Blackout has everything that I’ve come to expect from a Connie Willis novel. A plot composed mostly of missed connections. British stereotypes. Characters being in comas, asleep, or delusional for critical action. Annoying/adorable children. Getting involved with a stranger’s domestic disputes substituting for character development. On some purely technical measures, this is a better book than her previous Hugo winners, with short suspenseful chapters and a few finely tuned sentences, but overall it remains a shambles masquerading as a novel.

This time around, three time traveling historians are sent to 1940 Britain to observe the “ordinary heroism of ordinary people.” Eileen is a maid taking care of evacuated children at a country manor. Polly is a shop girl observing life in the shelters during the heights of the Blitz. Mike is observing the Dunkirk evacuation from Dover. Of course nothing goes right, and when our three historians find themselves unable to make their drops for months, they realize that they’re stuck in the past, and that no one is coming. The novel ends with the trio standing under falling Nazi bombs, wondering how they’re going to survive. The story is told in triplicate, with three more or less identical characters coming to similar realizations.

If I may step back, Willis’ whole Historians series fails on two measures. First, time travel in fiction is a device that lets authors play around with causality and destiny. What does changing the past change in the future? Is history on rails or can it be changed? How does one event play out in different ways depending on the interference of time travelers? Did anything unusual happen behind the scenes to set up a perfect main timeline? (There’s a secondary use of time travel to go somewhere distant an unimaginable, a million years in the future rather than 100, but we’ll put that aside for now). Willis takes the most boring possible interpretation of time travel. Historians can’t do anything because the past is a chaotic and a single change might ramify throughout history and lead to say, the Nazis winning the war, but history also can’t change because the space-time continuum protects itself by slippage and weird coincidences. The results is a setting where characters have to walk on eggshells, but also can’t really do anything.

Second are the characters of the historians themselves. This is “Cops complaining about Law & Order” level griping, but I have a PhD in interdisciplinary social sciences. Real academics behave nothing like Willis’ historians. We have methods, we have data, we have a publican plan. At the very minimum, we have a research question. There is no way that a unique world-class facility like the Oxford Time Travel Lab would send three people back to 1940 to observe the “ordinary heroism of ordinary people.” There’s no question there, no data collection, no analysis, no history.

And as a personal insult, I still need to read All Clear, because for some reason (profits? Sheer physical size?) this book was split into two volumes. still have another 500+ pages of this crap to wade through before I can call it done. There is only one merit to this book, which are the well drawn depictions of Blitz Britain, but if you’re into that, a quick search reveals actual popular histories in Gardiner's The Blitz: The British Under Attack and Longmate's How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War.

Vigiliant is finally a real League of People's book, a high tech mystery on a planet inhabited by multiple species, and a long and forgotten past. The mystery takes a while to get moving, as our narrator Faye describes living through a terrible plague that targeted the avian Ooloom, before it was cured by her father, using ordinary olive oil. When her father was killed in a mining collapse, Faye acted out as hard a teenager could, but at the start of the action, she's gotten her life together and is a member of Vigil, a unique branch of government with the power to look into any official business and to objectively state how a proposed policy will work.

Faye's thrilling career investigating water plant refurbishment is sidelined when a team of androids try to assassinate her. Yeah, Rule #1 of the League of Peoples is that murder is impossible, or binds the perpetrator to a single planet. Faye investigates the attacks with a crazy Ooloom senior investigator, and Admiral Festina Ramos of Expendable. What she finds is, well, the soul of the world, machines with feelings, the origins of the plague, and how her father really died.

Gardner definitely has a pattern in his capable-but-emotionally-damaged protagonists, but he has a keen ear for character, and its fun to see the setting expand. Not as good as Expendable, better than Commitment Day.

The First Days of School is a manual for teachers, oriented towards primary school teachers, but with useful advice for educators at other levels as well. The Wongs have a clear idea of what they want teachers to be: dedicated, enthusiastic professionals who impact student's lives. The first and last chapters are exhortations towards this ideal (although I wonder what they'd say for cynical, disorganized, and unfriendly people. "Don't teach", maybe?).

The middle three chapters have useful advice. The first step is to set create a positive context for students, by being a friendly and professional dressed person who makes an effort to greet students as individual, and set expectations of success. Second, have an orderly classroom, with procedures for everything from turning in homework to getting the instructor's permission to evacuating from a fire. Third, focus on student learning through an Understanding by Design adjacent learning practice, rather than mere coverage of the curriculum. Oh, and never argue with students, because by doing so you've already lost precious time for teaching the rest of the class.

For college students, who have a lot of implicit knowledge about how school should work, and less structured classes, this book is less useful. I will take going forward what to do in the opening minutes of class, those dead minutes before class actually starts, setting procedures so that students know what to expect every day and start learning, and a list of "learning verbs" to use in assignments. There seems to be some strong disagreement about how structured a classroom should be, and if students can see through these ploys, but I agree with the Wongs: a structured classroom encourages learning. Chasing those moments of synchronicity from a more improvisational teaching style is a mistake.

Bruce McCall images a delightfully twisted world in the style of art-deco advertising, where speed rules, Albert Speer designs roadsides attractions, and Howard Hughes delivers three star meals from prototype racing planes. The joke is stretched like tafy, but manages to hold together. I particularly enjoyed the discourse on Golf Carts of the Third Reich, which is a spot on parody of actual Nazi procurement.

Amazon had the entire series for $2 per, and they're quick reads, but this is by-the-numbers powered armor MilSF with little to recommend it.

About a century from now, Earth is severely over populated, divided between the North American Commonwealth and the Sino-Russian Alliance. A cold war on Earth is hot out in space, with starships and space marines raiding alien colonies. Most of the population are welfare rats, and for them the only hope is a colonial lottery or military service.

Grayson, our protagonist, signs up, goes through bootcamp (where little happens, except for an unlikely sexual encounter), and winds up assigned to the Earthbound Territorial Army. See, conditions in the welfare projects are so bad that the only thing keeping crime from spilling out into middle class sections of the country are occasional raids by powered armor troopers with dropship support. Grayson deploys to Detroit to suppress a riot, which his squad does by machine gunning hundreds of people, and then blowing up an apartment block with thermobaric rockets. In the aftermath, he transfers to the Navy as an IT geek and has his ship blown out from under him by an unknown threat around a distant colony world. He discovers that humanity is not alone: the colonies have been invaded by 80 foot tall aliens named "Lankies" with advanced biotechnology who are terraforming human colonies in months and killing all the locals. Grayson hooks up with some survivors, helps kill one Lanky, and is rescued. Fin.

On the plus side, Kloos writes great battle sequences and has some realism to his military institutions (he's a vet). On the minus, the characterization and world-building is utterly lacking. The North American Commonwealth is a nightmare dystopia, and nobody seems to care. David Weber has more insightful thoughts about welfare states! On the military side, we have space cruisers and battle carriers and powered armored because they're obligatory in this genre, not because they fit into any kind of tactical picture. Aliens show up, and they simply die with no explanation.

As a character, Grayson is slightly better than a blank slate. He hates the housing projects that he grew up in, but without any sort of depth. There's no introspection about his unit going warcrimes-a-go-go on Detroit, or what it means that he's killing people just like himself a year ago or like his own mother. I've read of bunch of combat memoirs, and dehumanization and casual violence against civilians isn't something that just happens.

Kloos advances the setting up five years from the last book. Grayson is now a combat controller, part of the fleet elite responsible for fighting the Lankies. Humanity is totally outclassed, and they best that they can do is drop Grayson and a few of his buddies on Lanky worlds to designate targets for orbital nuclear strikes. Otherwise, humanity has lost over 40 colony worlds and innumerable fleet actions, without a single tactical victory.

We get one of those missions, and then he goes into action against the Sino-Russian Alliance, because stabbing the other bloc in the back won't wait for little things like human extinction. The raid on a colony goes off great, until a Lanky seedship shows up and wipes out the NAC fleet without stopping. Grayson evacuates back to Earth, and is assigned to a Territorial Army unit with his old sergeant that is sent to a frozen colony world around Fomalhaut right before the FTL network is shut down. When the one-star general in charge of the fleet decides to seize the colonist's food supplies, Grayson and his friends lead a mutiny. This ends when Lankies show up again and the fleet bolts. The local scientist comes up with a brilliant plan to destroy the Lanky seedship by crashing a freighter into it at full burn. This works, Grayson and his team mark up the first human kill of a Lanky, and then a combined NAC-SRA fleet shows up with the bad news that the Lankies have found and occupied Sol. They're cut off from Earth.

This book avoids some of the war crimes of Terms of Enlistment, but skips over a lot of things that matter, like five years of combat against an implacable foe, or anything really about the nature of the Lankies. I don't at all buy the depiction of the Fleet. This isn't just a force that is losing. This is a military that has become entirely ineffective, and there's little panic or real innovation. Eric Nyland's Halo tie-in novel The Fall of Reach covers these themes with more coherence and elegance.

Lost at Sea is a collection of short pieces by Ronson over the course of a decade, a meander through the strange course of his life. There's not much thematic coherence, aside from the oddness of the human condition, but some of the stories are quite delightful. I particularly enjoyed the journey to the town of North Pole, Alaska, where every day is Christmas, an interview with Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope of Insane Clown Posse about their hit song "Miracles", and a journey into Ronson's own past, when he played synth in the outsider pop group Frank Sidebottom, which was fronted by a man wearing a giant fake head.

Charming as always, but wildly uneven.

To quote Will Smith, "Welcome to Earth!"

Cut off from the rest of humanity, Grayson and his ragged band of survivors have to figure out how to keep fighting before they run out of food. A quick run to Earth reveals that the fleet has been more or less wiped out, Lankies rule Mars, and (unsurprisingly) Earth Command is full of assholes who are trying to flee with a secret fleet.

Grayson darts back and forth, collecting more units and making a desperate run to retrieve his fiance, a dropship pilot, while teaming up with Russian stereotype Dmitri (or a name identical to Dmitri, maybe Boris?). They arrive back at Earth, and in a desperate fight kill a Lanky scout (remember, an 80 foot tall alien) in Detroit with the help of a local militia, the Lazarus Brigade. Turns out that the projects are run by a fair and just veterans/citizens militia, that does what the government won't. Grayson and his friends decide to stay on Earth and keep up the fight, even if it seems hopeless.

This third book reveals three major things. First, Lankies are just boring to fight. They're both overpowering and dumb. Fighting them is like battling the tide. Second, Kloos has literally no idea how politics work. Given what he's described of the NAC, a group like the Lazarus Brigade is basically the last type of resistance that'd form in the slums. Third, Dmitri isn't even a cheap Russian stereotype, he's a cheap Soviet stereotype that'd make Ivan Drago blush.

There must be something to these books, because I read all of them in as many days, but they are okay at best. For MilSF popcorn, I'd recommend the Lost Fleet series.

To say that I was disappointed in All Clear would be to imply that I had any positive expectations about this book. Connie Willis puts words into sentences in a way that is not aesthetically awful, and that's the best that I can say.

All Clear picks up right after Blackout with Polly, Mike, and Eileen trying to figure out a way to get home. They race around London and England looking for other historians with working drops, only to find their way blocked at every turn. Mike nearly gets run over by Alan Turing, and then fakes his own death so he can leave the ladies and join Operation Fortitude, the deception plan for D-Day, where he spends his time as Ernest, inserting references to the lost time travelers into the Fortitude deception. We find out that another 1944 PoV is actually Polly, on a subjectively earlier trip back in time, and that she needs to get out because time travelers can't be in the same place at the same time. They run into Mr. Dunworthy, who's botched a rescue during the fire storm around St. Paul's Cathedral (or something around then), and Eileen decides to stay in the past and adopt the 'orrible Hodbin children. Everything works out in the end, as Colin Templar finally rescues the stranded travelers.

All of my critiques of Blackout and Willis' time travel apply, doubly so with the characters together. They withhold information from each other for no reason, panic about altering the flow of history even when the plot about passing messages forward through sidelong references in the Fortitude deception. Why doesn't the Time Travel department have an actual procedure for sending messages in a bottle forward through time? Doc Brown sends a telegram from 1885 to 1955 at the end of Back to the Future 2, surely the University of Oxford can hold a letter for 120 years. Dunworthy knows the drops are fallible--either paradoxes can occur, or they can't.

Jo Walton says that the Historians series is some kind of extended riff on free will and grace in Christian theology. Time travelers exist to make history turn out how it should. I'll buy that, because there's a lot of stuff that has to be taken on faith.

I was introduced to Scarfolk through the blog, particularly the fantastic Don't Campaign "Whatever you do, don't" and Brutalist Pornography.

The book has a lot more of the absurdist graphic design of Scarfolk, an alternative vision of 1970s England caught between Thatcher, Orwell, and dark satanic rites, but it wraps it all up in a profoundly bad story about a newcomer to Scarfolk searching for his lost sons. Absent of all restraint, the setting wears out its weirdness very quickly. The blog, with its posters and (de)contextualization, is superior in every way.

For more information, please reread.