Fascinating, if very mid-80s look at the role of war gaming in the defense establishment. Allen managed to FOIA a number of typically classified Pentagon simulation, and these transcripts, along with interviews of the major players and a few made-for-TV public war games with actual politicians, provide a fascinating overview of how the United States trained for political and military crises, up to and including global thermonuclear war. Allen's history leaps around a little bit, from the kriegspiel of the Prussian general staff, to pre-World War 2 tabletop naval exercises, to the serious computer simulations of the Rand corporation, and the similarities and differences between military games and hobbyist publishers like Avalon Hill.

The major problem with this book (aside from being a period piece), is that Allen vacillates between three perspectives on war gaming. The most charitable is that they are uncannily predictive and effective tools for preparing for the real world, training government officials to deal with terrorism and political crises, and revealing rigidity and weakness in real mobilization plans. Less charitably, they're a way for a cadre of mid-ranking officers and academics to pretend that they're doing something useful, when really they're just pushing around chits on a board. The array of gaming centers is a waste of resources, but hey, it's a rounding error compared to aerospace procurement boondoggles. The worst perspective is that the games are dangerous lies: based on unverified models, full of outright errors in rules and worldview, biased to support ever higher military budgets, justify an unwarranted sense of American superiority, and a dangerous lack of concern for triggering an actual nuclear war.

All of these perspectives are to some extent true, and I wish Allen had done a better job contextualizing them, but this is still a great little book for any one interested in the use of serious games, of the late Cold War. My favorite little anecdote is Col. Trevor Dupuy, one of the deans of wargaming, explaining how to calculate out the Theoretical Lethality Index for a sword (23) and a one megaton airburst (695,385,000) based on a long series of multiplied statistics based on... guesswork.

Going Dark closes out The Red trilogy in an unsatisfying manner. Lt. Shelley has gone off the grid entirely, now handling Existential Threat Management for The Red. Whenever the enigmatic AI detects a threat to its existence or to world security, Shelley and a squad of soldiers who have been marked officially dead in the databases, and survive in the cracks of the classified world with forged orders, show up and trouble-shoot with extreme prejudice.

The story opens with an assault on a arctic oil rig that's being used to house a potential biowarfare lab, but the mission goes tits up. There's a shootout with mercenaries, the lab turns out to be doing secret pharmaceutical work, the extraction is late, and eventually when Shelley and ETM Squad-7 get back to their secret lair, hidden in plain sight on an Army base in Texas, they get blown by their intel contractor and turned back over to the US Army, who needs them to do one last mission to save the world.

There's plenty of action, and Nagata still has a fine eye for shoot-outs, but little of the character moments or social criticism that made the prior books exceptional fiction. Shelley is officially dead, estranged from the world, and working for a rogue AI, but it's treated as shockingly normal. There's little tension within the unit over the weirdness of their situation, and for all the blather about 'non-linear warfare' and unlikely allies, a jovial Russian arms dealer stereotype seems pretty likely in this world. Dragons (in-setting term for the super-rich), the fragile state of American democracy in a world traumatized by nuclear terrorism, and even the desires of The Red, are treated in a mostly pro-forma way. I thought there was some cool potential with the idea that The Red had grown out of an advertising algorithm and wanted to make happy endings for people, whatever that might mean, but it acts mostly as a literal deus ex machina.

I think there's room for sequels, and it's a decent enough book on a sentence to sentence level, but the later seasons of Person of Interest handled these topics way better.

Among Others is a love letter to the idea of science fiction as a genre, a book that leaves large parts of the narrative submerged.

Morwenna Phelps is a 15 year old girl who's solace in life is books. Torn from her extensive Welsh family and sent to a boarding school in England, we follow her journal for six months. Mori has a lot of problems. She's fifteen; she was severely injured in a car crash which killed her twin sister Morganna, she hates her school which has terrible food, uniforms, and sports; she misses the hills and valleys of Wales; it's impossible to get American scifi books in a timely manner; and oh yeah, she sees fairies; her insane mother is a witch and caused the car crash which killed her sister, and is trying to finish the job to achieve ultimate magical power.

There's a refreshing realism in the way that Mori writes about the problems of school, her love of books, and fairies and magic in the same voice. She's a powerful character, confident and judgmental in the way that only a precocious teenager can be, but also vulnerable and confused. Her world simply is, and that's a triumph of realistic writing and character development. That said, beyond the semi-autobiographical elements (Jo Walton and Mori are the same age, and grew up in similar places, share severe leg pain, and obviously had similar interests in period scifi), I'm not sure how deep this book goes.

There's a coming of age story about Mori finding her karass (a found-family borrow from Vonnegut), and about the knife-edges of class issues in England and Wales at the time. I'm not saying that Mori is self-centered, but none of the other characters in the novel really come into focus as complete people. Her father is maybe the closest, but mostly it's a matter of if people are consumed by or rise above their personal tragedies, depending on how much Mori likes them.

The magical stuff, with fairies and witchcraft and the like, is great. Fairies are nature spirits that cluster around human ruins, some beautiful, most misshapen and tree-like. They speak in a broken language of verbs and adjectives and no nouns. Magic is imbued in objects, that take on purposes for certain people. A chair wants to be sat in, a certain kitchen knife hungers for blood, and so on. Magic itself works by chains of coincidence. Drop a flower in a lake and factory shuts down, or was it financial analysts in London cutting their losses? This thing is that magic is about 10% of the book.

The science fiction element is probably what grabbed the Hugo voters, but it's just name-checking. Ursula K. Le Guin is flatly declared to have the single best short story collection ever; Roger Zelazny is diverse and 'just brill', Piers Anthony is kinda crap. Mori doesn't say anything about science fiction, exception that it exists and that she loves it. There's an interesting story about the "real" fantasy of Mori's magic, and the "fictional" fantasy of literature, but Among Others never really gets to this.

The depiction of Mori in this book is legitimately great, but everything else depends on how much you see beneath the surface.

I couldn't imagine a more 70s piece of science fiction if it showed up and challenged me to a disco dance competition, and I own a replica Zardoz mask. Tiptree weaves a tripart plot about telepathy, alien minds, and salvation.

THE DESTROYER is some kind of immense and ancient interstellar war-machine on an endless journey between systems, obliterating intelligent life by forcing their stars to go nova. It speaks in ITALICS ALL CAPS. Tyree is a gas giant world soon to be targeted by THE DESTROYER, where a civilization of telepathic wind dwelling mantas have a complex and peaceful society based around the wisdom of Fathers, and shared engram-experience patterns. On Earth, Dr. Daniel Dann is a drug addicted medical advisor to a U.S. Navy psi project to develop telepathic communications, which will be used to transmit orders to nuclear submarines.

The Tyreen embark on a desperate plan to transmit some of their minds telepathically to Earth, which might ensure their survival but is also their worst kind of crime. Dr. Dann mopes about his alienation and sexual frustration and the futility of the project. Then as doom approaches Tyree, Dann swaps minds with Giadoc, a Tyreen scientist. He learns telepathy, tries to heal the others as they seek shelter from THE DESTROYER deep within the gas giant, and then when all is lost, it turns out that THE DESTROYER has been partially hijacked by Margorie Omali, a brilliant African-American computer programmer, and TOTAL, a variant of the ARPANET. Dann, the Tyreens, and everybody struggles for mental integrity within the vast bulk of THE DESTROYER.

There's at least two really cool ideas here, gas giant civilizations and alien berserkers, and bunch of stuff about telepathy and alternate senses and socialities. As I've heard, Tiptree has a keen and ironic eye for gender politics, and there's some good style there, but so much of the story is buried under flopsy cruft that it's hard to discern what happens, or why we should care. The Tyreen's are so utopian they can't seem to conceive of their extinction except rationally. The whole thing feels rather half-baked.

I think I'd like to read some of Tiptree's short stories, but this first book has not impressed me.

With Hunted, Gardner returns to the core of the series: the high crimes of Admirals and the dark secrets of the League of Nations.

Edward York is a genetically perfect clone of his father, the Admiral York, with a slight flaw in his brain that's rendered him embarrassingly stupid. Packed away to the Explorer Corps, he's spent 20 years on a small observation post around the planet Troyen, home to the insectile Mandasar. When a ship taking him to nearby Celestia crosses the line, everybody else is killed by the powerful intelligences of the League, and it's up to poor slow Edward to figure out the crime and save the day.

What he finds is a decades-long conspiracy to foment civil war, create a slave race, work around the League laws on murder, and exploit the unique biochemistry of the Mandasar to save humanity. The biochemical mystery is fantastic, a real cool take on the insectile hive alien, and mutual influence on thoughts via pheromones. We also get some important setting detail. The human Technocracy seems kind of blisteringly incompetent, even given anti-government slander. Turns out that this is because they actually are: in the past 400 years since humanity joined the League of People, their intelligence scores and physical abilities have declined, and no one know why. Admiral York's plan to create biological kings is insane, but may be necessary. Of course, he love of war seems rather misplaced, given that in-setting God is Real, and he smites people who even think of transporting weapons with a mighty hand.

My one concern was that Edward would prove to be some kind of magical retard (to borrow a phrase from Tropic Thunder, but as viewpoint character he's not nearly as stupid as he claims to be. While he's no Miles Vorkosigan, he puts the pieces together decently enough.

A Little War is a great candid account of the distant days of 2008, from a very Washington D.C. perspective. Asmus describes a reactive, divided, and unstrategic Washington-European diplomatic apparatus that failed to defuse a situation as it arose, precipitated a crisis by failing to understand Moscow, and left Georgia in the lurch in its moment of need.

Ultimately, blame for the war rests on Moscow, which maintained an untenable ceasefire over the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia for over a decade, resisted efforts at mediation, and then moved in with over a division of troops with armor, air, and naval support. However, the trigger for the war was very much the independence of Kosovo, which NATO and the EU saw as a one off event, and which Russia saw as the political dismemberment of a close ally by a unilateral and expansionist alliance which indicated that the rules had fundamentally changed, and the start of a process for admitting Ukraine and Georgia to NATO.

Georgia, a much smaller country, had little that it could do to meaningfully defend itself, yet still managed to be caught entirely off guard. President Saakashvili took the worst of all possible actions, a counter-attack that brought international opprobrium and played into Russia propaganda, while failing to meaningfully disrupt the actual attack. He was forced to act, because accepting the dismemberment of his country would be political suicide, on par with the 1921 submission to the Bolsheviks.

In the end, President Sarkozy of France managed to broker a tenuous and unsatisfying ceasefire. Russia started on a course of opposition to the West. The incoherence of Washington and Brussels was revealed. and Georgia and its separatist provinces probably suffered most of all. So yes, this book is biased, but it wears its bias on the sleeve, and a detailed and coherent account of significant events from the invaluable perspective of a diplomatic insider.

Before he translated The Three Body Problem and started his own epic fantasy series with The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu wrote some short fiction. I don't know what was left out, but what was included in this collection is a master finding his voice, with fifteen thoughtful and hard-hitting stories that span science-fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy.

Liu loops around similar themes and characters: the Asian-American experience, the hopes people hold for their children, and the memories they have for their parents, the power of the written word, atrocity and sacrifice. These are themes that deserve to be weighed, chewed over, glimpsed from many perspectives. The confidence, the imagination, the subtly of these stories, make them a must-read for anybody following modern science-fiction.

Buy this book.

I'm conflicted about Ascending. On the one hand, the story started in Expendable continues directly, with more space action and investigations into the deepest sins of the League of People, on the other hand I Am Not Such As One Who Thinks Oar Is Cute.

Four years after Expendable, Oar wakes up on Melaquin, healed by ridiculously advanced technology, just in time to be picked up by a biological spaceship named Starbiter crewed by Uclod, a semi-criminal information broker trying to get some advantage out of the shambles left the death of Admiral York in the previous book. Oak and Starbiter run from the Shadhill (sp? something like that), an even more ridiculously powerful race. They meet up with Festina Ramos, and over the course of the story it turns out the the Shadhill are responsible for uplifting most of the local races, and also responsible for ensuring their slow but inevitable degeneracy through concealed flaws in their technology, and a campaign of distracting scientific research into the problems.

It turns out that the Shadhill used to rule the local area about 5000 years ago, until most of their race uplifted. Now there are only two left, and they're afraid to abandon the project. Oar saves the day, fulfilling a mission given to her by an even more ridiculously advanced alien.

The setting moves along quite a bit, and there are some cool ideas, but at the end of the day, I don't like Oar at all as a narrator, and that knocked it down a star.

Greeting Comrades! Board your Sputnik, and prepare for Space Communism.



Red Star is one of those weird historical scifi artifacts. Written in 1907 by an early Bolshevik and good friend of Lenin's, it imagines contact between contemporary Earth and a Martian socialist utopia. Leonid, our narrator, is a communist revolutionary who is selected as the idea ambassador between Earth and Mars by a secret Martian mission equipped with an anti-gravity spaceship. He journeys to a world where the revolution has won. Mars has advanced industries that require only a single shift per week from each citizen, managed by a complex statistical bureau. The people are happy, healthy, clear and logical. There's the standard utopian plans for production, housing, and health, but I enjoyed the little details that Bogdanov let slip in. In the socialist future, poetry will have strict rhyme patterns in geometric harmony with the universe, none of this free verse nonsense. Meetings will be orderly and to the point, with little bloviating or pointless repetition. Of course, Red Mars is not perfect. They're decades away from running out of key resources and a complete ecological collapse. The Martian's only options are to colonize Earth or Venus, both incredibly dangerous prospects. Somehow, central planning can't see a way out of their dilemma. Engineer Menni is a prequel of sorts, concerning the building of the Martian canals and a metaphor for dialectical materialism as an inter-generational drama. It simply isn't as good as Red Star. This edition also includes some great historical notes on Bogdanov and his place in history.

If science fiction is about (among other things) contact between radically different minds, than it is harder to image a mind more different from our own than the dedicated revolutionary and scientific mystic Alexander Bogdanov.

Bradford loves Constantinople: the culture, the art, the politics, the people. It was the greatest city in the world, even as its once vaunted military decayed. In the 13th century, the city was sacked by the Fourth Crusade, leaving it a husk that was finally plucked by the Turks centuries later. In this quick popular history, Bradford uses the sack of Constantinople to explore the politics of the era, and the machinations of Doge Dandolo, who used financial leverage and a puppet emperor to direct an army of Franks from Egypt to a Christian nation. Carefully, he manipulated events to destroy Constantinople, leaving Venice the supreme trading power in the Eastern Mediterranean. Looted relics decorated cathedrals and monastery across Western Europe, but a unique storehouse of treasures, skills, and ancients writings was forever lost.

Bradford has a turgid writing style, which somehow captures the romance of the period. This isn't the last or only word on the fall of Constantinople, but it's a strong introduction.

Bonus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhqeNUFCyI0