Green Mars is still a good book, but it suffers a little but from a sophmore slump, as the conflicts and challenges are nowhere near as interesting as those in Red Mars. It doesn't help that many of the most interesting characters die during the last book. A bigger problem is that KSR seems too be losing touch with the scope and scale of what he's attempting. The best way that I can describe it is that in the book, people are fleeing an overcrowded Earth to move to Mars to live in tiny apartments and rovers where they teleoperate giant ice mining robots to create a world circling sea. The setting can't decide if it's pre-apocalyptic, post-scarcity, totally pulpy, or any other description. Maybe this is a strength, but in a very hard scifi book, I find this floppiness annoying.

(first read December 11, 2012, updated for Hugo reread below)

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Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is a masterpiece in science fiction, a dreamy, imaginative, yet rigorously technical account of building a new ecology and new society on Mars. The First Hundred are a compelling cast of geniuses and contradictions, world-class experts stable enough to pass a barrage of tests to go to Mars, yet monomaniacal enough to cast aside all their ties to Earth. Red Mars, the story of landing, division in the new colony, the growth of Mars into a world, and then the spasm of violence that is the abortive revolt of 2061, is one of the best books ever written: lyrical in its depictions of the Martian landscape, smart in its politics and science, and using its multiple narrators to best effect in showing the fragmentation of the unique men and women who first landed on Mars.

Green Mars continues the story, focusing on the native Martians and their nascent political community, but with a heavier touch and less interesting characters than the first book. The story opens with Nirgal, a third generation Martian and member of the underground society, growing up in a small town named Zygote under the South Polar Ice Cap, with the surviving First Hundred under the direct car of the enigmatic Hiroki, the farm ecologist who disappeared in the earliest days of the settlement. It's a profoundly strange upbringing, the smallest of small towns with a dozen or so other kids and the legends of the first days. It's like a town with a one-room school house where the teachers are all Nobel prize winning scientists, the Founding Fathers of your nascent nation, and a literal priestess-goddess. Nirgal grows up, wanders around Mars with the legendary traveler Coyote (who stowed away on the initial journey), and then goes off to coordinate all the diverse groups of the underground and demimonde community in political awareness of the their status as Martians.

The story then follows Sax Russell, another of the First Hundred, as he emerges from hiding to take back up the cause of terraforming. Sax wanders through alpine meadows and glaciers on Mars, forming a liaison with the only one of the First Hundred to stay loyal to Earth, and then getting captured and rescued by his friends, suffering a stroke in the process. The thread then switches between Nadia, Maya, and Art, respectively two of the First Hundred, Russian construction engineer and diplomat, and a spy sent from the profoundly strange super-corporation Praxis, which is trying to form an alliance with Mars as a test for new ecologically sustainable economics needed on Earth. Together, all the characters create a kind of constitutional convention at a settlement, where the diverse groups (space communists, Sufi mystics, Polynesian matriarchies, anarchist geologists) agree to recognize human rights and the diversity of communities in a generalized document. The biggest split is between Reds, who prefer to keep Mars as it is, and Greens, who want to follow a terraforming program leading to humans walking under an open sky. Years pass, tensions mount, and then the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf on Earth, Mars declares independence, use non-violent means to kick the last few cops off planet, and then evacuate a city threatened by flooding in an orderly and triumph walk with nothing but simple carbon dioxide filter masks.

This is not a fast book, or an action packed book, or one with strong characters, but then that's not what KSR is about as an author. The thing is that even on a reread, this feels like a 50 page political pamphlet wrapped in 500 pages about alpine meadows, scientific conferences, and left wing rallies. I really like Robinson, he's a gentleman and a scholar, and I even agree with his politics/economics. The world would be a lot better if more people saw it like he did. But this book is about as didactic as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and way more mellow. The little communities on Mars, scholar-farmers living in cliffside apartments and tented valleys as their gigantic robots go through the centuries long work of making seas and skies and fields, are just so... dull.

The first book really shined in the animosities and visions of three characters: Arkady Bogdanov and his utopian quest to break off entirely from an Earth-bound past, John Boone and his innate charisma and love of newness of Mars, and Frank Chambers and his aggressive pragmatism and anger at anyone who stood before him. All these characters are dead at the start of Green Mars, and and viewpoints that replace them are cloudier, smaller, more hectoring in their insistence that we the reader, as early 21st century humans, are at fault for not living in the world KSR imagines.

Ghost Fleet is a kind of modern update to Red Storm Rising, where a couple of strategic types write up their vision of a future war. In this case, it's China and the US in the Pacific, with cyberwar, spacewar, and drones against good old fashioned American military professionalism. Unfortunately, it fails to live up to its vision, and the workman-like writing isn't enough to compensate.

Let's talk about the tech first, since that's what we're here for. This book is basically one giant sloppy blowjob for the Zumwalt-class destroyer and the naval railgun. I'd estimate a solid third of the book is just talking about the difficulties in getting the railgun operational, and then marveling when it blows up every military target in Hawaii with hypersonic rounds. Space and cyber get a lot of detail as well, as the first real crippling blow is a Chinese space station using a laser cannon to take out American surveillance and communications satellites. Cyber attacks further jam networks in those first critical hours, and hardware vulnerabilities built into chips turn the F-35 into a beacon for radar guided missiles. The Littoral Combat Ship sucks in combat, and the Chinese develop a hard counter for American strategic power with a ballistic missile that homes in on Cherenkov radiation from submarine and aircraft carrier nuclear reactors. Soldiers are hopped to the gills on stim pills and some have cybernetic implants.

But there's also a lot to dislike in the depictions of the tech in this book. The hacking is just warmed over Gibsonian cyberspace. True, real hacking is dull, but more could've been done with deception in cyberspace, and the difference in effectiveness between having a network and up and not having one. Same with the drones, which have some nice terrorizing moments with Chinese quadcopter swarms, but don't do anything particularly interesting. In fact, for a book which is supposed to showcase a generational shift in war, it really ducks away from issues in autonomy, swarming, supply chains, and technological-economic warfare, aside from the hacked Chinese supplied microchips. The Hawaiian insurgency, and the whole "Red Dawn++ scenario" of how heavily armed and networked Americans might coordinate against invaders is just wasted. The authors want to give the sense that the book is accurate by throwing up model numbers for missiles and planes, but there's little sense of how it fits together. An ironic failure for a book who's strongest selling point is "a vision of future war."

On literary merits, this book just barely hits serviceable. A constant problem in the short choppy chapters are characters reacting with surprise to things we already know as readers. The first chunk of the book is supposed to be "business as normal" to amplify the shock of the Chinese sneak attack, but the very first scene has Russian astronauts murdering the sole American on the ISS for no reason (Was he going to call down fleet movements by eye from the observation window?), robbing the book of essential tension. The human heart of the story, the development of Jamie Simmons as Captain of the USS Zumwalt while dealing with his daddy issues with his father Senior Chief Mike Simmons, was just filler. The only really unique character is the serial killer taking out Chinese officers in Hawaii, and the Russian detective stalking her, who seem like they're lifted from a cheesier universe, but are at least a different point-of-view from the all the military types. The pacing is both staccato and too slow, major sins for a technothriller.

There are a few moments that made me smile as the book embraced the ridiculousness of the premise: The Hawaiian resistance calling itself the North Shore Mujaheddin as an ironic homage to the foe of Afghanistan, Yemen, and Kenya; an eccentric Australian-British billionaire demanding a letter of marque for space piracy; The F-35B actually using it's VTOL capabilities in combat. But this book isn't nearly as good as the press suggests.

Gladstone writes vividly imagined, high magic weird fantasy. Think China Mieville in a pinstripe suit instead of a Che Guevara t-shirt. In a world where magic works like the legal system, a god has been murdered and it's up to expelled student and newly minted mage Tara Abernathy to get to the bottom of things before all contracts are due on the New Moon; that is if she survives a deadly duel between her new mentor and her last mentor, both sorcerers well on their way to lichdom, and playing political games three layers deep.

The action positively hurtles along, featuring a supporting cast of a technician-priest, a cop addicted to vampire bites, and gargoyles in love with a dead moon goddess. High level intrigue flows in all directions, and Tara is a pleasing combination of decisive and out-of-her-depth, knowing just enough to get into a lot of trouble, and trusting that her wits will get her out. Modern fantasy isn't really my jam, but this is great.

Two Serpents Rise continues the Craft sequence with new characters and a new city. Caleb Altemoc is a risk manager for Red King Consolidated, one small cog in the giant corporation that keeps water flowing to the Aztec-flavored desert city Dresediel Lex. His boss is a scarlet skeleton who won control of the city by killing all its gods, and now eats a bite of soulstuff from everybody in the city who turns a tap. He's the son of the last priest of the Old Gods, who's most wanted terrorist dad drops in to dispense heartfelt advice. And he's fallen in love with a cliff-running sorceress who's inspiring him to take dangerous risks and has her own secrets. It's three trains on a collision course, and our hero at the center.

The basic question that the book asks is "under what circumstances should the few die to protect the many?" The old city was sustained by human sacrifice. The new city by immense magical contracts and the sliver-slicing of souls. Caleb rejects both paths, and tries to forge his own third course that respects the sanctity of life. On the one hand, it's nice to have a hero who refuses the easy pitfalls of hard men making hard decisions. On the other hand, he lives in a world where the major technology of the day is killing continents, and the lives of millions depend on torturing a comatose god. Some people don't get to make good decisions.

I'm picky, but I also feel like the writing was a little less finely tuned, the psychedelic technicolor explosions of magic and action an indulgent light show rather than something meaningful. I feel like Caleb is less well-realized as a character than Tara from the first book, even with all his tense emotional ties. Mind you, not enough to drop it a star, but I definitely preferred the first book.

Heavy Weather looks like an adaptation of the movie Twister on the surface: giant tornadoes, obsessed scientists, even that one scene with the flying cow, but it's actually a smart dark mirror that seriously asks and answers the question "What would it be like to live through the worst of anthropocentric climate change?"

In the year 2031, Alex Unger is dying in a private Mexican hospital when his sister Janey breaks him out and takes him for one last fling chasing tornadoes in blasted West Texas, where civilization simply dried up and blew away in a megadrought. It's bad everywhere: governments have collapsed into emergency management posses; pandemics strike with regularity; and the best that people can do is scrape out a shallow grave of a life before something kills them. The goal for the characters is the F-6 Super-Tornado, a storm a whole order of magnitude bigger than anything on this Earth. There's some amazing lyrical descriptions of storms across the Texas wastes, and the thrill of chasing tornadoes.

But where this book shines is its nihilistic shadow government. The Very Serious People who have decided that for civilization to survive, the population must fall. Nothing so crass as a Holocaust, just little tweaks here and there to ensure the birth rate falls and the death rate rises. All the chaos and suffering is careful planned by a distributed cadre of secret survivalists... Life boat cannibals who are willing to do anything to see that some of us get through, rather than none.

Heavy Weather is supremely creepy, and has only become more so in the past twenty years. Sure, an honest reviewer would note that some of the dialog is clunky, and that Janey might not be the best character, but it's got a solid dozen or so moments that make my hair stand on end, even after years of rereading.

I'll ask you, like Sterling asks in one of my favorite scenes in all of literature, "When did mankind lose control of its destiny?"

Adventures to the elemental planes have long been a troubling staple of D&D. Welcome to the Elemental Plane of Fire... where everything is on fire! The Plane Below improves the cosmology through mixing all the elements in one sprawling Elemental Chaos, but lacks the focused ideas of The Plane Above.

First off, the Elemental Chaos is a profoundly bad place to travel, with lakes of fire, rivers of lightning, tornadoes of stone, and vast bubbles of air and water. Lots of terrain of the 5/damage per tier type. Assuming that a party has enough enchantments not to die, they can visit locations like the City of Brass, possibly the greatest city in the universe, and ruled by Efreet Slavers, and the Abyss, home to horrible demons. There are a few more neutralist groups to meet and quest for. Githzerai live in monasteries practicing esoteric martial arts and using meditation to literally hold together fragile life-supporting domains. Djinn fought against the gods, and for their sins were scattered to the winds and entrapped in fine objects. A few free Djinn hire adventurers to help restore their lost empire. Slaads are dada-esque forces of pure chaos, and cultists of the defeated Primordials conduct dark rites. Overall, while there are some cool vistas and ideas, this book never real came together as a good thematic guide to adventures, or an explanation of the 4e cosmology.

What can I say about The Martian that hasn't been said? This is classic Campbellian science fiction updated for the 21st century, with a pop-culture referencing engineer stranded on Mars and having to "science the shit" out of his situation to survive. Weir has a fine eye for the technology that might be used to explore Mars, and the ways that it can be hacked for survival. Mark Watney, our hero is, is incredibly optimistic and knows his way around the equipment. His NASA bosses careful and clueless in turn. That said, the characters are a little flat, and so competent that while I was excited, there wasn't much tension. I think Weir didn't really get across how hard much of this would be: the backbreaking labor in a spacesuit under starvation rations, or the psychological pressures of being totally alone and totally observed. Real NASA astronauts acted out in all sorts of ways on the much less fraught moon voyages.

Finally, since this book is all about hard science and causal connections, a few things annoyed me. Weir devotes a lot of time to Watney's potato farm: where is Watney getting the grow lights, because I'm fairly sure that indoor farms need way more light than we need to see, and second, he's a botanist; wouldn't NASA include more seeds for him to do Martian farming tests on the mission? And third, Watney trawls through his fellow astronaut's entertainment systems; did he leave his music and TV on Earth? Little things, but they were missed opportunities.

I'm glad this book was the most recent scifi to go mainstream in a big way. It didn't do much new, but it presenting the genre in a charming and positive way.

"I read Playboy for the articles" is as tired as a joke can get, but don't be lulled by the cliche. Playboy published some pretty serious science-fiction, by grandmasters like Bradbury, Le Guin, Vonnegutt, Niven, Ballard, and Philip K. Dick. This is as serious as a 20th century scifi anthology gets, with strong stories from classic authors. The themes are bent towards the New Wave, psychological science fiction about minds and bodies and alienation, and yes, just a little sex, but not an overwhelming amount. I'd say my favorite of the collection was "Gianni" by Robert Silverberg, about a classical composer brought forward into the 21st century, but it's not an easy choice.

The Nightmare Stacks is a return to a more classic Laundry novel, with a new protagonist, a new enemy, and metric shittons of style. The story follows Alex, one of the PHANGS (Vampires with sorcerous abilities from The Rhesus Chart), as he's coming to terms with his new life as a civil servant and combat mage, and an unsatisfying assignment back in his hometown of Leeds.

While Alex is scouting out squalid Cold War bunkers as a new HQ, a cold and vasty intelligence has turned it's eyes towards Earth. In this case it's elves, who Stross' perfectly casts as the post-apocalyptic remnants of a high magic civilization turned into a perfect fascist imperial machine through mind control magic. CASE NIGHTMARE RED (oh yes, there is a whole rainbow of CASE NIGHTMARES!) involves extraplanar invasion by intelligent beings, and Stross does an incredible job showcasing the Cthulhuoid bio-horror military of the elves going up the scanty rapid response forces the diminished British military can throw together. Stross's ambition in this book was to treat folklore about elves with about the same coherence as an Afghan villager's account of why SEAL Team 6 shot up his village, and it works! This is the best world-building in the series since book one, and promises a major shift of events for the next book.

That said, as a protagonist Alex is kind of a wet squib. Yet another math nerd with women issues and a developing moral compass. He's a lot like early Bob Howard, without the sarcasm or the fun. The supporting cast exceeds. "Cassie", elven spy and princess, does a great job with her confusion at Earthly mores and her very predatory alien mindset. Pinky and Brains are back, along with their refurbished Kettenkrad. And the Most Awkward Family Dinner in History adds some solid human drama.

The Amazing Maurice is a young adult novel set in Discworld featuring talking animals. It is also one of the bleakest and most horrifying book I've read recently, and that includes such gems as Charles Stoss's latest Laundry novel and Halberstam's The Making of a Quagmire.

The book stars a community of rats given speech through magical garbage, their talking cat Maurice, and Keith, a boy. Under Maurice's urging, they have a good gig: rats cause trouble, Keith pipes them away, Maurice handles the con, split the cash three ways. No one gets hurt, except the government. When they arrive in the town of Bad Blintz, they discover that a pair of unethical rat-catchers have gotten their first, and are soaking the town while breeding their own rats in a horrific Darwinian experiment. It's up to the rats to use their relatively newfound intelligence to find a way out of this, for Maurice to figure out who's side he's on, and for Keith and Malicia (the mayor's daughter, and a Strange Girl) to Have An Adventure.

Discworld has a dark streak in it's humanism, and as I said, this book gets super-dark. This may be because other Discworld characters (notably Susan and Carrot) have the ability to bend the Narrative to their will; they seem to know the rules of the fiction universe that they live in. Malicia believes in the power of stories like a lot of young girls, but they don't believe in her. Only Terry Pratchett would do horribly truths for children, and about 2/3rds of the way through the book, I was doubtful that anybody was going to make it out alive. Really surprising, in a series that I thought had no more surprises for me.