"Borgia Pope" is synonymous with every sin and corruption imaginable. The lurid stories have echoed through history of orgies in the Vatican, incest, fratricide, assassination by poison and strangulation, and of course nepotism, financial fraud, and ordinary war crimes. In The Borgias: The Hidden History G.J. Meyer does the most surprising thing, and offers a revisionist history of the Borgias that argues that Pope Alexander was an active church reformer, Cesare his nephew one of the great men of the age, and Lucrezia a perfect image of a Renaissance princess.

Meyer's basic thesis is that the lurid tales of the Borgias are baseless political slander, contemporary accounts written by their enemies and accepted as truth by the first generation of Italian historians, most of whom were not even born by the time the Borgias died. A convenient scapegoat for every excess of Renaissance Catholicism, the Borgias became a enduring symbol of evil, despite an utter lack of hard evidence for their gravest crimes. It's an interesting thesis, but at times I think Meyer leans too far to the other side, accepting uncritically every positive description of a Borgia, and De Roo's obscure geneaology which 'proves' that Cesare and Lucrezia couldn't have been Alexander's children. It's hard to argue that you're writing the only honest account of the Borgia, when you constantly call [some obscure Italian noble] a truly deprave sadist.

That said, Meyer has a real talent for making clear the tangled web of 15th century Italian politics, the evershifting alliances of the city-states, and the delicate balancing act of Rome between France and Italy. Whatever else they were, Pope Alexander and Cesare were players, and they nearly won, setting up Cesare as ruler of a unified Papal States, before an unlucky bout of malaria killed Alexander and upset Cesare's plans.

Rajaniemi's fiction is the biggest, most ambitious work of visioning I've encountered since Sterling's Schismatrix. Master thief Jean Le Flambeur has escaped from Mars with more of his memories, on a course for the Jinn-haunted deserts of Earth to steal the childhood of a God. But the universe is a terrifying place, and great powers that imprison souls, enslave minds, and blast holes in space-time are on the same path as Le Flambeur, and immortality and death are two sides of the same bad bargain.

I simply can't describe this book, but if you like your writing lyrical, your scifi hard, your physics mixed with philosophy, and don't mind a hefty dose of confusion, you need to read this series.

****

The Fractal Prince is structurally more ambitious than the first book, moving back and forth across time and introducing Tawaddud as a narrator, a young woman from an important family on Earth who has fallen from power to become the girl who loves only monsters. Earth is a more deadly backwater than Mars. The catastrophes which rocked the system left the planet haunted by Wildcode, rogue nanotech that corrupts bodies with crystal intrusions and causes computers to glitch, and mind-stealing AI, among the more comprehensible dangers. The survivors live in the shattered ruins of a fallen O'Neill space habitat, mining the desert for rogue gogol AI-minds to sell to the powers of the Sobornost. Jean's target is the childhood backup of the most fearsome of the Sobornost Founders, a group of near-gods who aim for immortality, at the cost of enslaving every mind in the system to their will. The heist is less solid than the first book, but the 1001 Arabian Nights inspired post collapse human culture is still stylish as all hell.

"We have received a communication from Jean le Flambeur. He claims that in precisely 57 minutes, he is going to steal a ring of Saturn."

It's all true, of course. The system's greatest gentleman thief *almost* always gives fair warning when he's about to commit a crime. The Causal Angel takes us into the white hot cultural heart of the system, the intricate games of the quantum Zoku posthumans, who have embraced quantum narrativism as a weapon against the cold computational simulational hyperpolitics of the Sobornost Founders. At stake is the Kaminari Gem, an ancient artifact with the power to unmake and remake universes, which might be the only thing that can protect post-humanity from the hegemonic ursine embrace of the All-Defector strategic parasite.

Okay, wow. I've got almost no idea what's going in this book, but it is GLORIOUS. The Saturnian Zoku don't quite hold together as well Mars and Earth from the previous books, but the sheer awesome of the cosmological war over the very nature of existence makes up for a story that seems to be blowing itself apart at the pieces, like a combat thoughtwisp shedding its outer armor against slowgun viral parasites. What Rahaniemi says is that we *can* imagine the other side of The Singularity, and even there a few people can make all the difference.

****

Rajaniemi has been teasing about his cosmology and its relation to the story since book one, and he lays it all out here. There is something deeply spooky at the interface of quantum mechanics and computation, certain answers that come out of nanoscale blackholes that indicated that the secrets to the universe are encrypted, and whoever holds that password will be the next best thing to gods. The key is the macguffin of the series, the Kaminari Jewel. Crafted by the Zoku, a clade of posthumans descended from gamers who use quantum effects to optimize their society, the Jewel has been presumed lost. Le Flambeur's quest is to steal it, and to make himself someone who can use it. On a reread, this is more pessimistic than I remember. Both the Zoku and Sobornost are thoroughly monstrous, the jargon does not fully conceal the more or less arbitrary nature of the Kaminari as the object, and the Zoku society feels incredibly dated in an an internet culture circa 2014 kind of way, rather than hitting some eternal truth. It's a solid conclusion, but not a stunning one.

Gaslands is a tactical wargame that combines three great ingredients: a post-apocalyptic aesthetic of vehicular war that we all know and love from Mad Max, a template-based movement system reminiscent of Star Wars: X-Wing, and mod-your-own post-apocalyptic minis using Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars.

The system is pretty simple. You need to go fast to win, but going fast restricts your ability to turn and stacks hazard tokens, which can cause a wreck. Skids and spins add an element of chaos to maneuvering. Cars are armed with weapons ranging from 'a busload of half-life war boys with pistols' to heavy ordnance like rockets and machine guns, and fun stuff like oil slicks, tesla coils, and exploding rams. There are rules for a variety of scenarios, from death races to zombie mashes, and some notes on running extended campaigns. Rules explanations are technical and clear, and abundant color artwork adds a lot of flavor to the book.

I haven't played the game yet, but the rules seem serviceable. The use of gear-shift phases, which mean fast vehicles act more often, is inspired. I'm a little concerned that there's so much dice-rolling: roll when you move, roll when you shoot, roll defense. I think the system could have been streamlined a little, though I can also arguments in favor of dynamic defense, and roll on move is necessary to add uncertainty in combat which X-Wing gets through hidden maneuver dials.

Caveats aside, the best argument in favor of this game is the DIY-post-apoc-punk aesthetic. The rules are $11 on Amazon. Hot Wheels cars are a dollar per. If you're fancy, you can spend another $20 getting laser-cut move templates and custom dice, or you can make your own with a cereal box and pair of scissors.

Racers, start your engines, chrome your mouths, and prepare to Die Heroic on the Fury Road!

Trying to make sense of the l'affaire Russe is enough to make anyone a conspiracy theorist, and this book should come with a skein of red yarn to help readers connect the dots.

The basic facts are clear enough: in 2016, as part of a longstanding intelligence operation against the United States, Russia hacked into servers controlled by the DNC and the gmail account of longtime Clinton staffer John Podesta. The hacked documents trickled out to the media through the twitter persona Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks, and on Nov 9, 2016, we woke up and Donald Trump was President. Welcome to the darkest timeline.

The story is complex, and there are a lot moving parts. One part is Putin's campaign against the United States, and the nature of Russian intelligence operations and hybrid warfare. The authors point to the "Gerasimov doctrine", and longstanding animus between Putin and Clinton personally, but don't have the space to make a really good case about the nature of Russia's foreign policy, it's strategies of ambiguity and tension, and the role of Putin.

The second story is the hacks and the leaks. Isikoff reveals a decidedly lackluster cybersecurity effort at the DNC and in the Federal government. The DNC cyber people didn't take FBI warnings seriously. The Federal government dragged its feet on coordinating a response, done in by a belief that this could be resolved once Hilary was inevitably elected, Obama's desire to appear non-partisan, and the absolute refusal of Senate Major Leader Mitch McConnell to be part of a response (Turtle Mitch is dirty as fuck). This story matters, and a bunch of people in charge of state level election security need to be doing much better than they currently are, but the story of the leaks has an almost impossible job to do. We have to understand the weirdness of the race, both as it felt in fall of 2016, and knowing what we know now.

The third and final story can be summed up by that phrase from Watergate. "What did the President know? And when did he know it?" Collusion, the actions of Paul Manafort, who showed up after a decade long career repping pro-Russian plutocrats to work for Trump for free, Roger Stone and his history of dirty tricks, the idea that Russians have had compromat on Trump for years if not decades, linked to his desire to build a hotel in Moscow, along with the Steele dossier and The Pee Tape. This is the part of the story that is evolving the fastest, with the Mueller investigation ongoing, and Trump shitting himself in public constantly. And it's also the part where nothing is yet proven.

I think about who should read this book. Political junkies probably know all this already, and the material isn't organized, or linked with enough value insight to be really worth it. My Left-skeptic friends would dismiss the whole thing as CIA CYA. And as for the C.H.U.Ds, well, nothing will convince a C.H.U.D.

Wait for the final verdict.

The Female Man is a novel about feminism, identity, and a time-travelling assassin with metal teeth. All of these parts are equally important.

It's a howl of rage against decades of sexism, of "women should be happy in their place", of "give me a kiss/you frigid bitch!" Janet comes from Whileaway, a world where men died out centuries ago, which has evolved into a classic women's utopia. Whileawayans are busy, happy, peaceful, ecologically sound and sexually liberated. At worst, they're prone to soliphism and sudden bouts of interpersonal violence limited by a duels. Janet is an emissary, sent to a world where World War 2 never happened and the Great Depression trundles on, where she falls in with Jeannine, a librarian who is unhappily engaged and looking for a man to put her life to rights. They then encounter Joanna, from our 1970s, an accomplished professor of English and modern women who never meets the receding standards of male acceptance, and fumes with impotent rage. And finally, there's Jael, from a world defined by the Battle of Sexes, where men and women live in separated countries and wage a deadly war and covert trade for necessities. She's the one with the metal teeth, a killer who specializing in subverting male societies across the multiverse.

The writing is a kaleidoscope of post-modern structure, shifting points-of-view and narration at will, moving from the sweep of history to outpourings of emotion and sudden philosophical knocks. It is not an approachable book. Russ has a lot of anger, and a dark outlook, seeing humanity as two crippled co-species, the inner wounds of men extroverted into violence of women who lack effective means of resistance. Still, this is a powerful classic.

Flatlander is a collection of five sci-fi mysteries by hard scifi master Larry Niven, set in the 22nd century of his Known Space universe, and featuring detective Gil 'The Arm' Hamilton. As expected, Niven is all about the logical extrapolation of his universe. Earth has 18 billion people, and organ transplantation has revolutionized healthcare. The death penalty is in effect for almost every infraction in order to feed the voracious demands of the transplant hospitals, and the resulting new crime is organlegging, finding some victim and breaking them up for spare parts at about a million per. Next to organlegging, the other major crime is violation of the fertility laws.

Gil has his intuition, a steadfast doggedness, and the ace up his sleeves of psychic powers. An accident in the asteroid belt enabled him to develop minor telekinesis, in the form of an imaginary third arm that can reach about arm's length, and has just enough strength to lift a cigarette. It's a far cry from a telekinetic wrecking ball, but he can do some tricks, like reaching into bodies and through television screens.

The four 'old' stories are pretty solid scifi, even if they feel decades old in terms of big clunky computers and Niven attitudes on women. The new story, 'The woman in Del Rey crater', is a lacking one, and feels out of place. Pretty decent vintage scifi, and well worth the $2 I paid for them, but I would wait for a sale.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is an absolute classic on the creation and use of graphs. Done correctly, a good graph can make complex information instantly comprehensible, reveal relationships and patterns, and both delight and inform. Done poorly, a bad graph causes eyestrain, confusion, and the deliberate obfuscation of the truth. And in a world where graphs are ordinary, Tufte provides a quick history of how they came to be, and the cognitive leaps required.

Tufte rails against the sins of bad graphics: scaling and axes that lie about trends in the data; the use of unnecessary ink to convey redundant information; visual clutter and bad aesthetics. He advocates for a kind of elegant minimalism, conveying the most information with a few well-chosen lines of varying weights, and cleverly using edges and white space to mark boundaries, while supporting information with text. The advice is for a pre-computer graphics era (at least in my signed 1983 edition), but the aesthetics still hold, even if we aren't drawing graphs with a marker and straight-edge.

The problem is that Tufte turned out to be a voice crying in the wilderness. There are the majors flaws, like the use of flashy cluttered "infographics" that combine the worst features of text-heavy articles and data graphics. But then there is the minor things. I have at my fingertips about a half-dozen data visualizations packages, from Excel (boo!) to ggplot and bokeh. And not a single one, by default, does everything that Tufte says. They get close, but the defaults are not quite minimalist enough. And truly great graphs, like Minard's plot of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with his army vanishing into the snows, still require an artist's touch.

Barsk is a novel of a many parts, let down by an inability to grasp some ineffable quality of grandeur. In the far future, science has proved the existence of souls, and a select group of Speakers can commune with the dead by taking the drug Koph, which grows only on one planet. All the humans are gone, and the sentient beings are various species of uplifted animals. Barsk, source of the drug, is also home to the despised Fants, descended from elephants. For 800 years, their world has been defined by the compact, where they provide pharmaceuticals including Koph to the galaxy, and the galaxy leaves them the hell alone, as laid out by the prophetic visions and political wiles of their long dead matriarch.

Into this mess stumbles Jorl, a Speaker of rare talent who faces a prophesied crises called the Silence. His quest involves the mysterious suicide of his best friend, his friend's troubled and gifted son Pizlo, a Senator willing to commit any crime to maintain his hold on power, and a new formulation of koph which turns the user into the next best thing to a God.

Now I read a lot of science-fiction, so this might be on me, but I can see where the main ideas of Barsk have been done before and with more style. The uplifted animals and messy galactic confederations are from David Brin, and there's a stylistic similarity with Brin beyond the uplift part, except that Brin at his best is pulpy and daring, where Barsk plods. The intermingling of precognition, politics, and a planet that is the sole source of a vital drug are the key elements of Dune, but Dune is a masterpiece which reflects some uncomfortable truths about human nature and potential, and Barsk falls into a mundane Zootopia style "species as destiny". The physical reality of souls, precocious children, and the term Speaker comes from Orson Scott Card's Ender series (though the speaking is very different, without the transgressive humanism of Card's Speakers for the Dead). And say what you will about Card, he has at times a keen eye for character and as a good a prose style as anyone in the genre. Again, Barsk is just average.

It's frustrating, because this isn't an bad book, and it kept me entertained all the way through, but it just had so little to say. There's a really good novella at the heart of this book, about a man (okay, elephant thing) who can intercede between the living and the dead, and how existing in that ultimate liminal space transforms his world. Does he heal traumas that we must learn to grieve over, or does he reopen wounds that are best left closed? Unfortunately, that novella is buried under a bunch of space opera cruft.

The Calligrapher's Bible is an indispensable book for the beginning calligrapher, with advice on tools and posture, a historical overview of the development of handwriting, and 100 complete alphabets, from simple rusticas to ornate gothics and modern hands.