is still there (Bruce Sterling and MIT team up on near-future SF), but the stories aren't up to the same caliber, and some of the invited amateurs fall flat entirely.

The themes this year are apps, children, violence, and the messy intersection of all of these things in the gamification of crime, education, commerce, whatever else you have. Charles Stross, Jo Lindsey Walton, and Ned Beauman deliver the standouts that'll stick with me. Still worth it, but overall, I had a better time with the last issue of Clarkesworld.

City of Gold is an atmospheric but dissipated espionage novel, following a trio of more-or-less unlikable characters around, but failing to make much of them. Cairo in 1942 is trembling before Rommel's next strike, but a city about to fall is an opportunity to make a big score. The Western Desert is littered with abandoned weapons, Jews and Arabs and buying up guns, and somewhere is Rommel's spy; a man with perfect access to British orders and intelligence. The Nazi general knows what the British are going to do before they know it, and as long as he has his source, he'll take Cairo.

Ross is a murderer and deserter, yet a decent man who is avoiding the firing squad by assuming the identity of a dead officer. Ordered to find Rommel's spy, Ross's needs to fake being a detective and figure out his next move. Ross's story was the one I thought most interesting, but it doesn't really go anywhere.

Peggy West is a British Jew, a nurse, and a longtime resident of Cairo caught up in the treacherous world of espionage, and trying to figure out where her loyalties really lie.

Wallingford is a deserter and black marketeer, creating a fictional commando unit to disguise his actions. Unfortunately, he lacks any sort of dash and charm. He's just an overgrown schoolboy, using his bully habits to get enough money, because getting money is what you do.

Along with some minor characters, they wander around Cairo drinking, lying, and otherwise deceiving themselves and each other. But in the end, all their effort is fruitless (you can google up the historical source of Rommel's information), and they are released to their just ends.

Robert Silverberg has the distinction of being nominated for the Best Novel Hugo nine times without winning once. This was his last shot at the silver spaceship, and out of the random chance of a used bookstore, a copy came into my possession.

Shadrach is a biotech and political thriller, centering around the personal doctor of Genghis II Mao IV, dictator of earth. The century-old supreme ruler survives only due to organ transplants, and seeks immortality through multiple routes. Meanwhile, the Earth is slowly dying: most of the people dead from the aftermath of the late 20th century Virus Wars, and the remaining 2 billion incubating the inevitably fatal 'organ rot' disease. Only Genghis II Mao IV and his cronies have an antidote, living a life of paranoid power and drug-induced debauchery while the rest of the world waits for a cure.

The main plot centers around Project Avatar, a plan to make Genghis II Mao IV effectively immortal by imprinting his brainwaves on a young body. When the original test subject commits suicide, Genghis II Mao IV's personal physician, Shadrach Mordechai (an African American with an MD from Harvard) becomes the proposed victim. Shadrach has to come to turns with being nothing more than a spare part in his master's biomachinery, and the callous evil of the whole regime he has worked for. In the end, he finds survival in a new balance of power.

In some ways this book is so 70s it hurts, with sex, drugs, paranoid religious fantasy, and all that. Silverberg has the gut of a pulp writer, and the basic core of the story always pokes through the stylish cruft. Maybe not the greatest book, but a fun one.