Any student of history or fan of science-fiction has wondered about the element of chance and chaos in making history. What unlikely series of events linked together, brought us to the present moment. How could things have gone differently? The old Great Man school of history says that bold plans and great leaders make the times. Marxists say that history is a struggle of class warfare and material forces. But what if both of these theories are wrong? What if history were driven by blind chance? What if instead of great men, history was full of idiots and blusterers?

That would be an interesting book. Sadly, it is not this one. Instead, The Hinge Factor is veteran war journalist Erik Durschmied taking us on a tour of consequential battles in history, starting with the Trojan Horse, jumping the entire ancient world to Hattin in 1187, and then wandering up to Desert Storm, with a slight anglophile bias. Durschmied is a solid enough writer, and he livens up his history with plenty of close personal details. It's fine reading for say, dads at the beach with a couple of beers, though as a snob with letters after my name, I wonder what is strictly sourced, what is common mythos (the St. Crispin Day speech is moving, but it is Shakespeare's version for centuries later, and may bear about as much relationship to the actual events as Hamilton does to the American Revolution), and what is created whole cloth.

Fine enough, but the chapter on the Tet offensive was is to knock this down to a two star review, which is especially galling because Durschmied actually is a first-hand expert on the Vietnam War. He was a reporter in country for ten years, and as a Canadian reporter, also has a unique perspective on the Communist side, because he covered the 1977 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. His inability to pick a coherent story between Westmoreland's failure to anticipate Tet, the bloody battle of Hue, the infamous photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan summarily executing Nguyễn Văn Lém, and the destruction of the Viet Cong as a military force is just... staggering.

If you're in the mood for a book based around the title, I heartily recommend On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman F. Dixon. Now that is how stupidity has influenced military history.

Changer is an urban fantasy with an interesting idea that is an enjoyable read, if not quite a classic. The athanor, an immortal race of beings with supernatural powers live among us. Their presence in history is the source of myths and legends. Changer, one of the oldest athanor, is living as a coyote in New Mexico when an unknown adversary kills his mate and all but one of his pups. He seeks the aid of Arthur Pendragon (yes, that Arthur Pendragon) in gaining revenge, which brings him into contact with a plan by Loki to overthrow the reign of Arthur and the current policy of non-interference in human affairs.

Changer is pleasant enough on a chapter-by-chapter basis, but the overarching plot has a lot of threads and sidetracks, including South American eco-radicals, Merlin's second head, the king of the seas, and Sasquatches tired of living on the fringes of society. The closest comparison is American Gods, but American Gods is about mythological figures who are people, and Changer is about people who happen to be mythological figures. The four star rating has a bit of rounding up, but hey, a fun book is a fun book.

The Soul of a New Machine is one of my favorite books, an all time classic that transcends the bits and bolts of late 1970s computing to capture the ineffable process of invention. So when I saw Kidder had a memoir about his time in Vietnam, I picked this up.

Kidder goes back in memory to find his war and his past self. The problem is that his war is, frankly, boring, and his past self a callow youth. While a student at Harvard, Kidder signed up for ROTC for ill-defined reasons, before the war became a dividing line in a generation. He specialized in military intelligence, and wound up responsible for (I decline to use the phrase 'in command of') a eight man radio finding detachment. Kidder and his men were the REMFiest REMFs who never left the wire. His sergeant had a pair of boots he deliberately abused to feel like he was in the shit, and the entire unit would gather every night to watch Combat! on ABC. Kidder tries his best to befriend his men, to protect everyone from the bullshit of military authority, to fix the elusive NVA regiments on his division's maps. The plot, such as it is, is a series of pranks orchestrated by rebellious soldier Pancho, and a cycle of new commanders distinguished mostly by the unwanted attention that they bring to the unit.

A parallel arc is Kidder's strange, on-off, and frankly abusive relationship with a kind of cometary girlfriend, Mary Ann. An object of lust since childhood, Kidder guilts Mary Ann into accepting a ring before going to Vietnam, torments her with invented war stories of atrocities, and finally accepts the death of the relationship, a friendship destroyed by his inability to let it grow. Boys can be terrible, and for his degree and his bars, the Kidder of this story is very much not a man. The best parts of the book are the humor provided by the story within the story. In 1970, Kidder wrote a melodrama set in Vietnam called Ivory Fields, about an idealistic Lieutenant killed by his own men for intervening in a rape. The book was rejected by over 30 publishers before Kidder burnt the manuscript and went on to other things. There are excerpts, and it is truly awful. Even a Pulitzer Prize winning writer doesn't bat 100!

The fact is, for as much as the Vietnam War defined a generation, a lot of people who served did so without particular distinction or courage. They ran supply depots, maintained trucks, processed transfers, and triangulated radios. The REMFs deserve their own stories, but this is not it.

What is it like to be an octopus? No, really be an octopus?

Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of science and scuba diver who uses the strange intelligence of octopuses as an entry into evolution, consciousness, and the meeting of minds across a gulf of time and space. Octopuses are legendary in aquarium circles for being avid tricksters, squirting people with jets of water, and breaking out of their tanks to eat fish in the middle of the night before stopping home. Yet for all their intelligence, they are poorly understood animals. Why are they so intelligent, and how does their unusual neural architecture support consciousness.

The last ancestor between all of chordates and mollusks was some kind of flatworm that lived over 600 millions years ago, with a few neurons and light sensitive patches. And while vertebrates evolved densely networked brains, octopuses and their relatives have a 'ladder' neural architecture, with each tentacle possessing nearly as many neurons as the central brain. Cuttlefish, those seemingly deep and serene minds, send images sparkling across their skin in ever changing patterns.

In the end, we are left with more questions than answers. But it surely wonderous that we share our planet with such a strange aquatic intelligence.

The Hell's Angels is HST at his best, before the booze and the drugs and The Reputation got a hold of him. It made his reputation as the enfante terrible of New Journalism, and holds up today as a look at the fascinating all-American subculture of outlaw bikers. Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels for about two years, hanging out in their drinking holes, attending rallies in small California towns, and introducing them to Ken Kesey and the hip East Bay scene acid scene of 1965.

Thompson depicts the Hell's Angels as they are, crude violent outcasts who achieve a strange kind of grace behind the handlebars of a chopped Harley, and who are hopelessly oppressed by the world in any other situation. The Angels as they are just want to drink, fuck, do any drugs they can reach, and ride motorcycles. Sure, they wear ratty jeans literally soaked in motor oil and fight at the slightest provocation, but that's because the world cut them out, so fuck the world.

But where it went wrong is in the period when Thompson was writing this book, the Hell's Angels became famous, subject of the lurid Lynch Report and articles in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. They became automotive barbarians, destroying towns and raping innocent women. Cast in the mold of heroic celebrities, their aura of calculated menace curdled. The scene turned bad, with heavy heat from state and local cops, and weird conflicts. In the end, the Angels beat upThompson for some slight and kicked him out for good, but he got one hell of a book out of the whole weird journey.

After Hieroglyph and Everything Change, perhaps the inevitable next destination for the Center for Science and the Imagination is outer space. There 2017 offer, Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities is a collection of seven short stories from leading fiction writers, a dozen scholarly essays from the ASU faculty, and a dialog between scifi great Kim Stanley Robinson and Mars scientist Jim Bell.

These stories don't shy away from how hard life in space will be. That's hard as in hard vacuum, hard radiation, the tyrannies of the Tsiolkovsky equation, and the lag of merely lightspeed communication. But yet, space is still the final frontier, and even if the economics of space exploration are not there, and may never be there, we still dream of what we may find and become out in the black. The best story, in my opinion, is Vandana Singh's "Shikasta", about an encounter between a multicultural exploration team, their AI probe, and an alien life form closer to sentient volcanism than anything we might recognize. Madeline Ashby brings a taut small world story about choice and responsibility in "Death on Mars", while Karl Schroeder does a little buzzword mashing, but tries to find a way out of the thicket of property rights in "The Baker of Mars". All the authors bring a good game, and the accompanying essays provide criticism and context (with footnotes).

This is a great collection of hard science-fiction, meshed with science and science policy. Fans will enjoy this book, and I could easily see slotting some of the fiction and essays into a course module on space and space related issues. And for the price of free, the ebooks are well worth your time.

*Disclosure Notice: I am a graduate of ASU, and know many of the contributors as friends or colleagues. I was not part of the project, and received no compensation for this review.

The Big Ratchet is a decent, if breezy environmental history of agriculture. DeFries discusses human history in terms of energy, and especially available calories, in terms of a pattern of 'ratchet, hatchet, and pivot'. Some innovation increases the available food supply, a limit is reached, a new innovation moves around that limitation. The titular big ratchet, of course, is the combination of intensified agricultural techniques developed in the 20th century that increased the global population from 1.6 billion to over 7 billion.

Most animals live at the margins of survival. Agriculture allows the accumulation of surplus, and the support of a non-farming political, cultural, technological, and military elite. Agriculture advanced slowly in the centuries since the Mesopotamian breadbasket, limited by nutrients, pests, and imprecise breeding. Malthus, writing at the end of the 18th century, was correct from his local perspective. The fertility of the people always seemed to outstrip the fertility of the land. Hunger is mankind's constant companion.

The 20th century Green Revolution banished hunger, at least for a time, through artifical nitrogen fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process, mineral phosphorus, mechanized farm equipment, new breeds, and chemical best control. It also had numerous side effects: maritime dead zones from fertilizer run-off, ecocide from pesticide use, disruptions to ancient ways of living.

In DeFries's telling, we're reaching another hatchet, as the limits of Green Revolution techniques become clearer. What comes next is unclear. This book is more focused and optimistic than Harari's Sapiens. Civilization is about agriculture, and even as problems arise, they are dealt with, if not to complete satisfaction. Yet I wish DeFries had written less of a general history, and perhaps brought in some of her specialized knowledge on land use change, deforestation, and the coexistence of heavy agriculture and natural cycles.

Hardwired is like a datablast straight from the cyberpunk id. Guns-and-drugs-and-sex-and-tech-and-power all tangled up and flashing with neon lights.

Cowboy is a panzerboy, the pilot of an armored hovercraft smuggling lifesaving medicine across what used to be the midwest, before the orbital corporations shattered Earth's government in a hostile take-over proceeded by meteor bombardment. Sarah is a bodyguard and assassin, hustling in Tampa to buy herself and her brother two tickets off-world. When a job and a betrayal brings the two of them together, they decide to fight back: for money, for revenge, for respect, for the sheer thrill of armored combat in the glow of the interface.

What transpires is some high-octane action in a neon hellscape, as Cowboy and Sarah slash across a damaged world writhing under the exploitation of the orbitals. There's all the cyberpunk tropes you'd expect: Addicts, deviants, megacorps, mercenaries, operators, and that awesome mid-80s computer tech. Hardwired doesn't aspire to high art or grand statements, but it gets what it means to be an outlaw and to fight for what you believe in against something huge and slick and inhuman in all aspects.

This is one of my new favorite books, a cyberpunk essential, and has catapulted Williams way up my 'to read' list.

For some people, "Horatio in Hornblower in space" is a kind of metaphor. Sutherland is very literal. This is the Age of Sail, moved to the stars.

Alexis Carew is a 15 year girl with a problem. The patriarchial laws and mores of her home planet mean that her options are to get married to an idiotic fop, or be disinherited when her grandfather dies. Joining the space navy is a chance to get away from home and do some good. And while technically legal, it's almost entirely unknown. She signs up, and we move through the beats of Nelsonian plot.

So the good: The spacefaring tech is surprisingly evocative, without being ridiculous. Spaceships enter a hyperspace dimension at Lagrange points, where they sail winds of dark energy that blow between stars. Darkspace is full of shifting currents, squalls, and storms. Computers and radio simply won't work, meaning that everything is done by hand in space suits. The only weapon practical are lasers, firing off of geranium encased capacitors, with beams of light slowed to cannonball speeds and ranges. I believe David Drake did the idea first, but Sutherland carries off his setting conceits with verve. Carew is a great protagonist, an idealist who never backs down from a fight, and with infinite willingness to get her hands dirty to do the job.

There are cool moments, learning the ropes, chasing pirates, fighting battles and making friends, but a few days on I have trouble remembering literally anything other than darkspace. The first Alexis Carew book is popcorn, popcorn with a lot of promise and a little kick, and I'll probably be reading the rest of the series between more serious books, but you're not getting any surprises.

The Moon bounces and drifts languidly over its topic, Earth's nearest neighbor and how it's been conceptualized and made concrete.

As a world just out of reach, but easily visible even with the naked eye, the Moon has proven important to theories of Copernican astronomy and geological understanding of the world. The book doesn't really get moving until Morton describes 'the Orphans of Apollo', his own generation who were promised a new world, and left instead with scattered bootprints and a few thousand kg of moon rocks. In the 50 years since Apollo, no human has gone beyond Low Earth Orbit. The big science agencies turned their attention to Mars, Jupiter, and the stars.

This may all be changing, of course, with SpaceX and Blue Origin, and the revolution in launch costs. Oliver's discussion of the contemporary landscape of space exploration is not systematic enough to call a survey, but lays out the major economic reasons to exploit the Moon's resources, and why He3 and ice mining might be bad ideas, unless using the Moon's resources is axiomatic.

Discussion of speculative literature, starting with early modern Utopians and closing with a wonderful critical essay on Heinelin's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in light of the Anthropocene are the true heart of the book. Morton is a scifi nerd par excelance, and you think fans are slans, that essay is worth the price of admission. And you don't, you'll probably enjoy hearing what Morton thinks of Elon Musk.