Mike Resnick is one of the most nominated science fiction authors. A prolific writer with a long career, Resnick keep filling the short fiction sections of the Hugos and Nebulas, and has won a few awards as well. This collection is themed by viewpoint. Every single story is told in first person, from the point of few of a slightly odd protagonist in an odd situation. Resnick specializes in humor and Jewish shtick, so if you find that funny you'll enjoy this collection. If that isn't your thing, this will be a solid miss. A few more ironic stories (The Wizard of 34th Street) balance out the simply dumb, but nothing in here will take much time or brain power.

Ho is the precis of much longer political biography. In 1971, Ho the man, the thinker, and revolutionary political leader had already disappeared behind decades of underground life on the run and deliberate communist myth making. Halberstam draws from the best available evidence to describe Ho Chi Minh's career. Ho was an ardent Vietnamese nationalist who, while living in Paris around World War I, found the Communist Party to be the only group speaking to the concerns of colonized people. When the chance for Vietnamese freedom came post World War 2, the Vietn Minh was the group best placed to seize it, whatever the cost.

At just over 100 pages, and based primarily on interviews with a handful of Western journalists and writings from the 1920s, this book is necessarily thin of hard details. Halberstam is an engaging writer as always, but he doesn't have the tools to grapple with the big questions: How did the Viet Minh grow and win their wars? How did Ho Chi Minh avoid the authoritarian purges and cults of personality that characterized other Communist parties? (Not to cast Ho Chi Minh as blameless. There is blood on his hands, but it's nothing compared to Stalin and Mao.)

I'm sure better books on Ho Chi Minh have been written since the 70s.

The Logic of Failure is a popular translation of what appears to be some pretty hefty scholarly literature (I think-didn't bother to actually check 30 years of literature in German), that is hindered by becoming largely accepted wisdom. Dorner is a cognitive scientist who based this book on a series of studies of how people interacted with computer models: desertification in the Sahel, the economy and politics of a small town, predator and prey interactions. These studies, along with some examples drawn from recent events like Chernobyl and military history, are used to explain failure a consequence of a lack of understanding of complex systems.

Complex systems, interconnected networks with time-delays, buffering units, hidden keystone variables, and unclear indicators, are everywhere in the real world. Unfortunately, human minds tend to think linearly and concretely. Dorner documents several pathological thinking styles he encounters in his experiments. Some people over-correct, making dramatic changes while chasing a pointer that drowned out any data in induced oscillations. Some people get lost chasing irrelevant details, asking for more information rather than acting. And some people get trapped in methodism, following a predetermined course of action in complete disregard of the information coming in.

Against this, Dorner advocates for having a clear mental model of a system, discrete objectives, and a holistic sense of possible higher-order effects. Make small changes, seek steady states, and do not try and race a chaotic system. He points towards 'wisdom' with maddening vagueness. If there's a major problem with this book, it's that it's been overtaken by the zeitgeist. Dorner's methods are now children's toys rather than cutting edge science. We all 'get' networks and complexity, but we still lack the language to truly understand them.

Electricity was and is one of the first 'modern' technologies, the conjuring of a mystical power by science, harnessed to industry and social ends. Lieberman takes a unique approach to the study of electricity, making a literary analysis of major authors including Mark Twain, Charlotte Gilman Perkins, and Ralph Ellison to trace electricity as a metaphor in American thought, and as an early exemplar of the technological system. This approach blends close reading of texts from literary giants with a theoretically sophisticated approach to the history of technology, and the potential interpretive flexibility of emerging technologies.

This is a book on very specific subject (I was encouraged to read it by the author), and if you don't want to know more about a literary approach to electricity, well, it may not appeal. But in that remit, it is extremely well done.

River of Teeth is novella based on an absolutely nuts alternate history, a plan to introduce hippos to the United States for meat that almost went through. This story bolts the premise on to a bog standard western plot. Houndstooth has accepted a lot of money to clear out feral hippos from an artificial lake on the Mississippi River, and has put together a deadly and sexually ambiguous squad full of old enmities to do it. After that, it's nothing but knives, explosions, and people getting eaten by hippos. Somehow, it adds up to less than it should. A book like this should be Gothic. Should be Southern. Should be Weird. This is passable adventure fiction.

You can say pretty much everything worth saying about powered armor space marines between The Forever War and Starship Troopers. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War covers the same ground of training, combat, recuperation, and command as Heinlein's novel, but from a pacifistic and detached post-Vietnam perspective. William Mandella, our hero, is a reluctant soldier, an "elite draftee" with an IQ over 150 and a physics background sent out to fight an unknown alien enemy, the Taurans, who have been hitting human colony ships. FTL involves jumps through collapsars, black holes with orbiting planetoids, so Mandella and his comrades are trained to fight in extreme conditions just above absolute zero, with seas of liquid helium and deadly hydrogen ice sheets. The plan is simple: land on a planetoid, kill any Taurens, construct a bunker and laser installation and hold till relieved.

Of course, the first rule of all military activity is SNAFU, and for their first mission, Mandella is sent to a jungle world at near boiling temperatures. Their landing site is mile underwater (fortunately their dropships are submersible), the local wildlife is telepathic, and after an unprovoked attack kills the platoon's telepathic sensitive and spookily shadows them. The Tauren's don't fight back, but one escapes in a personal spaceship. Despite the lack of resistance, some of the squad is killed by anti-air weapon. Mandella is disgusted by the use of post-hypnotic suggestion to make him fight. A second encounter in space goes poorly for their cruiser and they retreat, with one of my favorite lines in the book "...surely the Captain was not possessed by something so unmilitary as the will to live." This is where one of the central conceits of the book is introduced. Though FTL exists, relativistic maneuvering around collapsars and fighting in the warped spacetime on portal planets dilates time for soldiers. Soldiers, even if they survive, can never really go back to a planet that has experienced decades of time to their subjective year-long tour. Worse, enemy forces can come from your subjective future, with the benefits of extra R&D. Technically, this advantage applies to both sides at random, but that's cold comfort when the enemy shows up with a superweapon you've never seen and have no counter for.

The second chunk of the book was stripped from the original version (I'm reading the 1991 complete edition), and follows Mandella on an Earth that has gone downhill since he left. His mother is 80 years old, a food war killed billions, and the survivors are equally victimized by a powerful one-world government which controls food, power, and jobs, and criminal factions which provide necessary work-arounds to the system and random criminal violence. Mandella and his lover, lost on Earth, re-enlist on promise of a safe training job and are immediately reassigned to combat. Mandella is no hero, but a knack for survival gets him promoted to Major and strike force command. By now, he's separated by centuries from the troops, who are creche raised and all gay, with heterosexuality treated as a curable deviance. Command is no picnic, Mandella is profoundly alone and untrusted by his troops, and separated forever from his lover. He sets up a base on a larger than average portal planet in the Magellanic Cloud, survives one last battle, which features a lone fighter making an attack run at .999c that destroys the enemy cruiser and shatters Mandella's bunker with an earthquake, and returns home to find that the war is over. Humanity has been replaced by Man, a race of clones, which has reached a peace settlement with the Taurans, also a race of clones. The whole war was a lie, the initial attack faked by UN high command who thought a war was just what Earth needed to kick it out of an economic depression. Baseline humans have settled space, and Mandella's lover Marygay, has also survived, using an obsolete cruiser as a relativistic shuttle until he returns.

Some closing thoughts: Haldeman is obviously a talent. He wrote this book in his late 20s (serialized in 1972, novel in 1974) as an MFA thesis at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which is the major influence on post-war American literary fiction. It's a personal novel as well; Haldeman is a Vietnam veteran with a physics degree, his wife shares a name with Mandella's partner. While Starship Troopers takes war as necessary to glorious, The Forever War sees it as dehumanizing and full of lies. The basic incompetence of commanders, and the numerous ways in which they screw with ordinary soldiers, is a repeated theme. The mutual alienation of soldiers, the society they are "defending", and the reasons for the war, are all directly translated from the Vietnam War. The social side is also fascinating. Mandella's army is a grunt's fantasy, 50-50 coed with willing combat females, legal marijuana after hours, and "Fuck you, sir!" as the mandatory closing refrain. Many changes on Earth are only sketched at, but the shift to mandatory homosexuality as a birth control measure is handled pretty well for a novel written back when being gay was still technically a mental illness ("...you think you're tolerant, sir.") But one of the coolest scifi points, and one which is easy to overlook, is the way The Forever War plays with temporality. While the Vietnam War as a whole seemed to go on forever, individual soldiers were acutely aware of how much time they had left on their 365 day tour, unlike the space marines who are unlikely to ever see the end of their two-year subjective enlistment. The subjectivity of time is another interesting point. In Vietnam, everybody's tours counted down the same, whether you were safe running a PX in Da Nang or an airmobile machinegunner who might see 300 days of combat. Time's the thing.

With The Ruin of Angels, Gladstone shifts The Craft Sequence into a new major arc. The first books stood on their own as fantasy-legal-thrillers, but now he's aiming higher, with the fate of the entire world at stake. The magical technology that sustains the setting is burning through necromantic earths and human souls at a dangerous pace, and something has to give.

The city of Alikand is one place where that something has already given. The first Master of the Craft, Gerhardt, waged war against the gods here 150 years ago. The gods killed him, but he refused to die, and the aftermath wore a hole in Reality, for lack of a better term. The city was reconstructed by the Iskari, squid cultists who unblinkingly observe a new city of Agdal Lex, on top of but not the same as the ruins of Alikand. Agdal Lex is a trade center across the wastes, and a hot startup scene for artists and dreamworkers inventing more user friendly forms of communication than the nightmare telegraph. And there's a lively criminal underworld of refugees and renegade archivists delving artifacts from dead Alikand.

Kai Pohala (from Five Fathoms Deep) arrives in Agdal Lex to make some deals, invest some money. Her sister Ley is there, and Ley is in massive trouble, tied up with a Craft startup with covert funding from the Iskari squid cultists that could save or destroy the world. Zeddig is a delver still in love with Ley. And everybody is going to put it all on their line to get what they want: love, and power, and a world remade.

This is the most ambitious Craft book yet, and the longest. The plot sometimes got lost in descriptive writing, though Gladstone is talented enough that it's okay. I think the biggest problem is in the characters. Ley is the protagonist, in that she initiates the action, but she's a cipher for much of the book. It works to the extent that you buy Kai and Zeddig's need to save Ley. If this love feels artificial sometimes, well, love doesn't need to make sense.

As the introductory essay makes clear, California is a state at home with the uncanny. Defined by generations of seekers and dreamers, from the Gold Rush to Hollywood to Silicon Valley, California is the kind of place where strange and normal are neighbors in the same ticky-tacky subdivision. What you get in this collection are 26 stories (and beautiful cover artworks) about California ranging from horror to fantasy to scifi, but mostly in that liminal gothic slipstream genre pioneered by (adopted) Californian Ray Bradbury.

The stories are universally strong, by well-known masters of short form fictions. I particularly liked S. Qiouyi Lu's "From Something Emerging" and Laura Blackwell's "The One Thing I Can Never Tell Julie", but everybody will have their own favorites. The settings and themes of the story vary, but are biased towards ordinary working people, small towns, and the suburbs of San Francisco. There are no starlets and venture capital unicorns to be found. Strange California is a little outside my usual reading, but it's quite enjoyable. Although as an Angelo, I wish we'd had more than one story set in L.A. So it goes.

There's a strand of libertarian internet thought that argues that computer networks, personal liberties, and immense profits are bound together like a coaxial cable. No authoritarian or socialist nation could ever invent the Internet. At best, they can buy these technologies from robust free societies. And on one level this is true: The Internet was invented by Americans, not Soviets. But on another level, this is false. The early internet was robustly supported by a profoundly non-capitalist military-academic complex. And in the Soviet Union, mathematicians, engineers, and cyberneticists worked on their own network.

In How Not to Network a Nation, Peters traces the origins and collapses of the Soviet network. Anatoly Kitov and Viktor Glushkov, two mathematicians inspired by a copy of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics in a military library, conceived of computerization as the solution to the creaky command economy of the Soviet Union. A computer network would serve as a national nervous system, linking automated factories with statistical planners in regional centers and Moscow. Glushkov got his own research center, named Kybergrad, with hacker culture Soviet-style (including a saxophone playing robot as a mascot), but plans for OGAS, the All-State-Automated-System, never seemed to quite jell. Even as the Soviets introduced computers to the factory floor and long-distance networks for military radars, the idea of a national civilian computer network remained just that; an idea. Research was sidetracked into problems of statistical management, and the program was finally killed by the Politburo in 1970, a year after ARPANET went online.

Peters deploys the concepts of hetarchy, and Arendt's theory of polis and oikos to explain the collapse, but behind the complicated theory the matter is simply one of power. The high powers in the Politburo who ran the Ministry of Finance, Defense, and the statistical planning bureaus were unwilling to delegate power to dreamy cyberneticists. The low powers who controlled the material facts of the Soviet economy were unwilling to give up their black market perks and influence. When the moment of truth came in 1970, the cyberneticians lacked the allies to fund their dream, and the network died stillborn.

This is a dense academic book, probably best read in partnership with a volume on the Soviet economy. The human glimpses of Glushkov and Kybergrad are oasis in a wilderness of theory and history. But for a certain kind of scholar, this is like a portal into an alternate world, where the 'why' of networks was answered by the imperatives of dialectical materialism and the class struggle, rather than serving as the all consuming vortex of lies, distractions, advertising, and surveillance that the internet has become.

Team of Team is one of those odd hybrid books, applying lessons from the military to business and vice versa, structured around General McChrystal's personal memoir of transforming Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) into the globe-spanning terrorist-hunting "sword and shield" that it is today, structured around the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, commander of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

McChrystal and his co-authors (Yale grad Tantum Collins appears to have done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of research and actual word-smithing) lay out a fairly simply story. Modern corporations are structured around efficiency, whether through explicitly Taylorist management practices where every motion is clocked and redesigned for speed, or implicitly through bureaucratic silos. Efficient organizations are great, until they interact with complex and chaotic systems, at which point efficiency becomes less important than adaptability. There are plenty of the usual examples from aviation and natural disasters, to make the case that efficiency and resilience are different goals, and that while machines should be efficient, the parts with humans in them need to be resilience.

The JSOC that McChrystal took over was an organization finely tuned to fight the last war, complicated operations along the lines of the Tehran Hostage Rescue debacle in 1980. In Iraq in 2003, they were stepping up operations and raids from 10 a night to 18 a night, but failing to stop the underground growth of Al Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal realized that his problems were organizational above all else: Vital intelligence went stale as overworked analysts tried to get a handle on a growing backlog of interrogations, documents, and surveillance video. Each individual unit in JSOC was world-class, but the organization was riddle with rivalries and barriers to trust and communication between operations (SEALs, Delta Force, Rangers, etc), analysts, and partner agencies in the intelligence community (CIA, NSA, NRO), not to mention the regular military, the rest of the government, and foreign partners. And above all, no one had a coherent strategic picture.

To fight a netwar, JSOC had to rewire itself. McChrystal institued an open bullpen organization layout at his headquarters in a fortified hanger at Baghdad International Airport. He instituted mandatory daily video conference calls for Operations and Intelligence, at 9 AM EST and 4 PM local time, as Washington was starting its day and operators were moving out for a night of raids. These calls involved thousands of participants, and allowed/required McChrystal to model the deeply inquisitive form of command he saw as necessary to win. JSOC became more flexible and fluid, an organization that made raids based on 'audible' calls and the immediate exploitation of intelligence. Actions went from an average of ~19 a night to over 300. In 2006, they got their man, tracking the elusive Zarqawi through personal networks and killing him with an airstrike.

Some of the stuff in here should be business conventional wisdom: Adaptability is key; architecture is destiny; missions-driven organizations that empower their employees succeed. McChrystal has some very good advice on the importance of asking the right questions, leadership being mostly about setting culture, and that while organizations should be as transparent as possible, leaders MUST MUST MUST resist the urge to micromanage. Delegate, cultivate, and focus on priorities and people rather than processes.

I have a few minor caveats. There's a bit of unwarranted techno-analogizing between computer networks and organization networks. Some of the hard questions about creating a "team of team" are left a little opaque, with that you should check out McChrystal's consulting firm, although the references are discrete and reasonable. Finally, McChrystal elides entirely the major strategic questions surrounding his tenure at JSOC and later in Afghanistan. At best, he achieved medium-level successes that have been submerged in larger strategic reversals. And his habit of 'thinking out loud' in front of a Rolling Stone reporter cost him his command. Anything he could say about the War would be outdated, but if you're looking for that perspective, try another book.