Dixon is an engaging and entertaining curmudgeon, who takes a psychological stab at explaining military incompetence. With several years as a bomb defusal specialist in the Royal Engineers before becoming a psychiatrist, Dixon is well suited to write such a study of generalship. Taking the British-centrism and psychoanalytic perspective as features rather than bugs, this is an interesting attempt to explain and improve the serious failures of military incompetence; starting from lost battles and heavy casualties up to the possibility of a nuclear war in error.

The first part of the book is a chronicle of British military incompetence from Crimea to Operation Market Garden, amply demonstrating several key operational qualities of military incompetence: wastage of life, clinging to tradition, rejection of contrary information, underestimation of the enemy, indecisiveness combined with obstinate persistence in a failing task, failure to exploit opportunities, failure to use reconnaissance and intelligence, predilection for frontal assaults, belief in brute force over deception, scapegoating, suppression of news from the front, and a belief in mystical forces.

The second part goes into the theory of why incompetence generals exhibit these traits. Dixon offers three nested psychological explanations. The first is cognitive dissonance; believing themselves to be great captains of a great army, incompetent officers deny any facts to the contrary, leading their forces into disaster. Second, high levels of cognitive dissonance are associated with the authoritarian personality (see Adorno 1950), along with a love of pomp and pointless order that Dixon classifies as 'military bull'. Third, these are of course the daily life traits of the anal-dystonic ego, and their inability to cope with a messy and chaotic world or the emotional damage of toilet training. I believe that psychoanalyzing from history is a methodological mistake (moreso than standard psychoanalysis), and Dixon uses this argument to gore his personal enemies rather than advance a case. However the cognitive dissonance and authoritarian personality parts seem spot on.

The implicit solutions, stop promoting authoritarian assholes, reduce tradition and increase flexibility in military culture, are the weakest parts of the book. The best way to fight and survive is a poorly understood subject, and Dixon's psychological weakness might have some survival value on a daily basis, even as they lead to systemic disaster. A fun book, but one with some strange oddities.

Science-fiction is a big genre, including everything from the trashiest 'rockets n' rayguns' schlock to serious sociological speculation. On that scale, The Fountains of Paradise falls clearly into the mega-engineering sub-genre, where rational yet humanistic men of science build immense engineering projects, and the author walks us through an exploration of their inner workings. In this case, the project is space elevator. The engineering is a little cursory, while harmonic and electrodynamic issues are brought up, it's assumed that a 40000 km unbreakable cable with maglev tracks is just going to work. On the human side, all characters are reasonable and wise and calm under pressure, which can be a little irritating, but they're more distinguishable than the alien explorers in Rendezvous at Rama. And somehow, the introductory chapter which skip between ancient Sri Lanka, the 22nd century engineering effort, and the 21st century visit of an intelligent alien probe to the solar system charmingly establish the novel. The Fountains at Paradise is earnestly old school, but sometimes that's just what you need.

****

UPDATED for Hugo Reread

The Fountains of Paradise is a relatively straightforward story of heroic engineering. In the 22nd century, Vannevar Morgan, world's greatest living engineering, wants to follow up his bridge across the Straits of Gibralter with a bridge to the stars, using a new carbon-based superfiber to construct a 40,000 km space elevator. Much of the engineering is surprisingly straightforward. There's some talk of the incredible tensile strength required, the super-conducting maglev track the cars will ride on, harmonic and electrodynamic structural complications, but mostly Morgan is very very smart, and things come together.

The biggest potential conflicts are over funding and siting. The best possible location for the elevator is perpetually owned by a Buddhist monastery, and the fantastical cost could bankrupt even an advanced 22nd century multiplanet economy. These problem are neatly avoided, when a fortuitous storm and an ancient prophecy cause the Buddhists to abandon their monastery without a fight, and Morgan outmaneuvers the petty minds who would unfund his tower for merely pragmatic reasons. Along with the main plot of building the story, Clarke adds the true mythology of Kalidasa, an ancient prince who built gardens of fabulous beauty, and the 21st century encounter with Starglider, an alien robot probe that passes through the Solar System, converses with Earth (disproving the existence of God in the process), and zooming onwards.

The actual drama, and climax of the book, occurs when a science team gets stranded in the upper ionosphere, 20,000 km from the midway station and rescue. The only way to get the team enough oxygen to survive till permanent rescue is to send a 'spider' cable car up far beyond it's design limit. Morgan, as chief designer, volunteers and saves the day, but dies of a concealed cardiac condition on the way down. The final scene is of an Earth being abandoned for a few centuries during an inter-glacial, as posthumanity uses a vastly expanded elevator to take refugee on Venus and Mercury. One of the starglider aliens asks why the elevator is named for Kalidasa, when that king lived thousands of years before it was constructed. Fin, and a nice bibliography about the actual theoretical development of the space elevator.

This book has all the strengths and weaknesses typical of Clarke, but is on the whole much better than Rendezvous with Rama. The setting is orderly to the point of obsession, with global peace and harmony, but the conflicts and ambition of Morgan and his opponents is real enough, if a little muted. The fictional island of Taprobane is based closely on Sri Lanka, which Clarke clearly loved (speaking of which, this book is dedicated to Leslie Ekanayake, Clarke's partner, who died a year prior to publication). The communicative Starglider is a much more relatable alien than either the Ramans or the Monolith from 2001, even if it can be a somewhat annoying author's voice on the subject of rationalism. The biggest weakness is the complete absence of female characters. Thematically, though the ending is about as subtle as a hammer blow, I like the meditation on what we'll be remembered for, and how Morgan never achieves the immortality of name that he sought, even after dying a hero on his tower.

This volume is the three Dunk and Egg novellas, together as one and beautifully illustrated. I'd read two of the stories before, but the fine pen drawings and general physical quality of this book make it a pleasure to own. As for the textual contents, Martin goes small, focusing on Westeros 100 years before the events of A Game of Thones as seen through the eyes of a hedge knight, a large lad raised up from the slums of King's Landing to really believe in honor, protecting the weak, and the brotherhood of men. In the first novella he picks up as his squire a Targaryen prince, and then go around having adventurers and mostly trying not to get killed.

Even though this is an age of peace, there's still plenty of misery. Plagues and famines rack the land, along with the aftermath of the Blackfyre rebellion, which killed thousands of knights and split the nobility into two uneasy camps. The first story is the best, with its focus on a single honorable tourney, and Dunk's survival in a trial by combat. The second focuses on a feud between an elderly knight and a young widow lady, and the way the ancient enmity and the smallest of insults can escalate to a sharp, pointless war. The final story brings it together with a scheme to restart the rebellion and bath Westeros in blood again.

The tighter focus, with a single POV and shorter length stories, constrains some of Martin's tendencies to wander away from the necessary climatic action, as anyone who's sat through Books 4 and 5 knows too well. However, with three stories together some other bad habits become evident; a tendency to lay on a few phrases very heavily, and a plot structure focused around trial by combat and Dunk's decency saving the day, that is almost too pat. This isn't GRRM on his worst day, but it isn't him on his best day either. Still, a fun read.

There comes a point in grad school where you realize that you're reading a Foucauldian ethnography of Soviet plumbing fixtures, and it's actually pretty good. Collier uses the distribution of heat as a lens to probe Soviet urbanism, the neoliberal reforms of the 90s, the way that the budgetary process reveals the substantive commitments of government, and the recalcitrance of things against reform.

The historical sections are some of the better parts of the book, as Collier reveals two different origins of normative commitments. In Soviet Russia in the 1920, visionary urban planners developed 'norms' as the telelogical goal by which centralized planning was organized. Industry and city came together, as the housing and services necessary to support a given major industry were calculable on the basis of the population (e.g. a tractor factory employing 5000 workers means housing for 5000 families means 3 elementary schools and 5 hospital beds means housing for teachers and doctors...) The result was a pattern of small cities based around a single heavy industry, acting as a khoziaistvo, the social and infrastructural support of the city, subsidized and directed by the local heavy industry. In the West, neoliberal economists following James Buchanan were working on the problem of government as an economic actor. Collier usefully elucidates the theory of federal redistribution of revenues based on equal regional burdens and benefits from government services that is practically axiomatic in American political thought.

Where this gets interesting, and messy, is in the clash of worldviews in 90s Russia. Neoliberal reformers demanded divesting local government services from unprofitable heavy industries; a division of political and economic spheres that had been linked in the socialist economy. The cash-poor and thoroughly Shock Therapied Russia government complied, but city-wide furnace systems remained a sticking point. Under the table transfers of gas, coal, and steam were the only way to keep entire cities from literally freezing to death, but the design of the system, from the furnaces that powered local industry and heated the city, to the way that it was impossible to link any given person or domicile to use of heat, ultimately foiled the neoliberal reformist vision.

Collier concludes with a argument on the critical stance; that both socialists and neoliberals have an idea of the political community, and the distribution of substantive goods within, and that academic work should not be based on bashing ideologies, but on revealing how those commitments and beliefs operate. The book doesn't quite come together as a project: I felt like there were gaps between the historical work, the ethnographic study of budgetary processes, and the assessment of the technology of centralized heating. As someone working on a similar project, Collier does a better job than I'm doing, but the chain of argument is not as smooth as it could be. And while this is pretty readable for high academic theory, it's still a slog through the Foucauldian taiga. Solid work, but not for everybody.

Modern fantasy as a genre has an uneasy relationship with creativity, in that it's about fantastic worlds of pure imagination and also more cliches than you can shake a glowing elfmade sword at. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is an acerbic alphabetical list of cliches, in the form of a tourist's guide to all the things that you might encounter on a QUEST through the KINGDOM.

It's pretty funny, sideshakingly so in parts (the entry for HORSE, for example), but the overall impression is a 30 second joke stretched out to 5 minutes. Part of the humor is how long it goes on, but this book was mostly a slog, which is an unforgivable sin in light reading.

Foundation's Edge is a return to Asimov's classic Foundation series, that fleshes out some elements of the setting, but also adds a bunch of unnecessary connections to his other work, and with staid plotting and characterization that reveal some of Asimov's flaws as an author.

It's impossible to avoid comparing this book to the earlier series. The earlier Foundation series mashed up the decline and fall of Rome with the idea that history could become a predictive science: that the laws that govern the behavior of human beings could be known and applied by an elite group to guide the galaxy out of a period of barbarianism and back to peace through the 1000 year Seldon Plan. The second part of the series, about the Mule and his ability to psychically control people, the destruction of the Seldon Plan, and its restoration, is much less well-regarded. Writing drama when the whole premise of your setting is that the action is pre-ordained is tricky, and Asimov got around that by using Foundation as a way to demonstrate different forms of power. Once he ran out (religious, economic, political), it got much less interesting.

The plot of this book centers on the warring of two conspiracies. The First Foundation believes that the Second Foundation still exists, and wanting democratic political independence for it's future, seeks to hunt it down and destroy it. The Second Foundation wants to defend itself and the Seldon Plan. Our eyes, most directly on this, are disgraced Councilman Trevize and doddering historian Pelorat, who have an advanced mission to search for Earth and threats to the First Foundation. Speaker Gendibal, one of the ruling 12 of the Second Foundation, is also on a mission because he believes that an unknown force threatens the Second Foundation. As is revealed over the course of 400 languid pages, that unknown force is the planet Gaia, a unique world that has developed psychic powers, and a collective mind that might be the next stage in human evolution. However, having taken the Three Laws of Robotics as a starting point for its ethics, it cannot force evolution on the galaxy. Trevize, with an intuitive gift for rightness, must decide whether the technological supremacy of the First Foundation will win out, whether the secret Second Foundation will continue the Seldon Plan, or whether Gaia will expand.

There are some good bits to this Foundation's Edge. The mind-interface computer is a stylish addition. The laws of hyperspace and the fact that there are no aliens are elucidated on. Pelorat's comparative mythology exercise in finding humanity's origin planet is surprising interesting, given that we know the answer.

There's also a lot of dumb. I'm not a fan of linking Foundation and the robot stories, and there's a lot of that here. The "war of conspiracies" aspect is interesting, but mostly mishandled. And the gender politics are positively retrograde. Gendibal's use of a Trantorian farmgirl as a servant and mental attack detector is medieval, even if the authorial intent was to show him as an arrogant ass. I remembered the last bit of the book being awkward, but I'd forgotten just bad Bliss, the young female representative of Gaia, was, and how dirty-old-man-wish-fulfillment it was when she fell in love with the middle-aged academic.

The themes of the next step in human evolution and our connection to a distant origin, are large and fitting ones for science fiction. Asimov has a lot to say, although his take is a psychic-powers addition to Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which had broken into popular consciousness a few years earlier. When the most interesting part of the book is all the ways that people semi-remember Earth, it might be time to pack it up.

Startide Rising is a solid modern pulp contribution to the Hugos. A few centuries into the future, humanity is part of a galaxy teeming with intelligent life. The catch is that all intelligent life is connected in a great chain of uplift, with older species advancing younger species to technological civilization and sapience. Humanity is alone as a wolfling, only allowed on the galactic stage by virtue of having uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins. Most species want humanity dead, and when the dolphin-crewed exploration ship Streaker finds a two-billion year old alien fleet, they turn into the target of a massive polygonal battle and hunt by the galactic powers.

But all of that takes place before the first page. The meat of the story concerns the Streaker, hiding on an abandoned water world and trying to make repairs and escape while battle rages above them. The majority dolphin crew are uneasy in their use of technology and logic, fracturing under the psychological strain of the siege. Worse, many of the crew are part of a secret project in improving uplifted dolphins, and even more volatile than the standard uplift. When the dolphin second-mate and psychologist conspire to mutiny, the Earthling's greatest enemy may be themselves. POV alternates between different members of the crew, and the alien factions in their sleek battlecruisers overhead.

I thought that the dolphin characters were well-realized as adjacent to humans, but not quite human, thinking and acting quite different from how we do. The mutineers were surprisingly sympathetic in their flaws: ambitious, cowardly, ultimately traitorous and murderous, but people who had a coherent strategy (surrender to the aliens and hope for the best, rather than run the gauntlet of enemy fire and pursuit). The idea of the galactic civilization based on uplift and servitude, and the way that humanity could threaten it, was quite appealing.

There's a lot to dislike about this book. People complain about Brin's writing, similar-voiced characters (not the lack of names. A day later I can only remember a few of the characters specifically), cartoonish antagonists, ridiculous setting, and dolphin poetry. They aren't wrong, but what they miss is that Startide Rising is FUN. Having read them in order, I can confidently state that the last decade of books were joyless slogs through dystopia, apocalypses, madness, and evil. Ringworld was the last Hugo that was optimistic, that took joy in space and action and exploration.

I'm willing to overlook a fair number of flaws in writing if the whole comes together, but there was one thing off about Startide which troubled me, and while I can't put my finger on it exactly, it's about smugness and sexism. The tone of the novel is a little too self-satisfied, a little too injokey. While there are plenty of female characters, they're all in supporting roles to the males. And the parts that fell the flattest were the "romances", and a rather generous ready of how acceptable sexual harassment is when stranded on a deadly alien planet. It's a lot better than almost all of the previous sexist scifi I've read in this series, but also somehow worse because Brin considers himself "forward-looking" (direct quote from his website), and would be externally described as a progressive Democrat with some unorthodox views. I'm not at all surprised that Jo Walton dumped her drink over his head at the 2003 Boskone. Fun book, but a little sticky.

Designing the New American University has an ambitious aim: reformulating the necessary role of the American research university, and describing how Arizona State University is succeeding in those reformulations. These are noble goals, but the book buries many of its points under chunky verbiage and thickets of quotes from academic thought leaders, and doesn't quite connect on its major points about what ASU is doing. This is a good book for seeing what Michael Crow has thought, but doesn't give much insight into what he is thinking next.

The first few chapters are literature review; describing the evolution of the university from the 10th century on, the origins and nature of the specific institutional configuration called the American Research University in the late 19th century, and the current crisis of faith about rising costs and decreasing utility. Crow and Dabars argue that the major sins of the American university are Havardization, a focus on academic prestige as measured by similarity to Harvard, which can be seen more regularly in an increasingly exclusive admissions process, and overweening filiopietism, a senseless worship of old traditions for their own sake. The result is rigid institutions that don't adapt to local needs and issues, that don't produce relevant knowledge, and that actually serve to block access to the middle class. It's a comprehensive lit review, but also a clunky piece of writing. The key point, that the research university created American prosperity from 1940-1970, may be unprovable. Personally, I'd give credit to being on the winning side of World War II and the early Cold War defense boom.

Against this, Crow offers a vision of access, innovation, entrepreneurship, and interdisciplinarity.
The New American University serves as tentpole for an entire region, providing expert knowledge, skilled workers, and pragmatic solutions in a massive value ad for society. Some of the things that happened during Crow's tenure are truly impressive: the dramatic rise in admissions, access for children of poor families and minorities groups, and increased student success without substantially compromising educational quality; A 250% increase in research funding over a 12 year period, with commensurate increases in outputs; Whole new forms of civic engagement; a proliferation of schools and programs

On the other hand, I was reading descriptions of people and organization I know, and saying "Wait, they do that?" The plan looks very different from the ground level, and I'm a person who has benefited. Where Crow see entrepreneurship, I see groups of scholars in defensive crouches, terrified that their piece of cheese will be moved yet again. I do agree that the traditional disciplinary department needs to be shaken up; I'm not convinced that ASU has modeled its replacement, or that this book elucidates what has happened.

**Disclosure: I am an ASU graduate student. I purchased this book with my own money, and received no compensation for this review. If I were more astute, it'd probably be gentler. But I'm in the truth business.

Neuromancer hit science fiction like a railgun shell, and deservedly so. This is one hell of a book: a dark cynical hotwired take on technology, crime, power, and ambition. Gibson is a top-tier prose stylist, and right from the start ("The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel...") he pulls you into a world of the Sprawl, of corporate games on an international levels, of crooks and spooks, of AI trying to evolve into something new.

The story follows Case, ex-keyboard cowboy and hacker, plummeting towards 'suicide-by-gangster' in Chiba City. His talent burned out by a vengeful employer he stole from, Case will move anything, make any deal, knowing that he's headed towards crossing a fatal line. He's given a second chance by Molly, a street samurai with upgraded reflexes and retractable blades under her fingers, working for Armitage, a blank-faced corporate cipher, and ultimately, Wintermute; an AI that has put together a team to hack itself, in violation of the basic laws that govern relationships between human beings and artificial intelligences: Never build one too smart.

Every part of this book hits home individually: the fast moving plot, the techno-noir stylings, the globe-trotting setting. But there are two things that lift Gibson far above the people who came after him. The first is that his philosophy is existentialist, not nihilist. Case, Molly, even Armitage, are profoundly damaged people trying to piece together lives on the margins of a society blowing itself apart on simulated reality and advanced technology, but they're *trying*. They're not the empty, gun-fetishistic, black-leather clad macho parodies of the genre that it's so easy to fall into--and which Gibson somehow presciently satires in one of Riveria's twisted hologram tableaux in the Villa Straylight. Second, Gibson has something interesting to say about power, in that it is literally dehumanizing. The entities that rule the world are strange post-human conglomerates: Corporate memory banks, rogue AI, clans of cryogenically preserved clones, CGI personality constructs. A lot of the later cyberpunk literature parroted this without understanding it, in the replacement of the nation-state with mega-corporations, or backstabbing Mr. Johnsons selling out the heroes, or heroic anarchist artists against soul-sucking plastic corporate goons. But for Gibson, it is always about what you lose, and what you keep with you as you approach that apex of power.

John Boyd was a genius, but he was not much of writer, preferring instead to spread his ideas through long, intensive briefings (supposedly he delivered his lectures on the OODA loop and modern strategy about 1500 times over the course of two decades.) Frans Osinga has performed an invaluable service rendering his ideas into a single coherent narrative that follows the intellectual origins of Boyd's theory through their development (including exact quotes of Boyd's key points) and their influence and relevance today.

Boyd recognized the task of strategy as organizational learning to preserve one's own freedom of action while denying that same freedom to an adversary. The battlefield is not just a time and place, it is also moral and intellectual, and the greatest victories come from scattering and paralyzing an enemy by maximizing his internal 'friction' rather than mass firepower or attrition. Osinga clearly demonstrates that there is for more to Boyd that "getting inside the bad guys' OODA loops."

The problem with this book (and the reason why it loses a star) lies with Boyd himself. For all his brilliance, he was on the obscure side. He was a post-modern strategist, a zen engineer, and he produced a mindset rather than maxims. Boydian perspectives can be used to justify nonsense as well as sound action. But for all their difficulty and amorphous form, Boyd remains the best guide to strategic thinking in the 21st century. Read this book, then despair.