Few authors are as like themselves as Roger Zelazny, and as hard to explain why they are like themselves. This collection encompasses the short fiction of the middle 1960s, when Zelazny was at the height of his power (his two novel Hugos were awarded in this time.) The stories are lyrical meditations on great themes of life, death, change, and small moments of humanity in the face of the absolute powers of the universe.

The stories are all solid, but the clear standout is "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", which follows a genius poet on a mission to understand Martian religion and culture, and translate the who sense of that dying race.

Evans is an editor at Cracked.com, and how much you enjoy this book is closely related to how much you can tolerate their house style. The premise is pretty simple, pop science focusing on sex, drugs, and rock and roll, looking at how people in the past got high, and how you can do the same. The story moves from primates metabolizing alcohol to ancient brewing, temple prostitution, and then the medical uses of painkillers and MDMA. The book closes with an epic quest to find Slovenian Salamander Brandy, a semi-legendary drink containing toxic salamander secretions. Not a great book, but pretty fun.

*I listened to this as an audiobook, and the narrator did a great job despite some problems with Spanish words.

I let this book sit on my shelves because I thought that it'd be too depressing to read. When I started, I couldn't put it down. The story of the Belgian Congo and the broader colonization of Africa is one of the most fascinating and horrible in history, and Hochschild makes King Leopold's Ghost come alive.

Late into the 19th century, Africa was still the 'dark continent', unmapped and uncontrolled by European powers. The great Congo river was blocked by falls a few hundred miles inland, and the slave traders camped out in disease ridden coastal towns were content to let slaves come to them. A few men of immense will and ambition broke that system. Henry Morton Stanley was a Welsh orphan, a man who invented his own past, and became a famous explorer. His expeditions could best be described as search and destroy operations, as he lead columns of enslaved porters into the African wilderness, blasting away at anything, animal or human, that crossed his path. His expedition to the headwaters of the Congo found thousands of miles of navigable river above the Congo rapids. King Leopold of Belgium was ruler of a small country with grand ambitions. In a clever series of diplomatic manuevers in the 1880s, he organized millions of square miles of internal Africa as a personal colony, responsible only to him.

And then he set out exploiting that. The system is simple. Get a few people from Europe ready for a grand adventure. Give them rifles, bullets, and a platoon of enslaved Africans separated from their home. Tell them to gather ivory by any means necessary, including hostage taking, repeated application of the chicotte (a kind of whip made out of hippo hide), and summary executions. When ivory began to fail, a rubber boom provide an even greater impetus to murder for the sake of profit. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and his Mr. Kurtz only scratch the surface of the mass murder and disfigurement of the Congo. At one point, soldiers were required to show a severed hand for every bullet expended, leading to a brisk trade in hands.

Leopold's Congo was brought down by public opprobrium, lead by the English abolistionist E.D. Morel, and substantially aided by a pair of African American missionaries, George Washing Williams and William Sheppard. These men revealed to the world what was happening in the Congo, and the immensity of the crime. Leopold was forced to relinquish the Congo a year before his death, but not before extracting one last concession from the Belgian people.

Since its publication, Hochschild's book has provoke a reexamination of King Leopold, and European colonialism more broadly. This is right. This is one of the best books I've read all year. Absolutely recommended.

Walter Jon Williams gets spookiness, writing a sci-fi espionage thriller that rivals vintage Le Carre. The protagonist, Stewart, is an old insurance policy, a clone with the 15 year old memories of his original, recently murdered on a space station. Last thing he remembers, he'd finish mercenary training with the Icehawks before a mission to Sheol to recover alien artifacts. After that, well, his original was a busy man with a lot of unfinished business.

A little less stylized than Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind tracks Stewart across the solar system and into a deadly game of corporate politics and biological warfare against the alien Powers, an advanced race that holds the key to massive wealth, and possibly an escape from the brutal cycle of corporate Darwin Days and ideological entropy. It's also not as compelling, but one chapter alternating Stewart making a drug connection in LA with an account of the war on Sheol, is as fine a writing as anything in scifi.

I first read this book in 2010, the summer before I started a PhD in science and technology studies. I remember picking it up at Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle, grabbing a beer at Afterwords, and then staying up all night reading it. Since then, I've read countless pages and megabytes of theory and history about technology, innovation, and the entanglements of politics and things. If anything, The Nature of Technology holds up even better than it did then.

Arthur offers a simple, yet powerful, model for understanding technology. A technology is one or more physical phenomenon captured to fulfill human needs. Technologies exhibit modular structure, from the literal nuts and bolts that fasten sub-units together, to a global transportation system that lets you airmail a package from Washington to Ulan Bator with a simple address. Physical principles are like veins of ore in the Earth, exposed and made ready for use by science, and grouped into domains by similarity (the electrical phenomenon, the thermal phenomenon, etc). Engineers gain fluency in the design principles of a domain, which they use to extend the range and power of technology.

Innovation is based around combinatorial evolution, a statement backed up by experiments on circuit design using genetic algorithms and NAND gates. Technologies become instantiated in modules, which are hooked up in different configurations. Innovation is accelerating, because modules are cheaper and easier to connect than before. Gradual evolution is punctuated by transitions to new domains, radical redefinition of technology that blow past previous limits, once the initial bugs are worked out.

There is some fuzziness around the nature of domains, and the links between science and technology, and the actual structure of innovation, but Arthur gets closer to capturing these processes on paper than other writer that I know.

Final Incal begins where we left John DiFool, falling down the shaft of the great city of Terra 2014 towards an acid lake, his cosmic encounters forgotten. He's rescued by plasma shooting giant bugs and informed of a new universal conflict. The great black Bentacodon, a horrible energy vampire, is conspiring with the Prezident of Terra 2014 to release a horrible plague, killing all organic life and forcing the survivors into metal bodies. DiFool meets up with Elohim, a glowing white archangel who informs him that only his love for Luz can save the galaxy, and they're off through the Incal cosmology, meeting mutants, space pirates, techno-technos, and the hermaphroditic Emperor/ess of the Galaxy.

What this feel like most is a retread, a return to basically the same themes and story beats as both previous Incals and the Metabaron, without the psychological tension or originality that made those stories great. Jodorowsky has his themes, and returns to them again and again. DiFool alternates between cowardice and heroic self-sacrifice as the narrative demands. The war between black and white, and their ultimate fusion, seems like an empty play of symbols. And finally, something is off about the art. It's incredibly detailed in every panel, but when I found in the end that Ladronn did it entirely digitally, and 3D modeled key elements like the city shaft, it made sense. Some things are better analog.

Official histories are frequently that. Official, bureaucratic, and basically tedious. Bulkley's account of PT boats, prepared for the US Navy in 1946 and released for a mass publication in 1962 after a PT boat skipper became President of the United States, is a decent example of the type. It's a comprehensive list of campaigns that the PTs were involved in across the world, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean to the Aleutian (and early model boats lacked heaters). Actions get a few paragraphs: boat number, skipper, any crew injured or killed, targets likely destroyed. It gets repetitive fast. A few sections quoting the men involved on their narrative of the action liven up the book, but those are few and far between.

This is a shame, because the PT boats deserve a book as thrilling as their actions. Nothing embodies the words of US Navy legend John Paul Jones, "I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast for I intend to go in harms way" than the PTs. A handful of men, under the command of at most a lieutenant, the PTs bristled with automatic weapons which they used in slashing attacks against enemy barges, lighters, planes, and destroyers, and used stealth and subterfuge to survive against far superior naval and air force. A routine patrol could turn into disaster in seconds in so many ways, from grounding on a coral reef under a shore battery, to friendly fire, to stumbling into an enemy convoy and having to escape under a hastily laid shore barrage. PT boats were based out of temporary facilities, constantly moving up support the frontline, with bases offering a respite from combat along with attempts to keep the high-performance boats and torpedoes running on shoestring logistics. Despite the fact that Bulkley served as a PT commander, this official history is almost free of color or excitement. It feels like government-issued metal desks, not a life at sea.

Alleged "cartoonist" and pundit Ted Rall ventured into Afghanistan in November and December 2001 to see the new war, and writes and draws about it in this book. On the plus side, Rall is a decent essayist who skepticism about the war turned out to be entirely correct. On the downside, his artistic style is one step above crayon scribbling, and the story is not that interesting. Being an independent journalist in Central Asia means a lot of getting ripped off by the locals, hoping you don't get killed by the locals, and cursing at the rich bastards with the networks. Rall froze in the Northen Alliance city of Taloqan, observed the battle for Kunduz from a distance, and noted both the basic decency of Afghanistani in helping each other in trying times, and the treachery of the fighters (literally identical across the Northern Alliance and the Taliban) and the roving nighttime rape-and-murder gangs of soldiers/bandits. Rall's point of view is, as usual, planetary in how self-centered it is. He's right, and you're wrong for not being as cynical about the war as he is.

If you're looking for a book in this view, get Matt Bors' War is Boring instead, which is better by every conceivable measure.

I picked this up on the strength of the Snow Queen, and got quite a bit into it before realizing it was a sequel. I didn't much like it, but out of fairness, I'll bump it up a star. Maybe with the first book there's a better sense of character and setting.

Cat is a psion streetkid in a galaxy that hates psions. Psychically crippled from his last job taking down a terrorist and running out of credits, he's offered a job as a bodyguard for Elnear taMing, a politician and corporate executive one step away from membership in the Federation Security Council. To get there, she needs to survive and win a key vote over drug legalization, with the opposition being spearheaded by a charismatic televangelist.

Cat bounces through intrigues involving the very strange taMing family, and the criminal underworld of N'Yurk, still capitol of the Federation. Nothing is as it seems, but this is not 'wheels with wheels', or opaque post-human psychodramas, more like ambitious people who take one edge too far. This book might have been better if I connected with the narrator, but Cat comes off as alternately petulant and out of his depth, with a deus ex machina in the form of his telepathy. His final plan hinges on blackmail, and the lusts of his opponent. The thoughts about political systems and governance in an age of interstellar networks sit uneasily on a story which is very personal in scope. The final result comes to extruded generic scifi product.

Citadel follows up Live Free Or Die with the basic outlines of the universe set up. Humanity is now a minor power, cut off from their galactic patrons by an expansionist empire. Now humanity has to race the clock to get their defenses up before a major invasion fleet comes through.

Our viewpoint characters are Butch, a space welder, and Dana, a shuttle pilot. These is a very guts eye look at mega-scale space construction, as they get the asteroid battlestation Troy turned into a warship. I'll admit, I cackled gleefully when they installed an Orion drive to send the Troy on offense in the final chapter. The bad aliens are delightfully hubristic, the tech big and glossy. Tyler Vernor shows up in a few places to play benevolent overlord, but this is at its heart a blue collar space action adventure.

That said, there's still a lot of Ringo weirdness. Not just the odd jabs at liberals, but stuff like a plague that makes blond women super fertile, or the "hard choice" to doom thousands of third-world contract employees to deaths in space because getting salvage in under the gun means cutting safety regs. And the basic problem of the setting, that Troy is so powerful that even kilometer-long dreadnoughts can barely scratch it, undercut the tension of the battles.