Finally translated in 2009, Every Man Dies Alone is a stark novel about life in Nazi Germany, the compromises and complicity of the entire nation, and the dignity of even the most futile act of resistance.

The main story tracks Otto and Anna, an ordinary married couple, who lose their only son in the invasion of France, and decide to launch a quixotic campaign to show that Germany does not support Hitler by leaving anonymous postcards around Berlin. However, the narrative quickly abandons them to track the doings of small time crooks, informers, and petty Nazi party members, as they seek to steal from their elderly Jewish neighbors, sponge off lonely widows, beat their children, and otherwise demonstrate that they are the worst of humanity, even without directly participating in the genocide. The pettiness of these people is directly compared to the drunk parties and twisted interrogations of the Gestapo and the supreme People's Court, and the way that the Nazi regime forced the world to match it's low and debased imagination.

Against this is the second half of the book, Otto and Anna in prison, separated, tortured, driven through a long humiliation before and inevitable execution. Even though their crude resistance with the postcards accomplished precisely nothing, they arrive at a sense of peace and mercy against the great injustices committed against them. It's almost bathetic, an undeserved salvation, but somehow it works. We have to believe that there is something left, even when dignity, community, life itself is taken.

My edition has a great historic footnote on Fallada's tragic personal life, and the swerves of his professional life under the Nazis and then the Soviet occupation. This is not an easy book to read, but it might be a great one.

I loved this book back when I was a kid. Cyberpunkish scifi in 22nd century Zimbabwe, with heroic kids, mutant detectives, evil criminals. You can never really go back, so does this book hold up? Well, yes and no.

I didn't realize how much I'd appreciate the main character, Tendai, and his relationship with his younger siblings as he tries to protect them. The future African setting is also well-imagined; as a rising power and real nation that has reach an accord with the legacy of colonialism. Farmer worked in Zimbabwe for years, the the magical-religious elements with spirit possession and witchcraft really kick the story up a notch.

On the minus side, the plot of captivity-escape-captivity is a little repetitive and didactic; a rising series of challenges for Tendai to overcome. The titular mutant detectives are also kind of a dud, speaking with identical voices and rarely using their powers to good effect. In a post -Harry Potter and Hunger Games world, the standards for YA fiction have moved.

Gateway is psychological drama that conceals its major points behind layers of mystery, and reveals them only tenuously.

In the future, the teeming billions of humanity are sustained only by poorly understood alien artifacts. The ancient vanished heechee left tunnels on Venus, unbreakable glowing alloy plates, hot objects used as cutting rods and generators, and all else, Gateway: an asteroid orbiting 90 degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic, and stocked with hundreds of mysterious FTL spaceships. The ships are easy enough to use. Dial in five numbers, tune until the control panel glows pink, and hit the go button. But dialing them in safely is impossible. Nobody knows how the controls correspond to real locations, how long a voyage will take, or what the crew will find at the far end. About 60% of ships come back with deaders, or not at all, but 10% come back with the big score of priceless alien artifacts or scientific data. One of these is enough to set a prospector up for life. Fancy living, full medical care, hot and cold running partners of your preference, anything that makes the risk almost worth it.

The story follows two tracks. Robinette Broadhead as a prospector, making friends in the tough corridors of Gateway and trying to work up the courage to join an expedition. And Robinette back on Earth after his big score, undergoing computer aided psychotherapy. Memos from the Gateway Company and personal ads drop in randomly. Some of this works, and some of it doesn't. Robinette isn't much of a protagonist, and his analytic revelation is teased out far longer than it deserves. On the other hand, the world of Gateway is fascinating, with the mystery of the vanished heechee aliens never faltering, nor the desperate gambler's lives of the prospectors, trying to survive a cosmic dungeon-crawl.

This book build entirely towards the revelation of Robinette's third voyage, which I decline to spoil, but it's fun scifi. On a personal note, I was surprised by how much Gibson's short story "Hinterlands" draws from Gateway, but the themes of exploration and its price are big handle many takes.

The Left Hand of Darkness is along with The Man in the High Tower and Dune, one of the very few science fiction books that rises to true greatness. Ursula K. Le Guin imagines a meeting of two very different and alien cultures, as revealed in a masterfully and deliberately paced novel.

Genly Ai is the Envoy, a representative of the interplanetary Ekumen. Definitely not a government, and not quite a church, the Ekumen is a loose coordinating and idea sharing group using the instantaneous communication device of the ansible to link the 84 human planets separated by the tyranny of distance at light-speed (by the way, Terra is just one of many human worlds, and not the world of origin). Envoys are sent alone and unarmed, a single representative of greater humanity, with no power and no threats, simply an offer to join communication.

His mission is to Gethen, a harsh world locked in an ice age, and home to the strangest human type yet. Gethenians are perfect hermaphrodites. 26 days of the month they are sexless neuters, but for 4 days they enter an estrus called 'kemmer', and become functionally male or female at random. Anybody can potentially give birth. The sexual unity defines Gethenian culture as totally as sexual dimorphism defines ours, and Le Guin works through the implications beautifully in description of myth, social organization, and patterns of everyday life that make up culture.

The plot, as such, concerns Genly Ai's very lonely mission to the leading nations of Gethen: Karhide, ruled by a mad king; Orgoreyn, ruled by a bureaucratic commission with Stalinist tendencies towards internal exile. The life of an Envoy is fraught with peril. They have no true friends on an alien planet, may be disbelieved and killed, or used by political factions. Genly finds himself exiled to a forced labor camp, and then with the help of another exile and his one true friend, makes a heroic escape over 1000 miles of ice. The escape across the ice is one journey, made with the aid of technology as perfectly adapted as the stillsuits of Dune, if less ostentatious, but the true journey is learning to see the Gethenians as not imperfectly male or female, but truly as themselves.

My copy begins with a great introduction by Le Guin on prediction, description, truth, lies, and the story as metaphor, which is an essay worth reading in and of itself. As a prose stylist, a true fan (she submitted her first SF story at 11) and philosopher inspired by Taoist ideas, Le Guin is a clear cut above.

Warriors 1 is part of an interesting genre bending project by Martin and Gardner Dozois to create an anthology of original fiction on war with contributions from science fiction, fantasy, and history (I didn't spot any contemporary thrillers on the list, but maybe in part 2.) These are major genre writers here, with tentpole contributions from Joe Haldeman and George R.R. Martin, as well as names you should recognize.

80% of people will probably buy this book because it has another Dunk & Egg story in it. I am sad to say that Martin's contribution is middling at best. Another tourney, another look at Westeros from the bottom, only slightly leavened by the evil and powerful Hand of the King, and stirrings of rebellion. Haldeman's contribution is similarly a thematic retread, with soldiers linked into a 10 person platoon remotely operating nine foot tall active camo robots used as a metaphor to explore the bonds of battle and the wounds of their absence.

The best story, and I think the one that'll stick with me, is by longtime SF master Robert Silverberg, with the remnants of a large army guarding a barren frontier, deciding whether or not to carry on with a purposeless mission. It's stark, thoughtful, and eerie, and I think the story the best manages to rise above the collection.

One of the blurbs on the back from Frank Herbert describes this book as "readable", and it is just about that, in the sense that Keystone Light is "drinkable" or Taco Bell "edible." Treacly characters, flopsy world-building, and shoddy writing combine for a book that is just embarrassing. What do I mean?

In a post-apocalyptic Earth, ravaged by nuclear war and contact with aliens, Snake is a Healer who used advanced biotechnology in the form of altered snake venom to cure disease. The dreamsnake is a strange alien creature, with a mind-altering bite that brings painless death to those who cannot be cured. Crude and superstitious herders kill Snake's precious dreamsnake, and so she wanders around the wasteland helping out people and trying to find another dreamsnake. Snake is really just the best. She cares about everybody: Snake does what she can for an prospector with a broken back, teaches a nervous young man about love, saves a dying lord, rescues a child from a sexually abusive guardian, fulfills a dying wish, helps an addict, and breaks up a cult that is abusing the powers of the dreamsnake, before finding Tru Wuv. She rides a fancy racehorse when she's not riding the tiger-striped pony she genetically engineered. But Snake's not perfect: she just cares so much it makes her tired and lonely; but she'd never abuse her healing powers in the wasteland for personal benefit; and sometimes she hurts from arthritis brought on by her snake-venom-juiced immune system.

The wasteland is the nicest post-apocalypse I've seen, with honest tribes of nomads, peaceful and prosperous cities, and the right craftsman when you need one. The only hints of conflict or desperation come from Central City, the sole humans who trade with aliens who are divided into paranoid clans. Of course, Snake doesn't actually go into Central City, or interact with them beyond the gatekeeper, because conflict isn't interesting or something. By the way, accidental pregnancy (and related drama) is avoided through "biocontrol" techniques that are explained in detail during awkward sex scenes. The atomic apocalypse, the aliens, the hints of more advanced technologies and hidden schools of esoteric knowledge, seem to be cargo culted from the genre at large rather than included for any actual reason. The seemingly benevolent Healers, like Snake, limit their numbers to the scarce dreamsnakes, rather than using their "mundane" techniques like tumor-melting vipers and vaccine-producing rattlesnakes, to serve as many people as possible. Some humanitarians!

As for the writing, it is overall juvenile, and in places cringe-worthy. And even though the language is simple, it's unclear in critical descriptions of action and physicality. I found myself flipping back a page to check where people were relative to each other, and who had been shot with a crossbow, multiple times. A few nice descriptions of deserts can't save this. The idea of the dreamsnake is woefully underused. We're told Snake needs one to be a healer, but she gets on perfectly well saving lives without one for the entire novel. Compared to other Hugo stinkers, Fritz Lieber at least writes with energy, and the ponderous psuedo-intellectualism of "yeast vat accident Mark Clifton’s They’d Rather Be Right" (props to Scott Lynch) fit the scope of the topics. Dreamsnake can't even live up to it's meager ambitions.

On an interesting historical note, 4 of the 5 Hugo nominees this year were women, with Vonda McIntyre, Ann McCaffrey, C.J. Cherryh, and a withdrawn entry from James Tiptree Jr. Both McCaffrey and Cherryh submitted the third book in a trilogy, which may have hurt their chances in the voting. Neither are my favorite authors, but they have to be better than this book.

2312 is a very divisive book, and one that is perhaps a little bit too avant-garde for its the constraints of the genre. A kind of spiritual sequel to the Mars trilogy, 2312 is a solar-system hopping adventure of long-lived posthumans dealing with the politics of new technology. KSR's sublime joy at the wonders of the solar system is shines very very brightly: surfing the rings of Saturn, running with wolves across the Canadian tundra, looking up at the noon sun from the the surface of Mercury. Unfortunately, the things that most people look for in a book, like plot and characters, don't hold nearly as well.

A comparison with the Mars Trilogy is probably best. The Martians felt real, because the politics of terraforming were just like contemporary science politics, where values and intellectual achievement and personal feuds mix together in a toxic brew, but on a planetary scale. Everything flowed naturally from the attitudes of the First 100, and their conflicts with each other and with Earth. 2312 centers on diplomats and artists instead, and their attitudes and styles are not nearly as well-caught as the scientists of the Mars trilogy.

Let me try and describe: The protagonist, Swan, is a century old posthuman with an quantum AI in her brain (along with bird and cat neurons), Europan bacteria in her gut, and male and female genitalia. She's quit a career designing asteroid habitat ecosystems to follow the sunrise on Mercury. The death of her grandmother draws her into a conspiracy that does not trust the Quantum AIs vital to space travel and the Mondragon economy. She and Wahram (another posthuman with a slightly less extreme suit of augmentations) survive near-fatal experiences across the solar system, while tracing a unique space-based weapon in an age when total surveillance has rendered warfare obsolete, and trying to foment a healing revolution on sick and tired Earth.

Basically, the characters are spooks: diplomats, secret police, the elite self-appointed guardians of humanity. They are also calm, wise, quick to act, and never wrong. Historically speaking, these qualities are rarely (never?) found together. The very competence of the characters is both unrealistic and works against the idea that there are stakes in this novel. The deaths of thousands? Sure, but worse happens every week today. The end of human civilization. Unlikely.

And as mentioned, 2312 does weird, avant-garde stuff that IMO, does not pay off. The narrative is loose enough that it doesn't need random lists and incomplete passages from strange points of view.

Actually, thinking about it, this book would work much better without the grand plot. As a simple planetary travelogue, it's actually quite good, and human problems could help develop the posthuman protagonist.

Guns Up! is a red-blooded war memoir by a Marine machine gunner. Clark's war was ugly: arriving in-country just after the Tet offensive, he marched through minefields, terrible weather, and endless jungle and mountain patrols. The big M60 that he carried was a life-saver for the squad, but the stream of orange tracers guaranteed return fire, and machine gunners reportedly had a 7.5 second life expectancy in combat (I want to know which RAND analyst figured that out, and who told the grunts.) There's battles, ambushes, and all the stock characters of war. Do the Marines issue giant guys named Red, taciturn Indians, and Boston snobs at a rate of one per platoon? What makes Guns Up! exceptional is the friendship between Clark and his alphabetical buddy since bootcamp, Richard Chan, a brilliant and devout Chinese-American who serves as a kind of moral center in an amoral universe.

This isn't Dispatches or Where the Rivers Ran Backward, and Clark tells his story directly. One thing that stands out is that combat troops were used hard: Clark is either in the field or in the hospital. He lost 40 pounds in six months, from marching, stress, and bad food. His interactions with the country were entirely through gunsights. Friends die or are seriously injured and replaced with boots, and the squad keeps going on after objectives that don't change the course of the war. Authority, such as it is, are corporals and rumors over the radio net about what the rest of the battalion is up to.

This book is also robustly Christian, and Clark is very upfront that Jesus saved his life; page 58 is where his Bible stops a shard of shrapnel from hitting his heart. This leads him to censor some of the language, but not the stories. Sam the Blooper Man carves numbers into NVA dead and carries a dried ear on his helmet. ARVN break under a night assault and get gunned down by the Marines. The squad almost gang rapes a dying NVA nurse. Somehow, the macho Christianity works.

"As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war."

This quote, from Ricks' friend and colleague Lt. Col. Yingling, is at the heart of The Generals, which examines how army culture and personnel policies turned the winners of WW2 into the losers of Vietnam, and the tactically adept but strategically blind generals of the War on Terror. Ricks takes as his guidestone the policies and attitudes of General George Marshall, Chief of Staff during WW2. Marshall wanted optimistic, determined, energetic, resourceful team players, and he was ruthless in clearing out the failures to get them. Marshall and his top commanders, Eisenhower and Bradley in particular, sacked generals by the score. Relief was an ordinary part of being a general. By Vietnam, the situation had become completely reversed; Generals were almost never relieved for combat ineffectiveness, and the top brass were regarded as mendacious micro-managers. Post-Vietnam, the Army managed to rebuild its tactical leadership and integrity, but the generals promoted under the polices of General William DuPuy would lack strategic insight or the ability to work closely with their political counterparts.

The book itself consists of many biographical vignettes. Ricks knows how to write and has done his research: while I wasn't particularly surprised by the sections on WW2, Korea, and Vietnam, the post-Vietnam rebuilding was all new information for me. The sections on the War on Terror will be familiar to anybody who's read Ricks' Pulitzer-winning Fiasco.

However, this book is stuck at Lieutenant General (three stars-get it?), because of a little bad luck and some weak theory. The bad luck is General Petraeus, of whom Ricks is a major defender, who was brought down by scandal just after The Generals went to print. I can't find the article right now, but in the wake of the scandal I remember reading an insightful critique of Petraeus that argued that his true genius was managing the White House and the American public, and while an adept combat leader, his forte was more for PR than battle. It's bad luck that Ricks didn't have the time to consider this position, but the difference between combat effectiveness and the perception of combat effectiveness is at the heart of the problem of generalship that Ricks investigates. Major wars are infrequent generational affairs, how can good men be distinguished in peacetime?

The weak theory is a lack of something else to compare current Army policy to. Ricks makes a convincing case that because it is impossible to fire generals, it is impossible to improve their quality overall. However, the Navy relieves officers all the damn time. Are admirals better than generals? Hard to say, since the last fleet action was in WW2. Ultimately, the Army is a special organization: unlike business or the government, there's no way to bring in an experienced outsider to provide leadership. We should demand more from senior military leaders: more strategic insight, more integrity, more honest dialog with the White House and Congress. Unfortunately, in the absence of a 'super-general' like Marshall, and several decades of critical personnel policy, it seems unlikely that the corps of generals will be improved.

Haraway is a titan of feminist studies of science and technology but did you also know that she's a crazy dog lady? The Companion Species Manifesto is a love letter to Canis familiaris in general, and Cayenne Pepper, an Australian Shepherd, in particular.

This brief volume is a sequel-parody of her famous Cyborg Manifesto (may we all write something so wildly interpreted), but focusing on dogginess, the love of dogs, the intense awareness and trust of human/dog agility competition, domesticity, significant otherness, knotty prehensions and technobiopolitics. It is 100% Haraway, and totally weird and incomprehensible. Meditations on feminist approaches to science studies intertwine with descriptions of dog training methods, and the ongoing conflict between AKC 'purity' and working dog hybridity.

I can't say what I got out of this book. Honestly, I tend to take Haraway as performance art, an academic version of Lord Buckley. It's cool, well-researched, and very flashy, but almost impossible to follow.