This collection is apparently Ellison at the height of his powers, an extended New Wave Scifi riff on the themes of gods and sacrifice. New gods of cities, of highways, of neon lights and computers. Old gods, bloody monsters buried in the earth or the psyche appearing and exacting a heavy toll from modern people.

If there's a word to describe these stories, it's excessive. The language is trippy and overwrought. When Ellison tempers the excess with humor, as he does in "Along the Scenic Route", a story of roadrage dueling in up-gunned sedans with hoverjets and laser cannons, its quite good. When he just vents his spleen, it's fairly miserable, as in "Bleeding Stones", where gargoyles come to life and murder everyone in New York city, starting with an assembly of Christians.

Ellison leans too heavily on the gambit of the psycho-symbolic journey, where the protagonist leaves mundane reality and enters a liminal zone of fantasy, where he encounters a series of set-pieces and images that usually depict the his pathetic nature before an actively hostile cosmos. It's the very antithesis of showing, not telling.

I'm really divided on this collection. There are a few stand out stories, but overall effect is a kind of pretentious misanthropy. This is of course, Ellison's stock in trade, so what do you expect. It's well done, but is it worth doing?

C.J. Cherryh has always been an author I struggled with. I gave up on The Faded Sun trilogy and Merchanter's Luck, putting them in a very small list of book I've abandoned midread like Infinite Jest and Crime and Punishment. Having stuck through all of Downbelow Station, I think I would've rather picked the dead Russian.

Cherryh writes in a genre of deadly serious space opera. There are starships and battles and heroes, but the tone here is historical drama. Downbelow Station is set in a crisis point in this future history, where the forces of Earth, the deep space Union, and the independent merchant Alliance, reach a new balance of power around the vital Pell Station and it's planet. The first chapter deserves Ken Burns-style narration and slow pans, but after that Cherryh introduces characters, and the story rapidly becomes confused. The initial drama is a refugee crisis as ships full of people from a destroyed station dock on Pell, and the authorities have to find room to house everybody. The refugees are a stalking horse for the strategic ploys of Union and Earth Company fleets, which appear and give battle as Pell decays into a state of riot, siege, and martial law. Our heroes, the kind and liberal Konstantin family, try and protect their people from the shadows, while hard-edged types maneuver around them.

This story repeatedly asks the question "who are you loyal to?" and "what sustains you?" Occasionally Cherryh has an interesting answer. Her universe is broken into a few broad classes of people. Earth Company is centered around the billions of people on Earth, insular and unaware of what is happening on the fringes of space. It's warfleet, lead by the charismatic Conrad Mazian, is a rogue piratical force. Stations are loyal to their leading families, mostly. Union is a group of stations centered around distant Cyteen that uses banned technologies like cloning and behavioral programming to produce a perfect fascist army to break free of Earth. The Merchanters are the independent traders of the galaxy, carrying news and goods between stations and jealously guarding their neutrality. Cherryh's setting-building assumption that both Station and Merchanter leadership would center around the first families of whatever respective tin-can people live in is a sound one. Space feudalism is fascinating; Dune is one of my very favorite books.

The problem is that the 'families' aspect is almost entirely dropped as a source of drama. Konstantins are good, their opponents are bad. And this is ludicrous on the face of it, because as much as the Konstantins mouth platitudes about democracy and the will of the people, they have no problem holding all the important offices on Pell Station, with the assumption that son will succeed father. The Konstantins are kind to the native Downers, a neolithic people from Pell, but complicit in their exploitation as labor downworld and on station. I'm not sure that a spacefaring people can ever interact fairly with a neolithic one, but the best I can say of the Konstantins is that they don't seek outright and immediate genocide. There is shockingly little tension within families, just wives and husband separating for safety's sake.

The second question, "what sustains you?", is vital given the literal physical presence of life support systems on station, but also obscured. As vital as trade is to the idea of the Stations and their linkages, Cherryh never talks about what exactly is being traded between the stars! Solar systems have plenty of raw materials, and once you have a self-replicating industrial base, you replicate it to make consumer goods and new technology... so why are traders worthy of a capital-M Merchanter culture and not mere courier ships tied to stations? Weak answers to these two key questions mean that the plot never really goes anywhere, or rises to drama. The appearance of "people power" against the brute militarism of Mazian and Union seems like a cop-out, relative to the power of fast military starships.

The Downer culture is a relative bright spot. With their sun worship and unique speech patterns, they were only slightly annoying. Having read this novel, I can see Cherryh's fingerprints over a ton of subsequent space opera, but I'm not sure if she had the ideas first or merely standardized on them. Overall, this book was a joyless slog. While technically competent, I have no idea how it won.

Kim takes on a wandering picareque through late 19th century Colonial India. Kim is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, a charismatic and daring boy of the bazaar who can make himself instantly at home in any of the myriad communities that make up India. Kim falls in with Tibetan Lama searching for the River of the Arrow, a mystical stream that cleanses sin, and finds his own destiny, as a secret errand for a Pathan horse-dealer conveys vital intelligence in the Great Power struggle against Russia. Kim is recruited into the India secret intelligence service as a bit player in the Great Game, where he uses his natural abilities to foil a pair of Russian agents in the Himalayas.

This book is at its best in its sincere appreciation of polyglot and polyvalent 19th century India, a land of million distinct castes and professions, ancient traditions existing uneasily next to railroads and European-style administration. Kipling, for all he's cast as brutal imperialist, has a sincere appreciation for the worth of all the people of colonial India, and the vivid lives of the local. Their
faiths, their jokes, their back-and-forth over profane priests, begged meals, charms, business and travel, is all appreciated much more than the deadly machinations of the spies and chiefs of bureaus. I enjoyed the Buddhist framing provided by the Lama, as the most important character next to Kim.

That said, the writing is wearing, a rolling river of phrases that flash colors without capturing a picture. A few scenes with actual tension rise above a plotting that is basically a ramble.

Morgan continues the kind of neo-noir scifi that made him famous with Thirteen. Carl Marsalis is both a cutting-edge genetically engineered super-soldier and a dangerous throwback. The product of a secret program to create the ultimate warrior, Marsalis is stronger, faster, and more vicious than any baseline human, a sociopathic monster modeled on a pre-agriculture alpha male. The world used the Variant Thirteens to fight a dirty counter-terrorism war, and then when blowback proved too much, proscribed all the existing Thirteens to exile on Mars, or prison-reservations. Marsalis is legal; his job is hunting down renegades Thirteens. When a Thirteen does the impossible, hijacking a ship from Mars and brutally murdering people across the fragmented remains of North America (broken up into RemPac, Jesusland, and the Union), Marsalis teams up with a tough Turkish-American female cop to unravel dark conspiracy at the highest corporate levels.

There's a definite deja vue to the story. Marsalis and Sevgi are a lot like Kovacs and Ortega from Altered Carbon. The bounty hunter tracking down deadly super-humans is straight out of Blade Runner. The setting of a USA fragmented on political lines is well-done, but nothing surprising. The only truly novel elements are a dash of evo-psych to explain the Thirteens and other semi-proscribed genetic variants, and a heavy dose of Andean altiplano as a stepping stone to Mars.

Thirteen is more generously paced than Altered Carbon. Morgan takes his time setting his pieces up, and letting the game play out. Style-wise, it's fairly restrained, stepping back from neon technological excess, but also a coherent picture of new technological world. As someone with a background in bioethics, I enjoyed the snippets of the 'Jacobsen Report' which proceeded each chapter, but I feel like Morgan comes down firmly on the boring side of genetic determinism.

This might be the most important book you read this decade. Graeber asks what the phrase "You have to pay your debts" really means, and his answer involves a looping historical, anthropological, linguistic, and philosophical inquiry into the nature of currency, coinage, and capitalism.

As Graeber notes, the standard economic story of the development of coinage: that bartering diverse goods (potatoes for shoes for sheep for shovels) was so inconvenient that people developed cash to be more efficient, has no evidence of support. Rather, indigenous societies tend to work on principles of mutual solidarity within the group. Everybody is bound together in a complex web of minor debts and obligations, the cancellation of which is the same as the end of the relationship. Currency in these 'human economies' is used to arrange marriages and compensate for murders. Their purpose is not that human beings can be bought, but precisely to point out how unique each human life is.

On top of this primordial communism, Graeber recognizes two harmful phenomenon. Debt peonage, caused by ever escalating interest on loans, reduces free citizens to slaves, prompting rebelling and escape from urban agricultural centers. Coinage, precious metal currency, is wealth stripped of all its context, anonymous money for strangers of little trust. Together, they lead to what Graeber describes as the 'military-slavery-coinage complex', the use of force to seize human beings, rip them away from their homes, set them to working mines and plantations, and turn them into coins to pay the army to continue the war. Combine the two, and you get the most rapacious form of modern capitalism: debt-laden soldiers trying to reduce everything around them to hard currency as fast as they can.

The philosophical and linguistic sections are if anything, better than the history and the anthropology. Almost all of our modern philosophies originate in questions about what money measures, what the universe is made of, and the paradox of ethical action and self-interest.

Graeber's arguments are more complex than what I've presented here. I'm sure that there are other interpretations to the history he has chosen. But he's asking The Big Questions, and one that cuts at the heart of our current crisis of faith.

Dan Hampton is a F-16 pilot and author, who offers an entertaining, if flawed look at the elite brotherhood of fighter pilots, starting from the First World War and moving through the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The style intersperses novelist accounts of combat with historical sketches, and analysis of changes in aircraft and tactics.

The book starts well enough, with Roland Garros using an machine gun shooting through the armored propeller of his Morane-Saulnier scout to destroy a German scout plane. Soon, famous aces like Boelcke and Lanoe Hawker were dueling over the trenches, and planes began getting faster and more heavily armed. The first section, on the Great War and aerial mercenaries in the interwar era, is a delight, joyfully written and comprehensive. The basic qualities of the lords of the sky are laid out. Excellent flying skills, good gunnery, confidence and aggressiveness, and some qualities of leadership to train and command aerial armies.

But as Hampton gets closer to the present day, the quality declines. WW2 is the Battle of Britain, Midway, and the tales of Nazi super-ace Hans-Joachim Marseille and female Soviet ace Lilya Litvyak. Post-WW2, we have Korea, Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War, and then Desert Storm and Iraq II. Hampton gets lost in jargon, and doesn't clearly get across what air combat with guided missiles, electronic warfare, and a hostile integrated air defense environment is like.

And then there are the errors. The B-29 is not a "large jet", an elementary mistake. In the description of the forces on an airplane in flight, lift counteracts drag, and thrust counteract weight, which a basic force diagram shows is nonsense. While it's impossible to give a complete history of air combat in a single volume, at 623 pages, this book feels both too long, and also incomplete.

Altered Carbon is the latest scifi novel to make the leap to the small screen, with a gorgeous adaptation by Netflix. But this isn't about the show, this is about the book.

Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-Envoy, member of an interstellar police force turned criminal turned prisoner. His world is defined by the technology of DHF, minds stored on tiny chips implanted in the skull and bodies reduced to "sleeves". Most people just get the body they're born with, but if you're rich enough you can have entire tanks of clones or just buy new flesh from someone who's fucked up and put their mind on ice. Kovacs is called back to the world by Laurens Bancroft, an effectively immortal super rich dude who blew his own head off a few weeks prior. Cops are treating it as a badly done suicide (why would someone with backups shoot themselves without erasing the backups?), but Bancroft thinks it was murder, and wants Kovacs' Envoy skills to find the true killer.

The story loops Kovacs through the criminal underworld of San Francisco, trouble with mistaken identity (his current body used to belong to a dirty cop), and a confrontation with an enemy out of the past, Reileen Kawahara, a powerful criminal who runs high-end brothels. In a world where any sin is available for enough money, Reileen has the ultimate illegal kick, snuffing prostitutes who will really die, because she's forged a "Do Not Resuscitate" order on the basis of their Catholic faith. With a bill coming through that'd allow resurrection in pursuit of criminal inquiry, Kawahara needed leverage on Bancroft, and had him kill one of her girls with the assistance of Bancroft's jealous wife. Grand plots of politics work down to sordid little personal conflicts. Forget it, Jake, it's cyberpunk neo-noir.

Morgan leavens up the standard cyberpunk tropes with references to poet and philosopher of revolution Falconer Quell, and he has an eye for action, but I can't say this book is more than the sum of it's bricolaged parts. And I will say that while this is the show bleeding over, this book is weird about women and women's bodies, and not in a particularly elegant or pointed way.

The warning sign should have been "[This book] is perfect for fans of Firefly, Joss Whedon, Mass Effect and Star Wars." If I may be forgiven for just a bit of nerd-gatekeeper elitism, if your marketing team won't refer to any other piece of textual scifi, maybe books are not the right medium. And if your marketing team says you can read this book without the first book, and your website FAQ disagrees, get a new marketing team. I'll admit, I did not finish this book. I gave it an honest 25% read before returning it for a refund, which I almost never do.

We start with the AI of the ship Lovelace, from the previous novel, who has suddenly been embodied in a very human chassis, and is not at all sure if she likes this. Putting an AI in a replicant body is Super Illegal, and we're not really told why this is, or why Pepper, our other major character, did this. They go to a planet, where they see some mass transit systems, cute multi-species communities, and various domestic locals. A second plotline takes place in the past, with Pepper (then called Jane23), growing up as a clone in a scrap-salvage facility run by AI.

There are two big problems with this book, which are absolutely fatal. First, Chambers ignores the Fiction 101 advice that STORIES ARE ABOUT CONFLICT. We don't need to have a war, but taking as a basic premise "What type of person is an AI in a human body?" and "Why is it super illegal in this setting?" we need to get some indications that there might be answers to these questions beyond "a ship AI likes to stand on a chair in the corner of the room to get a security camera perspective" and "the government is dumb, lol".

The second problem is that this book is way in love with world-building and exposition, a common scifi error, and then doubles down by being both derivative and banal. I didn't spot a single flash of originality or elegance. The whole thing is constructed around a kind of bland liberal "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone were nicer?" Which, yeah, sure, whatever. Maybe some people feel validated by quirky inclusive millennial characters. I feel pretty validated by the actual people in my life. I read books to be entertained and informed. This is the literary equivalent of a lukewarm bowl of plain oatmeal.

The fact that this was nominated for a whole bunch of awards make me unreasonably upset. At least it didn't win anything.

Warning, here be spoilers...

I'd heard that Too Like the Lightning was one of the modern classics of scifi, a book I had to read. A friend asking "hey, can anyone talk about this book?" inspired me to push it to the top of my list. It is definitely one of the most provocative books I've read, dense with allusions to history, philosophy, and archaic literary styles. I'm not sure entirely sure that beneath all the rocco layering and shocking moments, the book is actually great, but it is entirely its own thing.

Too Like the Lightning is structured around four mysteries. The first is a child by the name of Bridger who has the power to produce miracles. He can breath life into toys, convert dirt into feasts, and create curative potions. Bridger is protected till he can come of age by the criminal Mycroft Canner, serving a lifetime sentence of slavery for his crimes, and a few human allies. The mystery of Bridger, his power, and what he might serve frames the book, but is dropped.

The second mystery is that of setting, of this world of the 25th century and how it evolved from ours. Palmer drops the names chapters before the info dumps, but the basics are pretty clear. At some point a war between the creaking American superpower and Islam threatened the existence of the world. Just as nation-states threatened the nuclear apocalypse, powerful individuals announced their banishment, based on a border-shattering technology of hypersonic VTOL cars that made the entire world no bigger than 60 minutes. All existing polities were subsumed by the seven great Hives, megacorporations founded along ideological lines like mutual aid, art, government, land stewardship, technology, etc. The hives all have stereotypical modes of dress, and unique languages they use to communicate with each other. Most people live in 'bashes, homes of six to twelve adults with a common affinity. Material want is banished. Most people work 20 hours a week, and enjoy a fulfilling life of freely chosen associations and aesthetic experiences. Gender roles have been eliminated, and Palmer toys with stereotypes, placing pronouns and sex organs for effect rather than realism.

The third mystery is a literal who-done-it? A key piece of journalism has been stolen and placed in the Saneer-Weeksbooth 'bash, who both run the hypersonic cars that are the lifeblood of the world, and who are also secretly sheltering Bridger. The crime and the motive behind it threaten to undo everything, to collapse the fragile web of politics that sustains the world. This begins as the weakest mystery. Why should we the reader care about a seven-ten list, or why it might topple the Hives. This bit of trivia serves as an entry-point into two key facts about the world. First, it is on the brink of collapse as certain factions near majority positions before facing a maelstrom of backlash. And second, the leaders of the Hives are literally in bed with each other, part of a supremely odd incestuous family centered around an 18th-century themed brothel in Paris that violates every norm of their society, and focused on the uncanny, possibly supernatural powers of a young man named J.E.D.D. MASON, heir to the Empire that is the most politically potent faction.

The forth mystery is that of Mycroft Canner himself. We begin knowing he is a criminal, that he did something terrible, but as the book progresses its revealed that his crime was seventeen artistic murders of an entire bash of geniuses, deadly tortures that mocked ideology and anything decent. Canner is also a polymath genius himself, possessing hidden backdoors into computer systems, and seems to be the personal secret keeper and factotum of all the major powers. We learn little about Canner, or why he is the focal point.

Ada Palmer is by day a professor of history, focusing on Humanism as an ideology from the Renaissance on, and that scholarly bearing comes through. Expect to learn about Voltaire, and Diderot, and above all the Marquis de Sade, who blended shocking violent pornography with even more shocking atheistic anti-clerical screeds (yes, I've read de Sade. No, you should not read de Sade. He's actually pretty dull). So there's a lot of dense stuff her about 'the key of reason unlocking doors you'd rather have closed' and the philosophical justification of morality. The book both picks up steam and goes off the rails at 3/4ths of the way through, when the secret brothel/world headquarters is revealed. There might be a point that Palmer is making about how power corrupts, but it's another thing to ask me to suspend disbelief to say that this world's elite are all having crazy illegal Eyes Wide Shut style orgies mixed with archaic religious experiences as part of a program to do... I don't know, replace themselves with a perfectly divine philosopher king?

I have to read the next book, because of course, but for what it's worth, I think The Quantum Thief does posthuman mystery better. Palmer lampshades the flaws in her characters and plots (there's a whole digression on 'who is the protagonist?'), but doing that doesn't excuse how in love with its own setting this book is. At least its something new.

UPDATE: Dec 2021
I read the first two Terra Ignota books together, and knowing the core details of the setting instead of having to puzzle out the mystery box just make this better.

The General has achieved a recent notoriety as the book White House Chief of Staff (for now) General John Kelley reads after every promotion. And since I'm a long-time fan of Forester's Horatio Hornblower books, I decided to check it out. What we have is a lean, ironic, and acerbic picture of an exemplar of British military leadership during the First World War. Our protagonist, Curzon, is a cavalry officer of the old school: Red-faced, energetic, stiffly honorable, utterly unimaginative. Sent into line at the Battle of Mons, Major Curzon distinguishes himself through unyielding defense and is promoted to Major-General. He marries a duke's daughter, trains a new division of Kitchener's Army, and is promoted to Corps level. At Ypres, at the Somme, at Arras, he proceeds in the best tradition of the British Army, sending thousands of Tommies to their deaths in the trenches in futile attacks. Curzon is untroubled by the slaughter, by innovations like gas and tanks, unable to see victory beyond brutal attrition. He participates in intrigues at G.H.Q. and the dining table, until at the end of the war, his lines broken by new German stormtrooper tactics, he rides out to meet his fate, and loses a leg to a random shell. Death before comprehension, for this general.

The kindle edition has a solid introduction by Max Hasting, placing it in historiographic context of interpreting the first World War, the popularity of generals like Haig at the time, and their subsequent erasure as donkeys and butchers. Two passages, the description of Curzon in the beginning, and the metaphor of the general staff trying to win offensives like someone who had never seen a screw before try and remove one by pulling, are legendary. The book as a whole is a strong contribution to military literature, and a fascinating character study of a vanished breed.