Morning Star gets us to the firework factory. Actual revolution! Of course there's the little problem of the ending of the last book, with Ares/Kitchner dead, Darrow captured, and the forces of evil triumphant. Brown apparently had a similar problem, and this book begins to sprawl and lose focus.

So anyway, back on topic, Darrow is imprisoned and tortured for a year when the Sons of Ares break him out of prison. Turns out that the revolution is not in as bad of shape as it might seen. Sevro has stepped into the Ares role, Mustang and the fleet are in the wind, and rebel groups are striking across the solar system. The rebellion has a secret base in a city, but they're still losing. They need leadership and a strategy to win.

As might be expected, Darrow takes the lead in a series of bold strikes, first to Phobos to hit Helium-3 shipments that the system relies on, then to the Martian antarctic to gain the allegiance of the fearsome Obsidian warrior tribes, to the Moons of Jupiter to take out a former friend leading the government's major mobile fleet, and finally to the Moon, to confront Empress Octavia Au Lune herself, and end this thing once and for all.

It's good, but the plot feels slightly overstuffed, like there was one more act. And the setting begins breaking down under the limits of Darrow as a viewpoint. His coalition is fragile, held together by a handful of personalities. He needs the renegade Golds and fierce Obsidian to act as shocktroops, high colors like Silvers and Blues to handle logistics and tech, and low colors like Reds to round out numbers, do the dirty work, and give moral weight to the whole enterprise. But the focus, again and again, is can individual Golds be redeemed, not the justice of whatever comes next. Revolution is easy, compared to sticking the new society that comes next, as the French, Russians, and Chinese know.

Aside from some structural floppiness, Darrow has a signature move of making a sacrifice to get shocktroops in close and do an effective decapitation strike. It's a dramatic move, and pretty effective so far, but I think Brown needs to mix it up a little. I can sense sprawl setting in, which is good because Darrow's story is reaching an end, but bad because so much of what makes the series bounce is tied up in Darrow's rage and quest to be the best.

Dune is a book of immense scope and terrible purpose, set in a richly imagined universe of politics, religion, and mythos. Young Paul Atreides may be the next step in human evolution, armed with mental and physical power honed to a razor's edge and gifted with prescience. But this story is about more than a boy becoming a man--or even super man. It's about politics and power, good, evil, and the truth; The fate of entire nations, the nature of justice, ecology and economy and History with a capital H.

Dune is the greatest work of science fiction ever written, full stop, and one of the most influential books in my own personal canon. Reading Dune was a watershed moment in my adolescence. I've read two copies (and Children of Dune) into pieces, my first literary writing was a Dune pastiche. This book has marked me. But you shouldn't just take my word for it.

******EXPANDED REVIEW FOR THE HUGO AWARD PROJECT******

Dune is a densely imagined masterpiece, a book of immense scope and terrible purpose set in a universe of politics, religion, ecology, and myth. Approximately 10,000 years in the future, mankind has spread through the stars under the aegis of the Emperor, propelled by the starships of Spacing Guild, and ruled by innumerable feudal great houses. The most precious commodity in the universe is the spice melange, a powerful drug which extends life, opens the mind, and is the lifeblood of safe faster-than-light navigation. The spice comes from only one place: Arrakis, Dune, desert planet. A harsh world inhabited by harsh people. Two of the great feudal houses that rule human space are swapping control of Dune. The honorable Atreides and the vile Harkonnen are mortal enemies locked in an ancient and generations long feud. Harkonnen is abandoning the immense profits of Arrakis to the Atreides by order of the Emperor, but it is obvious to all that the swap is a trap. What is not obvious are the ramifications for humanity that will come of this action.

The story begins with young Paul Atreides, heir to House Atreides, asleep, being observed by his mother and an old witch. There is the potential that he is the Kwisatz Haderach, a super-man. He is tested with terrible pain; survives, and in the first third of the book we meet his world through the course of his life. Paul is subjected to intensive training in martial arts, physical control, and mental computation. Dune is described: a geography made of sand and bare rock, survival only through exotic technology like stillsuits that recapture and purify the body's water. The shape of the political struggle begin to emerge, and the war of assassins between the great houses. We meet the Fremen, the native people of Dune, and there is just a hint that House Atreides might accomplish great things before the jaws of the trap close. The Harkonnens, with the convert support of the Emperor, invade. Duke Leto Atreides is killed, and Paul and his mother are forced to flee the to the Fremen.

The second and third parts of the book are concerned with Paul learning the Fremen culture, fulfilling his destiny as the Kwisatz Haderach, and finally achieving vengeance against the Harkonnens and the Emperor. The Fremen are one of the most original cultures present so far. They're clearly inspired by Bedouins, follow Zensunni religious beliefs, and sprinkle their language with Arabic words, but this is more than Lawrence of Arabia in Space (and yes, I've read Seven Pillars of Wisdom). Paul's exploration of inner space and his burgeoning powers of prescience under the influence of drugs is for me the most interesting part of the book, with the philosophical message that the known path leads always into stagnation and death, and its depictions of a man caught between a terrible destiny (visions of a galactic jihad under Atreides flags) and his inability to halt it. And the final confrontation with the Baron Harkonnen and the Emperor and all the forces that have lead Paul Atreides to this nexus of power, are as satisfying and climatic as any scenes in fiction.

It is impossible for me to be objective about Dune. I've read two paperback copies of Dune (and one of Children of Dune) into pieces. Having read the 12 prior Hugo winners, I have a little more context on what makes Dune unique. This is the first of the novels with a galaxy-spanning empire based on non-democratic/meritocratic principles. It has by far best depictions of a protagonist culture truly alien to mid-American sensibilities in the Fremen, as well as the best developed planetary ecology (although there are some hints of that in A Case of Conscience. Dune is the first novel in this series that could (and did) support a whole cohesive setting, matched only by The Lord of the Rings in the fiction of the time. The psychotropic exploration of the inner self is written by someone who's actually done drugs, as opposed to have the sensation of altered states described to them. And above all, Dune has the best female characters so far in the Lady Jessica, Chani, and the epigraphs by Princess Irulan that begin each chapter. Dune is Paul's story, but the women in it are just as important and well-rounded as the men. And I love the tense perfection of some of the smaller scenes as well: The Arrakeen dinner party and it's hidden politics; the death of the Planetologist Liet-Kynes in the desert; Paul and Jessica retrieving their survival gear from a sandslide using foam.

Trying to read this with a more critical eye, there are some bits that don't work perfectly. The knife-fights are clunkier than I remember (somebody leaps only the to meet the blurring point of a blade on their chest two or three times), which is unfortunate given how important they are. Herbert has a grand authorial voice, but it renders all the characters a little similar. The only gay character is arch-villain Baron Harkonnen, although I think it's clear that his evil is defined by his pedophilia, sadism, and gluttony, rather than any sexual preference for men over women. The actual politics of the universe are smaller than I remember. Atreides, Harkonnen, and Corrino on Caladan, Arrakis, and Geidi Prime, although as in a play there is a sense of a bigger cast and other sets waiting in the wings.

In terms of the themes of human potential and the wisdom of government over centuries, the only fair comparison to Dune from this project are Stranger in a Strange Land and A Canticle for Liebowitz, and Dune blows them out of the water. If any of the setting elements or stylistic tricks of Dune seem like cliches, it's because the past 50 years of science fiction have borrowed from the original so liberally. Dune is a monument to human imagination.

Dune is probably the most important book I've ever read, but Dune Messiah never did much for me. Compared to the epic grandeur and human liberation of the first book, we have a depressing march through the tyranny of cynical politics and Paul's prescient visions. Instead of enlightening lessons, we're treated to long passages of Herbert's increasingly weird yet simultaneously banal thoughts on power, politics, economics, and religion. Worst, the characters are dimished, stagey, trotted out to speak their piece and then returned to the dressing room to wait their turn.

A decade after the events of Dune, Paul's Jihad has shaken the foundations of human civilization and cooled into a religious dictatorship, centered around the prescient emperor. A conspiracy of Paul's enemies, along with some traitorous Fremen, plot to destroy him and steal a sandworm to create a second Arrakis. Paul, meanwhile, is trapped by visions that he cannot foresee how to avoid, and the prescience blocking powers of a guild navigator brought into protect the conspirators. The plot of the book is mostly... there. Instead of the intricate wheels within wheels beloved by the Baron Harkonnen, Paul's enemies give him an obviously poisoned gift in the form of the resurrected ghola Duncan Idaho, he walks into an obvious trap based on false information, and pays a terrible price.

I'm not sure what's worse. Finding out that your messiah has feet of clay, or watching him march grimly towards destruction because the author has ordained it.

***

Updates as of 2019. I still don't much like Messiah for all the reasons mentioned above. Herbert has some very clear ideas about power; he despises legal and constitutional power, is fearful about the unity of politics and religion, and is curious about the stamp that a single human may leave on history. Dune is frequently about the differences between the Atreides and Harkonnen exercises of power. To paraphrase Paul, Harkonnen power is about fear, while Atreides loyalty is bought with love.

So twelve years after the Battle of Arakeen, with the Fremen Jihad having carved a bloody path across the universe, we're asking if there is a difference. I think Herbert wants to make a point about how power is a parasite in an ecology/economy, but rather than be subtle, it's hamhanded and confusing.

Lessons in Disaster is a post-mortem look at the pivotal moments of the Vietnam War as viewed through the eyes of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. "Mac" was one of the hawks, who publicly argued for escalating the Vietnam War, but he held private doubts about the possibility of success. This book originated in a collaboration between the author and Bundy on his memoirs, which was cut short by Bundy's death in 1996. Based on the historical record, scribbled 'fragments' for that book, and conversations with Bundy, Goldstein wrote a different book about the key decisions to intervene in Vietnam, and the relationship between Bundy and the presidents he served.

The primary argument that Goldstein advances is one that defends the reputation of Kennedy at the expense of Johnson. The picture of Kennedy that emerges is one of skepticism towards the military bureaucracy, a man who learned hard lessons in the Bay of Bigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, who knew that starting a war was easier than finishing it, and that there was little of strategic interest in Vietnam. Kennedy was willing to deploy special forces and adviser/training forces, but not to commit ground combat troops.

By contrast, Johnson was desperate to save political face, and unable to make the hard choice to abandon Vietnam. A dyed-in-the-wool creature of the legislature, Johnson treated his staff like Senators he was whipping for a key vote, not a source of ideas, options, and plans. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution shored up Johnson's right flank during the 1964 election, rather than acting towards a strategic end. The decision to escalate was based on a desire to get General Westmoreland onboard, and then to negotiate the lowest number of troops that would keep Westmoreland's support, not any clear strategic goals. This is a solid story, but better told in H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty.

The problem is that where we might get some unique insight into Bundy's character and role in the great drama of the Vietnam War, the book becomes maddeningly vague. American Rasputin draws a clear line between Rostow's modernization theory and faith in the efficacy of airpower. McNamara's memoirs describe a flawed process of analysis and roads not taken. The Best and The Brightest has a compelling argument about the fatal arrogance and political cowardice of the Washington establishment. All of those books are superior to Lessons in Disaster.

National Security Adviser is a strange role, with little formal power but a great deal of potential access to the President, and power through that channel. Bundy was one of the brightest of Kennedy's advisers, an academic wunderkind who became the youngest Dean of Harvard (fascinatingly, as Dean he was continually interviewed by David Halberstam for the Harvard Crimson, who would go on to cover the Vietnam War and excoriate Bundy for his role in it.) But relatively little of that man comes through. In fact, Bundy was on vacation for key moments, like the Vance telegram that set in motion the coup against Diem. The post-facto disapproval of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the introduction of ground troops are weakly contrasted against active approval for escalating the war at all decision points. And I wish we had more about the SIGMA II-64 wargame that correctly predicted how the war would go in 1964, and at which Bundy was present. Not a bad book, per se, but one almost entirely redundant.

With all thew uproar these days about how "NObama is a Socialist-Kenyan-Marxist-Nazi-Muslim", reading what an actual socialist believes is a vital antidote. Wright simply wants radical socialist democracy; the People empowered to make collective decisions over their own lives, with Capital and the State reduced until they can provide necessary services, but they no longer threaten the common welfare. While this is an admirable goal, this book is not quite up to the task. It feels musty, and set up bold claims and analytic frameworks while flinching away from the ultimate conclusions of what it would mean to live in a world of radical egalitarianism.

The Marxist analysis of the structural flaws of capitalism, and the way in which economic competition select for bad behavior is remains deadly accurate, but in many other respects, even this modernized Marxism fails to explain how capitalism will develop, and how it will develop given the admitted failure of the homogenization of the working class and the labor theory of productivity over the 20th century (two traditional Marxist keystone theories).

Society remains the most important actor in the book, and the least-well defined. Mutual solidarity and discussion is all well and good, but Wright doesn't quite develop the differences in society between the scales of say, a small worker-owned collective, a town, a nation, and the entire world. Ambitious plans for universal living wages and social ownership leave aside the massive inequalities between the 1st and 3rd world, and the 99% and the 1%. Finally, Wright has the typical Marxist valorization of the Worker, without considering how essentially non-economic activities fit into his utopian framework. This relentless materialism is both the strength of Marxism, and also its weakness, as it leaves a hollow "sociality" to battle against the Right's ideology of "liberty"

Heinlein's forth and final Hugo, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a thriller of revolution and interplanetary war, a tale of an unlikely friendship between man and machine, and a credible study of the evolution of human culture.

Taking these themes in roughly reverse order: in the year 2075 the moon is home to 3 million human beings, the descendants of convicts and exiles continually sent up by an overpopulated Earth. The world-building is top-notch, revealed through the narrator's clipped Loonie speech patterns and creole of English and Russian, and millions of those tiny details Heinlein is rightfully famous for. Heinlein has spent a lot of time thinking about life in low-gravity, and that work pays off here in effortless descriptions on lunar life. Most key is the gender ratio: most convicts are male, and even now there are two men for every woman on the moon. Plural marriages are common, from simple triads to clans and lines and more complex arrangement. The deadly lunar environment and lack of women have created an elaborate code that gives women all the power in every situation. A man that so much as touches a woman without her consent is likely to be thrown out the nearest airlock. Where many scifi cultures feel like they're thrown together from whatever the author found interesting, without much sense of history.

Second is the friendship between our narrator Manuel O'Kelly Davis, and the real hero Mycroft, a HOLMES type supercomputer operated by the Lunar authority. Mycroft (call him Mike) achieves self-awareness shortly before the start of the books, probably from being linked into every system on Luna. With Manny, Luna's best computer tech as his first friend, Mike goes from brilliant child to being of many personalities and a great deal of complexity. Mike is the ace-in-the-hole for the Revolution, handling communications, strategic analysis, and the big guns.

Oh yes, the Revolution. Even though Luna is a prison, it's almost irrelevant because there's nowhere to escape to, aside from the airless surface. The Lunar Authority controls all the ships, and lunar people adapted to 1/6th G have a great deal of trouble on Earth. The Lunar Authority buys grain for too little and charges too much for imports, but most Loonies barely notice. Except that if grain shipments aren't stopped, Luna will have food riots in seven years, cannibalism in eight, and nobody seems to notice or care about the grim future. It's up to Manny, and his fellow conspirators in Mike, Lunar patriot Wyoming Knot (practically the only Lunar patriot), and exiled professional revolutionary Professor Bernard de la Paz to lead a revolution and save the Moon! There's great stuff on conspiracy, on cellular organizations, and how to use propaganda to turn an apathetic population against a more or less hostile authoritarian occupying force. The climax of the book, with the Loonies 'throwing rocks' as a strategic demonstration of force, is some of the most exciting stuff in fiction.

But I mentioned that this is the last Heinlein-worth-reading, and there are two reasons. Heinlein always enjoys playing around with political systems and ideologies, and this is where he makes a final judgment. The only truly fair ideology is de la Paz's "rational anarchism": you do whatever you want up till the point where it affects me, and I'll do as little as possible that affects you. Everything else is just the twittering of yammerheads and petty injustices of bush-league authoritarians. Pure selfishness cloaked in high-minded ideals and appeals to common sense, in other words, and one that ignores everything we know about what it takes to live with strangers. It's in some ways more opposed to democracy than the fascism of Starship Troopers, which starts from the basic premise that the people are sovereign. I don't mind staunch libertarianism in fiction; I do mind that Heinlein gives up on thinking about politics at this point in favor of the individual uber alles. Second strike against late Heinlein is the weird sex stuff (e.g. time travelling incest), and while it may make sense in the context of Lunar culture, I have no interest in hearing about how weddable 14-year old girls are. I hate to end on a low note, because the book is great, but the signposts for 'go no further are all there.'

On an interesting historical aside, Luna wins its independence in a graduated campaign of strategic bombing against primarily symbolic targets to indicate that they can hit cities at will. At the same time as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was being published, America was engaged in a much less successful campaign of 'communication bombing' against North Vietnam in Operation Rolling Thunder.

Meeples Together is an encyclopedic treatment of cooperative boardgames. Given the paucity of good books about boardgames design, period, this book is important for game designers in general, and absolutely vital for anyone making a cooperative boardgame.

While competitive boardgames are made interesting by opposing tactics and hostile interference, cooperative boardgames pit the players against the rules. In order to make this interesting, to make it truly cooperative, the game must be flawed in some way, with imperfect information, randomness, or hidden teams and traitor mechanics. Meeples Together surveys the history of cooperative games, develops a general theory of what makes them fun, deeply investigates key mechanics for games, and conducts in depth case studies on about a dozen games. The paradigm games are Pandemic, The Lord of the Rings, and Arkham Horror, though other games come up frequently.

While this is an excellent book, it is on the dry and technical side. And given the otherwise exhaustive nature, I was puzzled by the omission of two games, the complex Pandemic successor and heavy gamer darling Spirit Island, and 2017 Spiel de Jahrs finalist Magic Maze. Certainly, a complete review of all games is hard, but both games are major contemporary coop games.

The Last Full Measure is contemporary military social history in the style of John Keegan, travelling most well-trodden examples of how soldiers die. In some sense, the task is impossible. No historian, however able, can conjure up Achilles' shade to ask "So what was it like to die?"

Stephenson starts with some insights from anthropology. Indigenous people worldwide, and our near cousins in chimpanzees, practice a similar form of 'raiding' warfare, based on ambush and sudden violence against the isolated and unweary. From this he moves into 'Western warfare', based on a close analysis of the Iliad and historical accounts of phalanx and legionary warfare. There's a clear distinction between 'heroic' combat between champions of similar social status and ability, the random mass crush of arms, and the hit-and-run tactics of nomadic horse archers.

A clear break with the past is the introduction of gunpowder weaponry, which change combat from the duty of a martial elite to the levy en mass, with new ways of dying from lead shot and cannons. Stephenson discusses the bayonet debate, following the conventional wisdom that almost no bayonet casualties arrived to be recording at field hospitals, but allowing for the alternative that bayonets were a secondary weapon used to finish off the wounded in close assault.

From there it's a leap to the best section, a discussion of death in the industrial abattoir of the Western Front in World War I, where men were murdered and mangled by the millions by high explosive shells, machine guns, and poison gas. Sections on the Second World War, and war since, round out the book.

I'm torn, because this is a very good history within its bounds, and has a great selection of excerpts. But Stephenson doesn't have an explicit thesis or argument about death in battle. His choice of sources is thorough, but also entirely conventional. There's nothing about how, say, Vikings saw death, or the mercenaries who ravaged Europe in the 15th-17th century, prior to modern explicitly national armies. Death is horrifying, and killing the central aspect of war, but there's an element of pornography to this book, and how it shows men in their last and most vulnerable moments. Call it a four, but a low four.

Westmoreland is a scholarly murder. Sorley does a masterful job showing the meteoric rise and fall of General Westmoreland, a man propelled by his ambitions beyond his capabilities. I don't think there was single person with a negative opinion of Westmoreland who did not get a chance to stick a knife in by the end.

From youth, Westmoreland was marked for success. The child of a South Carolina mill manager, he was an eagle scout and chief of cadets at West Point in 1936. A field grade officer during World War 2, his active and aggressive style as commander of an artillery battery saw him promoted to colonel, mentored by airborne commander General Maxwell Taylor (later chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ambassador to South Vietnam). As he cycled through command of elite airborne units and a stint as commander at West Point, Westmoreland knew how to play on his looks, bearing, and political connections, and was tapped to take command of the war in Vietnam in 1964.

There, Westmoreland met the test of his life, and failed. Sorley describes Westmoreland's defeat in detail as a commander over the next four years: Neglecting ARVN in favor of fruitless search and destroy missions; requiring optimistic assessments from his subordinates, regardless of the truth; the whole fiasco of removing entire classes of Viet Cong guerrillas from the order of battle; focusing on selling the war in '67 instead of fighting it. The Tet Offensive shattered what remained of Westmoreland's credibility, and he was failed upwards to Army Chief of Staff.

There, Sorley is even harsher, recounting a tenure that ignored major problems in the army to focus on protecting Westmoreland's reputation in the official history. Westmoreland in retirement seemed a broken man, with a farcical run for governor, and an ill-advised libel suit against CBS for a special report on the Order of Battle. Westmoreland appears to have done good work for Vietnam Veterans, but none of that is mentioned, aside from a quote from his New York Time obituary.

The picture of Westmoreland that emerges is a man with a planetary sense of self-importance, a narcissus captured by being the image of the modern four-star general at the expense of actually winning a war. Sorley uses the ample archives of Westmoreland's actions to contradict the man's memoirs and later testimony. Westmoreland the strategist is one behind step events and trying to take credit for other people's work. His personal warmth and loyalty to his friends is countered by repeated accusations of gross stupidity, of an inability to learn, or clearly discern significant elements in confusing circumstances.

My other reading on the Vietnam War has focused on Westmoreland as a central figure, as the man who set American tactics in South Vietnam, who had the best opportunity to "win" the war, if it could be won, and who instead escalated it to a futile meatgrinder. This biography is a strong negative assessment of the man, but dances around two key issues: First, why was Westmoreland selected for such a key role as commander in Vietnam? It seems no one made the affirmative decision to send him there, he was merely a rising star in the right place. Second, search and destroy became a self-justifying mission for the war. Why did Westmoreland choose this set of tactics, and persist in it despite clear evidence of its inefficiency? Sorley is silent on Westmoreland's affirmative qualities.