Yoon Ha Lee is rapidly becoming one of my favorite new talents. This short-story collection contains 16 of his favorite works, covering the usual themes: weapons and war criminals, betrayals and apocalypses, symbols and shadows, a high-tension mixture of math, calligraphy, and Eastern mysticism.

If you like what Lee is about, you probably like a whole lot. It feels a lot like H.P. Lovecraft meets Alistair Reynolds, but Lee is by far a better writer than the two of them. If you don't like it, you'll probably find the stories bleak and abstract. And we're all free have different opinions, but if you can't enjoy a story about a gun that erases the target's ancestors from history, leaving the shooter in an alternate universe, than I don't even know what.

Food has always been foremost in the Soviet mind, from the desperate aftermath of the Russian Civil War and the crude markets of "war communism", to Stalin's Holodomor genocides, through utopian schemes to make an Earthly Worker's Paradise, to the basic communal reality of the breadline. Anya von Bremzen and her mother, who emigrated to the US in 1974, walk through their family's past and the Soviet experience by the means of a meal-a-decade, walking the bitter-sweet paths of nostalgia.

This is an astounding picture of ordinary life in the Soviet Union. Anya and her mother were relatively lucky as dissident intelligentsia, their main crime that of constructing a small fantasy away from the grim reality of cramped communal housing, with the multiple families shoved into one set of apartment, and substandard food that hovered just above absolute starvation. Anya recalls being a junior black marketeer, selling scraps of foreign capitalist candy for kopeks at Kindergarten. Soviet cuisine, a mass of yeasty dough, suspicious sausages, and things which were once vegetables, transforms into sublime symbols in the loving hands of the right chef.

Burn is a tense novella that manages to stay one step ahead of the fireline of literary collapse, right through the end. Prosper "Spur" Gregory Leung is a firefighter in the Transcendental State of Walden, a planet that has rejected most technology in favor of a historical human lifestyle and the virtue of simplicity. Walden is locked in a guerrilla struggle with the puk puks, the previous inhabitants of the planet who still want automation. The battlefield are the immense planetary forests, genetically altered fast spreading trees the Waldenites are using to strangle the puk puks, and the arson fires the puk puks use to fight back.

Spur starts the novel recovering in a hospital from severe burns and the psychological trauma of letting his wife's brother and his best friend Vic die as a puk puk traitor. Random calls connect him with The Gregory of L'ung, a galactic child with the power to make luck, among other arcane skills. Now Spur has to go home and confront a mass of curdled small village politics while playing chaperone to an interstellar potentate.

I really enjoyed the tense small-town interactions of people who have known each other from birth, and the way Spur parries their keen Yankee questioning. The final bit, with a sudden fire threatening the town, is suitably dense with firefighting jargon. I don't think Burn quite properly engaged with the central conceit of technology changing the way people live, or rather Kelly couldn't mesh his ambitions with the words on the page, but what would have sunk a novel is brushed past in the shorter form.

Robot Dreams is a collection of stories from the latter half of Asimov's career, studded with some genuine gems (The Last Question, The Ugly Little Boy, Franchise, Hostess), and display his considerable amount of talent. There are a few robot stories at the beginning, but this book centers mostly around Multivac, the great mainframe computer, and a tingling sense of cosmological alienation. Humankind repeatedly turns over vital creative and communal tasks to invisible and arcane machinery, separated from the great masses by a cadre of technician-priests. Or it turns out that our whole civilization is an experiment by cold and vasty intelligence, and we are nearing the point where they decide data collection is over. Asimov is usually seen as one of the cuddlier of the 'greats', less militaristic than Heinlein, less mathematical than Clarke. A more thorough assessment reveals a stark and chilly author, with a deep streak of misanthropy.

And for my own records, that Asimov story about using humans trained in mental math to replace expensive military computers is "The Feeling of Power."

How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the of the classics of the self-help genre, and still holds up today, with lots of examples. Carnegie's principles are simple: stop being such a sourpuss, appreciate other people, avoid fights, and they'll come around to your point of view soon enough. Leadership consists more of praise than of scolding. Become the means by which other people fulfill their desires.

As always the, devils in the details: How does one genuinely appreciate and become interested in other human beings, flawed and mundane as many of them are? How do you balance your own bad habits of braggadocio and point scoring with apply these methods in the moment.

Well, we'll see.

What happens when a small West Virginia town circa 1999 gets sent back to 1632 and plopped in the middle of the 30 Years War, a conflagration that burnt down pretty much all of Germany? Well, for the good people of Grantville, it's time to kickstart the American Revolution 150 years early, and bring the 17th century democracy, human rights, and the American Way.

This book excels in fist pumping America, Fuck Yeah! moments. When the people of Grantville decide to make the best of their situation, or waste some particularly scummy mercenaries, or include refugees of all circumstances in their situation, it's really good. Flint is an old school union Democrat. He wanted to write a book about blue collar folk succeeding in a weird situation, and he did it.

That said, a lot of this book just kind of flops around with too many characters, most of whom are too calm. I really couldn't tell you what distinguished any of the viewpoints from Mike Stearns, the local man turned leader. Three cross-cultural romances tie the human side of the story together, but they were kind of awkward, which may be the point. Similarly, the military side is modern firearms laying waste to tercios, which is fun maybe twice.

Flint has really strong female characters, which is a plus, but he still has no idea how to write women. They're competent, smart, calm, utterly lethal with their choice of weapons, and barely seem human, let alone female. The high school cheerleader and biathlete turned ace sniper is at the top of the list. It's good that they're not damsels in distress, but they're still fetishized.

A More Beautiful Question is a flashy journey through the power of questioning to spark dialog, to bring people together, to upset the world, and too innovate. Berger synthesizes a lot of experience as journalist to look at the role that questioning plays in creativity, and develops a simple model based around "Why?-->What If?-->How?"

This book is best when it's selling ideas: Montessori schools as an antidote to how public schools beat questioning out of kids, the people at The Right Question Institute and IDEO. However, it commits the all-too-common error of assuming that because Silicon Valley people are rich, they are also wise. Berger tries to lay out a hagiographic account of heroically questioning tech founders, which doesn't match up with the actually process of innovation, or the very obvious limits to Silicon Valley ideology. Protip for Uber and AirBNB, wholesale violation of the law is not a business model. And likewise for Google and Facebook, advertising is not a human net good.

Also, questioning is hard. Trust me, as a PhD social scientist the most important part of a project is setting up your research question in a way that is both impactful and doable. Questioning is an action, but it also seems to be a behavior characteristic of a questioning mindset. Why do we stop asking questions? What if we never stopped? How do we ask questions again? This book says the answer is a kind of California zen. I'm less sure.

Forward Air Controllers had one of the most important jobs in Vietnam. They made sure that troops got airpower delivered exactly where they needed it, and not off in the jungle or on friendly positions. With a load of smoke rockets and a great radio network, FACs coordinated the delicate dance of getting bombs on target.

Harrison has a clean style that captures the chaos and complexity of his job, while providing enough context to follow along. Flying low and slow in OV-10 Broncos, his pilots made sure the fast-movers knew where to put their bombs. He also has plenty of 'life in Vietnam' stories, including a madcap attempt to get a pair of cobras out of his hooch's bunker that involved calling in the Green Berets.

All of this makes for a far above average memoir, but where this book gets truly nuts is when Harrison is seconded to MACV-SOG towards the end of his tour. He was shot down supporting operations in Cambodia and hid overnight in a bamboo grove while NVA troops hunted him. Back in the cockpit, on another mission, Harrison landed his OV-10 on a jungle road to pull out a SOG team that had been blown and was out of helicopter range for extraction. This is the kind of thing that gets you the Medal of Honor (Bernard F. Fisher got one extracting a downed pilot with his Skyraider under similar circumstances), but because it was all classified at the time, Harrison got nothing at all.

There were a lot of courageous men in Vietnam. I feel confident in calling Harrison a Hero-with-a-capital-H.

Hearing the Other Side is a technical academic book that hits at a paradox at the heart of democratic theory. Namely, exposure to alternative political views is strongly associated with lower levels of political participation. An educated citizen who understands the issues and alternative rationales for positions is less likely to actually vote. Discourse generates conflict; conflict generates ambiguity; ambiguity generates disengagement. Mutz uses a variety of surveys and experiments to probe the extent that Americans actually experience cross-cutting political dialog, and the impact of that dialog on attitudes, and finds that Americans are generally embedded in more homogeneous networks than we might expect, and that contrary naive models of political engagement, more heterogeneous networks lead to less engagement. She postulates a simple, and therefore likely true psychological mechanism, that the social costs of taking extreme and consistent political positions is not worth the resulting arguments.

In 2017, this book is approaching the status of a classic. It was published in 2006, and most of the research was done in the late 90s and early 2000s, which feels like some kind of vanished Paleozoic era, politically speaking. As such, the results are untainted one way or another by Facebook flamewars, twitter botnets, dank memes of the Communist or Fascist variety, and everything else that makes up politics in the present. I don't think any of these developments invalidate Mutz's point. The internet makes all of these discussions about deliberation vs Totally Destroying the Other Side much the same, but moreso.

Sadly, there are several interesting corollaries which are raised and not explored. More educated people live in the least diverse settings. Republicans are more extreme in their views than Democrats, even pre-Tea Party and Trump. The conclusion, that norms for hearing the other side should be more broadly distributed through society and not just confined to legislative elites who actually make policy, is a floppy statement out of line with the clarity and logic of the rest of the book. Still, this is a powerful and potent evidence-based look at why theories of liberal democracy are just that: theories.

This book is like a tactical nuke: small, dense, and explosive. Rush Hills was a literary editor of the old school, in charge of fiction at Esquire in the days when you could say with a straight face that you read it for the articles. In WIGSSIP he explains what the literary short story is, how it differs from the sketch or 'slick fiction', and how to go about writing one yourself. This isn't a manual, more of a mediation on that most elusive and evocative of forms, the literary short story, but the ideas of coherence, moving characters, and a crisis point are vital ways for an aspiring author to rise above the traps of the mundane.

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Updated for 2017: I return to WIGSSIP whenever I'm having trouble with my own fiction. This time around, the advice centered on character, and your character's roundedness and capacity for change. I think Hills is right. Get the character right, and the rest will flow naturally.