Education and LARPing are two flavors that should go together like chocolate and peanut butter, but making a good EduLARP is surprisingly hard. As a tabletop gamer and professor, I've been only moderately impressed with the games put out by the Reacting to the Past (RttP) consortium. RttP may beat the standard rigmarole of lectures and essays, but the game design is not particularly sophisticated, and my time in the RttP facebook group suggests that most professors have similar problems about students not reading background material, not getting involved, and the game system giving nonsensical answers about how the siege of Athens proceeds. My own efforts in this area were a near-total failure of design goals saved only by brilliant improvisation on the part of my co-instructors. So believe me when I say A) this stuff is hard and B) Jason Morningstar has cracked the code.

Winterhorn is a game about government surveillance and abuse of power. You are an interagency working group in an unnamed country loosely based on East Germany (but even western democracies have secret police, the FBI ran COINTELPRO for decades, and in 2003 a British undercover agent had a child with an activist before disappearing.) Your target is Winterhorn, an activist group composed of seven core members with ideals, desires, and weaknesses laid out in the briefing material. Additionally, you have a role as a secret police agent, with a past and an agenda of your own.

Over three rounds of thirty minutes each, your secret police squad will select seven options from deck of twelve secret police tactics, ranging in violence from hands-off wiretapping to sending 'patriotic' thugs (off-duty cops) to assault members of Winterhorn. You can also be tricky, setting up front groups to siphon away recruits and using "bad jacketing" to destroy the cohesion of the group by planting rumors suggesting some members are informers for the secret police. At the end of the game, the seven tactics that you chose in the last round are used to create a final report drawn from paragraphs in the rules, which describes how well the group succeeded in its mission. Then you debrief and discuss the ethics of the secret police.

Winterhorn is a shining example of rules-light design. Key game information like character roleplaying notes, OOC roles, and the results of operations, are contained on playing cards. The system of choosing seven of twelve options forces the group to evaluate and select tactics, but it is possible to over-commit and blow the operation. It's a brilliant piece of game design which creates an emergent narrative without getting tied down in complex rules or props. Twelve alternate operation cards provide a smidgen of replayability, but Winterhorn is mostly a one-and-done experience. The graphic design is top-notch, with bureaucratic memos describing Winterhorn, and a samizdat zine describing the secret police. You can choose to print-and-play the cards or buy them (mine are in the mail, and I full expect them to be excellent). A brief essay on the history of subverting political enemies rounds out the materials.

With the caveats that this is a read-through review rather than a playtest review, though I can't imagine the rules breaking, and that I didn't comprehensively crosscheck the cards to see if nonsense outcomes could arise, Winterhorn is an incredible game that does for LARPs what Papers Please did for videogames, making the banality of evil in authoritarian regimes real.

Captain Kel Cheris is having a very bad day. A loyal soldier of the Hexarchate, she's been paired with the undead, insane, and genocidal General Jedao, imprisoned for 400 years after betraying his own command and killing one million people. Evil though Jedao may be, he's never lost a battle, and Kel Command keeps him on ice to take down major threats, like the heretical corruption of a key border fortress protected by impenetrable shields. If Cheris can keep her sanity and accomplish her mission, power and promotion await.

Lee's first novel (he has an accomplished body of shorter fiction) is a dark byzantine military adventure. The Hexarchate runs on a combination of math and belief called the high calendar, which allows its military to access exotic quantum effects through the right formation. Life is an endless bulwark of rituals against the madness of the Hexarchate leaders, and a multisided history of atrocity and torture. Their military makes a fetish out of loyalty and suicide, while the intelligence services see everything as a game, and lives as nothing more than tokens to be spent in pursuit of victory. The people in charge of doctrine actively demand torture to keep the whole thing working. Super bleak, super stylish, and a strong debut in the weird tradition of The Quantum Thief.

***

On a reread of all three books, Ninefox Gambit is still damn near perfect, chilling in the implications of the setting and characters, the interplay between Cheris and Jedao, and occasional interjection of other viewpoints, most of whom serve to die horribly to illustrate some point.

Ninefox Gambit blew me away with its relentless purity of vision, and the very alien realism of the Hexarchate empire and their exotic technologies and politics run on a half-mathematical, half-magical High Calendar powered by mass atrocity. Themes of games, redemption, and identity ran through that book.

The sequel pulls back the focus a little bit, and sets the setting up for a crisis much bigger than the collapse of a major border fort. Revenant General Shous Jedao has seized command of an entire swarm of combat starships, which he is inexplicably using to fight the Hafn invaders, another human stellar empire somehow even more horrifying in their use of human lives as weapons than the hexarchate. Khiruev is the former commander of the swarm, a devoted officer who finds herself following the cause of the person who usurped her command. Brezan is a crashhawk, a Kel soldier who lacks the dictates of formation instinct and so chooses to follow orders rather obey them instinctively. And Shous Mikodez is a faction leader, wryly commenting on events as he manipulates grand strategy and politics towards a complete collapse of the Hexarchate. The goal here is nothing less than successful heresy on the grandest scale, and the end of the immoral High Calendar system.

Raven Strategem is very good, but it lacks the razorwire tautness of Lee's other work. A lot of pieces are being revealed and set in motion, but the pattern how they'll fall out is still unclear. A first scan says the big theme is if redemption is possible for any of these people, or if their active participation in the crimes of power forever dooms them. A level below is a question of cosmic nihilism: can anyone be saved? Is there such a thing as a good act in this world, or just varying shades of evil? Second books are hard, and I'm worried that the answers to these questions are less interesting than asking them.

***

On a reread of the whole series, and Raven Strategem is a lot less interesting. The Hafn invasion that takes up most of the book is in retrospect a feint. The real story is the assassination of the hexarchs and breaking up of the empire. But neither Brezan or Mikodez have the essential quality of a protagonist--making a character defining choice, and the story coasts on momentum from the last book.

Films from the Future begins with the premise that science-fiction cinema has something important to say about the relationship between science and society. That underneath all the whizbang special effects, the psuedo-scientific technobabble, and two-dimensional characters, thinking about these stories can help us grapple with the impacts of real technologies, under a rubric of responsible innovation or risk innovation.

To do this, Maynard has assembled a unique set of case studies. Some of the films are enduring futuristic blockbusters like Jurassic Park and Minority Report. Intellectual heavy hitters are represented by Ex Machina and Ghost In The Shell. The are truly obscure choices, like the 1951 Alec Guinness comedy The Man In The White Suit, and schlock like Inferno and Transcendence.

At its best, the writing dances between the film in question, recent scientific developments which might make the film real, and Maynard's personal experience. He writes with real passion about his early career in the mechanics of atmospheric dust (more interesting than it sounds), about growing up in England and falling in love with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio play, and his current globe-hopping life as an technology ethicist and futurist. The problem is that all too frequently, Maynard makes a rhetorical leap that the reader has difficulty following. There's a choppiness to a lot of the chapters that leave the book feeling stitched together, rather than a cohesive whole.

More seriously, the advantage of narrative futurism and stories like these is that it allows us to examine a given issue from multiple perspectives. The validity of multiple viewpoints, including non-expert viewpoints, is at the root of the last four decades of science and technology studies scholarship, and responsible innovation as a policy argument. I wish I'd seen more of that multiplicity, because all too often the argument retreats to a stance that the protagonists of the films were arrogant and should have consulted more stakeholders. The story of the overweening scientist being punished for his unnatural pursuit of power is one of the oldest in science-fiction (see Faust and Frankenstein), and I hoped to see a more interesting take on that basic narrative in at least one of these essays. Instead, we have replaced God with public engagement workshops and faceless regulatory committees.

And two notes. If you have a choice, get the ebook version. The typography in my paper copy is notably cramped. And second, in the interest of disclosure, Andrew is a friend, I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and I had some minor comments on one chapter.

1903 is one of those dates that is etched into history: The year that men flew in the persons of two brothers from Ohio. McCullough is one of the deans of historical biography, and an expert on America circa 1900, so this book is of course quite good.

The picture of the Wrights that he paints is one of methodological devotion to their dream of controlled flight. While men had been dreaming for ages, it was the Wrights who finally achieved that dream, recognizing that the first step had to be controlled flight, then powered flight, then aviation. The Wrights obsessively studied the flight of birds, built a wind tunnel to find the proper shape for an airfoil, and finally launched their Flyer at Kitty Hawk.

Some men, like Teddy Roosevelt and John Adams, seemed destined for greatness, their steps already marked by stars. The Wrights were the exact opposite, and most creditably, even as they became the center of the world they did not become infatuated with fame and with power. Flight itself was the thing, and what they wanted was enough money not to prove a burden to others.

What this book reveals, which I didn't know, was that the birth of flight was far spottier than might be expected. After their first flight in 1903, the Wrights didn't fly again until 1905, and it took several years to convince the American governments and European powers that flight was worth investing in, even as the brothers collected accolades. MCCullough stints the patent battle with Curtis that shaped early American aviation, and ends in a melancholy sense. Neither Wright brother, nor their sister Katherine, ever married. Wilbur died of Typhoid fever in 1912. Orville lived until 1948, but suffered from the effects of a 1908 crash, and ceased to fly in 1918.

Tahir Shah likes to play the fool, but behind the jokes is a sharp observer of people. Trail of Feathers is actually a fascinating adventure and serious work of ethnopharmacology masquerading as yet another dumb European travelogue (as a Pakistan Brit raised in the West, I count Tahir as Western, at least compared to indigenous Amazonians). A chance encounter with a mysterious Frenchman at a London auction for shrunken heads gives Tahir the bug of an idea. The Inca flew, and he's going to find evidence of pre-Columbian flight.

The first part of the book takes Tahir through the Peruvian tourist trail: Cuzco, Machu Pichu, Puno, Nazca, where encounters with other seekers and Peruvian shamans push him towards his ultimate destination, the Shuar tribe of the Amazon rainforest. The second half of the book is intense, a long journey by water in the Amazon, guided by a Vietnam Veteran and crewed by a handful of superstitious Peruvians on a leaky boat, towards the deadly Shuar headhunters. When he arrives at their village, he find that evangelical missionaries have gotten there first, but a few shamans hold to the old beliefs. Tahir convinces one of him to let him participate in the ayahausca ritual, which is a potent and truly awful hallucinogen, and yes, he meets the Birdmen.

For all that Tahir's quest is weird and exotic, it's also firmly grounded. He has no patience for those who say the Nazca lines were created by ancient aliens, and besides the lines are boring compared to Nazca mummies, which are nothing next to Peruvian textiles. I'm engaged to an Andean archaeologist, so I know Peruvian textiles are Serious Business. I've done a fair bit of the Peruvian tourist trail, and while it may have been grittier 20 years ago, any combi ride you walk away from is barely a hardship. Tahir exaggerates the standard Lonely Planet stuff for effect. That said, I've never been to Iquitos, and the whole jungle voyage thing seems like a real venture, with some real danger. On the last trip, the one by ayahausca is indescribable, and if you expect birdmen, you'll find them. While these days The Onion can crack jokes about the commodification of shamanic voyaging, Tahir's book holds up as a great adventure.

As Americans, we invaded and wrecked Iraq, so the least we can do is read some Iraqi literature. As editor Hassan Blasim, the Arab world has a dearth of genre literature. There is no Arab Tolkien or Asimov, no living or historical author who links the myths of the Muslim world to a modern retelling, or the present to the future. to paraphrase his introduction, the Arab imagination has been buried by authoritarian politics, religious fundamentalism, and foreign shock therapy. This 2013 collection, a decade after the sack by the latter day Hulagu Khans, Bush and Blair, imagines many futures for Iraqi in 2113.

The writers are exceptional, judging by the bios in the back. This is the creme of Iraqi literati, both in Mesopotamia and in exile. For all their literary skills, they are only okay at the art of speculative fiction. The best of the stories have the acid satire of Russian literature. The interesting ones find future peace in Iraq's history as the cradle of civilization. The average ones gripe about the injustice of occupation and sectarian warfare, and too many, roughly half by my count, fumble with the basic tools of speculative literature, getting so lost in imagination that they forget to add characters, or a plot.

I enjoyed reading this book, but I can't really recommend it either.

I'm always a little skeptical when a literary prodigy does genre fiction. Science fiction is bad enough enough, without the literary ball of neuroses that is the Iowa Writer's Workshop sliding in. So let me say that How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is slick and brilliant, and so gloriously clever that my concerns are washed out in a trillion degree flash of light.

Charles Yu is a time machine repairman is a science-fictional universe. Glamorously described, his job involves shutting breaches in the spacetime continuum and rescuing time travelers from reliving the worst day of their lives over and over again. In practice, it has all the glamour of being a technician for Verizon. Yu lives in a box that drifts in a kind of temporal neutral outside of the normal flow of life, with an ontologically valid but nonexistent dog, his time machine's AI TAMMY, and occasional messages from his manager Phil, a piece of software which mimics a kind of extroverted bro. It's more or less what Charles wants, since his father disappeared and his mother retired to a 60 minute time loop.

Time travel in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is based around a combination of narrative tenses and the intersection of physics and information theory a la Roger Penrose. Yu uses this to literary device explore his narrator's relationship to his father, a striving immigrant engineer who almost invented the time machine, and then became unstuck from the present in disappointment. We are all time travelers, moving into the future at a rate of 1 second per second, and yet it is unclear why we perceive the present and member the past.

When Charles returns to his home base, he breaks the first rule of time travel, "never interact with yourself" when a future him appears, he shoots the future him, and his dying future self hands him a copy of a book "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" before he escapes into his time machine, and the spiraling doom of a closed time-like loop.

The novel is dizzyingly inventive and creative, but pessimistic in its assessment that there only a few seconds in the roughly 2.3 billion we are bestowed which in which we are truly present, truly authentically there with ourselves. Kemper put it better words than I could:

My main issue is that Charles Yu arranged a big Homecoming Metafiction Parade down Metafiction Avenue, and he’s the Metafiction Parade Marshal waving to us from his big Metafiction Float just in front of the Metafiction Show Horses who will take a big steaming Metafiction Dump right in the street in front of us.

This book is good, maybe even great, but it's too ironic to be perfect, and I wish it was.

Across The Fence is a top-notch memoir and history detailing one of the most hazardous jobs in the Vietnam War. In order to gain intelligence on and disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, small teams of Americans and Vietnamese were secretly inserted into Laos and Cambodia under the umbrella of MACV-SOG (Studies and Observation Group). Wearing sanitized uniforms without emblems and carrying weapons without serial numbers, SOG teams were ghosts, in countries that were officially off-limitsoperating beyond artillery range with whatever air support that they could scrounge up.

Meyer has a fine ear for action-filled writing, and a keen memory (skills sharpened by a post-war career as a reporter and editor). The stories are incredible, with six and eight man teams facing off against entire NVA divisions, a tale I'd be inclined to say was exaggerated except that when writing the book Meyer managed to get in touch with the retired NVA general who commanded the other side of the battle. There are fraught ambushes, desperate firefights, and harrowing last minute rescues. SOG teams were half American, and half Vietnamese, and Meyer has a deep and true fondness for his Vietnamese comrades and their fight against Communism, particularly the ice-cold pilot Captain Nguyen Van Tuong, who flew the team into and out of danger in his elderly H-34 helicopter.

Across The Fence is a top-notch memoir by an exceptional soldier. It doesn't aspire to make a grand statement amount the nature of the war, but it meets its aims and then some. The only flaw is that while there are plenty of pictures, the publisher screwed up and made them postage stamp size. Meyer has his comrades deserve better than blurry pixels. I hope a new edition fixes that problem.

Following Raven Strategem was going to be a challenge, any way you cut it. The book finished with empire invaded, four of the six hexarchs assassinated, and "Jedao" revealed to be nothing more than Cheris with a bunch of memories. It'd be hard to follow up on that, and Lee really doesn't.

Instead, we're back with three new viewpoints. One is a servitor assigned to maintain a top-secret archive for the immortal hexarch Nirai Kujen. One is General-Protector Kel Innesser, who has taken over the 'loyalist' remnant of the empire. And the last is Shous Jedao, again. But this Jedao has been pieced together with the memories Cheris didn't steal, and is serving at the behest of Nirai Kujen. Kujen is the ultimate villain of the setting, the man responsible for setting up the high calendar and the remembrances. His immortality only works in calendrical space, and Cheris' rebellion has become an existential threat to him.

The first half of the book is a wandering retread of plot points and character moments. Everyone is so instantly willing to give up the hexarchy that I can't understand how it lasted. The second half is much better, with some real urgency, both military and sexual, but it's not enough to sustain the series. Lee drops revelation after revelation, in the hopes that new information will keep us from asking about old questions.

Ninefox Gambit opened with two fascinating questions: What made the original Shous Jedao go insane and murder his army? And what do you do when Shous Jedao starts making sense and the world seems insane? I feel profoundly betrayed that I'll never get answers. The first book is incredible, and Lee is a talented writer on a small-scale, but like The Fifth Season and sequels, I wish the series went in a different direction than how they did.