The Sympathizer is a great book about the war and espionage, a cynical and funny tale of divided loyalties and identities, and the angry shout of a diaspora community reaching maturity and speaking back to the colonialist fantasies of The Quiet American and Apocalypse Now.

Our narrator is a man of perpetually divided loyalties. An aide-de-camp in the South Vietnamese Secret Police, he is also a North Vietnamese spy passing intelligence to his blood brother. As PAVN armored divisions surround Saigon, he is given one last mission by the Communists: Join the diaspora, infiltrate their resistance movement, report to Hanoi. He arranges a desperate and bloody escape from Saigon, and then settles into the strange twilight existence of the Vietnamese refugee, where generals become restaurant owners and paratroop heroes drink themselves to death.

Questions of identity and feeling are central to this book. The narrator was born out of place, the bastard Eurasian child of a French priest and a Vietnamese peasant. He earned a scholarship to Occidental college in Los Angeles, earning a Master's degree in American studies, along with CIA training in unconventional interrogations. He sympathizes with everybody, even as he is unable to save them, participates in their damnation. He serves as a creative consultant for a war movie where The Auteur does not permit Vietnamese characters a single line, and assassinates men for the wishes of a man who does not yet know the war is over. In the harrowing final quarter, the narrator returns to Vietnam in a desperate bid to save the life of one of two people he is loyal to, and finds himself up against the horror of the victorious revolution, and the nihilism of the reeducation camps.

This is a complex book, well-deserving of all it's awards. Come for the dark cynicism and espionage, stay to think about questions of who we all are, as Americans, as Vietnamese, as people with blood on our hands, and how inadequate sympathies are.

Paintwerk is a trio of linked cyberpunk stories strongly reminiscent of Bruce Sterling ("Deep Eddy", "Bicycle Repairman" and "Taklamakan"). The key technologies here are spex and augmented reality, the themes about art and authentic creation and selling out to some massive corporate cloud that can only parasitize off the raw energy of The Street.

The first story, about graffiti artists in Bristol, is by far the best, with an appropriately weird cast of characters and a wry askance glance at a future where Banksy is as respected as Picasso, yet local taggers still get nabbed and ABSO'ed by the cops. The others, which go into gaming and virtual colonization, are more style over substance but still a lot of fun.

Good quick read, which even five years later has some of that near-future gloss on it.

There's a terrible density in seeing a career compressed into a "Best of..." collection. I'm sure I've read a few Lucius Shepard stories before, but it was some milSF in the Playboy Anthology that inspired me to follow up, and discover a truly great and weird author.

Shepard's form was the novella, stories long enough to let his characters and setting breath a little without deviating from his point, and this is a great collection of novellas. The 'straight scifi' centers on a guerrilla war in Central America between American soldier hopped on combat drugs and napalm, and locals who draw upon a mystical spirit of the land to fight them. But what really calls to Shepard is the weird, the mystical, the magical, and the stories explore the uncanny from Honduras to Vietnam to the American South.

Truly great authors have a knack for picking precisely the right word, the difference between lightning and lightning bug, and Shepard tends to bombard his stories with baroque layers of imagery, in the hopes that one will get close enough, but the style is very very good. My favorites were "Delta Sly Honey" and "Jailwise", but the only miss was the nihilistic criminal caper “Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?”

Lucius Shepard never quite made it into the top-tier of SF and weird writers, but if you haven't read him, you're missing out.

Goblet of Fire set several firsts for the Hugo Awards: first fantasy novel, first young adult novel. Potter-mania was in full fling back in 2001, and as always Rowling is a charming storyteller. However, in my opinion she's not much of a setting builder or plotter, and this book is where the series beings to slump under its own weight of accumulated details and questions.

Harry Potter is 14 and heading into his 4th year at the Hogwarts wizarding school, when a flash of pain in his scare reminds him that the dark lord Voldemort is increasing his power. But never mind that, because the Weasleys have invited Harry to the Quidditch World Cup. There's roughly 100 pages of prelude before revealing the real deal, a special young wizard's tournament between the top three wizard's schools in Europe. Harry is entered into the challenge by an unknown party and faces dragons, merpeople, and a maze, before it's revealed that the whole thing was arranged to get Harry out of Hogwarts and in front of Voldemort so that the Dark Lord can regain his power and body. Another Hogwarts student is killed, Harry escapes, and the wizarding world refuses to believe that Voldemort is back. Fin.

The main plot is so contrived that I continually asked why. Everybody cheats in the wizarding challenge, including Harry, who has useful items handed to him by friends immediately before the first two challenges, and then has one of Voldemort's accomplices clear his path to the "reward" at the end of maze. The side plots, with George and Fred Weasley starting a joke shop, Hermoine trying to get a House Elf liberation movement off the ground, and muckraking reporter Rita Skeeter, go in circles. The final scene, with the death of Cedric Diggory and a direct confrontation between Harry and Voldemort is appropriately tense, but comes at the end of the longest book so far, and one with few payoffs.

Harry spends the book confused and miserable, appropriately riding through the first waves of puberty and fights with his friends Ron and Hermoine (who is really the protagonist of the series). There's not much presence to the teachers, more obligatory check-ins with Dumbledore, Snape, and Hagrid that character moments. The foreigners, rather that being part of a bigger magical community, are used to make jokes about French people and Eastern Europeans. And with the gloss wearing off, its increasing clear that Rowling has no idea what magic can and cannot do in her setting, what wizards actually do on a daily basis, or how Harry is learning what he needs to know.

There are some interesting hints about what happened during Voldemort's War before Harry was born, and what it was like to have secret death squads roaming the country, killing people or throwing them in Azkaban. Many people served Voldemort, and some were left free. Anybody could've have been a Wizard Nazi, and Dumbledore was some sort of Nazi hunting badass, a "Mad Jack" Churchill or Aldo Raine who's retired to be a rather daffy educator. Of course, nobody seems to have thought of using the wide variety of spells and potions for disclosing identity, truth, or what happened in the past, to track down Voldemort's servants.

I care about setting, but the Harry Potter series is really about characters, and they're static in this installment. Harry is brave and generous, but we knew that already. The wizarding world refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat, and they continue in their ignorance. Hermoine is smart (and blossoming) yet underappreciated. Ron is the sidekick. Meh.

Harry Potter is a genuine phenomenon, and a large part of that is that this book is *perfect*. Rowling description of Potter's entry into the world of Hogwarts, the eccentricities of wizards and magic, the joy of finally finding a place that you belong, is luminescent, iridescence, funny and poignant.

I don't see much point writing a longer review, since everybody knows Harry Potter. I have a lot of problems with the setting, the over-arching plot, and the politics of the characters as the series develops, but this book is amazing, with a lightness and attention to the craft of wordsmithing that are truly amazing.

American Gods tops the list of books that I wish I could read for the first time once again. There's a storm coming, and in the middle is a man named Shadow: ex-con, recently widowed, working for the mysterious Mr. Wednesday. Shadow's dropped into a world where beings live on belief, where magic and ritual are real, and the dead are rarely gone. Gaiman's gods are very fallible supernatural beings, curmudgeons and mystics who drink, smoke, and feed off the scraps of belief left to them. America is a bad place for the gods; the Old World creatures are shambling shells of past glories, the new gods of Media, Technology, and the Spookshow (among others) anxious mayflies trembling before the winds of obsolescence.

It's a wonder how Gaiman blends the mythology of dozens of cultures with an utterly plausible explanation of how gods work, of their symbiotic relationship with people, and why America is such a terrible place for them to live. This combination of the fantastic and the logical is one of the joys of the book, along with Gaiman's evident skill as a wordsmith, and the lengthy and convoluted plot around the war of the gods. I enjoyed the frequent digressions into the lives of other goods, their journey to America with immigrants beyond the Ellis Island stereotypes.

I think this book opens some very interesting questions about the nature of belief, the necessity of having ideas and dreams about the universe, and the way that myths change shape in new contexts. That said, it is at times in love with how clever it is, and the Lakeside sanctuary plot is as slow and dull as I remembered it.

Lenin's Embalmers is a fascinating microcosm of the early Soviet state, the scientific project of preserving the great leader, and the sudden swings of fortune that accompanied the political winds of the time. Ilya's father Boris Zbarsky was a a Jewish socialist and scientist, who in 1924 became one of the men responsible for the care of Lenin's body. A consummate political player, Boris navigated the turbulent 30s and 40s, doing well through war and family while alternately favoring and dominating his son, the author of this book. Ilya describes the shambles of the educational system in the 30s, the nightmare of disappearances under the KGB, the opulent lives of the elite, and the stunning poverty that he lived in as his family fell out of favor.

The mine line of the story ends in 1952, as the Jewish Zbarsky's found themselves on the wrong side of Stalin's paranoia. Fortunately, Stalin died before Boris could be executed, but they still lost their role in Lenin's masoleum and the Soviet scientific system. Ilya survived somehow through the 90s when he wrote this book, and it ends with a little retrospective about preserving other socialist leaders, and then turning to the private sector of dead Russian gangsters.

Over all, a small but fascinating book on a topic easily overlooked.

Hominids is an interesting spin on utopian science-fiction, with a keen attention to detail. In a parallel universe, neanderthals have become the dominant hominid species. Two neanderthals physicists are working on a quantum computer when they accidentally open a portal to our planet. One of them is sucked through, and arrives in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. The plot continues along two arcs, revealing differences between the two species. Pontor, "our" neanderthal, learns English with the help of his computer and a small group of Canadian scientists, while the world does a very realistic flip out. In the other universe, Adikor, Pontor's partner is accused of murder, and has to clear his name through a very unusual justice system.

The most interesting parts are those relating to the neanderthals. They're a utopian society, high-tech but still ecologically sustainable, with little violence and social crime. Men and women are mostly segregated in different parts of the city, coming together for a monthly sexual holiday that is only set to a fertile period every 10 years. Elders make the key political decisions, and public safety enforced by a system of private and voluntary recordings. The 'Omelass moment' is that violence has been eliminated by brutal culling. Anyone 50% related to a murder (parents, siblings, children) is sterilized, and over time the propensity for violence has been mostly bred out of neanderthals. Over all, though, neanderthal society is peaceful and rational, a blend of biological basis and cultural aspirations, and almost irritating perfect.

The Canadian B plot is less interesting, mostly because contemporary Canadian society is the opposite of exotic. Characters are rational scientists, Sawyer has done his research on neanderthals and quantum physics, and the interludes about how the press and the world see the visitor from another universe as proof of their prejudices seems about right. I'm not knowledgeable enough about physics to have an opinion about Copenhagen vs. Many Worlds Interpretations, but Sawyer does, and the cosmology of consciousness drives this book. The Canadian characters were (for quiet professionals) pleasantly diverse: Anglo, French, Jamaican, Indian. I enjoyed the budding romance between Pontor and viewpoint Canadian geneticist Mary Vaughn.

Mary's story is the turd in the punch-bowl, however. We're introduced to her with a rape by an unknown assailant, and her difficulty dealing with it due to the patriarchy and Catholic guilt. It's realistic and treated with appropriate gravity, but also entirely gratuitous.

Corporate sponsorship has some upsides. When Microsoft wants to do a sci-fi anthology, it gets some of the most brilliant writers in the field. I think everyone here has at least one Hugo, Nebula, or Campbell award.

The stories lean towards hard sci-fi, and while they're generally optimistic about technology, Microsoft didn't buy loyalty. The company doesn't appear by name at all, and when a similar entity does show up (big Pacific NW tech company) its is usually as suits threatening to cut funding from the cool projects before they appear. Some guesses as to the cool tech demoed for the authors: machine translation, quantum computing, emotional intelligence, and SETI. Microsoft is more than Office and Xbox and a warehouse of unwanted Zunes. They want to remind people that they're on the cutting edge.

The stories are all solid, but my favorites came at the end. David Brin delivers a sharp and funny take on skeptical magicians debunking various types of fraudsters, and how we as a species can get better about thinking about the future (it'd be great if various speculating idiots were held to some level of accuracy in their speculation, which I'm sure we'll get around to doing in the next Critical Six Months, or Friedman), and Ann Leckie with a story about violence between two alien species variously aided and abetted by faulty machine translation.

Since last I checked this collection is free, you've got nothing to lose. Track down a link and enjoy the beneficence of the Beast of Redmond.

The Metabarons is beyond fantastic, beyond epic, it is MYTHIC! Rising from the ashes of Jodorowsky's failed Dune movie, The Metabarons chronicles themes of violence, revenge, salvation, and the sins of the father in a multigenerational tale of universe-spanning warfare. The artwork is simply incredible; imaginative and evocative in a way that Jodorowsky's films only wish they could be. And finally, this complete edition is beautifully bound and printed (important when you're dropping $$$ on a book).

Wow, just wow.