The Wanderer is not not a good book by any means, but it's fun enough disaster fiction and cosmological speculation, if you can overlook some real groaners in the writing.

The story follows a cast of dozens as a garishly decorated planet appears from hyperspace near the orbit of the moon. While at first people stare in wonder at their new purple and gold neighbor, wonder turns to horror as the 80-fold increased gravity of the Wanderer shreds the moon and starts a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, super-tides, volcanoes, and immense storms all over the Earth. Infrastructure, both physical and social, collapses under the immense weight of the unnatural disaster, as the mostly littoral human species flees to any high ground. There are scenes of destruction to rival a Roland Emmerich movie, and one advantage of the large cast is that Leiber can kill some to show he's serious.

Unfortunately, those deaths don't come soon enough, and the basic problem with the book is that it's mostly people in different places reacting to the same events in the same way. The only truly novel situations are two humans rescued/kipnapped by the aliens of the Wanderer. The planet is an artificial battlestation, designed for speed and escape in hyperspace, and crewed by rebels against a stultifying immortal galactic government that seeks to remember as much as possible against the heat-death of the universe. That is a grand idea, but one that appears much too late in the story, and presented in a giant expository monologue by a sexy alien catlady. The A plot of the book follows a group of 'Saucer Students', who happened to be attending a lecture on UFOs when the Wanderer appeared, trying to get an alien Momentum Gun to Vandenberg AFB and the world's best physicist. Though they pass for main characters, they're easily the most boring part of the book. While everybody is cardboard, the other characters are more brightly painted.

So about those groaners: Pointless sex and sadism, racial stereotypes, the hilariously dated 'weed-brothers' wandering Manhattan high on the devil dope while the world ends. This book is also panders to SF fans like crazy: all the smart people drop Heinlein and E.E. 'Doc' Smith references when discussing alien phenomena. I've read worse books, but I've also read better.

This Immortal follows an episode in the long and danger-filled life of Konstantin Karaghiosis, among other names (but call him Conrad). Seat-filling commissioner of Arts, Monuments, and Archives; expert lover, deadly fighter, degenerate sybarite, retired terrorist, and possible demigod, Conrad is called away from his Greek island refuge to serve as a tour-guide for a very important Vegan journalist, a representative of the alien race that now owns most of Earth. This journalist, Cort Mystigo, is writing a report that will determine the fate of Earth, and it is up to Conrad to keep him safe from myriad dangers of Earth, ranging from radioactive monsters to political radicals who want Mystigo dead.

The novel does a great job showing and not telling the dismal future earth. The population has been reduced to a mere 4 million, clinging to islands and a few small resort towns that the organized and aesthetic Vegans use as bases for atrocity tourism, since their species never experienced a nuclear war. With a population this small, it seems plausible that Conrad would know everyone of importance on Earth. The monsters and mutant cannibal tribes are both real threats and psychological markers of the sin of nuclear war. The characters are quite good, if you like them on the hyper-competent side.

But somehow, this book just didn't match my tastes. It was a fine enough dark adventure romp, with humanity stumbling along the verge of extinction and all of earth reduced to a mausoleum. There were a couple of great moments, like dismantling the pyramids to show how they were constructed by playing the film in reverse, and an anthropologist from New Harvard who becomes the witchdoctor of a mutant cannibal tribe, but the moments never really added up to more.

On reading this book, a lot of the advice strikes me as common sense in communication and getting your thoughts in order. On the other hand, having read policy documents before, most of us are manifestly terrible writers. Smith's advice is general, on thinking about an issue in a way that you can honestly present an accurate and evidenced backed policy proposal to people who will need to support or enact it. It's somewhat dry and short on detail, but the general method checklist in chapter 2 covers everything that a successful policy document must have, while the rest of the book covers different forms of policy communication, from position papers to legislative histories to public testimony.

As a short book, it's a solid read and reference for anyone working in public policy.

Briggs is apparently one of the major figures of folklore as an academic discipline, with a PhD from Oxford, and later president of the Folklore Society. The Personnell of Fairyland is an odd little volume. Even if it doesn’t quite match modern standards, the organization and ‘facticity’ of the book make it clear that this is a serious and scholarly collection of British fairy-stories. However, the subtitle is “for those who tell Stories to children,” and every third story or so has a darling little woodcut illustration.

As expected, this is a book of fairy tales. Each individual story is brief, and I recall the longest being no more than seven pages or so. The stories are divided into four major sections, heroic fairies who have great and mythical powers, brownies or little fairies who work in great swarms, tutelary families connected to a particular family or house, nature fairies, and finally assorted giants, witches, and monsters. Additionally, there’s a dictionary of different types of fairies. Generally, the stories involve humans interacting with fairies, sometimes tricking them but usually being tricked by the Fair Folk. There’s some deaths and maimings, although less than you’d see in unbowdlerized Grimm’s fairy tales. The worst thing that English fairies do in these stories is abandon humanity. Some of the tales are in plain English, some in dialect, without much pattern or explanation as to why.

As an introduction and basic reference, this is a decent enough introduction to English fairies. However, it entirely lacks context, and unless you are a particularly gifted reader, I can’t see reading these stories to children.

Burndive is a story of a traumatized boy growing up, and a hope that a long war is coming to an end. I read this without reading Warchild first, so I might be missing some context, but it seemed to make sense. There's a lot going on in this book, and it's fun and fast moving, but has some major structural flaws which I'm going to gripe about.

The first is the protagonist, Ryan Azarcon, child of privilege, child of a broken home, and traumatized survivor of bombings and assassination attacks. Ryan starts out in a bad place: depressed, angry, using drugs and trying to destroy everything around him. Generally, we know that the story is going to be about Ryan growing up and finding himself. that's what stories about 19 year old boys are about. And towards the end, there's some great stuff about old wounds healing and breaking preconceptions, but I'm not sure Ryan earns it. He's too smart and perceptive to be an unreliable narrator, and too mean for me to like.

Second is the FTL and the war. I'm a bit of a nut about the relationship between transit and governance, but I'm not sure that I buy that the ships, stations, and drives implied in the setting would give the plentiful pirates the setting entails. Basically, space is big, pirates need to intercept and board their targets, and FTL ships should just be able to leap away. It probably makes sense somewhere, and most people won't care, but I wasn't able to link up the politics, economics, and technology of the setting in my head.

Third is the Send, the omnipresent news network that invades Ryan's life again and again. His mother is a PR officer, and he has a tempestuous relationship with the news and it's combination of warmongering and celebrity gossip. Since this novel came out in 2003, I think this is a commentary about cable news and the War on Terror, but it could be a lot more pointed, or a lot darker. The divide between the Earth centered Send community, and the personal ties that define the ship-bound pirate culture could have been brought forward more.

There is some other stuff which readers may like or dislike according to their whims. Minor minus was the neologisms. For example, computer hacking is called 'Burndiving' for no apparent reason. Interestingly, this book is also super bi. Ryan has seems to prefer females, but has no problem hitting on men and being hit on in return. Again, I can't tell if it's deliberate or yaoi, but it's a neat point.

So if I griped so much, why four stars? Well, I had a lot of fun reading it, and if the pieces didn't quite come together the way I wanted them to, the individual sentences were really good, enough so to convince me to check out the first book.

Is 'landscape writer' a thing? Kim Stanley Robinson makes it his thing, and in this book he takes us to Antarctica, continent of ice and rock, the last great wilderness, a beautiful and deadly place.

I've been there, just as a tourist during one of the nicest summers on record, but KSR nails the ineffable qualities of the place and the strangeness of light and distance. Robinson spent a season in Antarctica with the NSF's Artists and Writer's Program, and it was time well spent on all sides. By far my favorite character was Ta Shu, a feng shui geomancer and artistic resident streaming the landscape back to an audience of millions with a running commentary on its five-dimensional harmony and nano-poems. Ta Shu feels both entirely authentic and very alien.

blue sky
white snow

There are more mundane people as well, and the A plot concerns the future of the Antarctica and the Earth, as scientists wrestle with evidence for the last warm period, support staff grumble under the feudal structure of science, oil exploration teams prepare to extract natural resources, 'native Antarcticans' try to stay below the radar, and ecological saboteurs plan a massive attack in the name of the planet. There's a sorta a love triangle between X, a blue collar General Field Assistant, Val, an elite expedition guide, and Wade, senator's aide, but the characters, while round and unique, feel somewhat muted compared to the landscape and the simply trials of getting anywhere alive on the continent. The only true shared culture of Antarctica; the early expeditions of Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen, come through again and again, along with the disagreements between different political factions. Though this is science fiction, the issues that Robinson explores are still very much alive.

Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed is a very hard book to write about. It's clearly great literature, but exactly why is hard to pin down.

The Dispossessed centers on the story of Shevek, a physicist and idealist, but the true characters of this book are the twinned planets of Urras and Anarres. Urras is a world much like own our, of nations and government and money, a garden planet riven by dominance and war. Anarres is a dry and dusty moon, home to an exile civilization of revolutionary anarchists. The story takes place in alternating chapters, an Urras track beginning with Shevek's escape from Anarres to Urras, and an Anarres track following his life and growing dissatisfaction with his homeworld.

This is a book about revolutionary anarchism, about the radical potential for humans to be truly free. But what separates it from most utopian literature is Le Guin's reflexive critique of Anarres. Most utopian literature is about a plan; "if you designed a society like, this is how it'd be perfect." Le Guin shows us a society that is freer and more egalitarian than any that exists on Earth, backed up by a rational language that makes even thoughts of ownership and dominance difficult to express, but she is also wise enough to show how the revolution has become conservative and fearful, how social norms replace law, how the dominance games of politicians and academics still play out in the absence of formal power, and how true freedom must begin and end in the spirit.

The Urras plot concerns Shevek's final work on a Theory of Simultaneity and Sequency (the caps are deserved), a unified theory of physics which would make faster-than-light travel possible, along with the ansible communicator from the rest of Le Guin's Hainish cycle. Fictional physics on this level aren't really my cup of tea, but the book takes a solid run at how cosmology, and how we perceive time, matters as a fundamental basis for society and ideas like property and profit. Shevek's idealism won't let him give his invention to either the grubbing 'invisible parliament' of his own world, which opposes new ideas, or the profiteering and warmongering Urrasian academics who host his stay. There's a war and a great strike, but somehow the action on Urras seems unreal and irrelevant, compared to the dust and hard work of Anarres.

Stepping back to look at the big picture, The Dispossessed covers a lot of the same territory as Left Hand of Darkness, with a lone ambassador coming to another world, but I think The Dispossessed does a better job by giving us some context for Shevek, and his principled opposition to walls and barriers of all kind, especially walls that exist in the head and heart. Le Guin's talk of Simultaneity and Sequency is also about the question "can two people really meet?" and "how do we know when become ourselves?"

This was also a solid year for the Hugos as a whole. The Mote in God's Eye could've easily won in any of the past five years or so. Flow My Tears The Policeman Said is one of my favorite Philip K Dick stories. I haven't heard of Fire Time or Inverted World, but both sound fascinating.

Illich makes a radical critique of education, capitalism, statism, and almost everything that is both extremely focused and also directs slashes at nearly every underpinning assumption of society. Illich's most direct criticism is at the idea that formal education solves problems. Rather than being about skill acquisition or personal development, Illich identifies schools as the ideological wing of the consumption-production engine that is capitalism. The role of schools is to produce ignorance rather than insight, to create credentials and envy of credentials rather than mastery, to suck up surplus labor and intellect in the Promethean furnace of a culture consuming itself. The criticism starts with Dewey's ideas about education, and moves through Johnson's Great Society, international development, drawing heavily on Illich's personal experiences in Mexico, the Vietnam War, and the industrial design of the transistor radio. Don't mistake this for Marxism though; Illich calls out the Soviet system as another gear in the world-spanning educational system.

Against traditional classrooms and curriculum, Illich imagines 'learning webs', where computers would connect people who wanted to learn something to people who already knew it, forming tutoring pairings and affinity groups that meet in cafes and converted shopfronts. Mass production of tapes and audiobooks, along with appropriate technology in the developing world, will liberate minds. Most of Illich's criticisms are directed at the liberal consensus, and he's not afraid of citing Milton Friedman's voucherization of school systems as a positive example, but mostly it's the idea of any sort of formal, obligatory, schooling that is the enemy. There's a direct line between military discipline and educational discipline, and for Illich both are wasteful, anti-human, and evil. The institutional attempt to achieve a goal will always fulfill it's opposite.

As a historical artifact, this work was published in 1971, when for a brief glorious moment it seemed like the Counterculture would triumph, and that all the corrupt and evil institutions of a rotten society would crumble to be replaced by a new dawn met people where they were. Now, more than 40 years on, we know that this moment would last only a little longer. But Illich, even in his strident utopianism, wasn't wrong. Speaking as someone in the 23rd grade, too much education is useless credentialism that serves to indebt the ambitious working classes. Those with power and money have their own networks of private tutors to pursue actually effective education for their children, while basic skills like knowing how to do something, or how to think in a straight line for 500 words, are increasingly the privilege of the elite.

City of Gold is an atmospheric but dissipated espionage novel, following a trio of more-or-less unlikable characters around, but failing to make much of them. Cairo in 1942 is trembling before Rommel's next strike, but a city about to fall is an opportunity to make a big score. The Western Desert is littered with abandoned weapons, Jews and Arabs and buying up guns, and somewhere is Rommel's spy; a man with perfect access to British orders and intelligence. The Nazi general knows what the British are going to do before they know it, and as long as he has his source, he'll take Cairo.

Ross is a murderer and deserter, yet a decent man who is avoiding the firing squad by assuming the identity of a dead officer. Ordered to find Rommel's spy, Ross's needs to fake being a detective and figure out his next move. Ross's story was the one I thought most interesting, but it doesn't really go anywhere.

Peggy West is a British Jew, a nurse, and a longtime resident of Cairo caught up in the treacherous world of espionage, and trying to figure out where her loyalties really lie.

Wallingford is a deserter and black marketeer, creating a fictional commando unit to disguise his actions. Unfortunately, he lacks any sort of dash and charm. He's just an overgrown schoolboy, using his bully habits to get enough money, because getting money is what you do.

Along with some minor characters, they wander around Cairo drinking, lying, and otherwise deceiving themselves and each other. But in the end, all their effort is fruitless (you can google up the historical source of Rommel's information), and they are released to their just ends.