There are two good reasons why I didn't get around to these books sooner: First, I didn't know where to start, and second, I confused them with the much less fun Seafort Saga.

Miles Vorkosigan is heir to an epic military-political tradition on the half-feudal half-interstellar planet Barrayar. His problem is that an assassination attempt on his mother left him with brittle bones in a culture that hates weakness and deformity. After failing out of Military Academy by breaking both his legs on the obstacle course, a very depressed Miles goes to visit his mother on libertine Beta Colony, and inadvertently walks his way into command of a broken down freighter, an interstellar arms deal, and a private war with a fleet of interstellar mercenaries.

This book has some of the usual milSF tropes: psuedo-Prussian/Tsarist empires, hotshot protagonists with lovable flaws, escalating challenges. Bujold, unlike a lot of people working in this field, is actually a competent novelist and makes it work. Miles earns his victories and his pain. Even if it sometimes seems like he has a direct line to God (or the author), Miles himself is very clear on the combination of deception, energy, and actual insight that gets him through boarding actions, fleet battles, and some rather desperate political maneuvering. Great fun, and I look forward to reading the rest of the series!

****

Re-read: I first read this book in August of 2014. I reread it because after reading The Vor Game in my Hugo read through, I had such a good time that I had to go back and read this book to. It's a fine introduction to the world and to Miles. Returning to this book, I think I saw with more clarity Miles' crushing "great man" syndrome. Still amazing, still five stars, but if there's anything that's different I didn't like the supporting cast as much. They seemed to exist as obstacles for Miles to conquer, and object lessons in failure, rather than people in their own right. Of course, this might just fit in with the profoundly self-centered young Miles. I remember being 19 too.

Two novellas* and a novel put Miles back on the map. The Mountains of Mourning sees Miles deal with justice and prejudice in a rurla backwater, while Weatherman has Ensign Vorkosigan assigned to a shitty arctic training camp staffed by drunkards and commanded by a sadist. After mutinying to save the lives of 20 men, a disgraced Miles is assigned to the intelligence section. Interstellar war is heating up in a crucial jumpgate hub, and all Miles has to do is keep his head down, follow orders, and distract attention from the real spies following him to get his career back on track. Of course, nothing like that happens, and Miles has to save the Dendarii Mercenaries, himself, and some Very Important People to avert an invasion from a foreign power and foil the plans of a completely insane mercenary captains. Great fun, great action, and a fantastic book.

*Out of fairness to my colleagues in Bookrace2014, I'm not counting the novellas separately.

*****

((Updated for the Hugo Read Through, from August 2014.))

I have to admit, I have doubts about the Vorkosigan books. I didn't grow up with them, and started the series in 2014. I guess the roots of my suspicion are in the statement "Nothing this much fun can be good for you." The Vorkosigan books are a hell of a lot of fun, and finding out that they might actually be good is like discovering that chocolate cures cancer, or that the person you made out with backstage is perfect for you and isn't crazy at all. I can only assume Bujold got this award the old-fashioned way: writing a bunch of good books, building up a fanbase, and then writing a truly great novel (publication-wise, The Vor game is #6. Story-wise, it's #5, slotted between a bunch of prequels and sequels)

The Vor Game is the most typical straight military SF of the series. Miles Vorkosigan is the scion of a noble family on the planet Barrayar, a brilliant and hyperactive military genius who's father is a legendary general, former regent, and current Prime Minister. Miles' problem is his physical deformity, poisoned in the womb during an attempted assassination, Miles has fragile bones and a twisted body that kept him out of the military, until a truly insane series of escapades saw him in command of a mercenary fleet at the age of 18 in The Warrior's Apprentice. Having earned a second chance, all Miles needs to do is keep his mouth shut, and let his abilities carry him to a brilliant career.

Of course it's never easy. His first assignment out of the Academy is as weather officer to Camp Frostbite, an arctic training station run by alcoholics and sadists. Miles is nearly killed when a prank goes awry, and then having gained some level of competence, throws everything on the line when the insane General Metzov orders a group of technicians to manually clean a leaking chemical weapons bunker rather than purifying it with fire. When they refuse, he charges them with mutiny and has them strip at gunpoint in sub-zero temperatures. Thinking quickly, Miles joins them, since refusing to obey an illegal, or at least very dangerous, order during peace-time isn;t mutiny, and Miles is important enough that his death can't be covered up.

Of course, it's a political disaster and the Vorkosigans are too honest to pull strings and get Miles the job he really wants on the latest battlecruiser. So after months of purgatory in ImpSec headquarters, Miles is assigned as the junior member of an intelligence mission to scout out the Hegen Hub, a star system with strategic jump points leading all over place, where various powers are militarizing. In the second act, the intelligence operation goes awry, as Miles' cover is blown by a sergeant from the mercenaries he commanded in The Warrior's Apprentice, he's accused of murdering a source by the local authorities, separated from his commander, and worst of all, runs into Cousin Greg, AKA Gregor Vorbarra Emperor of Barrayar, who's gotten very drunk, very depressed, skipped out on a diplomatic visit, and is now without money or contacts in a place where he might be captured by enemy agents.

When Gregor falls into the hands of Cavilo, the five foot, blond, and completely insane commander of another mercenary fleet, Miles needs to get his emperor back by any means necessary. Which involves first retaking command of his own mercenaries, who have fallen under the sway of their previous admiral in his absence, figuring out Cavilo's triple-backstab plot to let the age-old enemies of Barrayar seize the Hegen Hub and then escape by marrying Gregor and becoming Empress, retrieving Gregor in a tense negotiation, and then holding the line until reinforcements arrive.

It's an insane display of forward momentum and faking it until you make, inspired by T.E. Lawrence among other things. The characters are true joys to experience, especially Miles' continual striving and attempts to con his way out of trouble that he in no way is responsible for. Bujold also has a subtle skill as a writing and setting builder. She stays away from giant info dumps, but there's a diversity and ease to her ideas that I'm not sure I've seen in this series since Heinlein. The only flaw, and one which becomes more apparent later in the series, is that Miles wins too completely. Both Cavilo and Metzov are dead at the end of the story, when they would've made fine antagonists to grow along with Miles. The foes of Memory onwards barely seem to pose a threat to our heroes, which weakens the later books.

Street Without Joy is the definitively account of the first Indo-China War, as France attempted to hold on to it's East Asian colony. Bernard draws on first hand experience and documentary research in Paris to describe the slow defeat of France in the "vast empty spaces" of Vietnam's jungle and highlands to the light infantry of the Viet Minh.

Fall describes the complete failure of heavy mechanized units in guerrilla warfare. Tied to the scanty road network, the Groupes Mobile were juggernauts, but ones that could be avoided and lured into ambush by the Viet Minh. The epic destruction of G.M 100 at the same time as Dien Bien Phu is the climax of the book, an account of outnumbered professionals calmly laying down their lives after the war is lost. Heavy units imply substantial logistics needs, and the second battle was the battle of the forts, as France distributed its forces in penny packets along the de Lattre line and strategic roads. These forts were ineffective at preventing mass Viet Minh infiltration, served as supply depots for the enemy when overrun individually and looted, and cost on average 3 to 4 men per 100 km of road per day. Multiply it out, and it comes to thousands of casualties just to hold static positions without any pacification effort. The part of the war that Fall thinks worked were the command groups, alliances of French specialists and Montagnard guerrillas to attack Viet Minh supply lines, but this force was inherently limited and difficult to scale.

Fall's book has the flaws of its strengths. The wonderful portraits of the men and women who fought are a romanticized version of the French empire. (about 30% of the soldiers were French, with the rest split between Foreign Legion, Colonial units from Africa, and local levies) Communist tactics come down to 'screaming human wave attacks' a few too many times, without much insight into the actual weakness of light infantry forces. Bernard gets the problem of what he calls Revolutionary Warfare right, and the ways in which a motivated local force fighting for its own values will beat foreign occupiers, but doesn't extend the critique to the anti-communist project broadly speaking, or how Western democracies could defeat communism without becoming a mirror image of the enemy.

Ultimately, Fall was right, but there's little satisfaction in being a Cassandra, as the American military fought the same war as the French, but faster and louder.

Unfriendly Skies is a candid account of the aviation business in the late 80s by a senior pilot, with some of the rough edges smoothed over by a professional writer. When the anecdotes work, they really work, with hair-raising tales of threading the needle through tornadoes in the midwest, coming into small airports hot and steep, and the snap-second judgement that stand between life and death for everybody on the plane. The authors keep it quick and avoid getting bogged down in technical jargon.

Where it doesn't quite work is in the big picture case about deregulation as the worst thing that happened to airlines. Captain X decries the end of a system that made him, with tight-knit crews, pretty blondes, and homogenized airline cultures, but the argument that deregulation was literally killing everything doesn't quite stick, aside from change bad.

Be aware that there are some hilarious outdated Boomerism about how women and non-military pilots will never make it. And of course, the book itself is more than 25 years old at this point, so everything is done differently. But one ultimate test is in the pudding, and when Captain X discusses a future of technological accidents rather than pilot error (See Air France 447), and decreasing passenger comforts with the commoditization of air travel, he's spot on. The only thing he didn't predict is 9/11. If you can take the anecdotes with a grain of salt and handle the attitude, this is a fun book.

Robert Charles Wilson is probably the best contemporary genre writer I'm unfamiliar with. The only other book that I've read of his is The Chronoliths. I can see the tonal similarities, destiny, love, and a lot of loss. This book is smaller, much more personal, and hangs on the periphery of its Big Ideas.

In a world much like ours, the Affinities are a supercharged form of social networking, a set of neural tests where for a small fee, people with the right mindset can test into one of 22 cognitive groups (or none of the above). Adam Fisk is a young man at loose ends who finds himself in Tau, a group of liberal entrepreneurs that becomes a family in a way that his tightly wound upstate New York conservative biological family never did. For a time, it's perfect. A vast and expanding utopia of people who think just like you.

But there is trouble in the world of the Affinities. The neural tests are the proprietary data of a corporation which doesn't understand the new socialities, and threatens to destroy what it cannot control. The population at large is turning against the Affinities as a new Illuminati, and the major Affinities themselves cannot agree on a course of action, with hierarchical Het running covert operations against Tau. Adam becomes a diplomat, trying to line up allies for Tau and losing his lover to another major player in his Affinity. In the final act, the political becomes personal, as Adam plans to derail a Het-sponsored anti-Tau bill by blackmailing a Congressman (his brother) with evidence that he beats his wife (also Adam's high school sweet heart). This plan goes awry when Adam's stepbrother is kidnapped by Het as the India-Pakistan war goes hot and a massive cyberattack takes out the American power grid, and he has to improvise and lie to Tau to save the one member of his family that he actually likes.

In the end, it all comes to naught. The plan didn't need Adam. The Affinity doesn't need Adam, as he's drifted away, cognitively speaking, in the course of being a diplomat. He's alone in a world that's moved by. There's a really dark and sharp book in here about what it means to be among people who really *get* you, and about the rise of alternative forms of cooperation mediated by private technology, but that book is buried under generalities, and Adam's personal weaknesses.

Hanoi's War fills in key gaps in the history of the Vietnam War, drawing on recently opened North Vietnamese archives to explore the strategy and action of the Communist side. Too much work treats North Vietnam as essentially passive, or worse yet, inevitably victorious. The actual story is far more interesting, of internal divisions and purges, threading the diplomatic needle of the Sino-Soviet split, and tactical successes that were strategic defeats.

Nguyen follows Le Duan, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and his deputy (and only person to refuse a Nobel Peace Prize) Le Duc Tho, as the key actors during the war, as opposed to the more internationally famous Ho Chi Minh (elderly and in ill-health for much of the war) and Vo Nguyen Giap (side-lined in internal party disputes). Duan is a fascinating character, a guerrilla bureaucrat who started his career in the Mekong Delta, and moved North just prior to the Geneva Peace Accords in 1954. He secured power solely in his office through a Stalinesque series of purges against "reactionaries", and escalated the war in the South, trying to establish firm control over local guerrillas. As a strategist, Duan was a bust, but he had the virtue of endurance and flexibility in the face of adversity. He ordered the Tet Offensive (General Offensive-General Uprising), in the genuine belief that a mass guerrilla attack would topple the South Vietnamese government. The Tet Offensive was a disaster for the Communist side, and it was only later that the "greater victories" of destroying the local Viet Cong in favor of Northerns loyal to Duan, and the propaganda blow against the American home front became apparent. Far from monolithic communism, Laos and Cambodia were five-or-six way fights between local nationals, Vietnamese, and Chinese and Russian backed forced against right wing and neutralist factions that only barely preserved the vital lifeline of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Lam Son 719, the Cambodian incursion, was a tactical victory for PAVN forces but a strategic defeat in the context of super-power diplomacy. Contrary to unending commitment to the cause of a unified Vietnam, Duan and Tho ruled a war-weary population, which they controlled through massive preemptive arrests of anyone who looked like even potential opposition to their policies.

Textually, this book is a dense, almost year by year account from 1963 to 1972. It's best when it stays close to principles and when Nguyen draws from an unpublished memoir by Duan's second wife Nguyen Thuy Nga (speaking of which, Duan was bigamist. He had a family in the North when he married Nga in 1950. The two wives did not get along, and bigamy was illegal.) It becomes much less interesting post-1970, with the years-long drag of Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. There are few true upsets for mainstream historiography of the Vietnam War. Hopefully, as more high-level archives open up, we'll see further books from the Vietnamese perspective.

A Fire Upon the Deep is an action-packed space opera that also manages to be a fascinating exploration of radically different modes of thought, in a rich and surprising alien setting. Vinge's cosmology is based on an addition to the laws of physics, the Zones of Thought radiating out from the galactic: In the Unthinking Depths towards the galactic core, intelligent life is impossible. In the Slow Zone, physics works more or less like it does in real life (and in setting, Earth is buried somewhere in the Slow Zone.) In the Beyond, FTL, intuitive computers, and other sci-fi supertech work. And in the Transcend, vast and cool god-like intelligences live mayfly lives, lost in their own contemplation before leaving reality entirely, and occasionally sending artifacts and emissaries downwards. The action starts when an human expedition into the Transcend opens a 5 billion year-old archive, and instead of building a God, unleashes an ancient demon called the Blight. Two ships flee, and one is destroyed while the other jumps to an uncharted planet at the bottom of the Beyond, crewed by a family and 150 odd children in cold sleep. They have the bad luck to land in the territory of a local dictator, Lord Steel, and the parents are murdered in an ignorant attack on their ship. The children are separated and captured, 8-year old Jefri taken by Lord Steel and 14-year old Johanna rescued by travelers and taken to the more liberal realm of the Woodcarver. Meanwhile, up in the transcend, Ravna, a human librarian apprenticed to a major interstellar communications firms, puts together a rescue mission with the help of Pham Nuwen, a legendary hu,am hero reconstructed from a spaceship wreck by a Transcend Power, and two Skroderider traders; aliens descended from a sea anemone-like creature, and given mobility and short-term memory through the use of carts. They escape an attack by the Blight by the barest of margins, and it's a chase for the highest stakes.

The break-out stars of the books are the Tines, the alien species that Lord Steel and Wordcarver belong too, which captures Jefri and Johanna. The Tines are a dog-like group intelligence. A single Tine is a pathetic creature, but four or six of them together form a mind as intelligent as any human, using ultrasonic 'mindspeech' to create a coherent identity. Vinge explores the implications of Tine biology with both ease and depth, avoiding lengthy info-dumps while clearly laying out an alternative course of development. Because Tines think in the ultrasonic, pack-minds must stay fairly close together, and two packs can't mingle without losing all conscious control. The gestalt intelligence that is a Tine can be stable for centuries, adding new members as older bodies fade away, but inbreeding limits the successful lifespan. Much of the political conflict on the Tine's world is between Woodcarver's slow scientific experimentation, and the radical and unethical efforts Lord Steel and Flenserists to remake minds entirely, using torture and novel architectures to create Tines with singular capabilities never before seen on their world.

Johanna and Jefri are thrown into this mess and exploited to advance Tine technology, starting with gunpowder. Ironically, Johanna fights against Woodcarver, and the more or less benign Peregrine and Scriber, while Jefri is complete taken in by Lord Steel. Since Lord Steel has the starship, and the communication link to Ranva, he gets actual how-to guides for kickstarting a stagnant tech base, including breech loading howitzers and radios.

Meanwhile, in the Beyond, Ravna gets to see how dangerous the universe is close up. The Beyond culture expects things like a Class 2 Perversion to show up from the Transcend every thousand years or so and turn a few planets worth of sentients into tele-operated zombies, but the Blight is a threat of different level, and human polities are utterly destroyed by a combination of the Blight an opportunistic genocidal aliens. Pham Nuwen is an uncertain ally, either a true hero or an elaborate fraud constructed from a few strands of damaged DNA and memories faked up from adventure stories. The Skroderiders are revealed to be unwitting agents of the Blight, their billion-year old species containing backdoors that enable them to be mind-controlled.

One aspect of the book which I'm ambivalent on is the Net of a Millions Lies. While FTL communication is possible, the low bandwidth means it looks and works a lot like USENET circa 1993. The idiotic flamewars and misconceptions percolating through the Net Messages Ravna reads are entirely familiar even on the contemporary web. I'm not sure if it's great world-building (somethings never change), or edges on too-cute. Regardless, the great investigation of the minds of the Tines, and hints at the vast powers of the Transcend, along with a high-octane adventure plot, make for an ambitious book that succeeds at all of it's goals.

Bury Us Upside Down is a strong narrative look into the minds of some of the most exceptional fighter pilots of the Vietnam War, and the daring and loyalty that had them fly into some of the most dangerous air space in the world. Structured around the saga of MIA pilot Howard K. Williams, and his family and featuring cameos by Dick Rutan (yes, that Dick Rutan), this is a moving history.

Flying in two-seat F-100F SuperSabres armed with cannons and smoke rockets, the Misties were fast FACs, forward air controllers who spotted trucks and supply depots at the base of the Ho Chi Minh trail just north of the DMZ, and directed flights of Phantoms and Thuds onto these elusive, camouflaged targets. They also became experts in tactical reconnaissance, flak suppression, and the art of coordinating the rescue of downed pilots. These rescues, with their Sandies, Jollies, and desperate race against time to find and rescue the downed pilot before NVA troops got to him, are both moments of high tension and a perfect microcosm of Vietnam in a whole, as an entire day's missions would be scrubbed and dozen of lives risked to rescue a pilot shot down while attacking a target of negligible value. That might be the Misties as a whole: for all their courage and skill, assessments by RAND and the JASON group revealed that the Trail was barely interdicted at all. In a war of attrition, the NVA were making good their losses in trucks and flak faster than the Misties could take them out. In the end, nothing mattered, except for the stories and the other pilots.

The Planes Above is a solid setting supporting high paragon and epic level adventures in D&D4e, taking the Points of Letting setting assumption to cosmological scales. Heaven was broken in the Dawn War between the Gods and Primordials. Places of evil and forgotten relics are obvious targets for adventurers, tiny communities are threatened by raiders and abominations, and even Good Deities hold dark secrets.

The Astral Sea is much like you'd expect: an endless void haunted by Githyanki pirates and worse. Godly Domains serve as safe havens and larger sites for adventures. Inhabitants of the Astral come in three flavors: Exalted are dead worshipers of a god, enjoying a happy afterlife. Outsiders are dead mortals who's afterlife isn't working for mysterious reasons, leaving them stranded on border islands. And then there are mortal natives, travelers, and supernatural beings like Marut. Most of the book focuses on the setting, with some highlights being the Game of Mountains in Celestia, a tactical wargame that determines which of Moradin, Kord, or Bahamut gets to control the Domain that season, and the Prison Dominion of Carceri. There are about 40 pages of monsters, with CRs from 12 to 29, but a quick spotcheck suggests that they're built using pre-MM3 math, and so may require some conversion.

Not the most essential book, but full of cool bits of high fantasy weirdness to loot for other campaigns, and a solid expansion of the 4e Points of Light to epic-level extraplanar cosmology.

Connie Willis is one of those authors that Hugo voters love. I'm not among them. The main plot of the book concerns an ill-fated effort to do history via time travel at 21st century Oxford University. Kivrin, a driven undergraduate, has bamboozled the faculty into letting her be the first time traveler to visit the 14th century. She's fully prepared, with training in Middle English and Latin, a hopped-up immune system, a plausible alibi for a young woman travelling along, and an implanted translator and recorder to take field notes in her two week expedition. Unfortunately, the University isn't. She's going over break with a skeleton staff operating the time machine and an idiot as Acting Head of History who doesn't understand the first thing about time travel paradoxes. Which is bad, because instead of relatively safe 1320, she's been dumped in 1348, the year the Black Death came to England. When a sudden flu strikes modern Oxford, it's up to the only sane man in the asylum, Mr. Dunworthy, to figure out how to save Kivrin against a backdrop of chaos and quarentine.

The two stories are told in parallel; disease in the near future and disease in the distant past. Quarantine, sick bed, and human decency in the face of the end of the world are the common themes that bind the story together. There are two major problems with the book. The first is that it is repetitive and frankly boring. A solid half of the book is taken up with games of telephone tag (cellphones have been abandoned, an anachronism which has not aged well) or conversations where one side is delusional. Characters spend a lot of time waiting for people who never arrive. Jokes about the pettiness and shortsightedness of everybody around Dunworthy quickly wear out their welcome and yet hang around. The last fifty pages or so is quite gripping, but if I weren't reading this book for the project, I would have given up ages ago.

The second, and more important flaw, is that it is banal. The most obvious literary antecedent is Cumus's The Plague, which I read ages ago, but which I remember as a gripping existential tale about what people do under conditions of random danger, and about how the structures of order break down under pressure. The characters of Doomsday Book are so flat, defined mostly by a very British decency, that they never really do anything interesting. They keep going until they fall over from exhaustion, they rest, they get back up. The main characters of Kivrin and Dunworthy are basically competent pragmatists. The supporting cast of perky kids and various flavors of monomaniacs don't have enough emotional death to do anything except live (or mostly die) as the fates demand.

Maybe there's something in the novel about the history that we don't know people no one was alive to tell it, or an existential point like in Camus or some absurdism like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but that's generous. This novel is nowhere near interesting or bold enough to deserve its generosity. It's shameful, because there is an interesting novel about history becoming observational rather than interpretive, defined by access to time travel rather than documents, about being in the past without paradox, witnessing without being witnessed, and surviving horrific events, and at every turn Willis makes the most boring choice.