Magic Bites is a step outside my standard tastes in speculative fiction, a southern urban fantasy set in the magitech ruins of Atlanta. Kate Daniels is a saber-sling merc who winds up pulled into a investigation when her mentor is assassinated. Her style is pretty straight forward: Start asking questions until someone tries to kill her, and that's the suspect. What she finds is a plot to set the vampires and lycanthropes of the city at war, and then pick up the pieces.

On the upside, any scene where Kate stares down some high level supernatural being is ace, and well worth it for that alone. On the other hand, I don't much care for this version of a magical setting, or how ordinary humans get along in it. Kate has a Mysterious Bloodline that's hinted at repeatedly, but for people without a magic sword and uncanny reflexes, life seems pretty grim. Magical elements are included because this is a genre book, and they have to be there, but they don't really fuse into a cohesive setting.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos lab, chief designer of the atomic bomb, and a polymath with mystic and leftist inclinations, had the perfect quote for the first artificial dawn of an atomic explosion. There are many ways in which we die: disease, age, accident, violence. And many ways in which we might all die; suddenly in the wake of some cosmological catastrophe or slowly starving on a dying planet. With the atom bomb, it was now possible for a single individual, at the top of a chain of technological and political commitments, to kill almost everyone in the space of an afternoon. The bombs were only used in anger twice, punctuation to end the global slaughter of the Second World War. Since then, history has existed under the shadow of a potential mushroom cloud. This book is the story of how we got there.

Rhodes takes almost the first half of the book to establish the basic science and personalities of the atomic bomb. The first half of the 20th century was a golden age for physics which will likely never be equaled, as imaginative theorists and skilled experimenters probed the basic building blocks of the universe. Rutherford and Bohr nailed down, for the first time in evidence rather than speculation, the basic building blocks of matter. Atoms had most of their mass in a small nucleus, and owed their chemical properties to the quantum behavior of electron shells. The neutron was added to the list of fundamental particles. New elements were created by neutron bombardment, and by the late 1930s it was widely known that uranium would fission on bombardment, splitting into two lighter elements, and releasing a large deal of energy. There positive glee of work in this field, at this time, comes through in Rhodes' able biographical sketches of the scientists involved, particularly Bohr, Fermi, and Szilard.

Szilard was the first to think of the potential of a fission chain reaction. If some substance, on absorbing a neutron split and released two or more neutrons, could produce a great deal of energy in millionths of a second. It would be a bomb of stupendous power, a city-smasher. Politically perceptive, Szilard had been helping Jewish physicists flee the Nazis for years. He had hoped for an H.G. Wells inspired international coalition to peacefully control this new power, but in 1939 if the bomb was too be invented, best by the Americans or British rather than Hitler.

The next section, building the bomb, is less fun. Bohr predicted that you would need to turn all of America into a factory to build a bomb, and that is what the Manhattan project did, mobilizing thousands of scientists, $2 billion, and massive plants to do the hard work of separating fissile U-235 and Plutonium from natural uranium. Bureaucratic confusion and balky precision engineering made the task anything but easy. The other powers pursued the bomb. The British sent over their best to help with the Manhattan project. Germany's team, lead by Heisenberg, never had the necessary priority in the Reich, and were stalled by clever British-Norwegian sabotage directed at a heavy water production facility required for the Nazi reactor design. Japan never had access to the raw material to move beyond theory.

The last section is grimmer yet. The design of the bomb was an exercise in precision, in delicately engineered explosive lenses to make the implosion to critical mass happen smoothly in nanoseconds. Tibbetts' B-29 bomber group trained to a razor's edge to accomplish the mission of deploying the 'gadget'. Roosevelt, on approving the Manhattan project, had instinctively reserved the bomb to himself as President. In 1945, Vice President Truman had not been read into the project until he succeeded to the presidency. The bomb was used on Hiroshima because it could be, because the Japanese still resisted, and because something had to be shown for the effort invested. It was a crime, a mass-murder in an instant. Rhodes does not flinch from the horror of Hiroshima.

Personally, I think we need to distinguish between the bomb's use at the end of the Second World War, where it seems a matter of degree compared to area bombing rather than kind, and its use now, where that would signal breaking the nuclear taboo. This does not absolve the scientists who built the bomb of their responsibility. Nature's secrets were all around, and once fission had been theorized it was probably only a matter of time before someone figured out how to make it work, but these people made a choice to build Death a supersonic jet bomber to replicate his tired old horse.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a penetrating look at the most consequential scientific and political moment of the 20th century. I'd give it six stars, if I could. It is also my 1000th review on Goodreads!

Coercion, Capital, and European States charts a grand theory of history that attempts to explain why Europe in the late 20th century looks like it does, a fairly uniform sprawl of nation-state social democracies, as opposed to the diverse variety of political systems existent over the past 1000 years: feudal baronies, city-states, sprawling empires. Tilly's basic thesis is that states make war, and vice versa. The increasing expense of maintaining gunpowder, and later armies of mass conscripts, forced centralization and fictionalization, which broke less affluent and efficient states, and lead towards the modern ideal. This is not to imply a singular and inevitable path: Tilly traces a coercion intensive path followed by Sweden, a capital intensive path followed by the Dutch, and a medium path typical of France, England, and Prussia.

As a relatively short book, it's hard to cover every part of the grand theory in detail, but I was dissatisfied. Clearly, coercion and capital are two major forces in history, but as variables they lack explanatory power. Armies look like unitary instruments of coercion from a distance, and in a Clausewitzian framework, are coercive elements of power between states, but this glosses over the factionalism that characterized pre-modern armies, the autonomy of a warrior elite against the agricultural masses, and the difficulty of using coercion systematically against weaker states. While Tilly is right to note that budgets increased in time of war settle at a higher baseline, and to gesture at key phase transitions in warfare, he is vague on key details. In particular, there should be more comparison between strong kings and weak kings at the mercy of major dukes, the rise and fall of the condottieri mercenary regiment, the Levée en masse of the French Revolution, and high-tech warfare of the 20th century. I'd point towards McNeill's The Pursuit of Power and Mallett's Mercenaries and the Masters for the first two, I'm not well-versed enough on the French Revolution to talk about the second one, and the third deserves an entire shelf.

Economics is an area that I am less well-versed on than military history, but I was equally dissatisfied with his explanation of capital. Cities and trade networks serve as the engines of capital accumulation, and wealth is linked to military strength as wars became increasingly financed by loans, but there is more there. The good credit of Dutch merchants helped liberate them from Spanish rule as Spain declared bankruptcy several times during the Spanish-Dutch wars, yet the wealthy city-states of Italy declined as powers past the 16th century. There are obvious benefits to being the center of the financial system, as London and New York's dominance show. Yet capital is fluid, transnational, and while states benefit from and caused monetization, capital is distinct from statehood. In particular, more attention should be paid to 'real capital', in the productive qualities of physical objects on the land, against capital that exists on paper and in the beliefs of bankers.

It's not a surprise that someone with my academic pedigree would say this, but Coercion, Capital, and European States could really use more engagement with the biopolitical theories of Foucault. Tilly completely misses the development of disciplinary administrative apparatuses as an element of power, and the circulation of disciplinary techniques between states. The nation-state, which links ethnicity, territory, and administration in a sovereign union, can only be understood from a biopolitical perspective.

The final chapter, on the extension of European style states to the the post-colonial, post-World War II order, and the continued resilience of military elites in the third world, has not aged particularly well. I can't blame someone writing at the fall of the USSR for thinking out loud about states in the 21st century and not capturing the War on Terror, the rise of transnational NGOs as instruments of power, and the concerns about failed and failing states, but this book posits an end to history and fails to see beyond it. And finally, if I were a scholar in this field, I'm not sure how I'd use the ideas here. Plot my state on Capital vs Coercion over time? Draw lines? Postulate moderation as good?

"There is a war... for your Mind!"

That's the slogan of InfoWars, the incendiary conspiracy news network and nutritional supplement marketing firm. And while Alex Jones is wrong about almost everything, he's right about that. In LikeWar Singer and Brooking ably synthesize a sophisticated picture of information warfare in 2018, drawing from sources as diverse as Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, and ISIS, to argue that the internet has lead to a blurring of lines between consumer, citizen, journalist, activist, and warrior which threatens the foundations of liberal democracy. The tech companies which built these platforms and profited from them must grapple with the politics of their technologies, before we all reap the whirlwind.

Computer networks and smart phones connect billions of people, allowing ideas to flow faster than ever before in history. Sometimes, the results can be impressive. The Chiapas Zapatista movement in 1994 was a dial-up and fax version of a network insurgency that managed to bring enough international opprobrium on Mexico that the government blinked, and reached some kind of political accord (Chiapas is complicated). More recently, Eliot Higgins and a team of open source analysts at Bellingcat managed to track down the exact BUK missile system and Russian soldiers responsible for shooting down MH 17 in 2014.

But there are a lot of dark sides. When people connect, the emotion that spreads most rapidly is anger. Lies spread five times faster than truth. Musicians can use social networks to directly connect with their fans, and ISIS uses it to connect with alienated Muslim youths worldwide. Social networks sort diverse citizens into filter bubbles of people who think alike. Eliot Higgin's careful open source intelligence has a paranoid fun-house mirror version in the QAnon conspiracy, where Qultist decoders find hidden messages from an alleged 'senior white house source'.

And then there is the matter of information war, an area that even now, after years of offensive cyber operations, liberal democracies still don't understand. Hostile propaganda slips into Western news networks and major platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are infested with bots. LikeWar can even take a personal toll. Over the course of writing this book, General Michael Flynn went from forward looking full-spectrum commander to head Trumpist conspiracy cheerleader to indicted and plead out felon. Flynn's fall is complex, but it can't be separated from the internet. If the trolls got him, what chance does your idiot cousin stand? The counters, 'citizen truth teams' and senior emissaries to groups vulnerable to recruitment, seem like thin reeds against the coming maelstrom of noise.

LikeWar starts with Clausewitz's dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means, and there are clear links between cyberspace and physical space. Intensity of hashtags impacted the subsequent intensity of Israeli airstrikes during attacks on the Gaza strip. ISIS used propaganda to create an aura of invincibility that outflanked the defenders of Mosul, while Russia denied that its 'little green men' were even in Ukraine. But the difference is that cyberspace is constructed space rather than natural space. The networks are built, maintained, and owned by real corporations and real people. The internet grew from an anarchic specialized scientific network to a major engine of commerce and communicate with little deliberate government oversight. Section 230 absolved American companies of responsibility for policing content, with major carve outs for copyrighted IP and pornography. Yet as concerns over cyberbullying and counter-terrorism rose, major networks adopted digital constitutions that were permissive towards speech and censorious towards erotica. Policing content is and was possible, but always took a back seat to growth and engagement, the guide stars of Silicon Valley.

The future is if anything, darker. Advances in machine learning and AI allow ever more realistic bots, computer generated DeepFakes where a politician can be programmed to say anything, and personalized targeting of people with exactly the propaganda they'll believe. There are defensive counters, but if I might draw military analogies, what we saw in 2016 was armored warfare circa 1918: clearly the future, but not yet a mature system. Given the pace of technology, we only have a few years before digital blitzkrieg.

I'm extremely online, and I've been following this space for years. I've presented at multiple conferences on this topic, including Governance of Emerging Technologies and Association of Internet Researchers. LikeWar is the book I wish I'd written. Cognizant, forward looking, and deeply researched, it is vital reading for anyone interested in technology or politics.

My only reservation is that I wish the sources were better linked in the text, instead of being buried in static endnotes. Maybe the next edition will push an update.

As always, Scalzi is a charming, witty storyteller, and The Collapsing Empire is a surprisingly optimistic take the complete destruction of human society. The Interdependency is held together by the Flow, a system of hyperspace rivers that link the scattered human habitats. But the Flow is drying up, and humanity may only have a matter of months to find salvation. Worse yet, the geometry of Flow connections mean most humans live in artificial habitats that require constant interstellar trade to survive.

The story takes place through the eyes of three people coming to grips with the immanent crisis. Cardenia is the newly crowned Emperox of the Interdependency, a political outsider elevated by the accidental death of her brother, the heir apparent. Kiva is a foul-mouthed super-Type A scion of a major trading family, who's ship has been placed under a bullshit embargo at the rebellion-wracked planet of End. And Marce is a physicist from End who has calculated when and where the Flow will collapse. Against them are the Machiavellian Nohamapetan family, who have their own model for how the Flow will collapse, and believe that if they move correctly, the natural cycle of the universe will leave them the new ruling family.

The Collapsing Empire is a 3.5 star book, but its flaws are papered over by the fact that on a sentence-to-sentence level, Scalzi is a great writer. The characters exist to provide different views on the setting, not because they have moral arcs. Cardenia in particular is painfully passive compared to the wheels-within-wheels grade schemers around her. The story plays out in triplicate, as the characters realize what's happening, and come to similar conclusions about what to do. Only Kiva's mercenary ballbusting spices up a kind of doughy basic decency. And as much as this book claims to be about politics (and the constant "hey guys, Climate Change right here right now" elbow nudges), the politics of the book are just dull. The whole edifice of the Interdependency is a facade over the brutal extraction of wealth by robber barons who sit on the arteries of commerce with warships. Scalzi did the whole "the basis of the government is a LIE" thing already, and with more verve, in Old Man's War.

Frank Herbert had thoughts about politics. Heinlein had theories about individuality and conformity. Asimov had ideas about the sweep of history. So far, Scalzi just has like opinions, man. I wish they were better.

I'll preface this by saying that it is impossible for me to be objective about this book. As a descendant of the Oklahoma Slaners, I went to Grodno with "Cousin Felix" and the rest of his relatives when I was in kindergarten. I saw the old synagogue, the remains of the ghetto, heard the stories. So I knew I was related to this great man, and the outlines of his story of survival, but the details were filtered through years and the inevitable distortions of family legends. This is the authoritative version, in black and white.

This is really three books in one. Felix Zandman grew up in interwar Poland, in the city of Grodno with 30,000 Jews. He lived in a luxurious apartment building, owned by his Grandfather Freydovicz, a successful construction magnate. His grandmother Tema was a one-woman philanthropic organization. On his father's side, Grandfather Zandman was a poor religious scholar, married to a radical feminist. His family was a microcosm of the community, full of splintering arguments over socialism, Zionism, business, and bound together by love. It was a rich, fulfilling, world. The culmination of centuries of Jewish life.

All this ended with the Operation Barbarossa, and the Nazi invasion. (milhist note: Nazi Germany and the USSR were allies for the invasion of Poland. Grodno was in the Soviet Zone, and things got better for the Jews for a year or so). The Jews of Grodno had heard how bad things were in the German Zone, but only a few believed it and had the resources to flee. The Germans invaded, and began the "liquidation" of the Jews of Grodno, a years long horror of being forced into ghettos, arbitrary beatings and execution, and mass transportation to the death camps. Young Felix survived by the skin of his teeth, dodging random death and escaping the transports by hiding and running. When the ghetto was finally liquidated, he needed some place to hide, and remembered Janova Puchalski, a Polish woman who was the groundskeeper for the Freydovicz dachas. Felix managed to walk there, dodging patrols, and found his Uncle Sender and two other Grodno jews, Mottl and Goldie Bass. They excavated a shallow hole beneath the bedroom, and for 17 months the four of them survived in darkness, with Janova smuggling down a pail of a food and up a pail of excrement. To stay sane, Felix practiced an imaginary violin, and learned math from Sender, visualizing complex equations and geometric principles in the dark.

The hole was indescribable. 17 months of darkness, almost no motion, body parasites, and fear. Sender laid down an iron law. No sex for anyone, all food shared. These moral rules took on a very concrete reality, as the bedrock of the survival of the community. Somehow, they made it through, even when the Soviets pushed back, and the Nazis requisitioned the house. After a few days, they slipped out, managed to convince Nazi patrols they were refugees from the Soviets, and survived in another abandoned cottage till the war moved past.

Part two covers the immediate aftermath of the war. Felix and Sender lived as smugglers in Soviet-occupied Danzig, helping move refugees and guns to Israel as the Iron Curtain came up. They managed to get out, taking a trainload of refugees to France. There, Felix enrolled in the Sorbonne, making up for lost time. He specialized in optical coating for stress measurement, a technique with a wide variety of engineering applications, and eventually wound up as a consultant in the United States. He reconnected with the American side of his family (relatives of Grandma Tema's sister-my people). Felix recognized an opportunity in the electronics market for very precise, temperature-insensitive resistors, and with some funding from Alfred Slaner, set up a small electronics company, Vishay, which grew slowly on the basis of technical merits through the next few decades.

The third part of the book concerns a dizzying series of corporate deals, as Felix used leverage buyouts to snatch up distressed competitors, opened outsourcing plants in Israel, and expanded Vishay to a Fortune 500 company specializing in the whole range of electronic components. And of course along the way Felxi got married, had children, got divorced, re-married, was a witness at the trial of Gestapo Officer Kurt Weise, destroyer of Grodno, and brought the Puchalski children and grandchildren to Yad Vashem to see their family commemorated among the khasidei umót ha'olám.

Subjectively, this book is five stars for family reasons. Objectively, if you're interested in the holocaust, technology, or business, it's a good read although there are more classic books in each of these areas. Still, a fascinating biography of a man who passed through immense adversity, survived, and triumphed.

If science-fiction has a name, it's John W. Campbell. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction during the crucial Golden Age of Science Fiction from 1937 until the end of the Second World War, he defined the form and tropes of the genre. He was responsible for nurturing it as a serious endeavor, as real literature, and as a form distinct from fantasy, horror, adventure, and other speculative fiction. Even as the genre grew beyond the control of any one man, and Campbell slipped towards crankdom, he was still the Institution, the editor who authors measured their ambition against. Nevala-Lee links Campbell to the three most important men in his life: Asimov, Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard, and provides a fascinating story of the immense work of these visionaries, and their equally immense flaws.

Campbell had an unhappy childhood, caught between an authoritarian father and a manipulative mother. At worst, the cruelty of his mother and her identical twin sister provided the inspiration for his story "Who Goes There?", adapted in film as The Thing. At best, they provided him with drive and editorial skills. Certainly, Campbell's recollections of his childhood display a deep ambivalence and surety that his parents wounded him psychologically. Large, intense, almost friendless, with the ambition to be an engineer but without the talent, Campbell was hired as editor of Astounding Stories almost as a fluke. It was the job he was born to have.

As editor of Astounding, quickly renamed to Astounding Science Fiction, Campbell created a new form of literature for modernity, centered around advances in science and technology, rational extrapolation of those advances, and the figure of the 'competent man', the engineer-hero who analyzes problems and arrives at solutions through mastery of rational thinking. Campbell cultivated a stable of talented writers. Robert Heinlein was probably the greatest literary talent, with an eye for character, detail, the sweep of history, and perfect pacing. L. Ron Hubbard had raw charisma and an engaging style, even if his biography of adventure was a mutable facade over constant reversals and defeats. Isaac Asimov was an awkward youth, unable to fit in and desperate to please; his actual genius would see him advance the furthest of the group. As editor, Campbell shot ideas off the proper writers, a continual shower of sparks and a demand for higher standards right when the genre needed it most.

World War 2 provided a critical test for the group, and one which by many measures was a failure. Campbell thought his readership could serve as a super-lab for the US military, but failed to gain traction with the bureaucracy. Asimov and Heinlein worked together at the Pennsylvania Naval Shipyard, in important but mundane tasks, but they were too different personalities to be good friends. Hubbard was an abysmal failure as a naval officer. Campbell baited the censors with a story in 1944 that "predicted" the atomic bomb. The gamble, which could have closed Astounding, paid off, and became an element of Campbell's personal mythology.

The post-war years were marked by Campbell's fall into crankdom. Obsessed with the atomic bomb, and with the need for men to master themselves before they ended the world, Campbell became the leading proponent of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. The readership of Astounding served as the testbed for the process of auditing and generating "clears", humans free of negative memories with supposed superpowers. Campbell is apparently responsible for much of what is borrowed from cybernetics in Dianetics, but he and Hubbard soon parted ways over financial matters. Hubbard went on to turn Dianetics into the Church of Scientology, though there is no evidence that he founded the religion as part of a bet from either Asimov or Heinlein. The most parsimonious story is that he did it as a tax dodge, and to avoid lawsuits from medical licensing boards.

So what of those flaws? Campbell became increasingly domineering, a "universal expert" who lacked actual knowledge, lectured people at length, and became fascinating with psychic powers and supernatural phenomenon. As the civil rights movement advanced, he became harshly reactionary in his views on race. Heinlein's politics also turned rightwards (he had campaigned as a socialist in the 1930s), and the last truly great book he wrote was The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, as he believed he was too good to need editing. Isaac Asimov has perhaps the dirtiest feet, for all his talent. As he became a prolific science writer and institution in fandom, authoring over 400 books, his initial social awkwardness became a love of seeing his name in lights. His behavior was defined by constant sexual harassment, from pinching butts to public passes. Hubbard, of course, founded an authoritarian brainwashing cult and wrote Battlefield Earth, but expectations were low.

In an interesting bit of parallelism, all the men had deeply important first marriages that defined how they grew, and once they achieved success, they discarded their wives and remarried. The circumstances varied. Doña Campbell grew frustrated with John's obsession with dianetics and left him for another man. Leslyn Heinlein experienced a nervous collapse. Gertrude Asimov grew tired of Isaac's philandering. Hubbard tried to murder his wife Sara, have her committed, and deny her custody of their children. And while early scifi was very much a man's world, Astounding's assistant editor Catherine Tarrant was by Campbell's side the whole time, and so important that when she fell ill, it took five men to replace her.

But for their flaws, these were still great men. They wrote stories which will resonate for centuries. Campbell turned a tiny literary niche into a cultural juggernaut, and cast a mode of heroic futurism that is still at the heart of science-fictions. Nevala-Lee's book is deeply sourced, comes from an authentic love of the genre, and tells us who these men were, and why their ideas matter today. Campbell saw his mission as creating a literary 'Sword of Achilles', stories so appealing that boys who would grow into the men who would build the future would embrace it on sight. In that, he had absolute success.

This is a great book! If it doesn't win best associated work at the next Hugos, I will eat my hat.

This is my favorite book.

It's so much my favorite book that I wrote an article on its 20th anniversary for Slate. I interviewed Bruce Sterling on what inspired him while writing, and why this book is still relevant right before the 2018 midterms.

...

Okay, that's not a review. Let me explain why this is my favorite book. Distraction paints a picture of a world gone down the tubes in an all too familiar way, but unlike the usual dystopian moanings, Sterling has the guts to imagine a way out; a characteristically optimistic American faith in the endless frontier of science, technology, and freedom from any kind of notion of responsibility.

But there are three things that I really, truly love about Distraction. First is the setting, which after 15 years smells more like the future than when it was written. An American political system that has descended into an insane farce. An economy that no longer has jobs for half the people; most of whom have dropped out to join a perpetual nomad carnival run off of weird reputation servers. Ecological Cold War with the Dutch and a coalition of low-lying Third World nations. A lost economic war with the Chinese over intellectual property. And information warfare as the basic fact of life--a world where bugs can be bought in bulk at flea markets, spam email servers orchestrate assassinations, and the US Air Force has to hold a bake sale to keep the lights on. It's a rich tapestry, and all of it hangs together beautifully.

Second, the aphorisms. Bruce Sterling knows how to turn a phrase, and he has some great ones around science and politics in this book. I'm a science policy professional by a living, and personally, I think Sterling has a better understanding of how this all works than 90% of the boring scholarly types involved. You want a mind-expanding quote about science and society, this is your book. Sterling doesn't bash you over the head with abstruse STS theory, but you can feel it deep underneath the writing.

And third, I really enjoy the plot and the characters: the genetically altered political strategist, the Nobel prize winning scientist, the mad governor of Louisiana, and the intricate scheme of neural engineering and power machinations that draw them into collision. Sure, some of the more important plot points proceed by random happenstance, but history doesn't have good reasons. In the real world, strange stuff that nobody could've seen comes in and upsets the board all the time. Just sit back, relax, and let the ride take you.

Read it.

Okay, the President has not technically been kidnapped. Rather, the Operational Phenomenology Agency, aka the Black Chamber, aka the Nazgul, has worked a geas across the entire United States to make them forget that the President even exists. Mhari Murphy, Laundry Officer, PHANG, (oh, and Bob's ex from book 1) is the Bad Dude responsible for getting him back, along with a team of high-level Laundry agents doing old-school 'Set Europe Ablaze' style SOE sabotage.

This being The Laundry, nothing is simple or easy. The new Prime Minister, an avatar of Nyarlathotep, has taken a personal interest in Mhari's mission. Failure means that her skull, and the skulls of everyone she loves, will decorate the sacrificial arch Nyarly is building in the center of London. Success means advancing the plans of an Elder God, who's only virtue is that it finds humanity amusing. And messing up means getting caught in the United States, which is now run by the NSA crossed with mind-hacking Cthulhu cultists. There are fates worth than death, and being used as a fleshy avatar of Cthulhu is one of them.

Some parts really worked. Nyarlathotep is supremely creepy as Prime Minister. The Americans protecting the President, the last little cells free of the Nazgul's geas, feel properly paranoid and oppressed. They forget their mission every time they sleep, and are running on modafinil and fear. The ultimate plan of the Nazgul, a brute force attempt to wake Cthulhu by the inner solar system into a Matryoshka brain of orbital computers running invocations, is a nice call-back to Stross's first Singularity books. And the final set-piece, which involves a Concorde from 666 Squadron, is properly badass.

That said, while Mhari is decent enough as a protagonist, her concerns about being a bloodsucking vampire working for an inhuman monster, never felt more than obligatory. Yes, yes, she's a nice English girl so she doesn't like living by murder, and doesn't want to be an advance agent for an Empire that'd make the people who did the Opium Wars, mustard gas in COIN, and multiple famines in the name of the Free Market look like innocent schoolboys. But I don't really believe it. Stross is still only so-so about writing about America, though better than he was back in Book #4, as he sketches in a National Treasure style occult history of the US.

And finally the bad, and this is a thing where an editor should have put a foot down. The central human relationship of the book is between Mhari and Jim/Officer Friendly from Book 6. Jim is a super-powered flying tank, senior police officer, and silver fox of a man. Mhari has a "strictly physical, seriously guys" relationship with him that grows over the course of the book, and she also consistently calls him Fuckboy. Which, and Urban Dictionary will back me up on, is an entirely different species of lameass loser. I totally believe that Mhari would have a deeming nickname for Jim, but I'm roughly the same age she is, and there's no way an ambitious career-minded woman of my generation would use that specific phrase for someone who she ever wants to see again, even if she is a self-loathing monster.

There's also a doubt growing the in back of my mind about the long-term direction of The Laundry series, and the role of humans. Stross has always been concerned with the relationship between people and superhuman entities, whether they've been AIs running Economics 2.0, the Eschaton, corporate and government bureaucracies, or Lovecraftian entities standing in for any of the prior. His best heroes have dealt with these entities by being clever, basically by the hacker ethos. Mhari is not a hacker, she's a people person (or at least was). But Mhari solves her problems with superspeed, superstrength, and a basilisk gun. If the series going forward is just about PHANGs, that's a bad joke played on the readers.

Tomorrow, the Killing refines the formula from the first Low Town book, without breaking much new ground. A few years on, Warden is still in his comfortable niche as an independent operator, when his old commander, General Montgomery, asks for a favor. The general's daughter Rhaine is missing in Low Town, poking around the old murder of her brother Roland, and Warden should see her safely home. Of course, nothing is simple.

Roland Montgomery was the founder of the Veteran's Association, a political radical who was assassinated to protect the crown. Worse, Warden had a part in that. The Veteran's Association is just another mob these days, a gang of toughs. Out of what passes for justice in his cynicism and bitterness, Warden starts a multisided gang war between the veterans, the mafia, and the secret police.

It's a noir pastiche, but it's a fun noir pastiche, and Polansky is a little firmer with the secondary characters than he was in the first one. I'll keep reading.