"Welcome Brigador. Great Leader is dead. Solo Nobre must fall. Here is your contract..."

Brigador is the novelized tie-in to my Game of the Year, Brigador a tactical mech action game with a kicking synthwave vibe. This novel covers the events of the night of great leader's death from three perspectives. Armbruster is a recon mech pilot, who turns on his comrades and takes the brigador's contract to destroy Solo Nobre's defenses so it can be reclaimed by the corporation. Captain Blake is an efficient officer trying to carry out her mission in the midst of a massive uprising. Private Kinny is a young recruit with a balky powersuit, trying to stay alive with nothing more than a pair of 8mm machine guns and a vague loyalty to his squad.

There three of them stomp across the slums of Solo Nobre, an isolationist planet a lot like Space North Korea, dealing out high velocity death to anyone unfortunate enough to come in their path. Kinny is the main protagonist, and Buckmaster has a real talent for describing the desperate chaos of a firefight (he's a combat veteran), the superiority of the powered armor suits over human infantry and the improvised technicals of the Corvid rebels, and the building stomping, 105mm cannon blasting, destructive power of Captain Blake's Touro heavy mech.

This is pretty solid milSF, with a few moments that rise above the average. It definitely is superior to Marko Kloos' inexplicably popular Frontline series, even if the 24 hour timeline compresses what can be done with characterization. The thing that dropped this a star for me (and I hate to say it) is that the novel wasn't very Brigador. Videogame tie-in novel is not a medium that gets a lot of respect, but part of the reason why I love the game Brigador is it's event horizon-black sense of humor. Much of the setting is conveyed in snippets of lore about weapons and vehicles, which you buy with money you earn by indiscriminate firefights in populated areas, and the entries are funny. e.g. "This is one of the rare Spacer vehicles you can get good video of if you know a guy. You don't want to know a guy. I am that guy. --Marvin Beck" (who writes a lot of the entries). The novel mostly plays it straight. This is a serious business, people are really suffering, death happens all around you. Armbruster and the spacer who shows up towards the end have some of the proper attitude, but (and it's weird to write this), this novel cares too much.

Still, good enough that I grabbed Buckmaster's novellas on the chance he loosens up with a little more space to write in.

Welcome to a world loosely based on the Silk Road, where every empire rules under a different sky. Two dispossessed heirs, Temur of the great horse clans, and Samarkar once-princess and now wizard-in-training, meet and journey across the endless miles gathering allies and fighting against a murderous cult of the Goddess of Knowledge. The setting is amazing: weird and fantastic and grounded all at once, with believable versions of real Earth cultures without a return to the oddly democratic and Christian kingdom so commonly found in generic fantasy. Bear also treats horses as living creatures, rather than legged motorcycles.

The thing is that aside from the setting, the characters are empty vessels into which the Quest can be poured. Despite their royal blood, cosmopolitan learning, and understated yet exceptional skills, Temur and Samarkar have little agency. They run for survival, pray to their gods, and seek revenge. al-Sepher, the head of an assassin-like cult, at least seems to have a plan, even if his machinations seem to come down to sending outmatched goon squads against our heroes.

Having read another Silk Road themed fantasy recently (book 1 of The Mongoliad) I can safely say that Range of Ghosts is much much better. But while it has some really cool nuggets of detail, the overall plot isn't enough for me to actively seek out the sequels. Maybe if there's a sale, otherwise, my stack of books to read is deep enough these are going on the back-burner.

Renaissance Florence is a solid and very readable synthesis of one of the great cities. Drawing on post-war scholarship, and his own PhD work in the archivio de stato, Brucker describes the city in terms of its daily life, dipping through personal letters, business ledgers, and official pronouncements to render the proud and industrious people of Florence at a time when they were the leading city in Europe.

Renaissance Florence was a densely packed urban warren. The city's wealth came from mastery of cloth manufacture, which became the foundation of a European mercantile and banking network. Social life was defined by dense ties between classes, ranging from living on the same street, to rents and patronage, to the complexities of the largely unincorporated laborers and farmers, to the twenty one official guilds and their control of public offices, to the wealthy magnate families who dominated the apex of power but were officially banned from office. It's a complex web who's form shifted a lot over the nearly 200 years covered by the book, but out of this arose the scholarship and artistic creativity that birthed the renaissance. Conversely, the 14th century was also a dark time for the city, marked by the Black Death, recurrent war, and economic stagnation. It's odd that this period, in many ways objectively less prosperous than the ones that preceded and followed it, came to be the Renaissance.

Brucker has a keen awareness for social history, and for the ways in which his sources are representative or unrepresentative of their larger community. He gently chides Marxists for trying to fit the Florentines into a strictly orthodox structure of revolutionary classes, while maintaining an awareness of how birth defined the largely conservative order of his subjects world. This book would make a great major text for a undergraduate class focused on Renaissance Florence, supported by some context for the world and a few chosen primary sources. The biggest strike against it is that published in 1969, it's old, and I'm not sure what new scholarship has revealed.

The New Guinea Campaign is almost forgotten. Compared to the European theater, with charismatic generals like Eisenhower and Patton against the Nazi war machine, or the naval actions in the Pacific with the dramatic clash of carriers before USMC amphibious assaults, the Southwest Pacific Theater has receded from view. MacArthur's overbearing personality and Korean War fall from grace probably have something to do with it, along with the lack of focused battles.

Taafe reads the New Guinea Campaign as a clash of personalities, primarily between MacArthur and his obsession to liberate the Philippines, and the Navy and Joint Chiefs of Staff. MacArthur saw the theater as a race, to get in a strategic position to attack the Philippines before the Navy could get in position to attack Formosa. He pushed this pressures onto his subsidary commanders, General Kreuger of the Army, General Kenner of the Army Air Force, and Admiral Kinkaid, and the men who would actually do the fighting.

The jungle was as much their enemy as the Japanese. Trackless mountains, malarial swamps, kunai grass infested with typhus carrying mites, beaches that washed away, and warding coral reefs. Logistics in the SWPA was a nightmare, although the Americans had it far better than the Japanese, who lost millions of tons of shipping to submarines.

This book shows brilliant strategic outflanking moves, followed by the hard work of prying the Japanese out of the jungle. By 1944 the Japanese Army lacked the mobility to offer more than tactical resistance. One of MacArthur's greatest failures as a commander was to denigrate everything after the landing as "mopping up", when the Japanese forces no longer defended the waterline, and turning clearings into airbases required weeks of attacking fortified cave complexes.

In this book, the difficulties of terrain and distance rise foremost, while oddly enough from the title, MacArthur recedes. His victory came from a stubborn refuse to let nature stop him.

Oh, and the book could really use better maps.

Four Roads Cross takes us back to the (publishing order) beginning of The Craft series, taking up a year after Three Parts Dead with Tara Abernathy as in-house counsel to the Church of Tos Everburning, barely treading water on her student loans while trying to untangle the mess the of the first book. When the resurrected goddess Seril starts saving lives in the middle of the nights, the security of investments in Tos is threatened once again, and Tara and Cat and Raz have to stop a very hostile take-over by correcting the ancient sins of the God War.

It's a good Craft book, and I have to admit that I just like Tara more than the other protagonists. She's smart, strong, wicked, and totally overmatched by the forces against her. Gladstone really finds a rolling rhythm here, with his mediation on faith and what brings us together as humans. Tos and Seril are the only real gods left in his world, and from the perspective of this atheist, they aren't all that bad. The return to form is appreciated, especially after Last First Snow. I'm excited to see what follows.

Hess wrote this book at the closing of the Science Wars, a fraught period when physicist-philosophers tried to book post-modernist jackdaw studiers of science out of the academy entirely. He realized, with some alarm, that despite decades of work STS lacked a single graduate level overview of the field, and so wrote a short advanced introduction.

Despite being twenty years old, this book remains a treasure. The major chapters cover philosophy of science through the lens of theory choice, how should scientists distinguish between alternative theories; institutional sociology examining stratification and organization of scientists, the sociology of scientific knowledge, which pries open the black box to examine how scientists actually do their work; and closes with feminist and Foucauldian critiques of science. Hess has a careful sense of the graduations of the phrases "constructivist" and "relativist", and carefully teases out a productive areas for "realist" studies of science, which empower factual evidence of the real world, while still leaving space for change and the weird, for example his own anthropological work on spiritist cults in Brazil.

While some of the terms of the debate have changed, and Hess is not the final authority on every author or idea presented, this is a sweeping and comprehensives literature review. It never hurts to return to the fundamentals.

From an official list of declassified Soviet jokes prepared by the CIA (no kidding)

"A train bearing Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev stops suddenly when the tracks run out. Each leader applies his own, unique solution. Lenin gathers workers and peasants from miles around and exhorts them to build more track. Stalin shoots the train crew when the train still doesn't move. Krushchev rehabilitates the dead crew and orders the tracks behind the train ripped up and relaid in front. Brezhnev pulls down the curtains and rocks back and forth, pretending the train is moving. And Gorbachev calls a rally in front of the locomotive, where he leads a chant: 'No tracks! No tracks! No tracks!"

That's the notable feature of Communism. Despite a universal list of atrocities and failures, we can still joke about it. For figures on the left, a brush with Communism isn't the same kiss of death as a similar touch of Nazism (ironic North Korean propaganda hangs behind my monitor). Amis moves through his own biography and family history with Communism to write a personal history of coming to grips with Atrocity, in the person of Stalin, and the twenty million (at least) victims of the gulags, summary executions, purges, and deliberate famines.

Amis is a novelist, not a historian, but what he synthesizes out of the work of others, histories, survivors, and victims, is a picture of one of the great abattoirs of history, Stalin's personal weakness and paranoia, and the terrible way in which his victims came to love him. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this book, as it wandered through Martin's childhood and, his father the ex-Communist, and conversations with Christopher Hitchens, but once he finds his topic, Koba is hypnotic and compelling. We understand Stalin better by seeing his reflection in Martin Amis.

I've been a devotee of Boyd and the OODA Loop as a key strategic concept for a while, the basic premise that by executing "asymmetric fast transients", a fighter can create a fog of ambiguity and fear, blind and disorient their enemy, and ultimately disorient, disable, and kill their foe, even if they are notably weaker and smaller on paper. The broadest principle, that we are in a struggle to survive, and the ability to adapt without losing your essence is the only permanent strategy, made immediate and intuitive sense.

What did not make sense was the application to civilian life, at least until such time as someone hands me command of a Marine Expeditionary Unit. Dr. Richards makes a brave attempt to translate Boyd's briefings into the language of management consulting. As such this is "applied" book, next to the Osinga's book of intellectual theory and Coram's biography (with the caveat that I haven't yet read Hammond's The Mind of War.)

The first, and fundamental step is to think about and apply the Four German Words.

1. Einheit: Mutual trust, unity, and cohesion
2. Fingerspitzengefuhl: Intuitive feel, especially for complex and potentially chaotic situations
3. Auftragstaktik: Mission, generally considered as a contract between superior and subordinate
4. Schwerpunkt: Any concept that provides focus and direction to the operation

By doing so, you create an organization that is resilient and flexible, that is capable of spotting and exploiting opportunities at all level and following through on good ideas without unnecessary friction. The two hardest parts are Einheit, mutual trust, because so much managerial bullshit actually destroys it--I think conventional wisdom is that demoralized drones are easier to manage, even if they produce worse results. Schwerpunkt, the concept that energizes and drives the organization, is also somewhat opaque in application. Richards corrects this in the second to last chapter, where he introduce cheng, the obvious approach (quality, value, performance) with ch'i, the quality of delight or wonder that separates a mundane business from the best performing ones.

That is not to say that is a perfect book. It is somewhat repetitive, and maneuver warfare concepts are ultimately military in origin. Is disorienting the enemy and dazzling customers truly the same thing? Some of the hardest questions go unanswered, like crafting a schwerpunkt from imperfect information about a field, or how to pick which 25%-40% of your managerial staff to cut in this process of becoming Boydian. Richards is also hung up on Toyota as the ideal manufacturing system and Southwest as the ideal airline (caveat: I greatly prefer to fly Southwest whenever I have a choice). But I think Richards is right in saying that the first law of competition is that you cannot be measurably smarter or harder-working than the people you're going up against, and that the only way to be certain to win is to be more agile, to find asymmetric advantages wherever you can.

Dog Eat Dog is a brilliant, laser focused game about the dire consequences of privilege and the violence of colonial occupation. From the start, the game provokes. The Occupation is played by the richest player. Everybody else are Natives, inhabitants of an imaginary Pacific island who will play important roles in the drama to come. Collectively, the group works out a set of rules about the sides. The Occupation is a democracy. The Natives worship many totemic gods, etc. Oh, and there's one master rule: The Natives are Inferior to the Occupation.

From there play proceeds in a series of scenes, set and narrated in what's become story game RPG standard practice. Dog Eat Dog adds in the twist that conflict is escalated first to chance, and then to fiat from the Occupation. After each scene the group passes judgment, awarding tokens to Natives who followed the rules, taking away tokens from Natives who broke rules, and creating a new rule. The basic token economy paces the game, and describes whether the Natives wind up running amok in a suicidal display of futility, or assimilate to the Occupation. The roughly 20 pages of rules are followed by a essay of equal length on the design of the game.

This is a reading, not a playtest review, and like all narrative games, it requires buy-in from the players, but I think this game shines. I've come to the opinion that RPGs are about asking each other "what happens next" and we have rules to help support making the answer to that question interesting. Dog Eat Dog is a stark and provocative game that puts you inside the violence of colonization. There is no out.

A powerful work of magical realism, The Salt Roads follows four connected stories of black queer women across time and space. Metante Mer is a medicine woman and slave in what would become Haiti, trying to survive. Jeanne Duval is the (historical) mistress and muse of poet Charles Baudelaire in 19th century Paris. Thais is a 4th century Egyptian prostitute and slave who goes on a pilgrimage. Between them all, in fragmentary BEATS and BREAKS is the African goddess Lasirén or Ezili, of water and love, who possesses characters and influences events.

There's a lot of style here, and a lot of power in the characters, even if the Lasirén sections are a little overwrought. There's a keen urgency to the loves and lusts of her characters. Yet, I can't help but shake the sense that this is a premise without a conclusion. The deconstruction of Jeanne and Thais (historical personages, even if in some cases scantily documented), works at cross purposes to the construction of Mer-as wise, as powerful, as good. This book says "Wouldn't it be cool if these people existed?", and then having created their existence, ends.