Welcome to the Golden Age of piracy, where daring devils sail the Caribbean, waging war against fat merchants, corrupt officers, and the whole strictures of European society. Where renegades like Phil Davies and Edward Teach (AKA Blackbeard) rule the waves, combining brutal combat skills with a sorcerers edge in the quest for immortality and ultimate power!

Wait, give me that last bit again? This is Tim Powers, so the world is recognizably our own, with the twist that magic works and is real. In this case, former puppeteer John Chandagnac is on his way to Haiti to reclaim a plantation from his evil uncle, when his ship is captured by pirates and he is given the choice of joining up or dying. It turns out that one of the Chandagnac's fellow passengers, Hurwood, orchestrated the whole thing in an effort to bring his wife back from the dead and put her in the body of his daughter, and he's teamed up with Blackbeard (the most powerful white sorcerer in the Caribbean) to do it.

What follows is a rousing picaresque through the Caribbean, to the Fountain of Youth and back, where Chandagnac learns how to fight and sail and sorcerer, as he defeats increasingly powerful bad guys to get the girl and save the day. It's a quick and fun light entertainment, and while I wish Beth Hurwood had a little more agency, this book is eminently enjoyable.

The Dyatlov Pass Incident is one of those weird fortean moments in history. In 1959, nine young ski-hikers died in the frozen wilderness of the north Ural mountains. They were all experienced in the outdoors, and their bodies were found hundreds of meters from their tent, bootless, without their outer layers. The tent had been slashed from the inside, but was mostly intact. An investigation was inconclusive, an "outside compelling force" had caused the deaths. Into the vacuum flooded speculation: natural phenomenon like wind or avalanche didn't match the evidence at the site. Another group could have been responsible, either local Mani hunters or escape convicts, but there were no humans within 50 km of the place where the hikers died. Things got weirder: super-weapon tests, military experiments, UFOs and yetis.

Eichar is an American documentary film-maker who became fascinating by the incident, and out of pocket, funded a expedition back to where they died. In this book, he reconstruct the last journey of the Dyatlov Pass group, the innocent camaraderie of Soviet tourists in 1959 (in the USSR, the word is more like adventurer than fanny packs and buses). Eichar does a decent job reconstructing this, but I can't shake the feeling that he's not the right person. While he has a ear for narrative, and a rigorous skepticism, he doesn't speak Russian and he's not an outdoorsman, and I feel like there are dimensions missing.

Eichar does have an explanation, and it's not aliens. An atmospheric phenomenon called Kármán vortex street sent snow devils whirling off a nearby peak. The vortexes thrummed in infrasound, ultralow vibrations associated with psychological unease, and even extreme distress. Their nerves flaring for no perceptible reason, the Dyatlov group broke under the strain and ran into the night, where they met their deaths from cold and falling.

Ultimately, we'll never know what really happened, but Eichar makes a solid guess.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is famous for giving us the phrase "the banality of evil". 50+ years on, in the face of a worldwide refugee crisis and official policies of exclusion, denial of services, and child separation that have not yet risen to extermination, this examination of the complicity of one man, a Nazi expert in "Jewish resettlement", remains an important and challenging book.

From the start, Arendt has little sympathy for the juridical theater of David Ben Gurion's statemaking exercise of a trial for Adolf Eichmann. As a refugee herself, a former Zionist, still Jewish, always a philosopher, she sees through the contradictions in the trial. Israel kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina and is trying him retroactively for the crime of genocide, rather than any individual murder. The purpose of the trial is not to decide if Eichmann is guilty, it never would have been held if he were not undoubtedly guilty, but to demonstrate Eichmann's guilt to the world, and Israel's new power to advocate for the Jews by proclaiming it. The more important question, for Arendt and for us, is what precisely is Eichmann guilty of?

This book is at it's best when Arendt confronts Eichmann, and tries to probe his essence. He is a small man, unremarkable, totally normal except for the bulletproof glass cage around him. His testimony, thousands of pages of conversation with an Israeli interrogator, reveal a mind incapable of thought, of seeing the world from any viewpoint other than his own. Eichmann misappropriates a German idiom 'winged words' literally meaning 'quotations from the classics' to mean any cliche, and when he utters a sentence in his own words, he repeats it until it is a cliche. A repeated failure in business, Eichmann joined the SS in the early 1930s, where he rose to a middle-rank equivalent to Lt. Colonel. His job was quite literally making sure that the trains ran on time, that the transit between the ghettos and death camps was efficient and organized. He was quite good at it, and his main complaint was that he was never promoted to general.

But Eichmann is only a small part of this book, because he was only a bystander at his own trial. For much of this book is a recapitulation of the epoch-defining crime of the Shoah. Jewish communities across Europe were transported and exterminated, but there were key differences in every province of the Reich in how Jews were rendered stateless and then lifeless, with varying degrees of assistance from local anti-Semites and Jewish leaders. Arendt relies heavily on some contemporary accounts of the Holocaust here. The machinery of death is hard to grasp, both because it is horrific, and because contrary to the common conception of totalitarian as efficient, it was a mess of at least a dozen different agencies working at cross-purposes on their own version of the Holocaust.

Arednt closes the book by gesturing at 'acts of state' as transcending common morality, the Shoah as a crime against the order of nations rather than Jews in particularly, and the vagaries of responsibility in Europeans who have to live with the fact that almost all of them knew at some point, and did all too little to help. But these points are buried under the six million dead.

Evil has no depth. Evil is banal. Evil is mediocre little men who can't think in straight lines. But evil can still kill you dead.

Embassytown is Miéville channeling Ursula K. Le Guin with a strange piece of linguistic scifi that builds a fantastic world, but then fails to do much with it.

Welcome to Embassytown, a small town on the edge of human space. The locals, the Ariekei, are masters of exotic biotechnology, and speak a language unique in the universe. The Ariekei tongue, Language, is non-symbolic. Statements in Language simply are, voiced by two mouths simultaneous. The Ariekei themselves cannot communicate with machines or single humans, only with carefully groomed pairs named Ambassadors who they can recognize as minds.

Avice, our narrator, is a small-town girl who becomes part of an Ariekei simile, a living part of speech. She escapes Embassytown as a sailor on the dimension-skipping immerships, but returns when she marries a graduate student in linguistic. He is fascinated by the Language, and they way that it is impossible for Ariekei to lie. But he becomes distant, constructing a theology where the truthful Ariekei are angels, and the rest of the galaxy fallen.

When a new Ambassador arrives, and their discordant speech has a narcotic effect on the locals, things begin to move very quickly towards collapse. The Ariekei become a civilization of addicts, colonial patterns reinscribe themselves, and then the delicate biotech that keeps everyone alive begins to collapse. One faction of Ariekei cut off their "ears", becoming an army of the communication-less Deaf with a plan to wipe out humans and their verbal drug, and let the next generation rebuild free. Avice and her allies must teach a minority to use Language in a conventional way, to speak symbolically and lie.

The setting is incredible, but the plot and characters just... exist. I get the sense that Miéville wanted to use a lot of abstruse linguistic terminology, but he doesn't get it well enough to explain why Language is truly uncanny as opposed to merely odd. Still, lots of points for inventiveness.

What if the Napoleonic Wars, but dragons? There, I just saved you 300 pages.

Temeraire is a meringue of a book, a thin foam of historical fiction style over a puff of air. In a world exactly like our own, except there are dragons, Royal Navy Captain Will Laurence captures a dragon's egg from a French frigate. The creature inside bonds with Laurence, and he is out of the Navy and into the Dragon Corps, a distinct social step down.

The meat of the book is the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire (the dragon), who is quite intelligent, speaking English and French, and descended from a precious Chinese bloodline. Dragons come across quite like multi-ton speaking cats. Now, I have a dog, who I love, but I'm not sure I'd inflict a novel about our relationship on the world. And beyond that pair, I couldn't tell you a single thing about any of the other characters. It's like Novik heard somewhere that British people of the time were reserved and proper, and skipped character traits other than a "devoted to duty score." Dragon combat could be a highpoint, but feels very much like contemporary naval combat, but faster. At no point did I sense any bit of risk or danger in the story.

I'm not going to judge anyone who likes these books, because I'm a sucker for the Honor Harrington series, but I've got literally nothing good to say about this book, aside from readability.

A truly great biography reveals both the subject and the spirit of the times, and McDonough does both, tracing the tumultuous American adolescence through the life of General Sherman. Sherman was born in the Old Northwest of Ohio, named after the powerful Indian chief Tecumseh, who had lead a failed coalition against the Americans. After his father died, he was adopted into the influential Ewing family, and went to West Point, where he thrived as a cadet and in his early posting to Florida during the Seminole Wars, and California during the Mexican-American Wars. Early military posting across the South and Mississippi convinced him of the importance of the American heartland, and ironically in light of his later career, the basic friendship of Southerners. Sherman had a marriage to Ellen Ewing troubled by his wife's staunch Catholicism, and an uncertain career as a banker, when the Civil War broke out, and lifted Sherman to greatness.

Sherman struggled as a commander in the opening phases of the war, but he was never "insane", except in scurrilous newspaper columns, and after the Battle of Shiloh, repeatedly demonstrated his abilities as a strategist and logistician. Sherman excelled in operations along major rivers and railroads to dislocate strongpoints and force Confederate armies back without battle. His campaign to capture Atlanta was a masterpiece of maneuver.

Sherman's name will be forever connected with the March to the Sea, and scorched earth warfare. McDonough justifies the strategy as necessary in a framework of total war, and argues it was carried out as humanely as possible, without mass violence. Georgia howled, as Sherman burned anything with a potential military use, from railroads to cotton bales. In his use of economic warfare against the South and American Indians on the frontier, Sherman prefigured the worst of the 20th century.

Post-war, Sherman served as General-in-chief for over a decade, and took up a whirlwind of social engagements, speeches, and nights at the theater. The Sherman who comes across in his letters is a man of strong opinions: pro-Union, anti-Catholic, opposed to political nonsense and journalistic slander, confident in the superiority of white people, while still able to treat individual blacks and Indians humanely. As McDonough reveals through letters and archival research, Sherman was not above shading his memoirs in his favor, but in general he was scrupulously honest. A great biography of a fascinating man!

The Clarion workshops are American science-fiction. Kate Wilhelm (Hugo winner for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang) and her husband Damon Knight were two of the key members of the Clarion workshop, from it's start until Damon's declining health forced them to retire. Wilhelm's thoughts on writing science-fiction could be invaluable, but this collection mixes trivial anecdotes with writing advice that is better present elsewhere, and circles around what makes Clarion unique.

The workshops themselves are invaluable, a six-week bootcamp of writing and work-shopping. Wilhelm is most authentic here when she expresses her disdain at all the terrible first stories she's had to critique over 27 years. Her advice to focus on authentic characters in conflict, master the basics of point-of-views and grammar, and not play games with the reader, ensure that a story isn't an absolute stinker. Her point that a writer needs to write, and that time spent waiting for rejection letters or otherwise playing hooky are not writing, are of course true. And some writers might be gratified to learn that Wilhelm writes from scene and tone first, and fills in plot and character later.

The anecdotes are as I said, trivial. I enjoyed the name-dropping of luminaries in science-fiction (hello serious Kim Stanley Robinson, playful George Alec Effinger, and walking disaster Lucius Shepard), but you may not. Dorms are terrible, some admins are angels, Michigan in the summer sounds miserable. Workshopping is exhausting labor. But this is a collection of anecdotes, not an actual history of Clarion.

The missed opportunity with this book is that there's a reason people go to Clarion over, say the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and that's because they're writing Science Fiction & Fantasy! The advice for short stories is the advice for short stories (and you should read Rust Hill for that), but Wilhelm has almost nothing to say about writing scifi and fantasy, except that you should avoid weirdness for the sake of weirdness, think a few layers beyond the immediate, and not call a rabbit a smeep.

Revelation Space is a grandiose, paranoid, cosmological space opera that stares directly into the abyss.

Dan Sylveste is an genius archaeologist, stranded on a frontier colony where he is investigating the dead civilization of the Amarantin, a species of avian-descended sapients who were wiped out a million year ago by an unspecified event. Sylveste's obsession makes him vulnerable, and he runs afoul of expedition politics, becoming a prisoner. His past is tangled with another galactic anomaly, the Shrouds, areas of fractally tortured space time that appear to be protecting something. Sylveste went near the shroud, near enough to be given a message he cannot comprehend, in a place he calls Revelation Space. Also intertwined with his past is the starship Nostalgia for Infinity, a kilometers long flying city fallen into near complete degeneracy, inhabited by a handful of cybernetically altered crew.

Ilia Volyova is one of the crew of the Nostalgia for Infinity. Her job is the care of the cache-weapons, 40 artifacts of unknown origin with capabilities that start at "planet-cracking" and escalate from there. Her last gunnery officer was driven insane, scrawling messages about an entity called the Sun Stealer, and Ilia needs a new recruit. She also needs to find a cure for their captain, who has fallen ill to a virulent nanotech disease called the Melding Plague. Sylveste, or more properly an AI-backup of Sylveste's father, is the only man with the cure.

Ana Khouri is a former soldier turned assassin. With a paperwork error separating her from her husband by lightyears, she sees no point in living, which makes her the ideal recruit for an entity called the Mademoiselle. Her mission is simple: infiltrate the Nostalgia for Infinity, take it to Sylveste, and kill him.

Their stories and secrets build towards a conclusion around an alien artifact disguised as a small planet, an array of machines protecting a threshold to an unspeakable truth. The galaxy of Revelation Space is sprinkled with ruins, but empty of life. That is because something called The Inhibitors, ancient machines from the dawn of time, control organic life by destroying any cultures that advance too far. The Amarantin tripped this threshold; humanity has done so as well.

I've parodied Reynolds as "war-criminals war-crimeing", and this a dark book, but it's also an incredibly stylish piece of imagination.

This book a rare thing in contemporary scifi-gleeful. Sure, the solar system is riven by war between godlike Founders wielding billions of enslaved minds guiding self-replicating nanoweaponry, software swords, and strangelet bombs that make Hiroshima look like a firecracker (among the more comprehensible weapons), and history is a lie, and running out of Time on Mars can kill you, but the story is fun!

I don't think I've seen such a well-realized universe in a long time. Farsighted yet realistic extrapolations in physics, cryptography, and nanoscale engineering give the universe a strong surface for the play of legendary thief Jean le Flambeur, the Oortian warrior princess Miele, and freelance detective Isidore. The first two chapters were a little hard for me, but once I made it through that I took in the book in one excited lope towards the explosive conclusion. The Martian culture of the Oubliette was exotic and very real (a sixth sense for privacy rights!?). A few parts of the book, particular the Zoku refugees, seemed a little too cute for what was otherwise a very grounded story, but these are minor quibbles.

if you like space opera, scifi, and fun, you owe it to yourself to read this book!

****

So on a reread for 2018, and in light of my vague memories of the rest of the series, I'm less sure about The Quantum Thief. Rajaniemi's day job is as some kind of computational quantum physicist, and the densely layered jargon still holds it charm, picturing a solar system where cognitive, computation, and new states of matter have merged to create a post-Singularity culture. The Powers That Be in this setting are very very powerful indeed, the next best thing to gods, standing on centuries of accumulated wealth, power and secrets.

And yet it's hard to a square a universe where these entities exist, with one in which more ordinary baseline humans care about chocolate, and wine, and the simple joys of a con. Beneath the flashy jargon, Jean le Flambeur is a cipher, the human triangle at the heart of the book not quite holding at the corners.

This book is Harlan Ellison at his truest, and has some classics, like the titular story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream", and "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes." I'm familiar with Ellison as the grand old asshole of science fiction, and this volume, with it's brief introductory remarks, doubles down on that impression. Beyond the misanthropy and notable misogyny, Ellison also displays a remarkable disdain for the craft of writing and his readers. He's a genius, you see, and whatever comes out of his typerwriter is, with as little editing as possible, what we need; a jagged streak of hate, rage, betrayal, despair.

It's so fundamentally adolescent, and not nearly as well crafted as I expected. Ellison puts so much emotion into the stories that they barely have room for plot or character. Either he, or Ted Sturgeon's introduction, describe his style as 'an assault.' That's absolutely true. Up to you if you want to pay for the privilege of a punch in the face.