Heists are not something that RPGs do well. There's too much dungeon crawling and caution in our bloodstream, too much of an urge to master the rules and build an unstoppable juggernaut of a character. Leverage RPG is an exception-combining an elegantly light system in Cortex Plus with very solid gaming advice to help GMs and players come up with session long capers in classic Leverage style. There a natural affinity between episodic TV shows and episodic RPG sessions, and this games uses that brilliantly.

The book itself is a decent 200 pages, with your usual chapters on character creation, the rules, and creating an adventure. The adventure format is simple and elegant: Introduce a Mark who's screwed over a client somehow. The Mark has some obvious strengths and some hidden weaknesses. Figure out how to negate the Mark's strengths and bring pressure on the problem, and what's stopping the players from doing that right then and there. Rolling a one adds a Complication and gives the players a Plot Point, which are then used to make sure scenes go the players' way, particularly the vital ending scene.

The book itself is very nicely designed, with a breezy conversational tone. Lots of stills from the Leverage show provide some visual jazz. Summaries of Season 1 & 2 episodes described in the same adventure format help make it clear how the adventure design process works. My only quibbles is that there isn't a glossary (although the well laid out index could substitute), and that while the Cortex system is very simple, there are enough nooks and crannies that I really wanted a one page flowchart summarizing *everything* that could happen when the dice are down.

Nobody would ever accuse Harry Turtledove of originality. For a man who specializes in alternate history, his stories usually take a pretty blunt point of departure: time travelling South Africans give the Confederacy AK-47s, aliens with Gulf War military tech attack in the middle of WW2, thing like that.

The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump is set in a world where all religions are true, where magic works, and where magic is used to duplicate technology in the early 90s-mostly through endless puns of varying quality. That said, the book itself is an enjoyable noir/technothriller hybrid about strange doings in Angel City, and for all the bad jokes feels appropriately gritty and multicultural, with a lot of freeways and bad hamburgers. As somebody who grew up in a very mundane LA, it's feels just like home.

Hounded from Manticore in the wake of Field of Dishonor, Honor has landed on Grayson, to grieve, heal, and take up her new responsibilities as Steadholder Harrington. But not all is well on Grayson, and Protector Benjamin's reforms have provoked a powerful conservative reaction. Honor is the target of a massive conspiracy to set Grayson back to the bad old days, and of course the Peeps are up to their usual military tricks.

There are moments in this book that really work-everything from the assassination attempt against Honor to the confrontation in the Chamber of Keys is really compelling and dramatic. That aside, this is where the cracks in the series show. One common complaint is that Honor is infallible, and this would've been a perfect place for her to stumble a little. Sure, Honor is a very good starship commander and martial artist, and she wins her pistol duels, but she's operating entirely out of her element. She could've failed to delegate effectively when promoted from battlecruiser captain to superdreadnought admiral, or screwed up civilian administration somehow, or just have more cultural problems. But no, Honor is perfect and so is almost everything in her life, and she has to win her victories by unimaginable margins.

The other problem is that while Weber is a decent wordsmith and knows how to steal from history, he's a lousy sociologist, and the more we see of Grayson the less it holds together. I just don't buy the balance between the Steadholders, the Protector, and the Church, or the way that Graysons seem so ordinary and American, when in fact they're a monolith religious nation practicing polygamy and radical gender inequality living on a planet that's basically a toxic waste dump.

In my headcanon, this is where the Honorverse ends. Sure, there's more story to tell (and books to sell), but her personal arc has reached its limit. Weber might agree, since the later books get bloated with secondary viewpoint characters, digressions on treecats, and all kinds of nonsense.

Sam Adams had a problem. The numbers just didn't make sense. As a low level CIA analyst in 1966 working on a study on Viet Cong morale, his numbers of defections and desertions suggest the enemy would be gone in a year--a trend at odds with their growing strength on the ground. As he tracked down the source of this discrepancy, he realized that the MACV Order of Battle Estimate, the official count of the enemy at about 250,000, was a fiction based on the flimsiest of evidence. Adams struggled for years to get the right numbers out-his own estimate was that there were at least 250,000 more Viet Cong than on the list. In 1968 he was proven right, when during the Tet offensive 250,000 enemy soldiers that officially did not exist swarmed over American positions and dealt the greatest political blow of the war. But Adams was not vindicated, he was an embarrassment, and after five more years of spinning his wheels he quit the CIA for good in 1973.

War of Numbers somehow makes bureaucratic infighting as exciting as any battle. The OBE was the cornerstone of Westermoreland's strategy of attrition; the number upon which all other assessments of logistics and destruction were based. The clash between Adams' evidence based methods (even if the statistical inferences would make a professional cry) and MACV; who ignored small units, large numbers of logistics troops, and even entire classes of the enemy (guerrilla-militia) responsible for the mines and scouting that wore American forces down tactically, is a great story of deceit and failure in American leadership. The perpetrators shift; General Westmoreland (Adams was later the target of a libel suit by Westmoreland for his role in a CBS documentary), CIA Director Richard Helms, MACV J-2, other parties in the White House. Ultimately, Adams comes down to the conclusion that it was a mass collective delusion. A whole group of people responsible for running the war decided to run it on what was politically tenable rather than what was true.

Along with that grand narrative, War of Numbers has some great anecdotes about the life of a spy in the 60s and 70s. Its a lot of overstuffed arm-chairs, endless cables, 5x8 index cards, meetings with people trying to bury you. Two incidents stick out--one where Adams ran all over town looking for a Vietnam expert who worked at the next desk (he had started with her), and a second where he had to specially request a Viet Cong map of South Vietnam for one of his reports (the Viet Cong and government maps had different districts). How could we win if we we're not even on the same map? There's also a lot of black humor: parody songs in the Cosmos Lounge, quotes from Giap in the Saigon office. Adams would probably be the first to admit that he had an easy war, all he staked was his reputation, but his attempts to inform strategy with actual numbers were as a brave of a contribution as anything else.

Theological science fiction is an odd niche, but both religion and science fiction deal with man against the Cosmos, silhouetting the ordinary against the mystery of the unimaginal. The Sparrow is a compelling, finely crafted story of first contact and its consequences, tracing in parallel the Jesuit organized mission to the alien world of Rakhat, and the spiritual reconstruction of Father Emilio Sandoz, the lone survivor. Truly, a wondrous, sensitive, and generally excellent novel.

I've been contemplating a project to read all the Hugo winners for Best Novel, so let's start with the first, the intense and incredible Demolished Man.

Business tycoon Ben Reich needs to eliminate his greatest rival, but telepathic police make it impossible to have murder on your mind. Reich's plan is bold but full of holes, and it's up to psychic detective Lincoln Powell to unravel his scheme and collect damning physical evidence. What follows is an inverse mystery, a tense thriller, and a clear masterpiece of science fiction. Some stuff, female characters for example, are outdated to offensive, but the typographic conventionals used to illustrate telepathy feel surprisingly modern. Bester sketches rather than fleshes out his setting, with my favorite part being the creepy beneficent/eugenic long-term plan of the telepath guild to replace baseline humans. Of course, this is more than just a dumb adventure story, and the climax and conclusion get hyper-Freudian. It's an outdated theory, but one handled with verve and style.

Rumor (okay, other reviews on Goodreads) has it that this is the worst book ever to win the Hugo. I don't know if that's true-yet. I do know that this is not a good book from any kind of literary perspective, and one that buries its occasional good ideas under tedious essays.

The story begins with Joey, an 8 year old boy in a working class family who is a telepath. Unique in the world, a basic extrapolation of 1950s America, he discovers a sympathetic university psychiatrist who tells him to conceal his gift from the world. The plot then skips forward 14 years, with Joey as a college senior working in the lab of Dr. Billings, the great psychosomaticist, some sort of combination of behavioral therapist and neuroscientist. Dr. Billings is given a government grant to develop an automatic pilot for automobile and airplane that will avoid collisions. Billings decides the request is actually for a general purpose AI capable of moral reasoning, and with the help of Joey to coordinate an interdisciplinary research team, achieves the first genuine breakthrough in decades. The AI, named "Bossy" for its resemblance to a cow, prompts a public outcry, and Joey and Billings and another member of the research team are forced to go into hiding in San Francisco. They perfect Bossy in a warehouse owned by an Mable, an old retired prostitute, use the completed Bossy to psychosomatically rejuvenate Mable, opening a path to immortality. They then seek shelter with Kennedy, the last independent industrial titan, and then re-use a public outcry about the potential of immortality to get Bossy approved by the government and sold as a mass-market consumer device.

So yeah, as you can see, the plot has grand ideas, but does almost nothing to link them together. There are some really interesting ideas about the relationship between science and society, innovation being crushed by government dominance, the exigencies of the Cold War turning American into a totalitarian dictatorship more-or-less identical to the USSR, the next stage in human evolution and its relationship to artificial intelligence. The problem is that instead of demonstrating these ideas in plot, the story pauses for a character to have a long internal monologue. There's something here for say, a literary critic tracing the genealogy of certain Big Ideas in science-fiction, but this book isn't just old, it's positively musty--and not in a way that inspires any kind of nostalgia or imagination.

Game Design Workshop is a pragmatic textbook on how to make games, with a plethora of useful exercises in analysis and design for helping rookies turn their game design dreams into reality. There isn't much in the way of theory here; a brief nod towards Huizinga's magic circle and the flow state, and then the game delves into the meat of prototype, iteration, and improvement. As a gamer, it's interesting to see the small number of games which people at the top of the field consider their inspirations (ever heard of M.U.L.E?) As a teacher, there are tons of good exercises that could be adapted into homework.

Game Design Workshop is deliberately agnostic towards what type of games its reader will make, although there is a slight trend bias towards cardboard prototypes of computer games, a practice followed by many major studios. The advice on using playtesters was particularly good. Compared to Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses this book is much less theoretical, preferring a lose concept of 'play' to stricter ideas about storytelling, simulation, and balance.

I read the second edition, which in 2015 is slightly outdated, but I have faith that the 2013 3rd edition is a worthy upgrade. If I were teaching a class on game design, I'd definitely consider this book a central resource.

For one of the previous books, I asked "when will Miles mess up?" A Civil Campaign is when he screws the pooch. Miles wants to marry Ekaterina, and goes about it in much the same way that he'd go about assembling a mercenary fleet: a lot of fancy footwork, a little deception, and careful winnowing of options to force the opponent to submit to your will without conflict (Miles follows Sun Tzu and Liddell Hart on strategy). Of course a relationship is not a battle, and after the Worst Dinner Party of All Time, Miles finds his life in ruins-with vomiting, and has to rebuild everything.

'Comedy of manners' is not really my genre, but A Civil Campaign seems like a worthy part of the canon of Austen and Bronte. The genre as whole rests on the absurdity of elaborate social mores; of which there are plenty on Barrayar, and the necessity of the two protagonists getting over themselves so they can fall in love; also true of Miles and Ekaterina. The thoughts on reputation and honor are quite nice, and Miles' apology letter is simply epic.

There are also some good sideplots: The best one was the interactions of the trans Lord Dono Vorrutyer and the arcana of primogeniture inheritance law. Mark Vorkosign pursues a relation with Kareen Koudelka while trying to start a new business founded on insect-produced food, with a lot of of comedy. There are weddings aplenty by the end.

But where this book drops is the lowness of the stakes. Even at the worst points of the courtship, I never doubted that they'd end up together. Bujold's characters are just too fundamentally decent and right for each other. The threat is slander that Miles had Ekaterina's husband killed, which lacks credibility since we all know (along with the important characters) the real story of what happened. Even the worst slander couldn't damage Miles' career or stick to Ekaterina and her son. The foes are just so petty and incompetent compared to the galactic spies of the rest of the series that Miles and co. barely slow down running them over. Well, maybe you can't have everything.

This is where Heinlein starting getting heavy and weird. The story of the book is pretty simple. Valentine Michael Smith is the last survivor of an expedition to Mars, raised by Martians and brought back to Earth. He learns the absurdity of being human, and then teaches humans how to be Martian in a freaky-deeky free love cult that apparently served as the basis for at least one real life religion.

This book shines in its depiction of Martian philosophy. I don’t think there’s ever been a depiction of an alien mind as coherent as the flashes we get from the Martians. They are patient, logical, relentless; practically a geological force. The essence of the Martian philosophy is the word “grok”, which entered mainstream language for a while, and literally means “to drink”, but implies “understand”, “merge with”, “love/hate” and hundreds of other concepts. Once a Martian (or a human trained in Martian thought) groks something, they have incredible powers: telekinesis, teleportation, telepathy, the ability to banish people and things from this universe. With Martian thinking comes a newfound ethical awareness, the understanding that “Thou art God”, and are responsible for the shape of the universe. Jealousy, greed, illness, all the traditional deadly and venal sins are banished in the light of Martian enlightenment.

Heinlein uses this Martian philosophy to take a shotgun to traditional pillars of morality. The church, the state, marriage and monogamy are all mocked and revealed as hollow shells before the absolutely moral innocence of the Man from Mars. Religion is the main target, with Michael Smith using the legal shield of religious freedom to shelter his illuminated cult. A secondary religious target are the Fosterites, a new church founded on the pleasure principle and a hefty dose of violence against heretics. To me, the Fosterites look most like the rock-and-roll Christianity of American megachurches, but there are shades of Mormonism and Scientology as well. The free love advocacy towards the end was apparently immensely scandalous at the time. And of course, the ritual cannibalism that Michael Smith’s church follows is distasteful in a lot of places more exotic than Kansas.

Of course, some stuff seems oddly retro, and not in a good way. For a free love cult, Smith’s people are resolutely straight; no homo here. Everything is grounded in the male-female duality, not person-to-person intimacy. Mad Men style sexual harassment is played straight up, as delightful and pleasant and of no great concern, rather than as the front-line of patriarchal oppression. Female characters were never Heinlein’s strong suit, and the fact that there are so many just gives the book more time to fall flat on their presentation. A Greek Chorus of literal angels appear once in a while to comment on events to no real purpose. There’s new technology, with 3D television and flying cars, but the story doesn’t feel particularly grounded in any particular extrapolation of events. It’s just the 1960s, but moreso.

Where this book really annoyed me was the character of Jubal Harshaw. I don’t mind a lecture, if it’s intelligent and says something new. Harshaw is a Heinlein self-insert character: octogenarian superstar author, rugged individualist, pessimist, universal expert, father to Michael Smith’s humanity, and waited on hand and foot by three beautiful secretaries. Harshaw is supposed to be common-sense wisdom, as opposed to the expert lunacy of the modern world and the alien mindset of the Martians, but he just strikes me as a cranky coot uplifted to Mary Sue status through the undeserving love of the author.

Stranger in a Strange Land has attracted a lot of flack, much of it undeservedly (the one star reviews I’ve seen make me wonder if those reviewers have ever read a truly awful book). I cannot help but love what it’s selling: the idea that if human beings might learn to think straight, we might transcend our ape pasts and become truly luminous beings. You don’t need to believe this, and I don’t think Heinlein did either, but it’s a wonderful idea perfectly presented.