Song of Time is a melancholy reflection of life and legacy. Roushana Maitland is preparing to die, or more accurately shed her physical body and enter digital immortality. In the middle of her preparations, a young man with amnesia washes ashore on the cliffs below her house.

The meat of the book is is Roushana reflecting on her life through the tumultuous 21st century, and the role of art in a world. A talented concert violinist, Roushana provides a frame to ask if art gives life meaning, and if not art, then what. The biography is a clever way to provide a future history that is just short of apocalyptic. A new disease claims Roushana's brother. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan almost kills her mother. Global warming threatens everything, until the Yellowstone Volcano erupts and cools the plnet, at the cost of North America. Somehow, life goes on.

The book is best when it explores Roushana's relationship with the artistic people around her. Her piano prodigy brother, the gender-ambiguous critic Harad, her husband and conductor Claude, in his talent and weakness. The glimpses of the future are both chilling and believable. The 'present' timeline, with the amnesiac young man, doesn't do as much, and the odd unlife of the digitally immortal is sadly wasted as it relates to what the world looks like. Still, this is a satisfying, sophisticated, and melancholy yet optimistic book.

Golden Sun picks up a few years after Red Rising, with Darrow having lost touch with the revolutionary group the Sons of Ares. He's been busy in the intervening time, learning fencing from a legendary blademaster and starship command at the Academy. But this book is not a retread. The opening chapters see Darrow flunk the final exam when an almost defeated enemy rams his command ship. He's cast out of his cushy apprenticeship, sent to dangerous political exile in the capitol on Luna, and forced into an uneasy alliance with the Jackal, his nemesis from the first book, and disgraced son of Nero, who killed his beloved first wife at the start of Red Rising, and who is no longer Darrow's patron.

School is over, this time the game is very much for real, as Darrow kicks off a feud between two houses that escalates into civil war against the Sovereign of the Golden Society, a cruel near immortal. The plot moves briskly through conspiracy, battle, and tests of loyalty, as Darrow tries to soften the cruel hearts of the Goldens, and figures out how much trust to extend to his companions. The characterization of the secondary cast suffers a little, as they spin in and out of the story, but there is definitely no sophomore slump. Golden Son rocks and rolls to a climatic orbital assault that the best of its kind since Starship Troopers.

Red Rising draws immediate comparisons to The Hunger Games, because the main plot is about teenagers fighting to the death, but while The Hunger Games has a theme about responsibility, Red Rising is about pure power, and I think the superior work.

Darrow is a Red, a caste of laborers who slave away under Mars mining Helium-3 so that the planet might one day be fit for civilization. He has a job he loves operating a massive fusion drill, a beautiful and idealistic wife, and a life expectancy measured in months.When his wife is executed for breaking into a upper-caste garden, and he is left for dead after burying her, he discovers that his entire life is a lie. Mars is a prosperous planet, ruled by the Golden-caste aristocrats. His people slave and die for the benefit of others. He's recruited by a terrorist organization, remade into a Golden, and given a mission: Infiltrate the Golden academy, rise through the ranks, prepare to destroy their unjust society from within.

That's the first quarter of the book. The main body is concerned with the Golden academy. The question of how to select leaders is perhaps the ultimate basis of politics, and the Goldens have a brutally Darwinian system. To join the real military rulers, their youth must attend a school that begins with a literal unarmed combat thunderdome (two men enter, one man dies), and then the surviving 50% wage a twelve-side battle starting with medieval technology; the winning general given the plummest of apprenticeships. Darrow leads a brilliant guerrilla campaign against the brutality of his own Mars house, the superior forces of rival houses, and the mendacity and corruption of the proctors. It's a fascinating action-packed adventure that takes inspiration from Machiavelli and Clausewitz and Ho Chi Minh, all set in a frozen wasteland of fierce loyalties and deadly betrayals.

The first few chapters are rough, but the book improves rapidly once it finds its feet, and is an amazing example of "working class boy" makes good. Darrow is a tense and rageful narrator, the setting an authoritarian fantasy comparable to Starship Troopers. With the games out of the way, I'm interested in seeing how the story evolves, and where Darrow's true loyalties lie.

Luck in the Shadow opens with evil wizards unearthing tombs and massacring witnesses, but the prelude is just that, and the real story is how Alex, a 16 year old kid wrongfully imprisoned, becomes an apprentice spy through meeting Seregil, a dashing thief, master of disguise, agent to a powerful wizard, and man of many secrets.

Flewelling has a dense setting with some cool twists. The protagonist kingdom is a Queendom, relating to an ancient oracle, and women serve in the military with men. Most people are apparently casually bisexual. There's geography, and history, and a little economics, and it all holds together okay.

The problem is that it's mostly Just. So. Generic. The plot never rises above the level of minor intrigue. While the evil magic is appropriately spooky, nothing else seems particularly noteworthy, or even really authentically non-modern. Alex is a blank slate as a teenager, who has exactly one interesting character moment at the end of the book when he is tortured about using a servants sexual feelings for him to manipulate her. I mean, it's fine, the characters are all nice people, but the book felt at least 100 pages too long, and a lot of stuff was set up without much payoff. Maybe groundbreaking 20 years ago, but these days just average. I'd rather have reread The Lies of Locke Lamora.

Night Fighter Over Germany is a supremely frustrating book. Graham White is a charming storyteller of the codgerly British variety, and he seems like he'd be a great guy to have a pint with. He also had one of the most terrifying jobs of World War 2, as a nightfighter intruder pilot. In a Beaufort or Mosquito, he flew over occupied Europe at night, stalking Nazi nightfighters that were themselves trying to bring down the heavy bombers. For security reasons, they flew with last generation radar sets, and by the guidance of navigator-radar operators shouting "Right, left, he's above us. You're right on top of him! Don't you see him!" It was a knife-fight by oscilloscope above enemy territory, and the Nazis had aerial radar and ground guidance to help.

Yet in this book, there's about one chapter devoted to a mission. The rest is life in the RAF during the war and immediately after, when White was young, horny, and very drunk. The escapades get exhausting. I have to give him credit for quitting his war reserve job as an apprentice draftsman in supreme style, and I enjoyed learning that he trained at my local airbase of Falcon Field in Mesa, AZ. That said, while this book is fun enough, I wish it had a little more technical heft.

Noir as a genre earned its name from the play of shadows in film. Ellroy's The Black Dahlia is neo-noir made substance, reaching under the passing shade to find an abyss of paranoid corruption. Bucky Bleichert is a rising cop, a prizefighter partnered with Lee Blanchard. The two share the newspaper monikers Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice (Bleichert is Ice), and the love of a woman who is not quite the steady girlfriend of either of them. When an ordinary warrant check leads them into a vacant lot with the tortured and mutilated body of a young woman, the two of them are thrown into a maelstrom of obsession and revenge.

Blanchard sees solving the case as a way to redeem his murdered younger sister, an obsession that drives him off the edge of the world and to his eventual fate. Bleichert persues his partner, the case, and a wealthy heiress with family secrets. The Dahlia, the dead girl, is a mask ripped away from Los Angeles as an uneasy boomtown, seething with racial hatreds and old crimes.

Ellroy apparently fictionalized pretty much everything he wanted, but this isn't about facts. This is about the Truth, about what's at the center of a man or woman. And it's nothing pleasant.

Now this is my kind of dark fantasy! Low Town is classic noir with a fantasy gloss. Warden is an independent operator, a drug dealing middleman with an abrasive streak a mile wide. Before his fall, he used to be the Ice, a skilled detective, before that, a soldier in a brutal war, and before that, a street urchin. When children begin disappearing from Low Town, Warden is dragged from his comfortable criminal rut and into an investigation that reaches into dark and dangerous places. Because the kids aren't being snatched by slavers or pedophiles, they're being sacrificed. And the Void awaits for everybody.

Warden is a great protagonist, but there's some unevenness in tone and characterization. Polansky has trouble in the middle range between James Ellroy broken-glass rage and sarcastic obsequiousness. Secondary characters are a little thin. Warden is an unrepentant asshole, and if you need to like your protagonist this is not the right book at all. That said, I enjoyed the worldbuilding, which is close enough to the real world to feel authentic while being distinct enough not to be a direct copy. Polansky is a hair short of five star greatness, but this book is strong enough to get me to pick up #2 in the series.

90% of everything moves by ship, but these days we barely think about shipping. It's just something that happens. Rose George has written an interesting book about the human experience of maritime shipping today, but one that I wish got a little more technical.

The book is structured around a journey from the UK to Singapore on the Maersk Kendal, a 300m containship capable of hauling almost 6500 standard contains or 75000 tons of cargo. Kendal is captained by a senior Brit with 40 years of maritime experience, and crewed by a multi-ethnic group of 20 men and one woman (the cook), mostly Filipino, but with Indians, Ukrainians, and Chinese as well. The first line on being a sailor on one of these ships is "don't". Pay is miserable, conditions are worse, with long hours, bad food, and a very real risk of death.

While tradition has the Captain as sole authority at sea, these days he's the man who responsible for adjudicating costs and risks between the ship, its owners, its management charter, the sailor's commissioning agents, the cargo owner, insurers, the flag registry, etc, with many of these groups hidden behind layers of international shell companies. For the average sailor turning a wrench, this means that a job with 14 hour days, no breaks, no friends, and sub-US minimum wages can easily turn into one where you haven't been paid in months, the shipping company is demanding that you set sail in an unsafe vessel, and the people who have the power to literally save your life are insulated by so many layers of lawyers they're untouchable.

George spices up the rather humdrum voyage with pirate hunting in Somalia, work at a sailor's mission in the UK, whale biologists attempting to reduce the environmental impacts of shipping, and a history of shipwrecks and survival in the open sea. She's a skilled non-fiction writer. But what drops the book a star for me is that George can't seem to muster up any enthusiasm for the stuff of shipping. Containization and computerized cargo management have revolutionized logistics. The ships are the largest mobile objects ever created by man. But given an opportunity to go down into one of the massive maneuvering thrusters, George demurs: It's too dark, too cramped, too noisy, too clammy.

Please. You're writing 300 pages of shipping. At least see the whole ship.

Flame and Fortune is a dense and provocative academic text on the history and political ecology of fire in the America West, centered around the case study of the 1991 Tunnel Fire, also called the Oakland firestorm, which destroyed approximately 3000 structures and killed 25 people. Simon, then a high school student, lived in the area and evacuated with only the family cat. Some fluke of terrain and wind saved his family's home, while neighbors on either side burned. The Tunnel Fire serves as a human anchor for the history and theory that follows. Simon's goal is a full and accurate depiction of the 'hybrid' entity that is wildfire, in the sense of Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, without the ontological gaps imposed by using dualistic categories of 'natural' and 'cultural'.

Simon's argument centers around the need for new definitions and labels, as a prelude to comprehensive political action. The language that we use to describe the phenomenon of wildfire has been profoundly depoliticized, preventing communities from coming to grips with the root causes of destructive wildfire. His first target is the WUI, the Wildland-Urban Interface (or intermix in some publications), which makes the locations of destructive fires seem like a natural part of the universe. Instead, he prefers the term Affluence-Vulnerability Interface, which draws attention to the fact that these communities are the result of a social history.

In Oakland in particular, this history is one of wealth accumulation. The 19th century hills of Oakland were once covered in stands of redwoods, which were cut down to feed the lumber trade. Redwoods were replaced with eucalyptus groves, which were lousy lumber, but provided an arcadian fantasy that was parceled out and sold by developers. The Oakland hills developed into a community of elegant suburban homes along narrow twisty canyon roads. In California, this process was exacerbated by the Proposition 13 tax revolt, which left cities starving for revenue and unable to staff sufficient fire stations to protect these new communities. As long as there is money to be made, development will follow. Disaster even provides another opportunity for profit, as replacement homes tend to be built slightly larger, with an extra room on average.

"Vulnerability" is the second pillar of Simon's AVI framework. Drawing from the hazardscapes literature, Simon sees vulnerability as a process that is variegated on an individual level, and one which shifts and deepens over time. Vulnerability is the potential for loss of life or property, mitigated by the ability to adapt, for example by having expensive fire insurance and even concierge private firefighters and foam crews, being able to politically mobilize to demand state and federal assistance, and to rebuild with new hardened infrastructure. A particularly dramatic case of vulnerability are elderly people, who may lack the strength and dexterity to evacuate from a fire without help. In 1991, Simon helped carry a wheelchair bound neighbor to his car. But everyone in a fire zone is vulnerable, even those with a robust investment portfolio and insurance.

The third rhetorical move is to stop calling the west a 'flammable landscape' and instead call it the Incendiary (capital 'I' in the book). The conditions for firestorms are something that we've created by scattering house-sized Duraflame logs across the landscape. Debates over climate change, pine beetles, and eucalyptus are distractions from the essence of the situation, the metaphorical bombs planted at the edges of major cities.

Simon's recommendations lack the pointed social justice critique of Mike Davis' classic article "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn", but the major points are equally radical. To disarm the Incendiary, new growth in the affluence-vulnerability interface must be stopped. Existing communities should be pared back in favor of urban in-fill. As we do this, we must be careful not to replace the million-dollar homes with the trailer parks and shanty towns of the vulnerable poor. Political debates should recognize that life in the AVI is a choice which has consequences, while protecting the rights of those who have made this choice.

Flame and Fortune is an important book, and I hope that its intended audience finds it persuasive. I have a PhD in Foucauldian studies of science and technology, so hybridizing nature and culture is a move which I'm comfortable with. I'm worried that fire professionals and home-owners in the affected areas may not be willing to make the cognitive shift to thinking in terms of the AVI, let alone the Incendiary. Degrowth is a platform that I'm wary of, especially given the California housing crisis. I can't see a political coalition for it. And finally, I think this book could have used a chapter on the idea of the 'permanent emergency'. As fire seasons lengthen and intensify, wildfire fighting tactics based on the idea of mutual aid may be overwhelmed by a comprehensive disaster. Budgets based on ad hoc funding for the current emergency don't represent the fact that we know this year was bad, next year will be bad, and it's only getting worse. The only real question is "How bad will the Incendiary get before we try to change it?"

City of Stairs is incredible! The holy city of Bulikov was built by the Divines, a gleaming metropolis of miracles that ruled over an immense empire. Ruled, in the past tense, because a man in one of the enslaved colonies made a weapon that could kill a god, and led a rebellion. Now, 75 years laters, Bulikov is an immense shattered slum, with large parts of the city's infrastructure vanished with its divine creators, and the former slaves now military occupiers. History is written by the victors, and the Saypuri victors have made it illegal for locals to know their own divine history.

When an academic conducting the first serious study of the history of the continent is murdered, it falls to Shaya Thivani, a Saypuri Operative (with a capital O), and her immensely lethal bodyguard Sigurd, to do an investigation. Shaya is a decent person worn down by the cynicism of sixteen years of intelligence work, a woman who loves history and suppresses it, a miracle worker with a library of forbidden tools, a patriot who can never return home. She faces threats from divine revanchists, old lovers, her own allies, and the shallowly buried past, as she investigates the murder of a mentor and new threats to peace.

This is a great fantasy novel, but what really elevates it is the thematic unity of history and remembering the past. Since Tolkien, fantasy has been defined by its imagined history: thousand year empires, powers inherited from the creation of the world, heroic bloodlines and the myths of a world not our own. Bennett goes meta, and turns the nature of the history into the topic of the story. How can people (singular and and the people) lead authentic lives when their origins are suppressed, distorted, or simply lost?

City of Stairs draws immediate comparisons to The Traitor Baru Cormorant (a female protagonist in spycraft) and Gladstone's Craft series (victors over dead gods). I'd rank this first book in the series above both of then. Baru Cormorant is fantastic, but as bleak and unfriendly as its titular character, and I think Bennett has an edge on Dickinson as a descriptive writer. Gladstone is glib and fun, but his magic is a blend of law, finance, and tech, with painfully obvious analogies to our own world. Miracles in City of Stairs feel appropriately strange and miraculous, with the uneven symmetry of Jungian archetypes rather than shopping-list competitionism of a D&D magic item book.

Absolutely recommended.