When LBJ and his Whiz Kids marked targets at the Pentagon, it was Ed Rasimus and his brothers-in-arms who applied the graduated pressure of Operation Rolling Thunder. Flying F-105 from bases in Thailand, Lt. Rasimus went up against MiGs, SAMs, and layers of flak, screaming in across the deck to blast targets with tons of bombs before racing back to safety.

As an author, Rasimus has a cold, almost clinical voice in describing his missions, his fear, and the courage it took to fly a mission into North Vietnam. There's a distance to this memoir, whether it's describing the desperate radio calls coordinating the rescue of a downed pilot, or after hours hijinks at the Officer's Club. For what it's worth, he's a precise and competent writer, giving a clear view of his slice of the air war. Two moments make this book a classic: one an extended riff on the difference between pilots who fly fighters and fighter pilots. And a quote which I want to reproduce in full.

Let there be no doubt about it, running along the treetops at 540 knots in a flight of four F-105s loaded with high explosive ordinance may be the most exciting thing a man can do with his pants on. You've got the most impressive piece of machinery on the planet strapped to your ass, and it responds to your every wish. The throttle controls the beast's heartbeat, and the slightest movement of the stick directs your flight path. You're the Lord of Evil perched on your rocket-powered throne, coming to deliver justice. It's exhilarating and thrilling, frightening and almost orgasmic. But it isn't necessarily tactically sound.

Hot. Damn!

There's also a lot of good meat here on the air war, and the fractal fuckedupness that was Vietnam. From the grand mission of sending 50+ plane flights with MiGcaps and Wild Weasels and everything to hit a few suspected buried oil drums, or the rules of engagement that protected targets like SAM sites under construction. A policy that no pilot would be forced to fly a second tour until everyone had flown one, meant that Rasimus's hot, mean, and crazy fighting Lieutenants were replaced by Majors who'd last flown transports, or worse a desk at the Pentagon. Because Thailand was not a combat zone, pilots didn't get official R&R, which meant Rasimus was trapped in a Catch-22 limbo with no way to get back to base while in Japan, and had to play diplomatic courier to get a seat back to the war.

So far, I think I prefer Trotti's Phantom over Vietnam, but I'm excited to read Rasimus' second book.

I read M. John Harrison's Light and liked it enough to pick this book off my metaphorical ebookshelf. I regret almost everything. Viriconium is three novels and seven short stories set in and around a fantastic city of the same name. It's firmly of the dying earth sub-genre (see Vance, Jack and Wolfe, Gene), where the diminished inhabitants of a high-tech civilization try to make sense of their lives in the wondrous and deadly ruins of the past.

The first story, The Pastel City is a solid and straightforward fantasy quest, with sword-swinging heroes trying to stop a deadly ancient superweapon. But the rest of the book is a slog of a fever dream, with assassins and artists and strange cults and plagues and godlings. The characters move like marionettes through a world where Time itself has worn thin. A more generous review might say that Harrison is aiming for some sort of Mythos Affect, where Sign and Signifier circle each other in an Eternal Ouroboros (annoying caps placed deliberately). I find that it has all the tedium of listening to someone else's dream, and very little of the charm. The last three quarters of the book where at first a desperate hope it'd get better, and then a miserable journey to prove it wouldn't.

Read the first bit and stop.

Palace Cobra follows Rasimum's second tour in Vietnam as an F-4 during the Linebacker campaigns. In the years since When Thunder Rolled, Rasimus had been an instructor pilot and personnel officer, and he wanted to get back to flying fighters while there were still fighters to fly, even if that meant facing flak and SAMs again, and wrecking his marriage in the process.

By 1972 the war had become thoroughly routinized. Bureaucratic absurdities proliferated in the air bases, which were much the same as they had been in 1966. Rasimus slotted right in, becoming a hunter-killer pilot who specialized in going after SAM sites with cluster bombs.

In Palace Cobra, Rasimus opens up a little, speculating about how the war was fought, the ability of airpower to force a decision, and the culture of fighter pilots in Thailand in the 1970s. It's amazing how much more gregarious and personable the war becomes when there's another person sitting in the same cockpit as you, making the same desperate prayers about flak.

Having read them back to back, I recommend both of Rasimus's books. They're similar, of course, but just difference enough it's worth reading both.

I read The Mote In Gods Eye back in 2011, and didn't bother to write a review, but I remembered it as a slow investigation of the very strange alien culture of the Moties, and the fear of war to the knife between humanity and desperately poor, but fast-breeding aliens with technology just a hair more efficient than the humans. Out of fear, humanity imposed a quarantine on the Mote system, enforced by imperial blockade.

The Gripping Hand picks up 25 years after Mote, with Renner and Bury secret agents for the Empire, trying to smoke out traitors and possible leaks through the blockade. They find that a new FTL point to the Mote system is opening now, as opposed to millions of years in the future. It's to our heroes, along with a new generation of Blaines and a nosy reporter, to save the day by cutting a deal with the Moties involving a human-developed method of birth control.

There's political maneuvering and space battles, but I didn't much care for the story. Characterization has never been Niven and Pournelle's strong suit, and I found them particularly flat this time around. The tension is primarily tactical; how do we get the Moties to accept our negotiated solution, rather than the strategic tension of "who are these aliens?" from the first book. Decent, but not great.

There's a rule that a great parody of a genre is also a great representative of that genre. Look at Galaxy Quest, which is probably the greatest Star Trek movie. In Redshirts, Scalzi spins out a novel based on the lives of those people who always get shot in bad scifi shows, but doesn't quite bring it home.

In the distant future, Dahl is excited to be posted to the UU flagship The Intrepid. When he gets on board, he discovers a horrifying secret. People die on Away Team missions all the time, the bridge crew doesn't seem to care, the ordinary crew hides, and science on the ship works via a magic box. Dahl and his friends try to survive possession by a mysterious force that makes them spit exposition and then die for the benefit of the mostly invulnerable bridge crew, working out the rules of The Narrative.

See, the Intrepid isn't real. Or maybe it is, there is some philosophical confusion on this point. What is clear is that once a week the shows air, The Narrative takes over, and someone dies. To prevent this from happening, the crew decides on a desperate plan to go to Burbank in 2011 (based on a season 4 episode with time travel), and convince the people making the show to stop killing them. There's some hi-jinks in Hollywood, they get their meeting with the producer and writer, and make a deal to save the producer's son (in a coma from a motorcycle crash, and also briefly an extra on the show) using future medicine and the power of The Narrative. Everybody lives happily ever after.

And then there are three codas, from there different people in our present trying to deal with the knowledge that they are creating and connecting to "real" fictional characters through a TV show. This could be really deep and philosophical, but I think it actually just apes the forms of deepness. "Like, wouldn't it be cool if... we were all in a story, maaaan?"

So about that great-parodies-are-great-examples thing. I'm not a real big fan of Star Trek, but what I love about it is that it put three major temperaments (Kirk-sanguine, McCoy-choleric, Spock-melancholic) in contact with the cosmos: with dangerous situations and major unknowns, and showed that all approaches were necessary, but that sanguine optimism and enthusiasm would carry the day. And while Scalzi is as usual a breezy and fun writer, I couldn't tell you a single damn thing about the personalities of the characters. Perhaps the point is that they're extras with a little extra background so their death impacts more, but that undercuts the theory that the Intrepid is also real. Characters without personality are not good writing.

So yeah, this is flashy meta story, but for all the ideas that it should be commentary, it doesn't say much.


****
From June 15, 2012

The Intrepid is the flagship of an interstellar human union, it's five year mission to boldly go where no man has yada yada before. But it has a problem, crew members die with alarming regularity, and the bridge officers don't know why or seem to care. 5 newcomers have to band together to figure out why their lives are expended so meaninglessly, and how they can avoid death, and well, I won't ruin the twist.

It's a neat idea, and Scalzi knows how to move action along and keep the dialog snappy, but there's something formless and extruded about the end product. Star Trek is easy to parody, but surprisingly hard to parody well, and this novel is defined more by narrative tics than by personality or world-building.

Put this one firmly in the category of beach reading, at least if your beach time tends more towards Maui Wowie than margaritas.

With The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson relentlessly imagines a world both strange and familiar, full of advanced technology and retrograde cultures, and gives fascinating responses to the twinned questions "What does it mean to raise a child?" and "What does it take to sustain a culture?"

In the near future, nanotechnology has become the infrastructure that sustains the world. Atoms and small molecules are individually arranged in every useful configuration, from processed food for the poor to subcellular 'mites which interface with the human nervous system and wages terrible wars in the open air. Nations, foremost the United States, shattered to pieces under the technological onslaught, leaving only the new artificial tribes or phyles, bound together by ideology and the bloody legalism of the Common Economic Protocol. The foremost phyle are the Neo-Victorians, who wield expert engineering, financial resources, and cultural discipline like knives from their artificial island enclaves.

The story centers around Nell, a poor and abused girl living in the shadow of Atlantis/Shanghai, who comes into contact with The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, an intelligent children's book created by a subversive Neo-Victorian Noble who wants to make his granddaughter's life 'interesting'. While Nell and the Primer are the heart, the story loops through all kinds of fascinating characters: Hackworth, the designer of the Primer and potential catalyst for another technological revolution; Miranda, a young actress who winds up raising Nell; Judge Fang, a Confucian from New York who consults the Venerable Colonel Sanders before important rulings; Carl Hollywood, a rancher turned theater producer; and any number of stranger cultures, cults, and sects. Cryptographic anarchists, psychedelic human computer clusters, software khans bound together by death-defying rites, augmented reality theater impresarios....

Stephenson makes two absolutely critical observations. To paraphrase, the first is that when it is possible to do anything, the only important question is what is worth doing. The second is that there are only two industries, the making of things and the entertaining of people. The stories that we tell ourselves and each other are key to understanding The Diamond Age and Stephenson's vision of culture. This is a weighty and thoughtful book, and it's all too easy to make the superficial mistake the Stephenson agrees with the Neo-Victorians, rather than finding them interesting. While their discipline and skill at emotional repression lets them dominate the world, they also import their most creative and innovative citizens, and fail to teach the structure of their culture to their children as opposed to the form. Nell's story, and her successes, is an indictment of the Neo-Victorians in general.

That said, there are some parts of this book which are a little troubling. Lots of the book's authorial statement is a slam at the degeneracy of 20th century politically correct morally relativist culture, which is similar to a bit in Cryptonomicon that totally misreads English Department culture. Stephenson may be a storyteller, but his home phyle is very much engineering. Second, The Diamond Age, is orientalist as all hell, with a kind of fortune cookie Confucianism put up as the best alternative to the hyper-Western style of the Neo-Victorians. Asian characters don't get a lot of their own story, even as they're the main victims and perpetrator of the violence at the end. And third, there are some Issues With Women (capital letters needed). Nell suffers a lot of harm and rises above it, while Miranda submerges her career and life in favor of a new kind of motherhood. I can't describe it precisely, but again and again women are sacrificed as the object of someone else's needs or desires. Sometimes literally, as with the Drummer's biomediated computation that ends in spontaneous human combustion.

And of course this wouldn't be Stephenson without some stylistic quirks, like the lack of a proper ending or lengthy digression on computer science. For all those complaints, in sheer force of imagination, in extrapolation from a wholly new technological premise with nanotechnology, and in the richness of its characters and setting, The Diamond Age is a triumph, and one of the best books of the 90s.

Harlan Ellison once said that the best sentence in all of science fiction was Heinlein's "The door dilated" because it packed so much into so little. Double Star is a lot like that, with an action-packed thriller plot surrounded by a mess of fascinating details about the developing solar system and relations between humans and Martians.

The basic plot follows Lorenzo Smythe, an egotistical and underworked actor who finds himself roped into the role of a lifetime, impersonating the great politician John Bonforte for a vital Martian deal, since the real thing has been kidnapped by the dastardly Opposition. One thing leads to another, and Lorenzo winds up playing for far higher stakes than he signed on for. The story is pretty basic, a transition between 'juvenile Heinlein' (Space Cadet, Have Space Suit Will Travel) and 'classic Heinlein' (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land). Smythe begins as delightfully weaselly narcissist who develops integrity by playing a man with some, and the supporting cast are some of the best examples of Heinlein's stock square-jawed pilots and uber-competent secretaries.

So about those amazing details. The description of a spaceman's walk and terrible ground clothes that open the book are some of the greatest expository writing in the genre. Martian society is mostly sketched at, but all seems quite consistent for a race that reproduces by budding and holds propriety above all else. Heinlein's politics are too expansive to box in, aside from the basic claim that he loves thinking about them, but this novel is some of his more honest thoughts on politics. Democracy is the worst system we have, except for all the others, and the greatest game of all. There should be a division between the messy business of policy and the symbols of State, so that we can have change with continuity, and one quote which I'll reproduce in full.

"If there were ethical basics that transcended time and place, then they were true for both for Martians and for men. They were true on any planet around any star-and if the human race did not behave accordingly they weren't ever going to win to the stars because some better race would slap them down for double-dealing.
The price of expansion was virtue. "Never give a sucker an even break" was too narrow a philosophy to fit the broad reaches of pace."

Dang, Heinlein, dang.

I can feel the capital letters and italics. Davidson is a person who is entirely sincere about the need to Innovate and Revolutionize and Engage higher education with 21st Century Challenges. She sees big looming problems ahead for colleges, which haven't been substantially reorganized in centuries. However, to meet these problems all she has are good wishes and a handful of anecdotes.

The book begins cannily enough, with the story of a wealthy college graduate unprepared for the tough job market following a financial collapse. This isn't some Millennial, rather she begins with Charles Eliot, a young man who in the wake of the Panic of 1857 would seek to reform higher education as a long-serving president of Harvard, essentially inventing the modern university of departments, majors, standardized testing, and courses designed to filter unprepared students. Her history of the university basically ends with the Industrial Revolution, with only cursory overviews of the research revolution and academic-military-industrial complex of the Cold War, the university as a center of resistance during Vietnam, and pretty much anything that's happened since 1980s, aside from austerity driven budget cuts.

Davidson decries higher education as it exists today, a system that burdens students with debt and has a shockingly high amount of failure, one that serves to insulate the 1% rather than drive an engine of economic mobility. She's right that the conventional set of assignments; tutorial driven problem sets, content-recitation multiple choice questions, and essays to be read only by the instructor. She's right to note that the increasing adjunctification means that the most youngest and most connected teachers have little incentive to rock the boat.

But beyond that? She points to some stuff that her CUNY school as done to improve graduation rates from an abysmal ~10% to a merely mediocre ~50%. And she points to innovative units at Kansas State, ASU, and Georgetown as new models. But ultimately it's just a reiteration of "we need flexible and engaging curricula", while glossing over the fact that real learning is often hard. Incorporating new modes of thinking, new facts, new skills, into your personal repertoire is one of the hardest things imaginable. I strongly believe that the best classes don't require any sort of exotic standards. Can you read pdfs? Do you have someone to talk about them with? Do you have something to write with? Okay, let's go. If you're willing to do the work. Enthusiasm is no substitute for effort. Knowledge is cumulative, and without an approach that balances the "why" and the "how", you either get appliers who know how to find an answer without understanding what it means, or people who invent the universe from first principles to bake an apple pie.

There are opportunities for solid, data driven work in this space. I recommend Arum and Roska's Academically Adrift for having both a better thesis, and better evidence.

Jorgenson is a real soldier and journalist by his bio, seven years in the Army and then a stint as editor of a Special Forces oriented magazine Behind The Lines in the 90s. In Very Crazy G.I., he collects tall tales of the Vietnam War, the kinds of yarns soldiers would tell each other at a bar. Some are well attested to, as in the punched up description of Joe Hooper's Medal of Honor. Many of them feature canny GIs, getting even with stuffed shirt pogues and tricking bar girls, with turnabout for soldiers who pay $50 for a pair of Ho Chi Minh's sandals, or who tested the stability of C4 (very stable, fortunately for the guy jumping on a flaming chunk of it).

I'd have to say that my absolutely favorite though were when Jorgenson puts an almost Fortean lens on the war. Ape-men unknown to science lurking in triple canopy jungles and dragons swimming in the Gulf of Tonkin. Viet Cong ghosts creeping through the wire before an attack. A Marine who figured out that God's first name is Frank, and divinely dodged death in a dozen ways at Dong Ha.

I'll leave it to Tim O'Brien to deliver the lecture about true war stories. Some of these try and find moral lessons or punch lines, but the best of them glory in the strangeness and absurdity.

Lyle Peripart is an average astronomer, an American ex-pat living in New Zealand and making a pretty good go of it, in a world where the Nazis won WW2 and Twelve Reichs divide the globe. He's got a steady relationship, a nice house, and a talking suborbital rocketship. When he accepts a new job with a mysterious industrial tycoon his life gets seriously weird. He starts running into a Gestapo agent, his fiance is a gun-slinging international assassin rather than a history professor, and there are gaps in what Lyle can say and think: worlds and phrases that trigger headaches and amnesia. The biggest problem: no two people agree on what history looks like, and no one has every actually communicated with America. An entire country has been missing for decades, memory is a lie, and something is very fishy.

What follows is a thrilling quest into the empty heart of America, the weirdness of Many Worlds Quantum Mechanics, and what it means to really Pursue Happiness above all else. Finity is a strange strange book, a breezy picaresque tied to quantum speculation and a brutal death march, but it's quite cool and an under appreciated gem.