Robert Silverberg has the distinction of being nominated for the Best Novel Hugo nine times without winning once. This was his last shot at the silver spaceship, and out of the random chance of a used bookstore, a copy came into my possession.

Shadrach is a biotech and political thriller, centering around the personal doctor of Genghis II Mao IV, dictator of earth. The century-old supreme ruler survives only due to organ transplants, and seeks immortality through multiple routes. Meanwhile, the Earth is slowly dying: most of the people dead from the aftermath of the late 20th century Virus Wars, and the remaining 2 billion incubating the inevitably fatal 'organ rot' disease. Only Genghis II Mao IV and his cronies have an antidote, living a life of paranoid power and drug-induced debauchery while the rest of the world waits for a cure.

The main plot centers around Project Avatar, a plan to make Genghis II Mao IV effectively immortal by imprinting his brainwaves on a young body. When the original test subject commits suicide, Genghis II Mao IV's personal physician, Shadrach Mordechai (an African American with an MD from Harvard) becomes the proposed victim. Shadrach has to come to turns with being nothing more than a spare part in his master's biomachinery, and the callous evil of the whole regime he has worked for. In the end, he finds survival in a new balance of power.

In some ways this book is so 70s it hurts, with sex, drugs, paranoid religious fantasy, and all that. Silverberg has the gut of a pulp writer, and the basic core of the story always pokes through the stylish cruft. Maybe not the greatest book, but a fun one.

The Left Hand of Darkness is along with The Man in the High Tower and Dune, one of the very few science fiction books that rises to true greatness. Ursula K. Le Guin imagines a meeting of two very different and alien cultures, as revealed in a masterfully and deliberately paced novel.

Genly Ai is the Envoy, a representative of the interplanetary Ekumen. Definitely not a government, and not quite a church, the Ekumen is a loose coordinating and idea sharing group using the instantaneous communication device of the ansible to link the 84 human planets separated by the tyranny of distance at light-speed (by the way, Terra is just one of many human worlds, and not the world of origin). Envoys are sent alone and unarmed, a single representative of greater humanity, with no power and no threats, simply an offer to join communication.

His mission is to Gethen, a harsh world locked in an ice age, and home to the strangest human type yet. Gethenians are perfect hermaphrodites. 26 days of the month they are sexless neuters, but for 4 days they enter an estrus called 'kemmer', and become functionally male or female at random. Anybody can potentially give birth. The sexual unity defines Gethenian culture as totally as sexual dimorphism defines ours, and Le Guin works through the implications beautifully in description of myth, social organization, and patterns of everyday life that make up culture.

The plot, as such, concerns Genly Ai's very lonely mission to the leading nations of Gethen: Karhide, ruled by a mad king; Orgoreyn, ruled by a bureaucratic commission with Stalinist tendencies towards internal exile. The life of an Envoy is fraught with peril. They have no true friends on an alien planet, may be disbelieved and killed, or used by political factions. Genly finds himself exiled to a forced labor camp, and then with the help of another exile and his one true friend, makes a heroic escape over 1000 miles of ice. The escape across the ice is one journey, made with the aid of technology as perfectly adapted as the stillsuits of Dune, if less ostentatious, but the true journey is learning to see the Gethenians as not imperfectly male or female, but truly as themselves.

My copy begins with a great introduction by Le Guin on prediction, description, truth, lies, and the story as metaphor, which is an essay worth reading in and of itself. As a prose stylist, a true fan (she submitted her first SF story at 11) and philosopher inspired by Taoist ideas, Le Guin is a clear cut above.

Warriors 1 is part of an interesting genre bending project by Martin and Gardner Dozois to create an anthology of original fiction on war with contributions from science fiction, fantasy, and history (I didn't spot any contemporary thrillers on the list, but maybe in part 2.) These are major genre writers here, with tentpole contributions from Joe Haldeman and George R.R. Martin, as well as names you should recognize.

80% of people will probably buy this book because it has another Dunk & Egg story in it. I am sad to say that Martin's contribution is middling at best. Another tourney, another look at Westeros from the bottom, only slightly leavened by the evil and powerful Hand of the King, and stirrings of rebellion. Haldeman's contribution is similarly a thematic retread, with soldiers linked into a 10 person platoon remotely operating nine foot tall active camo robots used as a metaphor to explore the bonds of battle and the wounds of their absence.

The best story, and I think the one that'll stick with me, is by longtime SF master Robert Silverberg, with the remnants of a large army guarding a barren frontier, deciding whether or not to carry on with a purposeless mission. It's stark, thoughtful, and eerie, and I think the story the best manages to rise above the collection.

2312 is a very divisive book, and one that is perhaps a little bit too avant-garde for its the constraints of the genre. A kind of spiritual sequel to the Mars trilogy, 2312 is a solar-system hopping adventure of long-lived posthumans dealing with the politics of new technology. KSR's sublime joy at the wonders of the solar system is shines very very brightly: surfing the rings of Saturn, running with wolves across the Canadian tundra, looking up at the noon sun from the the surface of Mercury. Unfortunately, the things that most people look for in a book, like plot and characters, don't hold nearly as well.

A comparison with the Mars Trilogy is probably best. The Martians felt real, because the politics of terraforming were just like contemporary science politics, where values and intellectual achievement and personal feuds mix together in a toxic brew, but on a planetary scale. Everything flowed naturally from the attitudes of the First 100, and their conflicts with each other and with Earth. 2312 centers on diplomats and artists instead, and their attitudes and styles are not nearly as well-caught as the scientists of the Mars trilogy.

Let me try and describe: The protagonist, Swan, is a century old posthuman with an quantum AI in her brain (along with bird and cat neurons), Europan bacteria in her gut, and male and female genitalia. She's quit a career designing asteroid habitat ecosystems to follow the sunrise on Mercury. The death of her grandmother draws her into a conspiracy that does not trust the Quantum AIs vital to space travel and the Mondragon economy. She and Wahram (another posthuman with a slightly less extreme suit of augmentations) survive near-fatal experiences across the solar system, while tracing a unique space-based weapon in an age when total surveillance has rendered warfare obsolete, and trying to foment a healing revolution on sick and tired Earth.

Basically, the characters are spooks: diplomats, secret police, the elite self-appointed guardians of humanity. They are also calm, wise, quick to act, and never wrong. Historically speaking, these qualities are rarely (never?) found together. The very competence of the characters is both unrealistic and works against the idea that there are stakes in this novel. The deaths of thousands? Sure, but worse happens every week today. The end of human civilization. Unlikely.

And as mentioned, 2312 does weird, avant-garde stuff that IMO, does not pay off. The narrative is loose enough that it doesn't need random lists and incomplete passages from strange points of view.

Actually, thinking about it, this book would work much better without the grand plot. As a simple planetary travelogue, it's actually quite good, and human problems could help develop the posthuman protagonist.

Guns Up! is a red-blooded war memoir by a Marine machine gunner. Clark's war was ugly: arriving in-country just after the Tet offensive, he marched through minefields, terrible weather, and endless jungle and mountain patrols. The big M60 that he carried was a life-saver for the squad, but the stream of orange tracers guaranteed return fire, and machine gunners reportedly had a 7.5 second life expectancy in combat (I want to know which RAND analyst figured that out, and who told the grunts.) There's battles, ambushes, and all the stock characters of war. Do the Marines issue giant guys named Red, taciturn Indians, and Boston snobs at a rate of one per platoon? What makes Guns Up! exceptional is the friendship between Clark and his alphabetical buddy since bootcamp, Richard Chan, a brilliant and devout Chinese-American who serves as a kind of moral center in an amoral universe.

This isn't Dispatches or Where the Rivers Ran Backward, and Clark tells his story directly. One thing that stands out is that combat troops were used hard: Clark is either in the field or in the hospital. He lost 40 pounds in six months, from marching, stress, and bad food. His interactions with the country were entirely through gunsights. Friends die or are seriously injured and replaced with boots, and the squad keeps going on after objectives that don't change the course of the war. Authority, such as it is, are corporals and rumors over the radio net about what the rest of the battalion is up to.

This book is also robustly Christian, and Clark is very upfront that Jesus saved his life; page 58 is where his Bible stops a shard of shrapnel from hitting his heart. This leads him to censor some of the language, but not the stories. Sam the Blooper Man carves numbers into NVA dead and carries a dried ear on his helmet. ARVN break under a night assault and get gunned down by the Marines. The squad almost gang rapes a dying NVA nurse. Somehow, the macho Christianity works.

"As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war."

This quote, from Ricks' friend and colleague Lt. Col. Yingling, is at the heart of The Generals, which examines how army culture and personnel policies turned the winners of WW2 into the losers of Vietnam, and the tactically adept but strategically blind generals of the War on Terror. Ricks takes as his guidestone the policies and attitudes of General George Marshall, Chief of Staff during WW2. Marshall wanted optimistic, determined, energetic, resourceful team players, and he was ruthless in clearing out the failures to get them. Marshall and his top commanders, Eisenhower and Bradley in particular, sacked generals by the score. Relief was an ordinary part of being a general. By Vietnam, the situation had become completely reversed; Generals were almost never relieved for combat ineffectiveness, and the top brass were regarded as mendacious micro-managers. Post-Vietnam, the Army managed to rebuild its tactical leadership and integrity, but the generals promoted under the polices of General William DuPuy would lack strategic insight or the ability to work closely with their political counterparts.

The book itself consists of many biographical vignettes. Ricks knows how to write and has done his research: while I wasn't particularly surprised by the sections on WW2, Korea, and Vietnam, the post-Vietnam rebuilding was all new information for me. The sections on the War on Terror will be familiar to anybody who's read Ricks' Pulitzer-winning Fiasco.

However, this book is stuck at Lieutenant General (three stars-get it?), because of a little bad luck and some weak theory. The bad luck is General Petraeus, of whom Ricks is a major defender, who was brought down by scandal just after The Generals went to print. I can't find the article right now, but in the wake of the scandal I remember reading an insightful critique of Petraeus that argued that his true genius was managing the White House and the American public, and while an adept combat leader, his forte was more for PR than battle. It's bad luck that Ricks didn't have the time to consider this position, but the difference between combat effectiveness and the perception of combat effectiveness is at the heart of the problem of generalship that Ricks investigates. Major wars are infrequent generational affairs, how can good men be distinguished in peacetime?

The weak theory is a lack of something else to compare current Army policy to. Ricks makes a convincing case that because it is impossible to fire generals, it is impossible to improve their quality overall. However, the Navy relieves officers all the damn time. Are admirals better than generals? Hard to say, since the last fleet action was in WW2. Ultimately, the Army is a special organization: unlike business or the government, there's no way to bring in an experienced outsider to provide leadership. We should demand more from senior military leaders: more strategic insight, more integrity, more honest dialog with the White House and Congress. Unfortunately, in the absence of a 'super-general' like Marshall, and several decades of critical personnel policy, it seems unlikely that the corps of generals will be improved.

Dixon is an engaging and entertaining curmudgeon, who takes a psychological stab at explaining military incompetence. With several years as a bomb defusal specialist in the Royal Engineers before becoming a psychiatrist, Dixon is well suited to write such a study of generalship. Taking the British-centrism and psychoanalytic perspective as features rather than bugs, this is an interesting attempt to explain and improve the serious failures of military incompetence; starting from lost battles and heavy casualties up to the possibility of a nuclear war in error.

The first part of the book is a chronicle of British military incompetence from Crimea to Operation Market Garden, amply demonstrating several key operational qualities of military incompetence: wastage of life, clinging to tradition, rejection of contrary information, underestimation of the enemy, indecisiveness combined with obstinate persistence in a failing task, failure to exploit opportunities, failure to use reconnaissance and intelligence, predilection for frontal assaults, belief in brute force over deception, scapegoating, suppression of news from the front, and a belief in mystical forces.

The second part goes into the theory of why incompetence generals exhibit these traits. Dixon offers three nested psychological explanations. The first is cognitive dissonance; believing themselves to be great captains of a great army, incompetent officers deny any facts to the contrary, leading their forces into disaster. Second, high levels of cognitive dissonance are associated with the authoritarian personality (see Adorno 1950), along with a love of pomp and pointless order that Dixon classifies as 'military bull'. Third, these are of course the daily life traits of the anal-dystonic ego, and their inability to cope with a messy and chaotic world or the emotional damage of toilet training. I believe that psychoanalyzing from history is a methodological mistake (moreso than standard psychoanalysis), and Dixon uses this argument to gore his personal enemies rather than advance a case. However the cognitive dissonance and authoritarian personality parts seem spot on.

The implicit solutions, stop promoting authoritarian assholes, reduce tradition and increase flexibility in military culture, are the weakest parts of the book. The best way to fight and survive is a poorly understood subject, and Dixon's psychological weakness might have some survival value on a daily basis, even as they lead to systemic disaster. A fun book, but one with some strange oddities.

Startide Rising is a solid modern pulp contribution to the Hugos. A few centuries into the future, humanity is part of a galaxy teeming with intelligent life. The catch is that all intelligent life is connected in a great chain of uplift, with older species advancing younger species to technological civilization and sapience. Humanity is alone as a wolfling, only allowed on the galactic stage by virtue of having uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins. Most species want humanity dead, and when the dolphin-crewed exploration ship Streaker finds a two-billion year old alien fleet, they turn into the target of a massive polygonal battle and hunt by the galactic powers.

But all of that takes place before the first page. The meat of the story concerns the Streaker, hiding on an abandoned water world and trying to make repairs and escape while battle rages above them. The majority dolphin crew are uneasy in their use of technology and logic, fracturing under the psychological strain of the siege. Worse, many of the crew are part of a secret project in improving uplifted dolphins, and even more volatile than the standard uplift. When the dolphin second-mate and psychologist conspire to mutiny, the Earthling's greatest enemy may be themselves. POV alternates between different members of the crew, and the alien factions in their sleek battlecruisers overhead.

I thought that the dolphin characters were well-realized as adjacent to humans, but not quite human, thinking and acting quite different from how we do. The mutineers were surprisingly sympathetic in their flaws: ambitious, cowardly, ultimately traitorous and murderous, but people who had a coherent strategy (surrender to the aliens and hope for the best, rather than run the gauntlet of enemy fire and pursuit). The idea of the galactic civilization based on uplift and servitude, and the way that humanity could threaten it, was quite appealing.

There's a lot to dislike about this book. People complain about Brin's writing, similar-voiced characters (not the lack of names. A day later I can only remember a few of the characters specifically), cartoonish antagonists, ridiculous setting, and dolphin poetry. They aren't wrong, but what they miss is that Startide Rising is FUN. Having read them in order, I can confidently state that the last decade of books were joyless slogs through dystopia, apocalypses, madness, and evil. Ringworld was the last Hugo that was optimistic, that took joy in space and action and exploration.

I'm willing to overlook a fair number of flaws in writing if the whole comes together, but there was one thing off about Startide which troubled me, and while I can't put my finger on it exactly, it's about smugness and sexism. The tone of the novel is a little too self-satisfied, a little too injokey. While there are plenty of female characters, they're all in supporting roles to the males. And the parts that fell the flattest were the "romances", and a rather generous ready of how acceptable sexual harassment is when stranded on a deadly alien planet. It's a lot better than almost all of the previous sexist scifi I've read in this series, but also somehow worse because Brin considers himself "forward-looking" (direct quote from his website), and would be externally described as a progressive Democrat with some unorthodox views. I'm not at all surprised that Jo Walton dumped her drink over his head at the 2003 Boskone. Fun book, but a little sticky.

Neuromancer hit science fiction like a railgun shell, and deservedly so. This is one hell of a book: a dark cynical hotwired take on technology, crime, power, and ambition. Gibson is a top-tier prose stylist, and right from the start ("The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel...") he pulls you into a world of the Sprawl, of corporate games on an international levels, of crooks and spooks, of AI trying to evolve into something new.

The story follows Case, ex-keyboard cowboy and hacker, plummeting towards 'suicide-by-gangster' in Chiba City. His talent burned out by a vengeful employer he stole from, Case will move anything, make any deal, knowing that he's headed towards crossing a fatal line. He's given a second chance by Molly, a street samurai with upgraded reflexes and retractable blades under her fingers, working for Armitage, a blank-faced corporate cipher, and ultimately, Wintermute; an AI that has put together a team to hack itself, in violation of the basic laws that govern relationships between human beings and artificial intelligences: Never build one too smart.

Every part of this book hits home individually: the fast moving plot, the techno-noir stylings, the globe-trotting setting. But there are two things that lift Gibson far above the people who came after him. The first is that his philosophy is existentialist, not nihilist. Case, Molly, even Armitage, are profoundly damaged people trying to piece together lives on the margins of a society blowing itself apart on simulated reality and advanced technology, but they're *trying*. They're not the empty, gun-fetishistic, black-leather clad macho parodies of the genre that it's so easy to fall into--and which Gibson somehow presciently satires in one of Riveria's twisted hologram tableaux in the Villa Straylight. Second, Gibson has something interesting to say about power, in that it is literally dehumanizing. The entities that rule the world are strange post-human conglomerates: Corporate memory banks, rogue AI, clans of cryogenically preserved clones, CGI personality constructs. A lot of the later cyberpunk literature parroted this without understanding it, in the replacement of the nation-state with mega-corporations, or backstabbing Mr. Johnsons selling out the heroes, or heroic anarchist artists against soul-sucking plastic corporate goons. But for Gibson, it is always about what you lose, and what you keep with you as you approach that apex of power.

I heard that Queers Destroy Science Fiction was super controversial, really good, really transgressive. As usual, the rumor mill was wrong. Not that this is bad, and I don't actually read a lot of contemporary short scifi so my comparisons might be off, but I found this collection surprisingly... "bland" is the best word. Little domestic problems that were not particularly science-fictiony, or particularly GLTBQ. The only new story that really stuck with me was one of the flash fictions, "Bucket List", by Erica L. Satifka.

I think the most pressing argument for this collection as average is that by far the best stories, the ones with the most edge and attitude and good ideas and writing, were the oldest; Raven Kaldera's "CyberFruit Swamp" from 1996 and Geoff Ryman's "O Happy Day!"