Singularity Sky is where Stross gets it, chewing through the insulation of insufferable singulatarian techno-optimism to bite into the high voltage wire of Awesome that makes for a great and surprisingly deep space opera. The New Republic is a deliberate anachronism patterned after one of the Great Powers of the 19th century, and the bucolic colony of Rochard's World has fallen prey to The Festival, a self-replicating interstellar civilization that trades radical cyborg enhancements and nanotech cornucopias for folk tales. In response, the New Republic has dispatched it's proud battlefleet of heavily armed space cruisers on a course that threatens to trespass the Third Commandment. "I am the Eschaton. I am not your god. I am descended from you. Do not violate causality in my light cone. OR ELSE." It's up to a cynical warp-drive engineer and a UN diplomat to keep the hapless militarists of the New Republic from inviting a disaster from a god-like force they can't even begin to understanding. Great action, great characters, great cosmology, and a great book over all.

** 2022 Reread **
Yeah, Singularity Sky still slaps. Just one of my favorite books. Everything I've said above remains true.

The Obelisk Gate falls victim to second-book syndrome, being merely very good where The Fifth Season was great. The story condenses down to two lines. Essun in the underground town of Castrima, trying to survive the beginning of what may be the worst apocalypse yet, and her daughter Nassum at an antarctic training facility for orogenes. The two are set up for a collision course, as they learn to master the ancient technology of the floating half-real obelisks, and a form of orogeny beyond orogeny that goes by the prosaic name of 'magic'.

The story is best when it stands on its characters, and the ethical impossibility of doing what is necessary to survive. This is familiar ground, but Jemisin has a sharp eye for these moments, and for how people live with their bad decisions. The story is weakest as she adds new elements to deepen the mystery. Factions of an ancient war and the silvery threads of the new magic are less realized and less interesting than the previous politics around orogeny, and the mastery of heat and force.

That said, I enjoyed it a lot, Jemisin is a hell of a talent, and I think she knows where book 3 is heading. I'm not sure I do though, and I'm not sure if these people deserve their happy ending, or if they deserve to watch it all burn. On consideration, it'll be both. Moses never set foot in the Promised Land.

The Prince is a slim volume of advice for rulers, eminently quotable, eminently misunderstandable. My translation, which dates to 1910, could use some footnotes, since Machiavelli assumes a level of familiarity with Renaissance Italian politics which I lack, but the principles are firm. The true base of support for a ruler is in the people. Beware of allies and mercenaries, for their objectives are not your own. Cultivate a good reputation, but be willing to cast aside a bargain or social norm the moment it does not benefit you. The sense that rulership is fickle, and only through continued practice and contact with the ruled, comes through again and again.

Although apparently Machiavelli got everything about warfare wrong, this is a book of sound advice for anyone who wishes to gain a little space in the world.

This is the most British book that I've ever read. Its about as British as Queen Elizabeth stepping out of a TARDIS to hand you a nice cup of tea. Coster promises a story of engineering and aviation derring-do, with a team of clever tinkerers pulling a state-of-the-art flying boat out of the Belgian Congo at the start of the Second World War. There's about three chapters of this, and the rescue of the Corsair is surprisingly straightforward.

What this book mostly is is a mediation on nostalgia, and the brief years when a luxurious flying boat service held the Empire together. For their time, the Empire-class flying boats were as advanced as aviation got, with four engines and a cockpit full of electronics. But the innate design of a flying boat involves compromises: weight, aerodynamics, corrosion, and the whole class never had a chance post-war. What Coster does is interview the 80+ year old veterans of the flying boat service, crew and passengers, and tries to reconstruct some of the magic for a nation that somehow forgot to save even one of its grand dames. He also bounces around Africa, where the desperate race to stay in the present, and the light footprint of flying boat operations, means that locals don't believe such a thing ever existed, and visits Kodiak Island and the Florida Keys, where in remote areas flying boats serve as local delivery vans. There's shocking little left of passenger flying boats (for some reason Coster entirely ignores water bombers), but he manages to conjure up a few glorious ghosts.

Go in looking for engineering heroism (like I did), and you'll be disappointed. Go in looking for magic, and this book might suit.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a clear phenomenon, a richly texture tome of literary fantasy that also happens to be a mass-market best seller adapted by the BBC. The plot is almost simple, at the dawn of the 19th century, English magic has been reduced to a handful of elderly eccentrics discussing dry and inaccurate histories. Mr Norrell, last of the practical magicians, seeks to restore English magic to its rightful place, first by winning the war against Napoleon, and then by putting all of magic on sound rational principles. He takes on a student, Jonathan Strange, but of course nothing is as easy as it seems.

Mr. Norrell makes a secret deal with a fairie lord, who enchants away Lady Pole, wife of an important minister that Mr Norrell restored to life to prove his powers as a wizard. Strange and Norrell fall to quarreling, and Norrell's high-handed habits of secrecy destroy all efforts to educate other wizards, and Strange goes mad and is enveloped in a pillar of perpetual night as he attempts to find his own wife, stolen by the same fairie lord. The plot, in my opinion, does not really matter. Clarke delights in little character sketches, and in devising an immense history of English magic, based around the ancient king Jon Uskglass and his magical Kingdom of Northern England.

Clarke has been compared to Dickens or Austen, but I think this is a mistake due to the shared settings of 19th century England. Clarke is really the heir to Tolkien, in her love of setting building, of magic as something truly strange and awesome and terrible, and of not giving a fig for conventional notions of plot or pacing or protagonists. This is a long book, Jonathan Strange doesn't show up for the first quarter. Mr. Norrell is the most dis-likable main character I've encountered in this Hugo's project, and that includes Gateway's Robinette Broadhead, who abandons his friends and lover to eternal damnation in a black hole to save his skin. I found myself reading chapters and putting the book aside with little desire to see the story through, at least up until the final confrontation between Strange and Norrell and the unnamed faerie king of Lost-Hope.

So about magic. Magic is sadly deprecated in modern fantasy. Perhaps its presented as another branch of science or martial arts that anyone can learn. Or maybe it's a matter of being of the right bloodline, and being born with talent. Or magic is simply willpower, or the willingness to bargain away something precious for temporal power. In Clarke's world, magic is a matter of attunement, of being able to speak to the trees and the stones and the sky, and skilled magicians really do become Something Else, concerned which what's beyond the sky and behind the rain. Though in many ways Strange & Norrell was a week long, 750 page slog (plus footnotes), those moments of true eerie glory redeem a lot of rather pointless parlor scenes.

College is broken, and anyone with an ounce of insight knows it. I know it, as someone who attended two rather elite institutions, and who's attended and taught at a much more mundane one that nevertheless brags about its 'innovation'. Students are disengaged in their classes, with attitudes ranging from bored to outright rebellion. Despite decades of work on student support and learning, the state of higher education remains dismal. I doubt students remember much of anything from beyond the end of the semester. This status quo would be, well, accepted as much as we've accepted everything else in higher education, except that these days college is ruinously expensive, online courses are lurking to demolish the already precarious structure of academic labor, and as a society we're counting on college graduates to solve so many looming social and technological problems.

Carnes thinks he has discovered the solution, in his Reacting to the Past series of games. Reacting to the Past replaces several weeks of traditional curriculum activities (lectures, papers, etc), with an interactive simulation where students take on the roles of key figures around major historical events (The Trial of Socrates, The French Revolution, and many more), break into factions, and try and persuade the other students to favor their cause, with a little help from the dice as arbiters of uncertainty. In character speeches, debates, and papers drive the class, with students driven to research above and beyond their packets by the desire to impress their class.

When it works, it works astoundingly well. Anecdotes from students describe an almost obsessive level of engagement with the class, life-changing experiences that taught them about empathy, leadership, and resilience, and improvements in critical thinking, teamwork and subject expertise. Carnes also has a strong synthesis of the history and psychology of the failure of college, dating back the 1880s Ivy League, and the way in which his theory of "subversive play" describes why students drop out.

However, there's markedly little systemic research on the Reacting to the Past curriculum (just Stroesser et al 2009), and this book sometimes takes on overly defensive, hard-sell attitude. Fair, since it's wildly different than what colleges have been doing, but this may turn off some people.

My more substantial criticism comes from the serious direction of tabletop roleplaying game theory. While I haven't had a chance to delve deeply into a Reacting to the Past unit, from what I understand, it's a cross between a GURPS source-book and a history course reader. I'm a strong proponent that System Matters in tabletop games, and there have been a lot of impressive work done since the mid-90s on system design, particularly lighter systems for narrative play. The second, related criticism, is that I play a lot of RPGs, I consider myself pretty good as a GM, and I've seen a lot of games utterly fall apart. With the much bigger and messier historical simulations of Reacting to the Past, I'm sure there's a lot more places for things to get derailed, and I hope Carnes is engaged with the messy details of the simulation in his guidebooks for teachers.

That aside, this is a serious criticism of college as practiced today, a strong theory as how to improve it, and an extremely impressive collection of anecdotes. In a worst case scenario of just 1% of Reacting to the Past students having the kinds of experiences that Carnes describes, implementing this curriculum is the only ethically sound choice for educators.

Sensory deprivation tanks are one of those strange retro things that never seem to go away. Invented in 1954 by the truly bizarre Dr. John C. Lilly, they experienced a surge of interest during the New Agey/human potential movement 70s, culminating in the sci-fi horror thriller Altered States. These days they're back, with cameos in the hit Netflix show Stranger Things. You too can try float therapy, with franchises and spas in every major cities.

As far as guides to floating go, this is apparently it. Hutchinson went in as a skeptic, and came out a true believer, and this book is a breathless pitch for the benefits of this type of therapy. You can do anything with a tank, from perfecting your golf swing to curing cancer. Hutchinson doesn't know how it works, but offers explanations using every pop-science understanding of the mind available in the 80s. All of these theories are probably Not Even Wrong, but if you accept the premise that the mind can affect the body, and that something like meditation affects the mind, then stripped of it's New Age vibes, floating is a great way for distracted and stressed people to unwind and focus.

Chapters 16 and 17, which focus on breathing exercises, self-hypnosis, and visualization, are the most useful for a novice floater, and strongly complemented the brief instructional video that my location provided. I'm not going to claim that float therapy is some sort of universal key for unlocking the human mind, but in the short term it has helped my neck pain and writer's block.

Noli Me Tangere, along with the sequel El Filibusterismo, are the national books of the Philippines; required reading in high schools across the country. Written by martyred revolutionary Joze Rizal and published in Europe, Noli Me Tangere is a cutting anti-clerical satire, a rich depiction of life in the colonial Philippines, and a clarion call to action and reform. It's also flawed as a novel, and while this may be the fault of my 1922 translation, I think the issues are structural, in the characters and plot rather than the language.

The plot, for all its circumlocutions, is simple. Ibarra is a good and ambitious young man, recently returned from seven years in Europe, to find that his father has died alone and disgraced in jail due to his independent mind and feud with the Catholic church. Ibarra continues his engagement with his childhood love, and embarks on a peaceful plan of reform through education, which runs afoul of the Church and the cabal of wealthy and corrupt landowners who control his home town of San Diego. He narrowly evades an assassination attempt, but is unable to stop his enemies from tying his name to an attempted revolution. Ibarra is exiled, his fiance Maria Clara enters a nunnery, and even his enemies wind up destroying their reputations and lives. In the end, it all comes to naught, and Ibarra is a mostly reactive protagonist, who only lets his ideals and passions drive the plot in a few instances.

The major questions that Rizal opens and does not adequately disclose, and "who pays for the sins of our ancestors?", and the relationship between the Philippines and the modern world. Ibarra and his young friends are pawns in a game played by their fathers and grandfathers, seemingly all the way back to Magellan. The question is-what separates these young nationalist revolutionaries from the sins of their fathers? How might their ideals be better from the Catholic ideals that made the nation? Rizal is relentless is criticizing Catholicism as the source of all evils in the Philippines, the greed and the hypocrisy of the priests, and the indolence and arrogance of the colonial authorities, the hopeless lives of the peasants. And while I will not defend the Church, modernity is no better master.

Noli Me Tangere is a novel obsessed with patrimony, giving fathers due respect, with finding the necessary independence from your own father, with correcting the sins and errors of the past. As with all such matters of the soul, and answers that it provides are partial and obscured. And at the distance of 130 years, a history of colonization by Spain, America, and Japan, of exploitation by the Marcos family, and now with Duarte, it seems that the issue of national fatherhood is still unresolved.

Spin starts with an utterly fascinating premise. One day, in the near present, the stars go out. The moon is hidden, sunlight is filtered. Earth is cut off from the universe by the Spin barrier, and one year on Earth equals 100 million years in the universe. Time is literally passing humanity by, and within one lifetime the sun will expand to encompass the Earth.

The story follows Tyler Dupree, a family confidant of the intelligent and powerful Lawton family. The twins Jason and Diane, two years older than Tyler, serve as windows on the human reaction to the Spin. Jason becomes a scientist, in charge of the aerospace program to find a way around the barrier. Diane falls in with a millenialist Christian movement as she and Tyler lead the broken lives of star-crossed lovers.

The scientific side of the story is one of the boldest and coolest bits that I've read in a while. Jason Lawton learns to use the Spin as a temporal weapon, terraforming Mars and founding a new human world that hopefully can find a solution. Later, Oort-cloud inhabiting nanotech serves as a Von Nuemann probe network, mapping the cosmos over billions of years to discover what force created the Spin. The Martian technology and Martian envoy, Wun, are also high-points in the story.

The human side of the story, around Diane, is not nearly as satisfying. The romance is realistically tense and awkward, with all the burning of high emotion, but not very satisfying as a story. The Christian millenialists are mostly generic, people who deal with mystery by falling into ancient Greek, rather than technical equations, their fervor muted by Dupree's distance as a protagonist and Wilson's style as an author. The Spin is a slow motion apocalypse, and people go mad, but it's all a very ordinary kind of petty crime and alcoholism with a dash of despairing suicide.

The final bit, the meaning behind it all, is entirely unsatisfying. The Spin was created by a hyper-advanced galactic intelligence, one that lived in the Oort cloud and "thought" on timescales too slow to interact with biological beings. But it hated seeing the mayfly lives of planetary civilizations as they hit their resource limits, and so embarked on a scheme to protect all planetary civilizations in Spin barriers, until they can create a massive set of artificial planets linked by wormhole gates, where planetary civilizations can expand indefinitely. The story ends with our protagonists sailing into a new world, empty and free.

The ideas are grand, amazing, but a story needs some character, some plot. I ask myself, did Tyler learn anything over the course of the story? Did anybody's knowledge or faith or sacrifice make a difference? And the answer is a resounding negative. This is a wonderful Out Of Context Problem story, but is even weaker in characterization than Rendezvous with Rama, something I believed to be impossible.

Matterhorn is on track to be one of the classic books about men and warfare. An autobiographical account of battle by decorated Marine, Matterhorn reveals the essence of the war in Vietnam, the lies that men die for, and the truth that can be found at the limits of mortality.

Matterhorn is a code name for a mountain right at the border of North Vietnam and Laos, an isolated outpost far beyond Khe Sanh. Lt. Mellas is a green officer, trying to navigate the struggles of command and keep his men alive. Against life, he has the implacable jungle, the rigors of patrolling, a racially divided unit, the skilled enemy of the NVA, and above all a high command obsessed with looking good in the stats back home, willing to spend the lives of Mellas and his men for nothing at all. The blind brute stupidity of high command, their inability to understand how hard it is to move in the jungle and hills, to deliver supplies, let alone justice, comes through again and again.

Marlantes plays his book straight, drawing from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and the epic chivalric poem Parzival, rather than the fragmented, post-modern school. It works, it's entirely authentic, it goes beyond the strict limits of temporal order and a single point of view of the memoir to strive towards mythic resonance. Marlantes elegantly captures the strain of humping through the jungle, the human universe of an infantry unit, the terror and liberation and uncertainty of battle.

Take it from a guy who reads a lot of these books, Matterhorn is in the top tier.