As I write this review, Fifth Season has not yet won the 2016 Hugo. I am however, confident that is will (caveat: haven't looked at Seveneves yet, still have a week to vote UPDATE: The Fifth Season did win!). This is a powerful masterpiece in the vein of classic Ursula K. LeGuin, a rich character and sociological study in fear, control, revenge, and above all survival.

From the opening lines, "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things." Fifth Season draws the reader into the strange world of Stillness, smashed in the opening scene by the rage of a mad sorcerer, and the institutions that humanity has create to survive its harsh and regular cataclysms. Stonelore, the ancient pragmatic wisdom of survival, and the harsh rule of the Sanze Empire, where enslaved orogene sorcerers provide a fragile security from minor catastrophes like earthquakes and tsunamis. Orogenes have the ability to control the earth, which they can use to protect their friends or summon catastrophe. Hatred of orogenes is an instinct bred deeply into the people of Stillness, control of their power the basis on which their civilization lies.

The non-linear story follows an orogene woman named Essun, hunting her daughter and husband through the start of the end of the world. Her husband killed their son when he found that the boy had inherited her terrible and hidden power. The other two tracks follow Essun in a previous life, in training and in the fullness of her power, and her search for some basic humanity despite her power.

Jeminsin is relentless in following utilitarianism to its logical conclusion, to the reduction of human beings to uses and tools, to the brutality of the necessity of survival and false heroism of 'hard men making hard choices'. Communities are closed against outsiders, wisdom consists in shedding the weak, society rests on the enslavement and ability to instantly kill those who threaten it. For all the cruelty of the world, its complete destruction is an even greater crime. Revenge is no fair reason.

This book is also deeply weird in the best possible way, with a rich invented vocabulary, orogene 'magic' that is simultaneously fantastic and scientific, and artifacts from dead civilizations ranging from unrusting metal roads to immense floating obelisks. A race of statue-like Stone Eaters and the anti-orogene power of the Guardian orders provides further mysteries.

I've not read any Jemisin, but she is definitely on my radar screen.

Tin Men is action packed military scifi that waves big ideas around, but never really moves away from its pulpy roots.

In the near future, the only thing keeping the peace are the robotic soldiers of America's Remote Infantry Corps, who patrol dozens of bushfire zones with their operators safely in bunkers under Germany. When a cadre of global anarchists detonate an EMP bomb that wipes out all technology, Tin Man Danny Kelso discovers that they aren't remotely operating the bots, their consciousness has been transferred to the bots. If he and his squad of diverse stereotypes want to get back to their bodies, they'll have to fight his way from Damascus to the base in Germany, all while being chased by 'bot killer' anarchists with a grudge, carrying an ambassador's daughter, and oh yeah, proving that they're Bad Enough 'Bots To Save The President, who's at a G-20 summit in Athens.

There are some good gunfights, but the ideas and characters never really go anywhere, personality traits standing in for things like American global hegemony, anarchy as a reaction, and standard milSF tropes like honor and duty. Shame that I read this so close to The Red: First Light, because this novel comes off as worse in every way.

Loosely based on a famous fairy tale, The Snow Queen is a story about good, evil, power, and love above all else. The planet Tiamat is defined by two cultures, which alternate power over centuries. When Tiamat is accessible by the black hole based FTL drive, it is part of the Hegemony, the Snow Queen ruling over Winter with technological tricks from the stars. For the century of Summer, when the stars of the planet orbit close on the black hole, Summer rules, a luddite culture that rejects technology. Tiamat is also the only source of the immortality drug the Water of Life, murderously extracted from the local mer, a seal-like species.

The cycle has endured for centuries, but the current Snow Queen, Arienrhod, a woman of tremendous power and evil, plans to break the cycle and uphold Winter. The first step of her plan is to clone herself, and have the clone raised as a member of the Summer culture. But then everything goes awry, as the clone, Moon, and her cousin and true love Sparks, refuse to fit neatly into the plan. Moon becomes a sybil; a semi-legendary breed of oracles, and winds up leaving the planet with idealistic tech-smugglers trying to help out Tiamat in their own way. Sparks falls into the orbit of Arienrhod and becomes her right hand, the masked hunter Starbuck. Most of the novel concerns the arc of degeneration around Arienrhod, her city of Carbuncle (an immense shell-like spiral constructed by the fallen Old Empire), and the moral degeneracy that is connected to the immortality drug. Meanwhile, Moon discovers the extent of her powers and returns to set things right.

Vinge is the first self-consciously feminist writer to win the Hugo for best novel, an opinion confirmed by the front and backwards material in this version. Ursula LeGuin is a great writer, but concerned more with Humanity than with women. Vonda McIntyre wrote an adolescent fantasy, and a bad one at that. I think Snow Queen is a female counterpart to Dune The similarities are clear: a chosen one with the power of prophecy; a harsh and primitive world valued for its immortality drug; themes of moral decay and personal salvation; along with inversions like water for sand, and lust instead of revenge as the prime driver for personal politics. One of the viewpoint characters, the interstellar cop Jerusha PalaThion, is a clear analog to the stark discrimination women faced in the late 1970s.

I was surprised by how much I liked this book, given that I'd never heard of Joan D. Vinge before. She had a checkered career, doing novelizations to make ends meet in the 90s, and then spending most of the 00s down with medical problems. The way that minor uses and abuses on human dignity add up to a complete lack of empathy and great evil in Arienrhod and her minions, is as good a picture of evil as any that I've read (comparable to Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone). Vinge is vividly imaginative and solid on the world-building. For example the FTL drive involves plunging into a black hole, so starships are disc-like to minimize tidal stresses, while the cultures of Tiamat and the Hegemony are brightly painted. She's an enthusiastic writer, and a great describer of place and character. If I have any strike against this book, it's that it's actually too quickly paced. I think the story could've been done better as two volumes or a trilogy, with a little more room to breath.

Not that my audience needs any reminders, but The Snow Queen is proof that great stories can be written by women, about women, for everybody.

Don't expect a traditional novel. Hell, don't expect a traditional Bruce Sterling story. This is transmission from a parallel Earth by the Italian Futurist and Fantasist Bruno Argento, about a brief moment where Futurists broke all the conventions, seized a city, made the future.

Secondari is the Pirate Engineer, a veteran of the Alpine Front (imagine the Western Front, but up a mountain, on a glacier, with scanty trenches carved out of living rock, and even more bloody minded idiots in charge. They fought 12 Battles of the Isonzo, and General Cadorna instituted literal decimation for units that retreated). Now, after the war, Secondari runs an anarchist-syndicalist torpedo factory that turns out cheap weapons for anyone who needs them, makes motor-boat raids on unguarded surplus armament stockpiles, and dreams of a radio controlled aerial torpedo firing fatal F-rays (nuclear cruise missile, for those of you weak in anachronism).

The story wanders through the travails of Secondari and his fellow Pirates, the Prophet and the Ace of Hearts. Futurism was a strange protofascist ideology, based on speed and violence and machines and finding Nietzschean powers within yourself. The alternative history speeds up towards the end, with the introduction of Mussolini and Adolf from Linz, along with the American master spy Harry Houdini and his loyal assistants Howard Lovecraft and Edgar Burroughs. But just as the story is about to get supremely weird, a full fledged alternate history, it ends, violently and abruptly.

Part of me wishes it'd continued, that we got a full novel instead of Act I, but from any sort of pragmatic sense Futurism is totally indefensible. You can't eat speed or glory. It's a shabby ideology based on favors and a cult of personality. It's hurting people because you're stronger than them, and the romance wears thin.

Still, for its flaws, a fascinating and strange novel.

There's a certain shame in going back to books which were important in your adolescence. How did I think this was wise? How did I even think this was good? Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is an incredibly uneven book, written on the downslope of Thompson's meteoric career but still showing a guttering flicker of his genius. Stapled together out of a year of Rolling Stone columns, Thompson covers the '72 Nixon-McGovern campaign in his own inimitable style: a mix of drug fantasy experiences, rumor, straight-shooting opinion, and (verbatim?) transcripts of tape recordings with senior people.

Thompson picked Senator McGovern as his man early, the last decent man in Congress, a staunch opponent of the ongoing atrocity in Vietnam, and the catalyst of a new Youth Movement-centered democratic party to finally sink the crusty and corrupt bosses in Big Labor, ethnic machines, and imperialist warmongering before going on to crush a weak President Nixon. The early primaries are a slog, but once the convention hits, Thompson really gets into his groove. Forget the facts, nobody captures the sheer edge and obsession of a presidential race like the master of Gonzo Journalism, along with the gritty details of 1970s convention procedures and retail politics.

Of course, at the end of the day the facts do matter, and McGovern's youth coalition failed to materialize. McGovern was beaten like a dog by Nixon, losing even his own state. What's weird about this book is the way that the patterns seem to repeat in slight variation: The embattled incumbent, the decrepit party establishment, the anarchic new idealism candidate, the racist spoiler, or the way the 'thought leaders' seem to have no idea what is going on. Just change the name and the dates, and this book works in 2012 or 2016.

There's a lot of cruft in F&L '72, but when Thompson hits home, he hits home, and I'd like to preserve a few quotes here where I can find them.

"The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip each other on with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics."

"There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition... The other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that they have a *duty* to vote."

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Hell. Yeah. Always more, always worse.

David Keen has a profoundly interesting outside take on violence. He rejects explanations based on "evil, chaos, and tribal enmity" as tautological to re-describe war as a functional system, and on the relationships between great powers, NGOs, and the residents of conflict and disaster ravaged regions as a self-perpetuating logic of violence that enables small groups of economic and political winners to thrive at the expense of the great mass of people.

For Keen, nothing is simple; nothing does precisely what it says on the tin and nothing more; everything is a matter of feedback loops and hidden alliances. The basic pattern of his war is a conflict between different bands of elites and populists in a Third World country, a necessary reaction against decades of unequal development. Both rebels and the government may enjoy benefits from an ongoing State of Emergency. Famine, atrocity, and genocide are tactics to transfer land and legitimacy from one group to another. NGO and aid programs have little review, little strategy, and may not in fact alleviate any real harms. Most provocatively, Keen sees a cycle of humiliation, and of preemptively demonstrating one's relevance to broader society, as the spark for these conflicts.

Keen's evidence is based on a wide scan of the atrocities of the late 20th century, with a particular focus on African wars (Sierra Leone, the Congo War, Sudan), but also the Balkans, Guatemala, and Cambodia. I wish there had been a little more systematic analysis, or contextualization of these conflicts. While I'm sure Keen knows his material, I'm only vaguely familiar with most of the wars, and I'd hesitate to build even an advanced undergraduate class around this book.

Finally, while it is good to be aware of the way that you're language and categories bias your response, to want more integrated policy, and a renewed focus on disarmament and post-conflict issues, "everything is complex" is not a cry to rally around. It's a weak response to "There are bad guys, and there are innocents, and we're killing bad guys and protecting the victims." The logic of humanitarian interventionism has a momentum of its own, and complexity and contingency is not firm enough to stand against calls to "do something now."

Rainbows End blends some really interesting futurism with much less worthwhile plots about family drama and the whole idea of spooky power, and while the story builds to an explosive climax, the different thematic lines never really come together, leaving the book less than the sum of its parts.

Let's start with the setting, since that's the real star of the book. It was Bruce Sterling who observed that nothing obsolesces like the future. From about 2006, Vinge imagined a strange and radically different 2026, where the dominant technology was wearable computing, with kids using ensemble coding to created augmented realities and fantasy universes. Everything is full of non-user servicable parts, innovation is ramping up at a breakneck pace, and schools have evolved into virtual collaborative environments where students work on applied projects and hope to catch the eye of a real business or major fandom circle.

Our entry into this world is Robert Gu, a "retread" senior citizen. Once a gifted poet, Robert nearly succumb to Alzhimer's before a miracle of the "medical minefield" of advanced biotechnology restored him to teenagehood. Now he's living with his middle-aged son Bob and his family, going back to a Vocational High School to learn how to use the new technology. The problem is that Robert Gu, aside from being a genius poet, was also a legendary asshole, and he's on thin ice with his kids. Robert falls in with a similar group of retreads who are trying to save the books in the UCSD Geisel Library (a truly cool piece of brutalist architecture) from a plan to shred and digitize him. Meanwhile, his granddaughter Miri is trying to set him up with like-minded friends and an adoring grad student so he's not so much of an asshole, and fellow student Juan Orozco is teaching Robert Gu how to use technology in exchange for learning how to use words like a poet.

But Robert Gu's problems adapting to modernity and making up for a lifetime of abuse are small potatoes compared to the spooky side of the story. Modern technology makes it possible to kill a lot of people very quickly, and only through constant vigilance by the intelligence services of the Great Powers (and the DHS mandated Secure Hardware Environment) is it possible to avert one of a million apocalypses. A group of Indo-European spooks detected a weapons test of You Gotta Believe Me technology--basically mind control, which is under development at a UCSD affiliated biotech lab, and engage the enigmatic Mr. Rabbit to break into the lab. The problem is that their most senior member is actually the mastermind behind the program, a man who believes that it may be necessary to enslave humanity to save them. Oh, and Bob Gu and his wife Alice are also high level spooks themselves in the USMC, which is a full-fledged cyber-intervention force.

The plot loops around these topics and converge on a single night when opposing fandoms battle for control of the Geisel Library in an immense augmented reality battle, Robery Gu and his friends stage a break-in at UCSD to save the books, acting as the hands of the intelligence operatives, who finally act against each other/Mr. Rabbit--who may be a rogue AI. A platoon of USMC rapid response forces make an assault on UCSD, backed up with everything from netwar drones to nukes, but it's to Miri and Robert and Juan as the hands on the ground to foil the plot and save the day. Which they do.

But both the mastermind and Mr. Rabbit get away, status quo ante restored. Robert becomes an okay programmer instead of a great poet, and may only be cranky rather than irredeemably cruel. The Library becomes an augmented reality library, but with some real books. Again and again, it turns out that both sides were being manipulated by a power above them, but that conspiracy was for the Greater Good. From an emotional level, it's immensely dissatisfying.

The futurism holds up surprisingly well. The online world of 2006 was very different. Youtube had just come into being, Facebook was restricted to colleges, the first iPhone was in the future, Uber and Airbnb and the million other parts of the "Sharing economy" didn't exist. Augmented reality and wereable computing were very much lab demos, and not anything that consumers could buy (well, they still aren't really, but give it a decade). Vinge misses a lot of the contemporary feel of social media, but who knows, that could change as well. In one of his more clever bits, he imagines the 'vandal charity' of Friends of Privacy, which exists solely to obscure web-searchable facts about people with plausible lies.

The thing that Vinge misses, and what he really needed to grapple with to drive this book home, is the difference between Power, Wealth, and Prestige. Roughly, power is the ability to make people do what you want, and this book believes in the power of information control and conspiracies, while also making traditional power very weak, teetering on a knife-edge of rogue destruction. Strict descriptions of wealth, the ability to get what you want, are danced around in a very American way. The characters are constantly anxious about being broke, but none of them appear to be under any actual material pressure. The ultra-wealthy appear to be able to make their own laws, but the only thing they do is the strange library transformation project. Finally, there's prestige, something that Robert Gu and all the retreads are immensely concerned with. Prestige might also accrue through the belief circles and gaming, but no one truly leet shows up to demonstrate the difference between the deliberate obscurity of the spooks and the glamour of the new stars. I think more philosophical clarity on these points would have helped Vinge focus the plot and characters of his story.

And on that note, while the setting was truly cool, and an interesting comparison of Silicon Valley ideology next to The Diamond Age, the characters and plot were very close to Vinge's previous two Hugo winners. Another grumpy old man out of time with the potential for greatness and evil. Another precocious young girl who learns to save the day. Another spies' war of information that culminates in a rapid and shadowy duel between great powers. You know what intelligence professionals say about anything that happens three times...

Forcyzk writes a relatively readable account of the first two years of Eastern Front, bulwarked by extensive documentary research and his own experience as an American tanker. There's a lot of the boring details of the form "Kampfgruppe Raus advanced 10 km towards Plotsk until stopped by blocking detachments from the 15th Tank Corps, which was defeated at 1800 with heavy losses, leaving the path clear for...", but Forcyzk has an eye for the big picture and patterns.

In particular, Nazi Panzer divisions had absolute tactical supremacy due to high levels of training, radios, and well-ordered command structures that enabled decisive attacks against key objectives and flexible retreats. Soviet forces were decimated in the opening days of Barbarossa and never really recovered as a strategic or operational arm, New T-34 and KV-1 tanks were dispatched in penny packets for infantry support. Even though the Soviet medium and heavy tanks were qualitatively superior to early war Panzer IIIs and IVs, Nazi combined arm tactics and the Flak 88 minimized the Soviet advantage. More than anything else, the tyranny of distance and supply problems stopped the blitzkrieg, as mighty Panzer spearheads were reduced to handfuls of exhausted tanks and infantry companies right at the edge of strategic objectives. The Soviets, though they took catastrophic losses, were bettered prepared for the industrial war of annihilation than the Nazis, and attrition evened out the experience gap, as veteran NCOs and officers on the Nazi side died, and a few surviving Soviets became more competent at their jobs.

More than gun size and armor weight, Forcyzk has a feel for the operational qualities of tanks as part of a combined arms team, and the ways in which complicated German engineering hindered the performance of the Panzers, or how the Soviet practice of fighting 'buttoned-up' reduced situational awareness and left. There are some oddities. Forcyzk has an almost personal hatred of a few generals who's (over-inflated) memoirs dictated conventional history (Guderian and Zhukov). He's astute in noting that many tanks were light tanks with minimal combat effectiveness, like the Czech-produced Panzer 38(t) or the pre-war BT-series, but doesn't quite figure out what light tanks were for, or if they had an impact on battle one way or another.

As long as this book is $2 on kindle, it's a vital purchase for anyone interested in WW2 or tanks. I'm not sure how it'd hold up at a higher price point.

Every major war inspires a science-fiction novel. Starship Troopers is a paean to World War II Marines and Paratroopers, now dropping into an atomic hell against commie bugs. Vietnam inspired The Forever War with its reluctant draftees and purposeless battles. Now, with The Red: First Light, Nagata has given us the milSF novel for the Global War on Terror.

Lt. James Shelley is the commander of a Linked Combat Squad, an American infantry unit with powered exoskeletons, HUD targeting helmets, drones overhead, neural implants that suppress stress, and comlinks to each other and "Guidance" back in the states that give them an uncanny ability to coordinate. The enemy is well... anybody overseas will do, as the cynical Shelley explains to his squad: War is profitable, and defense contractors manipulate the media to ensure that people like Shelley are out there somewhere, on the end of a very long supply chain that can be milked dry.

Along with all the high-tech gear, Shelley has a 6th Sense, or maybe a direct line to God, that warns him about danger. His uncanny alertness saves him multiple times on patrol, only failing when fighter jets that shouldn't have even been in the war blow the hell out his outpost. Shelley loses his legs, and becomes the test subject for an experimental program in neuroprosthetics. Meanwhile, the army and Shelley's ex are coming to terms with the fact that Shelley's 6th Sense is because something is dancing through the best military grade encryption to manipulate Shelley's mind.

The entity, an AI that antagonist and bugfuck-nuts defense contractor CEO Thelma Sheridan identifies as the Devil deems "the red stain that creeps through human affairs" and which is adapted as The Red by Shelley and his friends, seems to be manipulating thousands or millions of people via subtle chains of coincidence. As Shelley recuperates and learns to use his new cyborg legs, Sheridan launches an all out assault against The Red, using tactical nukes against key data centers in an attempt to cut The Red apart in the Cloud. Millions of people die, the country is paralyzed, The Red limps along, and Sheridan retreats to an arctic lair to plot her next step, insulated from the consequences by her immense power (remember, this is a private citizen with a nuclear arsenal). The final third of the book is a sheer rocket, as Shelley attempts to bring Sheridan to justice, with terrible terrible cost.

The Red: First Light is a great story, balancing action and Clancy-esque "tomorrow's weapons" (trust me on that one, I know the subject), with rich characters and some worrying insights about the rise of algorithmic filter bubbles, ubiquitous computing, and the power of super-elite individuals. I'm excited to see how the rest of the series plays out.

Dracula is one of the foundations of modern horror. It is creepy, gothic, terrifying in dimensions sexual, psychological, and geographical. It is also a lumpy epistolary, and continually brought down by its characters.

You know the basic plot. Lawyer goes to darkest Transylvania, where he helps the mysterious Count Dracula move himself to London. Young ladies start weirdly dying with neck bites, and it's up to Professor Van Helsing and a crack team of vampire hunters to defeat this ancient undead and save the day.

The problem is that I couldn't stand many of the characters. Of the ladies, Mina is okay, but her friend Lucy is a gormless sack of Victorian mush. Dr. Seward is utter waste of page count, accurate describing without a perspective of his own. And Van Helsing is said to be a genius, but comes across more as a doddering pedant. Dracula and his brides are riveting when they appear, which is sadly infrequently. The book is about two acts too long, and the more familiar Balderston/Universal 1931 adaptation compresses characters and cuts long sections to good effect.

One thing that I did actually enjoy was Dracula as a contemporary thriller, with the protagonists using late Victorian technology like telegraphs, steam launches, and Winchester rifles to get an advantage over Count Dracula (who is, by the way, killed with a Bowie knife and kukri). One theme which the book presented, but didn't seem to know what to do with, was science vs. horror. Both Van Helsing and Seward are medical men, rational observers. Yet them seem to have little to say on ancient folklore about garlic repelling vampires being accurate, or about Christian items like the cross and host being capable of halting vampires. I don't know what the default 1897 worldview was, but I'd reconsider my atheism if God could shoot invisible lasers that made monsters die. Stoker invokes these kinds of absolute notions of good and evil reflexively, but perhaps us modern decadents need a little more help in explaining why "good" symbols defeat the "evil" of vampires.