A worthy conclusion to an amazing trilogy. After the heroic struggle for survival in Red Mars, and the covert war of Green Mars, KSR settles down to the messy business of governing a growing planet. A lot of reviews have criticized this book as a 600 page epilogue, but I thought that the story was all very present, all very live issues. KSR has a better gift for imagining future social and political conflicts than he does the vagaries of ground-to-orbit warfare and civil disobedience (or at least his fictional politics haven't been obsolesced as brutally as the revolutionary stuff). The water-rich, terraformed (seas, canals, Mediterranean villages, storms!) Mars is a delight to visit. The aging cast feel appropriately melancholy, and the new arrivals to the setting are a lot more relatable than the strange Zygotes of Green Mars.

The Mars Trilogy is a massive, ambitious, modern classic of SF.

***UPDATE from December 19, 2012, for HUGO REREAD PROJECT***

If Red Mars was about finding Mars, Green Mars about becoming Martian, Blue Mars is about living with the consequences. Mars is now independent and mostly terraformed, the Martians trying to make their fragile government work, while hoping that a massively overpopulated Earth doesn't take them down with them. The characters are again the First Hundred, now pushing into their second century, and dealing with the consequences of such an unnatural life: memory that no longer works, habits of thought becoming psychological canyons, the ancient feud between 'Green' terraformer Sax Russell and 'Red' aerophile Ann Clayborn and its resolution. This isn't so much a novel as a linked anthology, and many of the stories feel like repeats--same characters, same plots, similar points on ecological responsibility and co-op economics.

The first half of the book is a slog through constitution-writing and a trip to Earth that goes nowhere. Only halfway through does Blue Mars find its pace, with Nirgal catching up with a band of feral hunter-gatherers, who wander the land hunting with thrown weapons and harvesting orchards before brief spurts of shopping and drinking in town. The story then follows the only new character, Zo, daughter of the power-hungry Jackie Boone and a diplomatic enforcer for Mars First trying to unite the scattered minor worlds into an alliance against Earth, and then returns to the aging First Hundred, living relics wondering at the world that they made and their place in it.

The sheer mass and momentum of the Mars Trilogy is impressive, but in the end I feel like it's too didactic, to in love with landscapes and ideas rather than people. KSR ends on the thought that it is better to think that you left your children a new Golden Age, rather than having squandered their birthright (ouch. very ouch), but I was left unsatisfied by both the retrospective and re-creative aspects of this concluding volume.

The Trials opens with James Shelley and his squad facing a death sentence for what they did First Light, an assortment of crimes from treason and murder down to theft of an item valued more than $500 (to whit, a C-17 transport), but that trial is only the first of many as Shelley adapts to the brave new world, defined by a secret war between agents of the enigmatic AI called "The Red", and the super-rich CEOs, called Dragons, who rule the world. Already, a series of EMP attacks have crippled the economy without destroying the parts of the Cloud that people live in. Once a cynical soldier, Shelley has trouble adapting to his new life as a popular hero, true believer in what's left of patriotism, and still a central element in the plots of The Red and its enemies.

This book suffers a little from the second book slump. It's still a tightly packed action thriller, but the characters and their motivations are little less tightly defined, the action at lower stakes than before. Nagata teases out more of The Red's hypothesized motivations, but its still very much an alien presence. I'm onboard to see how the third book ends.

With the caveat that a lot has changed in the world of publishing since 2000, this is still a solid guide for going to from science-fiction fan to science-fiction author. You probably know Cory Doctorow, and you probably should know Karl Schroeder, who were at the time ambitious young strivers in the small but growing Canadian science-fiction scene. This book condenses a lot of received wisdom on the publishing industry: how to submit stories without annoying editors, how to manage contracts and self-promotion, with some basic guidelines on writing every day and avoiding cliches.

Sadly, the list of agents and publishers is basically noise right now, and while the authors are forward looking and mostly right on ebooks (no surprise given their interests in digital rights and futurism), there's no way they could have foreseen Kindle Unlimited, or give advice for striving authors there. There's probably a newer resource, but not knowing what it is, I can say that this book is a decent start.

Forever Peace is a thematic rather than direct sequel to Haldeman's earlier novel The Forever War, dealing with some of the same issues of battle, pacifism, military technology, love, and destiny, but in a new setting with new characters. It's stuffed with ideas; overstuffed in my opinion, and loses the coherence and elegance that made The Forever War an instant classic.

Let's talk about the tech first, since it informs everything else in the novel in what is solid, if slightly dated setting-building. The star technology is the neural jack, which lets two or more humans merge into a gestalt being or experience recorded memories. The army uses this technology to create neurally linked platoons of soldierboys, remotely operated platoons of stealthed humanoid mechs loaded with lethal and non-lethal weaponry. The soldierboys are fighting a war, the wealthy Alliance against the poor Ngumi, over standard post-colonial issues and control of the priceless nanoforges, which have knocked all sense out of the world economy. And meanwhile, scientists are constructing a supersized particle accelerator in Jupiter orbit to probe conditions just after the Big Bang. Neural links, advanced weapons in a very familiar war, and basic physics.

Our protagonist is Julian Case. For 20 days a month, he's a physicist working on the Jupiter Project accelerator. The Army owns his ass for the other 10 days, where he commands a platoon of soldierboys in Costa Rica. Julian stumbles through jungle patrols, snatch missions, and a PR job turned massacre. War is still dangerous, even by remote control. Even though mechanics, as soldierboy operators are called, are out of the line of fire, they suffer strokes and psychological breaks at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, on civvie street Julian has a good, if undefined relationship with an older physicist (his former doctoral adviser and current boss). She decides to get a neural jack, the operation goes poorly and she's paralyzed but recovers. Under stress from everything, Julian attempts suicide, which gets him placed on leave from the army, but also leads him to two fantastic discoveries.

First, the Jupiter Project could destroy the entire universe by creating a bubble of new physical laws (think LHC eating the Earth with an artificial black hole). Second, the ten day limit on soldierboy operations is because people jacked together for much longer develop such a degree of empathy that they can no longer kill. Julian and a group of unlikely allies in the university and the academy develop a plan to kidnap large numbers of people, do neurosurgery to give them jacks, and then create a new pacifistic society by keeping them linked for a few weeks. Up against the plan are a hidden cadre of Enders, apocalypse cultists high in the military with spec-ops assassins at their command. People die, shit goes down, and in the end justice wins out.

There were some eminently cool bits: jungle war, sex while being jacked into your partner, the weird economy of the United Welfare States based on nano-replicated government-distributed goods, but it got buried in a mass of too many new ideas and plot threads. None of the characters really resolved themselves. Julian barely held together as the physicist-draftee, the reluctant warrior, but he was a weaker versi0n of Mandella from The Forever War. I couldn't tell you a thing about any of the other characters just minutes after finishing the book. There's a clear and elegant story here about the reasons why we kill and what killing does to a person, but it's buried under tons of futuristic rubble.

Seveneves is a lumpy novel with a fascinating premise interrupted by long info dumps and weakened by scanty characterization. Earth is destroyed, civilization is reduced to seven women in a shattered spaceship, and we see the shape of the society created by their descendants 5000 years later. Fairly, this should be three books, or even more, but it's one brick of a tome.

At some point around the present day, the Moon is destroyed by a sudden and unknown cataclysm. All of humanity has only 700 days to build and crew a lifeboat, a distributed planetary ark of cheap mass-produced capsules centered around an expanded ISS. This first part of the story is the weakest, full of "as you know Bob" exposition about characters we have yet to care about. Psychological realism has never been Stephenson's strongpoint, but I can't imagine that a species knowing that it was about to die, except for 1500 people selected by esoteric criteria, would behave so rationally. They do their best to engineer and launch space solutions, and all the technology the survivors will need.

The second part is the lifeboat drama, which is one of the better parts of the books. The ramshackle life-support system is falling apart, the former President of the United States has hitched a ride to orbit on a X-37 against the rules of the Last Treaty and is causing political trouble, and the only chance to get enough precious water is to carry out a deep space grab of a comet using an unshielded nuclear rocket. Precious samples are destroyed by asteroid bombardment, people die from radiation poisoning and failure of algae farms, there's desperate boarding actions, and at the end seven childbearing women are left alive, finally safe in the bottom of a fault in the largest fragment of the moon. They decide to repopulate the human species, with each Eve getting to rewrite her genes in the image of who she thinks humanity should be.

And then, with a scratch like a bad DJ, the story skips 5000 years (5000 years separates us and Minoan Crete), where humanity has made a ring of sophisticated habitats around Earth, and is well through recreating a livable ecosystem on the surface. Humanity has splintered into a number of sub-races based around the Seven Eves, each with stereotyped behaviors and reactions, and two major political factions based around one of the Eves being on the very wrong side of lifeboat survival. The action here centers around first contact with two new subspecies of humans, who survived the apocalypse in mine-shafts and submarines, but is mostly taken up with an explanation of the massive orbital habs and military technology based around smart 'ambots' rather than dumb lead bullets.

There are some very cool ideas in here, and one or two moments of actual emotional tension, but mostly this book is just long and surprisingly sedate, given the scope of the disaster.

The 48 Laws of Power is a fascinating, if single-minded book of advice centered around historical examples about how to gain and maintain power using deception, flattery, and strategy. Greene's model of society is the royal court, with scheme nobles seeking patronage from some central king or queen. Some of the advice is useful universal: don't let yourself be driven by emotions like anger or love, manage perceptions of yourself, have a plan but be willing to improvise, avoid certain traps sure to alienate the powerful or the masses.

Greene illuminates his book with hundreds of examples drawn from the ancient world, including Greece, China, and Japan, Medieval and Renaissance courts, and the con artists of Gilded Age America. The trick is translating these examples into a modern corporate environment. Who is the king? How do you crush your enemies? How does power operate in the world of 'five years out and up?'

The problem with this book is not that the advice is utterly amoral and mercenary, it's that it's conception of Power is very diffuse. Is it wealth, respect, lethal force, or something else? The 48 Laws of Power has solid advice on how to avoid some common traps, but offers surprisingly little guidance towards positive steps that one might take on the road to power.

A Deepness in the Sky is the first Vinge novel that I read, and while it lacks the cosmological intensity of A Fire in the Deep, I think it holds up as the superior work.

In the distant future humanity has hit a plateau of development. Human planetary civilizations rise and fall over their century-long cycles, while the interstellar traders of the Qeng Ho skip from system to system in sublight ships, hoping to find a technological civilization worth trading with when they arrive. Just outside of human space is the OnOff star, a stellar anomaly that recently begun crude radio transmissions. The possibility of aliens inspires two great expeditions: a Qeng Ho trading fleet and one from the Emergents, a small interstellar empire that uses a unique form of neurological slavery. What they find is a civilization of giant spiders gone into hibernation, at the threshold of a leap into the information age. It's the most profitable time to arrive, and with the first contact the technological aliens, the value of the prize is infinite.

Above a frozen alien world the fleets collide, nearly annihilate each other in a flurry of nuclear sneak attacks, and the Qeng Ho and Emergents settle into an uneasy unified society. Both sides need each other for survival, and neither trusts the other. The only hope is to last until the locals Spiders develop a tech base that can be bootstrapped to space-flight. Qeng Ho 'peddling' is practically treason to the Emergents, who's use of Focused slaves (people infected with a specialized disease and turned into monomaniacal experts) is anathema to the basic concept of human rights. The Emergents have all the guns, but the Qeng Ho have a secret weapon. In hiding is Pham Nuwen, the legendary founder of the Qeng Ho and a practiced programmer-at-arms. All he has to do is evade the unblinking eye of the most effective police state imaginable, where the will of sadists is backed up by enslaved analysts capable of putting together the pieces of any plans. Meanwhile, the Spiders are facing their own annihilation, with the specter of a nuclear exchange overshadowing mastery of technology that would overturn their long history under the strange OnOff star.

This is a book of slow exploration of three alien societies--even the humans are foreign to us--and then rapid bursts of violent action. Vinge has a real eye for espionage, and the way that slow plans explode into violence and split-second decisions. He uses the multiple points-of-view to maximum effect, revealing how ordinary Qeng Ho see Pham Nuwen's disguise, and the plots of the Emergent dictators. Two technologies, the neurological Focus and the localizers (tiny internet-of-things chips) that Nuwen uses as his backdoor, stand out as some great sci-fi. The Spiders are deliberate cast as twee Victorian Heroic Engineers, a some-what grating narrative choice that is explained in book.

There are some similarities with A Fire in the Deep: Pham Nuwen, an alien society reaching new levels of technology, a Machiavellian antagonist, but this book handles the same themes with greater elegance and style, absent the hoary space-opera-isms of the earlier book.

With Full Fathom Five, the Craft sequence finally lands square on its feet. Not the that the previous books were bad, but they were a little too taken with flashy descriptions of magic or pure idealism for my taste. This time around, Gladstone grounds his setting in very real and relatable concerns. The formula is much the same: a noir mystery or Grisham-esque thriller translated to high magic fantasy, but now executed perfectly.

Kai is a priestess of empty idols, a kind of divine hedge fund manager who stores wealth away from the greedy eyes of true gods and Immortal Kings. When she recklessly decides to save Seven Alpha, an over-stretched idols being torn apart on volatile futures contracts, she accidentally exposes a flaw and a crime at the heart of her Order. Meanwhile, Izza is an orphan refugee, an unwitting priestess of mayfly gods on an island cleansed of the divine. Their paths intersect through poetry, prophecy, and the tortured golem-human police officers called Penitents. Characters from the previous books return as well, the truly terrifying Ms. Kevarian, Cat, and Teo are all wound up in this plan.

It's hard to specify why I liked this one a little better. Kai is yet anther damaged workaholic, but her quest for justice seems more human than the ones that came before. The plotting is slower, taking about 2/3rds of the book to move pieces into play, but the deliberation pays off. I'm glad to see Gladstone improving, and excited to see where this series goes.

By tonnage, mines sunk more ships in World War I than guns and torpedoes combined. They diverted submarine missions, damaged dreadnoughts, and killed Lord Kitchener. The slow industrial-attritional warfare of mines and minesweeping is a far cry from the usual milHist topic of battles and strategies, but this detailed book reveals the quiet heroism of naval mine warfare. Civilian volunteers combed the North Sea in trawlers, precisely maneuvering heavy and awkward sweeps through rough seas to clear channels for more valuable transports and warships.

This book is comprehensive, if somewhat disorganized, and well-explained with diagrams and personal accounts. It's a niche topic, but if you've ever wanted to read a book about mines in WW 1, this is a solid choice.

The Incas is a strong academic introduction to the Inca empire, drawing from a balanced reading of colonial chronicle and the latest in archeological research to present the political and logistical marvel that were the Inca. A little dry, but deeply sourced.