Speaker for the Dead hits a few milestones in Hugo history. It's the first sequel to win, and the first time an author won two years in a row. It's a good book, and the story that Card really wanted to tell, but it falls a little flat compared to Ender's Game.

3000 years after the events of the first book, Ender is still a young man thanks to frequent interstellar travel, adrift out of time with his sister Valentine as itinerant speaker for the dead. No one knows that Andrew Wiggin is the first Speaker, the author of the books Hegemon and Hive Queen, which form the basis of popular secular religion, or that they're the same as the semi-legendary and cursed xenocide Ender. Ender and Val lead ordinary lives as scholars, moving to a new planet every few months of life-time, and losing decades in the process. Ender is searching for a planet to incubate the Buggerqueen he carries, and remedy his distant crime.

Meanwhile, the colony planet of Lusitania, settled by descendants of a Brazilian-cultural planet, is home to the only other sentient species humanity has encountered, the Pequeninos. Small, porcine humanoids, the Pequeninos have stone age technology and an easy facility with language. Humanity, taking the opposite approach from the tragedy of the Bugger War, limits contact as much as possible. One Xenologer and one apprentice, no technology, minimize cultural contamination. When the elder xenologer (anthropologist to the aliens) is brutally slain by the Pequeninos, Ender is called to speak his death by a rebel in the staunchly Catholic colony. As expected, he arrives and uncovers terrible secrets, using his uncanny insight and stark approach to the truth to set things right.

Some parts of this book really work. Much of the drama centers around Novinha, a brilliant girl and then cold and distant woman. Orphan daughter of xenobiologists, Novinha calls for Ender at the start of the story, and then rejects him when he arrives, having created a self-made martyrdom of a large and incredibly unhappy family, which Ender falls in love with and sets right. The vividness of Novinha's family in it's overt abuse, secret poisons, and prison of "love" is one of those things which give the "let's psychoanalyze Card" crowd lots of material. The rising biological drama towards the end, with Ender uncovering the life-cycle of the Pequeninos, the role of the terrible descolada disease in the planetary ecology, and why the xenologers keep getting killed, is truly moving and wonderful.

But there's also a lot that doesn't work. The book takes a while to get moving, and the elder Ender is less appealing, less fully fleshed out in many ways, than the boy genius of Ender's Game. This book's journey towards understanding is a lot less gripping than the struggle for survival and a fragmentary ethical existence from the last book. There's a lot less depth and ambiguity once the mysteries are stripped away. The basic message of looking for interior reasons for why people do things (even when those people are pig-like aliens who have killed twice), offers less to think about than the shades of winning and gaming in the last book.

Finally, there's stuff that doesn't work at all: like Jane, a superhuman AI that has developed awareness in the ansible network that ties humanity together, and who only talks to Ender. She's a literal deus ex machina for much of the book. The humans on Lusitania never really came into focus as particularly Brazilian, particularly Catholic, and worst of all, particularly a tiny frontier community on a unique planet in human space, devastated by a terrible plague in the recent past. The human side of the setting just collapsed.

For all my criticism, I do quite like Speaker for the Dead. It's far from perfect, but still a worthy successor to Ender's Game.

Steampunk as a genre is best described by "p-words": privileged, problematic, preposterous. Much of it is about sticking brass gears on a top hat and having rollicking anachronistic adventurers that recapitulate and glorify the worst excesses of Victorian imperialism, when men had mustaches, women wore corsets, and the "lesser races" knew their place. It's fantasy, not science fiction, and mostly set dressing to replace magic with Babbage engines, knights with engineers, and give everybody an excuse for a hot water show. I don't like it much.

But I'm also interested in other visions of how the world could be, and The Sea is Ours asks authors from South East Asia to mash up their own culture and mythology with Steampunk set sressing. In this case it works, as a fantasy of much more successful resistance to colonialism, as a way to honor craftsmanship and natural spirits. I can't say that any of the stories stuck out as me, but this is a richly textured collection that scores above its genre, and is exactly what it says on the tin.

I heard that Queers Destroy Science Fiction was super controversial, really good, really transgressive. As usual, the rumor mill was wrong. Not that this is bad, and I don't actually read a lot of contemporary short scifi so my comparisons might be off, but I found this collection surprisingly... "bland" is the best word. Little domestic problems that were not particularly science-fictiony, or particularly GLTBQ. The only new story that really stuck with me was one of the flash fictions, "Bucket List", by Erica L. Satifka.

I think the most pressing argument for this collection as average is that by far the best stories, the ones with the most edge and attitude and good ideas and writing, were the oldest; Raven Kaldera's "CyberFruit Swamp" from 1996 and Geoff Ryman's "O Happy Day!"

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in exchange for an objective and honest review. I've received no other compensation.

Hashmi thinks innovation is hilarious broken in general, and that in particularly Silicon Valley start-up culture is focused on chasing it's own tail, on management fads, and on eking out minuscule margins rather than making big changes. This book is his attempt to change that culture. It's structured as a series of short thoughts, on pitches, on patterns, on breaking ahead of the curve, and written in a breezy and conversational tone, with links to TED talks rather than footnotes to academic tomes and policy white papers. As a guide to founding a start up, to having it be a good idea, to successfully pitching it to various venture capital rounds, this seems like useful advice.

However, the flip side of that it worrying, and I'm a science policy scholar, so I'm on the flip side. Say that you have a substantial chunk of money to invest in a company (some people, some ideas, some tech). Your choices are people who have some sort of data-backed statement that they're 3% better than the existing alternatives in a massive market, or a group of people who claim that they're passionate, that major disruption is coming just down the pipeline, and they're the people who are ready. Do you go for the staid, conservative, incremental group, or do you bet the farm? How, in the absence of prior evidence, do you distinguish between innovators and cranks? This is the hard question, and a readable applied version of Christensen's "innovator's dilemma" isn't quite it. Hashmi said he was deliberately avoiding anecdotes which may not be applicable to your circumstances, but I wish I had a little more data from the trenches to justify the rather general ideas about thinking bigger.

The Uplift War parallels Startide Rising with a slightly bigger story, this time starring uplifted chimps instead of dolphins, and focuses on a smaller group of aliens with the bird-like Gubru as the enemy, and a few friendly Tymbrimi diplomats. The plot is fairly similar to the previous book. In the wake of discovery of an ancient fleet, aliens hold human hostage in hopes of concessions, and humans fight back using cunning guerrilla tactics. Young people come into their own against a backdrop of war. Brin doesn't reveal any big secrets here, but some parts of the setting are fleshed out further.

The story takes place on Garth, a planet devastated when an older uplifted predatory race reverted and killed everything larger than a mouse. Terrans got the colony in the hopes that'd they'd repair the collapsing ecosystem. The outpost is overwhelmed by an aggressive galactic race who use a delayed-action gas to hold the humans hostage, and it's up to kids to fight the good fight. Robert Oneagle is the son of the colony administrator and the last free human, who becomes a Tarzan-like warrior. Athlaclena is the daughter of the Tymbrimi ambassador, and must navigate her own feelings of isolation while being the only 'neutral' adult active in the resistance. Fiben is a young chimpanzee who doesn't know when to give up on the resistance.

There are lots of moments that are really neat: Garth's trees exchange molecules at jungle cenotes, forming a continental molecular web that the resistance uses as a secure comms network; The chimps have developed their own rave-like Thunder Dance party culture; The whole mystery of how the Gubru can unerringly track down all human technology; the triune Gubru command structure; Rumors of surviving native Garthlings, and how it leads to the ultimate practical joke. After reading this book, I finally get why Galactic culture looks the way it does, how the elaborate rituals and rules protect the galaxy from holocaust, and why the Terrans are so threatening to the established order.

There are a lot of fun moments, cool bits of science and culture, and some decent characters, but this story still feels peripheral. All the parts are better developed, but the plot and character beats still feel a lot like Startide Rising. Less dolphin haiku, but also less gonzo. I can't quite put my finger on it, but some indefinable thing is missing, and that prevents this book from being truly great.

Written as a companion volume to a 1987 BBC miniseries, The Celts has the grand ambition of covering the entire sweep of Celtic history in an accessible format, and does a good job, with some compromises in terms of organization and systematic oversight.

Starting with the Hochdorf and La Tene archaeological finds, moving through Roman and Greek interactions with high Celtic culture, decline and Christianity, and the modern Celtic revivals. Art and stories are the center points, with lots of beautiful photographic plates of Celtic grave goods, along with translations of several Celtic myths. Unfortunately, a lot of what made the Celts tick as a culture is lost to time: their druid priestly class refused to write anything down to preserve their own power, which means that the accounts we have are Roman and Greek. From a culture which controlled territory from Austria to Ireland in the centuries BCE, the Celts were consistently forced backwards, by Roman invasion and cultural domination, by waves of Germanic migration, and then by Christian missionaries, who replaced some local heroes with saints, and then by Medieval and Early Modern monarchs who colonized Ireland, enclosed the Scottish highlands, crushed independent Brittany, etc.

For the Celts, history was very much written by the winners, and Delaney is aware that much of contemporary Celtic culture was made up wholesale by folklorists in the 19th century, that there are enough gaps in the oral tradition that reconstructing something from an old fisherman storyteller who died in 1956 may not be sufficient, that the modern (i.e. 1980s) Celtic language revival is about identity rather than history. But read with a critical eye, this book is a useful survey and introduction to the topic.

Cyteen is a densely textured psychological thriller set around the genius scientist-politician Ariane Emory, and the laboratory complex Reseune. Roughly 120 years old, Ari is a titan in her field of psychological engineering and human cloning, responsible for much of the developments that make the planet of Cyteen and the whole political system of Union work. She's also a dangerous sociopath, mixing science, politics, blackmail, and sex with her 17 year student Justin Warrick. When she is murdered in her lab, Justin's father Jordan takes the blame and accepts exile.

Ariane has a contingency in place for her death. She's to be cloned and raised in an environment as close to her own childhood, recreating her irreplaceable scientific and political talents with barely a break in continuity. Most of the book follows Ari (II) growing up and coming to grips with the looming figure of her predecessor as she learns to outmaneuver her enemies, forge new alliances within her fractured family, and repair what was done to Justin Warrick.

It's an interesting concept, and definitely one big enough to hang a series around. Can a personality be preserved through death? Can "greatness" be turned on like a light switch, with the right combination of genes and experiences. Unlike Downbelow Station, I fully bought into the details of the setting: The deadly ecology of Cyteen outside the safe space of human habitation; The immense psychological pressure of the labs and apartments; the politics of Union; and particularly the technology of the azi. Azi are humans raised on subliminal tape, the major product of Reseune, and probably why Union won the war. In their niche, azi are quick and clever, although they lack general adaptability. They're also perfect slaves (although some Alpha models can earn citizenship), and the abolition of azi is *the* major political conflict in Cyteen, and one that inspires fanatical violence.

Unfortunately, this book is also such a slog. Some of it is Cherryh falling in love with her imagined biological and psychological science. I think 90% of the sentences containing the phrases 'endocrine flux' and 'deep tape' could have been removed to the benefit of the book. Technical points of parliamentary procedure and computer security play similar important, and tedious roles. A lot of it is "close camera" on deeply unhappy people, like Justin Warrick, or the frankly monstrous Ari. There's little pleasure in watching a girl grow into the tyrant that the elder Ariane Emory began the book as, whatever her genius.

But I think I've hit on what I dislike about Cherryh as an author, and that is that she is relentlessly opposed to the traditional forms of science fiction storytelling. I'm not a strict Campbellian by any means, but there's a reason why the monomyth format is enduring. In a very general format: Here's a character you can identify with. Here's a world different from our own. He's rising danger, a test of skill and character, a decisive victory. Here is the return home. Cherryh doesn't do any of that in the "proper" order, because life isn't tidy, history isn't tidy, and things don't happen for a good reason.

But stories do, and if I want to read things without any kind of narrative structure, I've got a whole shelf of RPG sourcebooks.

Falling Free is an engineering adventure set in the same universe as Vorkosigan books, but separated from the main events by a couple centuries. Very professional engineer Leo Graf is sent to a space habitat to teach vacuum welding to the quaddies, a genetically modified human species with arms instead of legs and a host of subtler adaptations to zero-G. When advances in artificial gravity make the quaddies a net loss instead of a gain for GalacTech, the company decides to pull the plug and dispose of the "post-fetal biological waste samples". You know, genocide one thousand kids because the PR implications of revealing their existence would be messy. Graf, with an iron morality around safety and quality disagrees, and leads a quaddie revolt to hijack a starship and turn their habitat into a colony ship. There's some good stuff about quick and delicate work under trying circumstances, but this book is mostly forgettable, with thin characters and amateurish (for Bujold) writing.

It's interesting to compare Falling Free to Cyteen as paired biological thrillers centered around the slavery of near humans. While Bujold goes with contemporary liberal morality that slavery is bad, Cherryh finds a way to say that the azi are workable, might even be better than humans in some circumstances. Weird synchronicity.

Better Than Human is a slim philosophical volume that lays out Buchanan's positions in favor of human enhancement, and particularly against the arguments of Michael Sandel (next on my reading list). Buchanan takes the line that future biotechnological enhancements to humanity, such as genetic enhancement, expansion of emotional and cognitive capacities by drugs, and cybernetic implants, is not qualitatively different than the traditional ways that humans have enhanced themselves and their environment through technologies like literature and agriculture. This statement is grounding in an idea of evolution as blind and clumsy, and human beings as resilient. There are many areas where evolution has produced "good enough" adaptations, because genotypes are trapped on local peaks of fitness, and any harms that occur after reproduction are not sorted against. The rapid cultural evolution of humans (10,000 years of agriculture, 150 years of industrialization, and now post-industrialism) means that our genetic heritage may not yet be able to reach capabilities within reach of some humans, but out of reach of the species as a whole.

Buchanan takes particular ire at the bad arguments of bioconservatives (Kass, Fukuyama, Sandel), in particular for a weak understanding of the facts of evolution and biology, for assuming that an eternal "human nature" exactly matches early 21st century Republican positions on the family and bioethics, and for raising issues of concern that do not rise to the level of a persuasive argument. Buchanan acknowledges that no development is risk free, but that a conscious choice to engage with the complexities of enhancement technologies and their public risks and benefits is likelier to produce positive outcomes than the existing system, which allows access only through the creation of new diseases, and may be most aggressively pursued by countries with weak ethical governance regimes.

In full candor, I'm personally aligned with Buchanan's position. I agree with his counter to the bioconservatives, but I'm not sure that his version of evolution and the "good" of enhancing human capacities is any less of a "just-so" story than what he argues against.

Hyperion is as good as space opera gets, in a beautiful and lyrical story that teases at a much bigger issue. The planet Hyperion lies on the edge of the human Hegemony, an interstellar civilization bound together by teleportation gates and the guiding aegis of the independent AI TechnoCore. On Hyperion are the Time Tombs, mysterious temples guarded by an anti-entropic field, and a horrific killing machine called the Shrike. Seven pilgrims have been selected for one last pilgrimage, in the very teeth of an invasion by an opposing civilization of star-travelling barbarians, each of them seeking some blessing from the Shrike. As they travel from deep space to the Time Tombs, the pilgrims each tell their story of an encounter with the Shrike, and Simmons shifts to another genre, revealing more mysterious, and painting a picture of a deeply decadent civilization.

Father Lenar Hoyt is a Catholic priest who carries the heavy burden of the Cruciform, a cross-shaped parasite he picked in the immense labyrinths under Hyperion (as an aside, nine planets are labryinthine worlds, with massive tunnel complexes deep in the crust. No one knows who made the tunnels, or why). Fedmahn Kassad is a retired soldier, obsessed with a strange woman he met in his training simulations. Kassad once fought a battle on Hyperion, teaming up with the woman and the Shrike to defeat an Ouster landing force. The next time, he plans to kill them. Martin Silenus was born on Old Earth, before it was destroyed by an artificial Black Hole, and became a great poet. He lived in the artists' colony of Keats, writing an epic canto as the Shrike killed everyone else around him. Sol Weintraub's daughter was an archaeologist who has been afflicted by a strange disease from the Time Tombs and is aging backwards; in less than a week she'll be unborn. Jewish, he dreams of the God of Abraham demanding that he sacrifice his daughter at the Time Tombs. Het Masteen is a starship captain and Priest of Muir, and killed before he can tell his story. Brawne Lamia is the daughter of a senator and a private investigator. She's hired to investigate one Johnny Keats, a recreation of the poet (who wrote the original Hyperion cantos) made at immense cost by the AI technocore for their own mysterious purposes. And The Consul is the former governor of Hyperion, a grandchild of one of the greatest rebels in history, a participant in genocide, and now traitor to the Hegemony. Everybody carries and unburdens a terrible secret, building to a complete picture of an immanent Catastrophe, some unknown event which will pivot around these few people and the Time Tombs...

And that's where the book ends, with them singing a song from the Wizard of Oz and tramping towards their destiny. The sequel, Fall of Hyperion, has the proper conclusion, but Fall didn't win a Hugo, and I haven't read it recently. Hyperion is so good that it doesn't need a closure. Simmons' writing in this is perfect, a live wire that connects the biggest cosmological mysteries with the lives of more-or-less ordinary people. I know how it ends, how the pieces all fit together, but this story with it's deliberate gaps and constant revelations, is a true masterpiece.