The Uplift War parallels Startide Rising with a slightly bigger story, this time starring uplifted chimps instead of dolphins, and focuses on a smaller group of aliens with the bird-like Gubru as the enemy, and a few friendly Tymbrimi diplomats. The plot is fairly similar to the previous book. In the wake of discovery of an ancient fleet, aliens hold human hostage in hopes of concessions, and humans fight back using cunning guerrilla tactics. Young people come into their own against a backdrop of war. Brin doesn't reveal any big secrets here, but some parts of the setting are fleshed out further.

The story takes place on Garth, a planet devastated when an older uplifted predatory race reverted and killed everything larger than a mouse. Terrans got the colony in the hopes that'd they'd repair the collapsing ecosystem. The outpost is overwhelmed by an aggressive galactic race who use a delayed-action gas to hold the humans hostage, and it's up to kids to fight the good fight. Robert Oneagle is the son of the colony administrator and the last free human, who becomes a Tarzan-like warrior. Athlaclena is the daughter of the Tymbrimi ambassador, and must navigate her own feelings of isolation while being the only 'neutral' adult active in the resistance. Fiben is a young chimpanzee who doesn't know when to give up on the resistance.

There are lots of moments that are really neat: Garth's trees exchange molecules at jungle cenotes, forming a continental molecular web that the resistance uses as a secure comms network; The chimps have developed their own rave-like Thunder Dance party culture; The whole mystery of how the Gubru can unerringly track down all human technology; the triune Gubru command structure; Rumors of surviving native Garthlings, and how it leads to the ultimate practical joke. After reading this book, I finally get why Galactic culture looks the way it does, how the elaborate rituals and rules protect the galaxy from holocaust, and why the Terrans are so threatening to the established order.

There are a lot of fun moments, cool bits of science and culture, and some decent characters, but this story still feels peripheral. All the parts are better developed, but the plot and character beats still feel a lot like Startide Rising. Less dolphin haiku, but also less gonzo. I can't quite put my finger on it, but some indefinable thing is missing, and that prevents this book from being truly great.

Written as a companion volume to a 1987 BBC miniseries, The Celts has the grand ambition of covering the entire sweep of Celtic history in an accessible format, and does a good job, with some compromises in terms of organization and systematic oversight.

Starting with the Hochdorf and La Tene archaeological finds, moving through Roman and Greek interactions with high Celtic culture, decline and Christianity, and the modern Celtic revivals. Art and stories are the center points, with lots of beautiful photographic plates of Celtic grave goods, along with translations of several Celtic myths. Unfortunately, a lot of what made the Celts tick as a culture is lost to time: their druid priestly class refused to write anything down to preserve their own power, which means that the accounts we have are Roman and Greek. From a culture which controlled territory from Austria to Ireland in the centuries BCE, the Celts were consistently forced backwards, by Roman invasion and cultural domination, by waves of Germanic migration, and then by Christian missionaries, who replaced some local heroes with saints, and then by Medieval and Early Modern monarchs who colonized Ireland, enclosed the Scottish highlands, crushed independent Brittany, etc.

For the Celts, history was very much written by the winners, and Delaney is aware that much of contemporary Celtic culture was made up wholesale by folklorists in the 19th century, that there are enough gaps in the oral tradition that reconstructing something from an old fisherman storyteller who died in 1956 may not be sufficient, that the modern (i.e. 1980s) Celtic language revival is about identity rather than history. But read with a critical eye, this book is a useful survey and introduction to the topic.

Better Than Human is a slim philosophical volume that lays out Buchanan's positions in favor of human enhancement, and particularly against the arguments of Michael Sandel (next on my reading list). Buchanan takes the line that future biotechnological enhancements to humanity, such as genetic enhancement, expansion of emotional and cognitive capacities by drugs, and cybernetic implants, is not qualitatively different than the traditional ways that humans have enhanced themselves and their environment through technologies like literature and agriculture. This statement is grounding in an idea of evolution as blind and clumsy, and human beings as resilient. There are many areas where evolution has produced "good enough" adaptations, because genotypes are trapped on local peaks of fitness, and any harms that occur after reproduction are not sorted against. The rapid cultural evolution of humans (10,000 years of agriculture, 150 years of industrialization, and now post-industrialism) means that our genetic heritage may not yet be able to reach capabilities within reach of some humans, but out of reach of the species as a whole.

Buchanan takes particular ire at the bad arguments of bioconservatives (Kass, Fukuyama, Sandel), in particular for a weak understanding of the facts of evolution and biology, for assuming that an eternal "human nature" exactly matches early 21st century Republican positions on the family and bioethics, and for raising issues of concern that do not rise to the level of a persuasive argument. Buchanan acknowledges that no development is risk free, but that a conscious choice to engage with the complexities of enhancement technologies and their public risks and benefits is likelier to produce positive outcomes than the existing system, which allows access only through the creation of new diseases, and may be most aggressively pursued by countries with weak ethical governance regimes.

In full candor, I'm personally aligned with Buchanan's position. I agree with his counter to the bioconservatives, but I'm not sure that his version of evolution and the "good" of enhancing human capacities is any less of a "just-so" story than what he argues against.

Unfriendly Skies is a candid account of the aviation business in the late 80s by a senior pilot, with some of the rough edges smoothed over by a professional writer. When the anecdotes work, they really work, with hair-raising tales of threading the needle through tornadoes in the midwest, coming into small airports hot and steep, and the snap-second judgement that stand between life and death for everybody on the plane. The authors keep it quick and avoid getting bogged down in technical jargon.

Where it doesn't quite work is in the big picture case about deregulation as the worst thing that happened to airlines. Captain X decries the end of a system that made him, with tight-knit crews, pretty blondes, and homogenized airline cultures, but the argument that deregulation was literally killing everything doesn't quite stick, aside from change bad.

Be aware that there are some hilarious outdated Boomerism about how women and non-military pilots will never make it. And of course, the book itself is more than 25 years old at this point, so everything is done differently. But one ultimate test is in the pudding, and when Captain X discusses a future of technological accidents rather than pilot error (See Air France 447), and decreasing passenger comforts with the commoditization of air travel, he's spot on. The only thing he didn't predict is 9/11. If you can take the anecdotes with a grain of salt and handle the attitude, this is a fun book.

Hanoi's War fills in key gaps in the history of the Vietnam War, drawing on recently opened North Vietnamese archives to explore the strategy and action of the Communist side. Too much work treats North Vietnam as essentially passive, or worse yet, inevitably victorious. The actual story is far more interesting, of internal divisions and purges, threading the diplomatic needle of the Sino-Soviet split, and tactical successes that were strategic defeats.

Nguyen follows Le Duan, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and his deputy (and only person to refuse a Nobel Peace Prize) Le Duc Tho, as the key actors during the war, as opposed to the more internationally famous Ho Chi Minh (elderly and in ill-health for much of the war) and Vo Nguyen Giap (side-lined in internal party disputes). Duan is a fascinating character, a guerrilla bureaucrat who started his career in the Mekong Delta, and moved North just prior to the Geneva Peace Accords in 1954. He secured power solely in his office through a Stalinesque series of purges against "reactionaries", and escalated the war in the South, trying to establish firm control over local guerrillas. As a strategist, Duan was a bust, but he had the virtue of endurance and flexibility in the face of adversity. He ordered the Tet Offensive (General Offensive-General Uprising), in the genuine belief that a mass guerrilla attack would topple the South Vietnamese government. The Tet Offensive was a disaster for the Communist side, and it was only later that the "greater victories" of destroying the local Viet Cong in favor of Northerns loyal to Duan, and the propaganda blow against the American home front became apparent. Far from monolithic communism, Laos and Cambodia were five-or-six way fights between local nationals, Vietnamese, and Chinese and Russian backed forced against right wing and neutralist factions that only barely preserved the vital lifeline of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Lam Son 719, the Cambodian incursion, was a tactical victory for PAVN forces but a strategic defeat in the context of super-power diplomacy. Contrary to unending commitment to the cause of a unified Vietnam, Duan and Tho ruled a war-weary population, which they controlled through massive preemptive arrests of anyone who looked like even potential opposition to their policies.

Textually, this book is a dense, almost year by year account from 1963 to 1972. It's best when it stays close to principles and when Nguyen draws from an unpublished memoir by Duan's second wife Nguyen Thuy Nga (speaking of which, Duan was bigamist. He had a family in the North when he married Nga in 1950. The two wives did not get along, and bigamy was illegal.) It becomes much less interesting post-1970, with the years-long drag of Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. There are few true upsets for mainstream historiography of the Vietnam War. Hopefully, as more high-level archives open up, we'll see further books from the Vietnamese perspective.

The Planes Above is a solid setting supporting high paragon and epic level adventures in D&D4e, taking the Points of Letting setting assumption to cosmological scales. Heaven was broken in the Dawn War between the Gods and Primordials. Places of evil and forgotten relics are obvious targets for adventurers, tiny communities are threatened by raiders and abominations, and even Good Deities hold dark secrets.

The Astral Sea is much like you'd expect: an endless void haunted by Githyanki pirates and worse. Godly Domains serve as safe havens and larger sites for adventures. Inhabitants of the Astral come in three flavors: Exalted are dead worshipers of a god, enjoying a happy afterlife. Outsiders are dead mortals who's afterlife isn't working for mysterious reasons, leaving them stranded on border islands. And then there are mortal natives, travelers, and supernatural beings like Marut. Most of the book focuses on the setting, with some highlights being the Game of Mountains in Celestia, a tactical wargame that determines which of Moradin, Kord, or Bahamut gets to control the Domain that season, and the Prison Dominion of Carceri. There are about 40 pages of monsters, with CRs from 12 to 29, but a quick spotcheck suggests that they're built using pre-MM3 math, and so may require some conversion.

Not the most essential book, but full of cool bits of high fantasy weirdness to loot for other campaigns, and a solid expansion of the 4e Points of Light to epic-level extraplanar cosmology.

Ghost Fleet is a kind of modern update to Red Storm Rising, where a couple of strategic types write up their vision of a future war. In this case, it's China and the US in the Pacific, with cyberwar, spacewar, and drones against good old fashioned American military professionalism. Unfortunately, it fails to live up to its vision, and the workman-like writing isn't enough to compensate.

Let's talk about the tech first, since that's what we're here for. This book is basically one giant sloppy blowjob for the Zumwalt-class destroyer and the naval railgun. I'd estimate a solid third of the book is just talking about the difficulties in getting the railgun operational, and then marveling when it blows up every military target in Hawaii with hypersonic rounds. Space and cyber get a lot of detail as well, as the first real crippling blow is a Chinese space station using a laser cannon to take out American surveillance and communications satellites. Cyber attacks further jam networks in those first critical hours, and hardware vulnerabilities built into chips turn the F-35 into a beacon for radar guided missiles. The Littoral Combat Ship sucks in combat, and the Chinese develop a hard counter for American strategic power with a ballistic missile that homes in on Cherenkov radiation from submarine and aircraft carrier nuclear reactors. Soldiers are hopped to the gills on stim pills and some have cybernetic implants.

But there's also a lot to dislike in the depictions of the tech in this book. The hacking is just warmed over Gibsonian cyberspace. True, real hacking is dull, but more could've been done with deception in cyberspace, and the difference in effectiveness between having a network and up and not having one. Same with the drones, which have some nice terrorizing moments with Chinese quadcopter swarms, but don't do anything particularly interesting. In fact, for a book which is supposed to showcase a generational shift in war, it really ducks away from issues in autonomy, swarming, supply chains, and technological-economic warfare, aside from the hacked Chinese supplied microchips. The Hawaiian insurgency, and the whole "Red Dawn++ scenario" of how heavily armed and networked Americans might coordinate against invaders is just wasted. The authors want to give the sense that the book is accurate by throwing up model numbers for missiles and planes, but there's little sense of how it fits together. An ironic failure for a book who's strongest selling point is "a vision of future war."

On literary merits, this book just barely hits serviceable. A constant problem in the short choppy chapters are characters reacting with surprise to things we already know as readers. The first chunk of the book is supposed to be "business as normal" to amplify the shock of the Chinese sneak attack, but the very first scene has Russian astronauts murdering the sole American on the ISS for no reason (Was he going to call down fleet movements by eye from the observation window?), robbing the book of essential tension. The human heart of the story, the development of Jamie Simmons as Captain of the USS Zumwalt while dealing with his daddy issues with his father Senior Chief Mike Simmons, was just filler. The only really unique character is the serial killer taking out Chinese officers in Hawaii, and the Russian detective stalking her, who seem like they're lifted from a cheesier universe, but are at least a different point-of-view from the all the military types. The pacing is both staccato and too slow, major sins for a technothriller.

There are a few moments that made me smile as the book embraced the ridiculousness of the premise: The Hawaiian resistance calling itself the North Shore Mujaheddin as an ironic homage to the foe of Afghanistan, Yemen, and Kenya; an eccentric Australian-British billionaire demanding a letter of marque for space piracy; The F-35B actually using it's VTOL capabilities in combat. But this book isn't nearly as good as the press suggests.

Gladstone writes vividly imagined, high magic weird fantasy. Think China Mieville in a pinstripe suit instead of a Che Guevara t-shirt. In a world where magic works like the legal system, a god has been murdered and it's up to expelled student and newly minted mage Tara Abernathy to get to the bottom of things before all contracts are due on the New Moon; that is if she survives a deadly duel between her new mentor and her last mentor, both sorcerers well on their way to lichdom, and playing political games three layers deep.

The action positively hurtles along, featuring a supporting cast of a technician-priest, a cop addicted to vampire bites, and gargoyles in love with a dead moon goddess. High level intrigue flows in all directions, and Tara is a pleasing combination of decisive and out-of-her-depth, knowing just enough to get into a lot of trouble, and trusting that her wits will get her out. Modern fantasy isn't really my jam, but this is great.

Two Serpents Rise continues the Craft sequence with new characters and a new city. Caleb Altemoc is a risk manager for Red King Consolidated, one small cog in the giant corporation that keeps water flowing to the Aztec-flavored desert city Dresediel Lex. His boss is a scarlet skeleton who won control of the city by killing all its gods, and now eats a bite of soulstuff from everybody in the city who turns a tap. He's the son of the last priest of the Old Gods, who's most wanted terrorist dad drops in to dispense heartfelt advice. And he's fallen in love with a cliff-running sorceress who's inspiring him to take dangerous risks and has her own secrets. It's three trains on a collision course, and our hero at the center.

The basic question that the book asks is "under what circumstances should the few die to protect the many?" The old city was sustained by human sacrifice. The new city by immense magical contracts and the sliver-slicing of souls. Caleb rejects both paths, and tries to forge his own third course that respects the sanctity of life. On the one hand, it's nice to have a hero who refuses the easy pitfalls of hard men making hard decisions. On the other hand, he lives in a world where the major technology of the day is killing continents, and the lives of millions depend on torturing a comatose god. Some people don't get to make good decisions.

I'm picky, but I also feel like the writing was a little less finely tuned, the psychedelic technicolor explosions of magic and action an indulgent light show rather than something meaningful. I feel like Caleb is less well-realized as a character than Tara from the first book, even with all his tense emotional ties. Mind you, not enough to drop it a star, but I definitely preferred the first book.

Adventures to the elemental planes have long been a troubling staple of D&D. Welcome to the Elemental Plane of Fire... where everything is on fire! The Plane Below improves the cosmology through mixing all the elements in one sprawling Elemental Chaos, but lacks the focused ideas of The Plane Above.

First off, the Elemental Chaos is a profoundly bad place to travel, with lakes of fire, rivers of lightning, tornadoes of stone, and vast bubbles of air and water. Lots of terrain of the 5/damage per tier type. Assuming that a party has enough enchantments not to die, they can visit locations like the City of Brass, possibly the greatest city in the universe, and ruled by Efreet Slavers, and the Abyss, home to horrible demons. There are a few more neutralist groups to meet and quest for. Githzerai live in monasteries practicing esoteric martial arts and using meditation to literally hold together fragile life-supporting domains. Djinn fought against the gods, and for their sins were scattered to the winds and entrapped in fine objects. A few free Djinn hire adventurers to help restore their lost empire. Slaads are dada-esque forces of pure chaos, and cultists of the defeated Primordials conduct dark rites. Overall, while there are some cool vistas and ideas, this book never real came together as a good thematic guide to adventures, or an explanation of the 4e cosmology.