Stuff Matters is pop material science, organized around ten or so everyday materials visible in a photo of the author in his rooftop garden. The tone is light and fluffy, without much substance, as Miodownik makes his point that micro and nano scale structures create the material properties of the macro world that we inhabit, skips through the history of the material, and how we find it pleasing today. The chapter on carbon, with a futuristic look towards the properties of graphene is the strongest. The chapter on plastic is a tragic waste, a fictionalized tale around late 19th celluloid, rather than any kind of thoughtful look at the most innovative, flexible, and environmentally dangerous of modern materials.

I picked this up on a whim, having heard Deighton described as a master of the understated spy thriller. This is all that, and more. Even in alt-hist Nazi occupied England, people are shot and murders have to be investigated. But this being an espionage novel, nothing is simple, and our protagonist, Douglas Archer, finds himself drawn into a deadly web of intrigue between factions in the SS, Wehrmacht, and the struggling British Resistance.

The characters and plot are nothing that stands out, but that's all part of the subtle English charm of the book. It is a very, very gray novel. Even the Nazis refuse to be cast as genocidal monsters; merely self-interested conquerors who are taking advantage of the moment to loot everything not nailed down. And of course, there is little honor or glory in collaboration--even collaboration which might soften the iron grip of the Third Reich.

And as for the setting, it's great alternate history. It skips the part when Operation Sea Lion works (military history consensus: lol, nope), to focus on the bitter aftermath of life under occupation, and trying to salvage some sort of dignity from the wreckage of defeat. Great book, lots of fun, if that level of grimness is your thing.

Claude Shannon's theory of information is one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, up there with general relativity and the structure of DNA for things that reshaped the world. But the man himself was oddly self-effacing, an undoubted genius who cared little for the trappings of academic prestige and power, and who spent the latter part of his life tinkering with odd one-off devices while his disciples invented the practical applications of computing. A Mind at Play is a great biography of an unconventional past.

Shannon was born and raised in upstate Michigan, and was a strong if not top performing student. A chance fellowship for graduate work at MIT put him in contact with Vannevar Bush, and Bush's rooms of analogue computing machinery. Shannon had a magicians touch with devices, and more importantly the ability to see through the complexities of a problem to an underlying mathematics. Shannon was the first to apply a previously obscure branch of formal logic, Boolean operators, to electrical circuits, turning circuit design from an art to a science. Bush pushed him to do a PhD in genetics, where Shannon's equations for the evolution of traits in populations were far ahead of the field, and then saw him to a position at Bell Labs.

Shannon worked on military projects involving automatic gunsights and cryptography, was briefly married, and spent his evenings enjoying jazz and working on a private project on the fundamental nature of communication. His paper, when published in 1948, was like a starting gun, providing a formal basis for the new technology of computers which had been kick-started by the second World War.

Having created a field, Shannon entered a playful semi-retirement. He became a professor at MIT and worked on problems of interest, including a mechanical mouse that 'learned', a chess AI, wearable computers, and juggling and unicycles. By nature shy, he had little interest in leverage his intellectual authority for power and empire building, or even anything like a coherent research plan. He worked on what was interesting, and have advice to colleagues and students by asking provocative questions. Shannon life was made better by his wife Betty, a formidable mathematician in her own right, and children. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1983, and lived until 2001, in what can only be described as a pitiful shadow of his abilities.

A Mind at Play is a good, loving biography of a subject, whom for all his genius, had a clear purity. But the reason why I didn't give it five stars is that it seems clear that Shannon's tinkering was a clear mode of thought for him, and that his work at Bell Labs provided the impetus for information theory, and for whatever reason, this book fails to convey the joy of thinking with your hands.

God Emperor is a sharp bend in the Dune series. The intricate plots, politics, and prescient visions of the first three books are replaced with Leto II Atreides, emperor of human space, over 3000 years old, ruler, tyrant, and above all, The Worm That Is God.

Through absolute monopoly on the precious spice, as well as control of religion and an all-female army of fanatic warrior-priestess, Leto has remade humanity in his image. He is the ultimate predator, and humans are reduced to space-faring peasants before his power. Yet this all has a plan, Leto II's Golden Path, a hard course to ensure the survival of the species. And to get there, Leto II, in this most pivotal moment, must confront and be confronted by four people.

The first is Momeo, his majordomo, trusted adviser, and long-time survivor. The second is Momeo's daughter Siona, a product of breeding program as extensive as the one that created her distant ancestor Paul-Muad'Dib. The third is a Duncan Idaho, latest in the line of gholas produced by the Tleilaxu, and the last is Hwi Noree, the Ixian ambassador who has been trained and educated as a snare for a god, a last reminder of his lost humanity.

This is a weird, lumpy book, as a very alien Leto II tests his human companions with puzzles and paradoxes about the nature of reality, perception, humanity, government, justice, and more. With the right mindset, he is appropriately terrifying, a god made flesh. He might also be a long-winded author self-insert. And there are some bits of genuine 'old scifi author pervness'. Idaho gives a woman an organism by climbing a wall. Siona must drink spice-water teased from Leto's body.

But on the balance, this book presents a very interesting argument about the nature of human evolution, and about what it might mean to survive as a community on a cosmological scale. And interestingly for me, it's presented as a straight history, chapters proceeded by Leto's secret journals, book-ended with histographic essays on their discover thousands of years later. Dune was guided by Irulan's many histories and quotations. Messiah and Children caught up in apocrypha. In a series that has always been about the blurry boundaries between reality, history, and myth, God Emperor is a return to proper form.

Personally, I run hot and cold on ptbA games. I love the simplicity of the system and the clarity of design that a good execution of pbtA enforces. But Apocalypse World 1e had some rough edges and some fuzziness about its version of the wasteland that made it hard for me to see how I'd ever play it. Dungeon World is alright, but if you want to have high fantasy adventures, why not just play D&D, or 13th Age, the best version of D&D? And while Night Witches is absolute masterpiece of design, I'm never going to find another person to play it with. Comrades is the antidote to my all my problems with pbtA.

Comrades distills both pbtA and revolution down to their essences, and what remains is as close to a utopian ideal of an RPG as I can imagine. This is a game about your revolutionary vanguard, about a small band of comrades who are willing to dare everything to bring about a better world. You'll throw down with thugs from across the political spectrum, out-manuever splinter factions in your own movement, suffer under the oppressive tactics of the secret police, hear a dying comrade's last words, raise a mob, and strike a blow for revolution.

The moves and playbooks are wonderfully calibrated to revolutionary action: I especially appreciate the inclusion of a universal Start Something move to incite a mob, and the perceptive list of questions on the What's Going On Here? move to read a situation. The GM advice helps develop the ideology of the comrades, and put them under pressure from adversarial fronts, which work through a series of steps that cause the world to crumble. I particularly like the Pathway Moves, end of session rolls which describe how the comrades are advancing towards revolution on five tracks, ranging from a democratic victory at the ballot box to assassinating the head of state.

Nearly a decade on from the release of Apocalypse World, designers have a good sense of how pbtA works. W. M. Akers has written one of the best examples of the ruleset, perfectly calibrated for telling a thrilling tale of revolution, with plenty of examples on how to make the game the your own. Comrades includes a fully-fleshed out setting for Khresht 1915, a fictional country inspired mostly by the Russian revolution, and thumbnails settings for New York 1776 and Callisto 2219. You also get 10 playbooks for comrades from Artist to Worker, and great advice on running the game, and building your revolution. The visual design is spare and evocative, with well-chosen black-and-white prints standing out against a red and yellow color scheme. Comrades is inspired by the radical leftists of the 19th and 20th century, but there's not a set ideological stance in the game. This game is about anybody who is willing to die for their ideals, to fight bravely for a better world, and bring down the evil SOBs in charge.

Blades in the Dark is one of my favorite fantasy roleplaying games. The system is exceptional, and this scifi adaptation doesn't vary far from the core. What you get is a tightly tuned and evocative game about scoundrels on the rim of space, in the vein of Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Killjoys, Mass Effect, and of course the Mos Eisley cantina.


KILLJOYS: My favorite underappreciated scifi show.

Scum & Villany comes with seven character classes that cover the usual crew, from Mechanics and Pilots to Mystics and Doctors. The clever bit is that your ship is like a character itself, covering much the same area as your gang did in Blades. The Stardancer is a light freighter specializing in smuggling jobs; the Cerberus is a swift hunter for retrieval of difficult people and artifacts; and the Firedrake is a bruiser of a corvette that can take the fight to the corrupt Hegemony. The rest of the system is pretty much the same as Blades, with three exceptions: The action list has been rejiggered to be appropriate for scifi; character action ratings (think skills) are limited to a max of three instead of four; and Gambits are a new meta-currency that can add dice or an effect increase to a roll, and are recharged on a six or crit on a risky action.

The setting is an eminently gameable mashup of things you've seen before. There's an oppressive and corrupt Hegemony, with many officious factions in opposition all declaring what can't be done, and a spectrum of outlaw groups doing it anyway. Moderate magitech is an integral part of the setting, with Precursor artifacts enabling travel along hyperspace lanes, semi-sentient AI, and other effects. The mystical Way and the Precursors are fortunately less overbearing than Blades ghost field, and can be mapped to your choice of spooky unknown effects in fiction, from The Force in Star Wars to Mass Effect biotics or River Tam's psychic abilities. It'd be hard to remove entirely, so this system may not be suited for rock hard scifi.

Compared to Blades, I think the downtime sections are a little more streamlined, and the setting is a hell of a lot more gameable, or at least it is with my taste in fiction. I have some quibbles with the economy, and the lack of a 'last score' mechanic, but this is a great game, and a solid goto for science fiction.

Karl Polanyi sadly passed away before his writing could find its natural format, a 100+ tweet thread beginning with "It's Time For Some Game Theory..."

This book is nominally an account of the development of laissez faire capitalism, and a rebuttal to the arguments of Ludwig Von Mises that free markets naturally develop in the absence of political intervention, with a kicker about capitalism's responsibility for the rise of fascism (the book was published in 1944).

What this book is is a rambling series of vaguely linked essays and tangents, with a few sparkling epigrams buried in a mass of economical-historical mush. Polanyi is vague about his timeline, switching the exact period under study repeatedly through the book, which hinders comparisons of pre-transformation 18th century England with various policy innovations in the 19th century, and mature capitalism in the 20th. The thread, as much as I can follow it, is that pre-modern people always distinguished between domestic production, which was limited by traditional feudal and guild structures to protect livelihoods, and production for foreign trade, which was used to exploit any community foolish enough to let it in. Through the 19th century, Britain enacted a series of reforms that destroyed the old order, ushering in a period of dramatic capitalist growth based on promises of profit for the bourgeois, and the lash of hunger to motivate workers.

More broadly, classical liberalism can never work, because three key commodities: land, labor, and money, are "fictitious", and under pure free market influences immediately collapse into some sort of disastrous singularity. Labor is human life, land is nature, the gold standard a false idol, and these things must be protected from society and vice versa. As evidence for this, Polanyi puts forth the masses of regulatory laws that followed laissez-fair reforms. Even in the absence of a program, Chartist or Marxist in ideology, people instinctively realized that market logic was corrosive, and restricted pure market functioning. Liberty is built on society, and society is a matter of submitting to limits.

I'm intensely frustrated. I mostly agree with Polanyi politically, but he connects evidence to argument in a way that feels entirely opaque. This may be a foundational work in economic history, but it reads with all the relevance of last centuries flamewars. The basic dyad of the debate between capital and society remains, but the contours and points of argument have shifted so rapidly this book feel archaic.

Dear Committee Members is a brilliant gimmick of a book, an epistolary novel wrapped around the letters of recommendation of one Jason Fitger, a professor of literature at Payne University, a middling liberal arts school.

Fitger is a irascible curmudgeon, a horrific oversharer who's tale of woe at departmental budget cuts, construction on his building, academic politics, and a messy series of failed relationships is slowly unfurled via the letters he writes: Glowing ones for a favored graduate student who he sees as the next literary genius; Half-hearted ones for B- students applying to corporate jobs Fitger disdains; a few sarcastic and back-biting.

The novel has some touching moments of lucidity, and its fun how Fitger dances around how much of a miserable person he is; the cruel mockery of other faculty members, whatever he took from he three exes emotionally, his failures as an artist, and his responsibility for a 'reply all' email fiasco (a crime worse than genocide in my personal book).

The basic absurdity of the letter of recommendation, a middle-class version of the aristocratic letter of introduction, a kind of commoditized reputation that nonetheless demands actual thought and care from the writer, has plenty of room for exploration, and Schumacher mines all of it. But I can't buy Fitger's growth and transformation at the end. I've known more than real one real-life Fitger, mediocrities who had one good idea 30 years ago, and who has ossified into miserable creatures living in small toxic waste ponds. I have no desire to sympathize with one, even in short fiction.

Let the letter fall where they may!

The Red Earth is a fascinating and strange historical document. In the early 1960s, North Vietnam published over 100 memoirs by veterans of the 'protracted struggle' from 1925-1940 as part of preparing the people for the war against America. At the time, Tran was ambassador to China, a key role. This memoir focuses on his early career as an organizer at a Michelin rubber plantation, where Tran helped lead a successful strike.

Tran was a member of the emerging Vietnamese intelligentsia. His parents were poor peasants, but they managed to send him to seminary, where he learned Latin, French, and how to write before being kicked out for opposing the priest over a funeral for a Vietnamese historian. He worked as an itinerant Bible teacher, before poverty and a desire to 'proletarianize' himself, to join the workers, lead him to sign on as a laborer in a rubber plantation.

Rubber harvesting is hard, dangerous work under good conditions, and French colonialism was far from good conditions. The contract, which the mostly illiterate workers couldn't read anyways, promised a certain amount of food and good treatment. Instead, workers face starvation rations, arbitrary beatings, and no medical care. Tran describes workers kicked to death, shackled and forgotten until they starved, or simply worked to death on the plantation. Rape was omnipresent, and according to Tran due to poor food, rice of the worst quality and rotten slated fish, all children were stillborn. Transported hundreds of miles and cut off from community, they had no support but each other.

Tran was part of an embryonic party cell, and as a natural organizer he formed links with the other workers to create a union. In 1930, they successfully organized a strike, shutting down work at the factory, driving off the French soldiers, and then beating and disarming a small patrol sent to recapture the plantation. Some of the strikers argued for a general revolt, for building barricades and fighting to the the death, but Tran knew that would lead only to annihilation. He argued that they must outwit the enemy. The strikers left their guns by the manager's mansion, and said they'd return to work if conditions improve.

It was a victory, but these were amateur revolutionaries, and due to poor security, all the ringleaders, including Tran were arrested and sentenced to prison. Jail was a true revolutionary college, and when Tran left, he was a committed communist and organizer, though the book does not cover that part of his life.

The Red Earth is a fascinating account of collective action and an illuminating portrait of how and why the Vietnamese Communist Party organized as it did, heading into the deadly struggles post 1945.

The Poppy War is better than average fantasy that pulls in some interesting pieces, but doesn't quite integrate all its parts into a truly great whole.

Rin is an shopgirl and orphan living in the south of a large but fragile empire modeled on China. To avoid a forced marriage to an older man, she studies like mad for the national examinations, aces them, and winds up going to the elite military academy of Sinegard. There, the outcast Rin outshines the pampered elite and becomes an initiate of a secret magical tradition. There's little time to savor her lessons, because soon their traditional enemy (a stand-in for Japan) attacks, and repeatedly crushes what feeble resistance Rin's nation can offer. As Rin survives sack and siege, she falls in with an elite assassination unit of magical adepts, shamans who can make the gods manifest. Shamanism is a powerful weapon, but channeling too much power leads to madness, and Rin's patron of the Phoenix is a particularly dangerous one, asking for endless sacrifice.

So what's good here? The usual fantasy-school plotline is handled with appreciable style and understanding for the tropes. Mythic China is better than a usual setting. The frank depictions of warfare and the use of hallucinogen drugs to spark shamanic voyages are outstanding.

And yet, it doesn't quite work. Cities are put to the sword, but Rin's friends lead charmed lives. Shamanism gives supernatural powers, and yet it feels surprisingly mundane. There's a kind of holistic unity between character, plot, setting and theme, which The Poppy War falls just short of, and for two good ideas, there's too many that I've seen before. In a world where The Traitor Baru Cormorant, City of Stairs, and even Low Town exist, The Poppy War is a good book, but not a great one.