The Kingdom of Copper moves five years past the events of The City of Brass, and adds Dara as a new point of view. The characters are... floating. Nahri is trapped in an unhappy marriage to the prince of the city, Ali is in exile, hunted by assassins and with strange new water powers, and Dara is leading a guerilla band under the fearsome (and thought-to-be-dead) Manizeh, plotting revenge on the ruling Geziri exiles.

The plot brings these three threads together, as Ali returns to Daevabad, and he and Nahri try and set up a hospital against the corruption and divide-and-rule politics of the city. Meanwhile, Dara is working on a sneak attack on the night of major festival, with the assistance of the power water-elemental marids and a deadly poison gas.

Second books are hard, and if The City of Brass was a 4.5 star book, this is 3.5 stars. The (relatively) sophistication of the validity of both Ali and Nahri's politics is weakened when compared against the tyranny of the status quo and Manizeh's ends-justify-the-means terrorism. The theme of a legacy of revenge leading only to ashes is hammered a bit too hard. And worse, the first book shined on the electric connection between the main characters, and they are sadly separated for most of this book.

Still, the ending shows some bold promises to disrupt the status quo, and this trilogy is some of the best fantasy I've read lately.

Longitude is a sheer delight of a popular history of technology. Up until the 18th century, half of navigation was done by chance. Finding latitude is easy, simply take the angle between the horizon of the sun at noon or Polaris at night, adjust for the date, and you know where you are relative to the equator. But longitude is a different matter. Ships wandered in the great oceans, crews riddled with scurvy, or crashed into rising cliffs. The British government offered a prize of 20,000 Pounds, equivalent to millions of dollars today, for a solution to the longitude problem. Meanwhile, finding longitude was ridiculed as an impossible quest, on par with perpetual motion and squaring the circle.

Serious approaches to longitude centered on time. If you knew what time was at some fixed point, a home port, and could compare it to local time, then 1 hour of difference in time corresponded to 15 degrees of longitude. But keeping track of the time simply was not possible with contemporary clocks which gained or lost whole minutes in an hour on land. Shipboard conditions, with constant motion, dampness, and temperatures ranging from sweltering tropics to arctic gales, made the problem seem impossible.

Sobel follows the story of the man who cracked it, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire named John Harrison. Harrison developed the first chronometer, a clock which kept accuracy to within seconds under harsh maritime conditions. But Harrison's triumph was bedeviled by official opposition. The men who made up the longitude board were mostly astronomers, and they believed that the problem must be solved by reference to a celestial clock, either eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, or the position of the moon relative to major stars. British astronomer royal Nevil Maskelyne refused to accept a 'mere mechanic' had cracked the problem, instead preferring a method based on the moon.

After a decades long struggle, an elderly Harrison was awarded the money by Parliament, though not the prize. Chronometers were very expensive, ten times as expensive as an almanac of lunar ephemera, and navigators used lunar methods for decades. Harrison became the victor in the eyes of history. His chronometers are treasured artifacts. GPS, that omnipresent locator, relies on satellites and ultra-precise clocks. Longitude captures the spirit of the great age of exploration, and the taming of the leviathans in the blue spaces on the maps, in the best possible way.

The War of Atonement is an uneven account of the Yom Kippur War. Herzog was a retired IDF general and Israeli politician. Around the time the book was first published in 1975 he was Israeli ambassador to the UN, and he would later serve as the (largely ceremonial) President of Israel. This book is at its worst, and paradoxically at its most interesting, when it argues for Israeli military reforms, and is otherwise a workman-like account of a war that had barely faded from the headlines.

The strategic situation heading into 1973 was one of instability. The Arab powers, particularly Egypt and Syria, were itching for a chance to reverse their catastrophic defeat in 1967. Israel knew that a second war was coming, but conventional wisdom was that it would be in 1975, when Egypt had rebuilt its medium bomber fleet. Israeli defense policy was based around taking the initial attack with outposts and what little strategic depth was available, and then counter-attacking with an armored force composed from reserves, which required between 46 and 72 hours to be organized. And this time, diplomatic realities preventing the kind of brilliant preemptive strike which began the Six Day War. The Arabs would launch the first strike.

The long War of Attrition in the lead-up to October 1973 served Egypt and Syria better than Israel. Israeli defenses were small and undermanned, its command structure weakened by rotation of senior officer, and its defense plans ambiguous. Meanwhile, Egypt and Syria trained for years on the initial attacks, every part of the plan rehearsed, while concentrating artillery and new anti-air missiles. While Israeli military intelligence did get wind of the attack with perhaps a days notice, they specified H-hour as 6:00 PM local time, 4 hours later than the actual H-hour of 2:00 PM. The initial Arab attacks met with great success, but Israeli defenders managed to inflict outsized losses in the fine defensive terrain of the Golan heights, and desperately mobilized forces finally turned back the Syrians. Meanwhile, in the south, Egypt crossed that Suez canal across its entire 110 mile length, but failed to move deeper into Sinai. A daring counter-crossing by the Israeli military drove deep into Egyptian territory, severing the Egyptian supply lines.

This book was published before the Camp David accords were finalized, so the diplomatic resolution is out of scope of the book. And while Israeli won, its military resolve was shaken. Herzog goes after Moshe Dayan for irresponsibility as defense minister in the lead up to the war, and defeatism in command during the war. Ariel Sharon is criticized for being unable to work as part of a unified command team, a charismatic asshole after glory. And the Israeli military as a whole assumed the ongoing supremacy of its armor and airpower, neglecting its infantry and artillery and the counters of new Soviet guided missiles in Arab hands, which caused excessive causalities.

I know I've read some Drake. He's prolific enough he's inescapable. But I'm not sure that I've ever read more than a story or two from Hammer's Slammers. Released on the Baen "First One is Free" policy, The Tank Lords is three decent short stories and one mediocre novella.

The basic premise of the series is that the Slammers are interstellar mercenaries, an armored regiment formed around hover-tanks and hover-APCs, and paid by one side of planetary wars to stomp the other side. The best of these stories bring home the themes of the sublime absolute of firepower, the bonds between soldiers, and the incommensurable gap between soldiers and civilians.

But the stories are weaker on characterization, on showing that the civilians have any kind of point of view. And the novella, rather than using its length to do something interesting, is one long rolling firefight based on the Tet Offensive.

So first one is free, but I'm going to let someone else point out which books in the series are actually good before committing to any more.

Acceptance is the last stage in the Kubler-Ross model of grief, a calm retrospective internalization of impending mortality. And the final part of a trilogy should bring some kind of closure. Given what I thought of book 2, the only reason I read book 3 is that someone on the train was reading it, and he said it was good. Never take advice from people on public transit.

Of course, Acceptance resolutely refuses to do any of internalization of impending mortality. Area X is expanding, swallowing up Southern Reach and perhaps remaking the world in an alien image. And rather than reveal any of this straight on, VanderMeer splits his narrative into three chronologically distinct viewpoints, the director deciding to go on the fatal 12th expedition, Ghost Bird and Control seeking the end of Area X, and Saul, the light house keeper, decades ago when Area X was just the bayou coast, dealing with weirdos from the Science & Seance Brigade and making some kind of ordinary life, as a strange power grows within him.

This kind of fiction challenges us to image the Out of Context Event, to borrow a phrase from Iain M. Banks. What do people do when confronted with something that defies all expectations? How can an author describe something for which ordinary language lacks the words? This final book disappears in a puff of obscurity, leaving the most mundane explanation of all. Perhaps Area X is just a metaphor, for cancer, for environmental catastrophe, for the unexplained depths of the soul.

We know North Korea through two lenses. The insane propaganda of the Kim Regime, and the horrific and pitiable tales of defectors. Suki Kim gives us a unique third take, based on her time as an English teacher at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. PUST was a partnership between an Evangelical Christian community and the Regime to provide education to the elite. Suki Kim was twice a double agent; a westerner in North Korea, and a non-believer among Christians. In the fraught days just prior to the death of Kim Jong-il in 2011, she taught the children of the elite conversational and written English.

Kim ably weaves together several stands of the story. Foremost are her students. In some ways they're ideal; enthusiastic, obedient, playful and romantic in the way that young people are. The children of elite politicians and doctors, they grew up in the shadow of the famine but were protected from its worst effects. Yet at the same time they seem to have had all the individuality beaten out of them. They cannot speak with the instructors alone, they have a buddy system for mutual political reliability, and they're even organized into paramilitary platoons. As expected, the students have massive gaps in their knowledge (North Korea is the best at everything!), but more alarmingly is the casual way that they lie and invent stories to cover for each other, to paper over the authoritarian society of North Korea.

Along with this, Kim recounts her family's personal tragedy of the Korean War; an uncle lost, a grandmother driven mad by grief, and the way the arbitrary partition in 1945 broke the unified Korean people in a way that may never ever be remedied. She also recounts with delicacy her depression and isolation in the hermit kingdom, the stark prison-like setting of an elite school, and the strangeness of trips into the Pyongyang or the countryside. Beautifully and courageously written, this book is an essential addition to the literature on North Korea.

The Black Company is one of the foundations of modern gritty fantasy, and a classic in its own right. The titular company is a band of mercenaries who find themselves under contract to an empire ruled by 300 year old sorcerers: Soulcatcher, The Lady, The Limper, Stormcaller, etc. With the northern front falling apart, they're the only effective unit fighting against the Rebels and their sorcerer-generals, holding the line in a desperate retreat and last stand at the fortress of Charm.

Our viewpoint is Croaker, field surgeon and company annalist. He has a wonderful tone balanced between cynicism and the limited morality of mercenaries: honor the word of the contract, pay for supplies, don't fight to the death if there's another way (because that death might be yours). There are no heroes in war, just various shades of grey, as he chronicles the soldiers and wizards of the Black Company.

The best part is the magic. Sorcery is terrifying, literally dehumanizing. The hedge-wizards attached to the company and their little illusions and feuds are merely odd. The top figures of the The Lady's empire, the Ten Who Were Taken, are monsters out of myth, their deadly intrigues cutting back and forth with the company in the center. Though magic melts stone to lava and sends poisonous clouds racing across the battlefield, sorcerers mostly cancel each other out, and it's up to poor bloody infantry to save the day. And behind it all is the legend of the White Rose, a young girl who will lead the Rebels to victory, and the undead hand of the Dominator, a sorcerer-king who would break the world.

What a book!

I enjoyed this book a lot more when it was called Heirs of Empire.

The premise is pretty cool. At some point in the future, interstellar humanity encounters a genocidal alien empire. Overmatched by sheer numbers, they come up with a desperate plan to plant a secret colony, hinder its technological development until the threat has passed, and then tech back up and kick alien ass. The plan gets highjacked by the high command, who brainwash the colonists to regard them as divine entities and set up an even more brutally stultifying theocracy. Internecine fighting wipes out these 'archangels', and 900 years later a contingency plan of an AI based off a young officer wakes up in a robot body with instructions to kick off the scientific revolution.

That's the first three chapters, and then the rest is a slog though Weber's usual themes. The superiority of enlightened despotism; using 18th century military technology to beat up more primitive weapons; adoration of Nelsonian England; multiple points of view, including the antagonists. The story pits Merlin and his chosen maritime power of the Kingdom of Charis as the seed for the industrial revolution. We get descriptions of ships of the line, intrigues, swordfights, etc, as Merlin and Charis build a navy that outmatches anything on the planet. Galleons armed with carronades and backed up by satellite recon and bugs in the chambers of the holy alliance against them give Merlin's forces an incredible advantage, and they win a lopsided victory that took the Honorverse five books to settle into. The king is dead, but his sacrifice creates a noble example against the harsh repression of the anti-innovation Church.

This book basically mashes up a bunch of Weber's previous works, and it's overlong and melodramatic to boot. I got this book for free, and I still feel like I overpaid. The only reason for two stars is that Weber is still a decent writer on a sentence to sentence level, and hey, you didn't expect to do much thinking. I'll be passing on the rest of the Safehold series.

Radiant closes out the League of Peoples series in classic style. Youn Suu is an explorer disfigured by a weeping sore on her cheek and a narcissistic mother. When a diplomatic mission goes awry, she is infested with the hyper-intelligent Balrog spores, teamed up with Admiral Festina Ramos, and sent to rescue a survey team from the post-human Unity clade.

What we have is a mystery of a deadly alien world and a transcendence program gone horribly awry, as framed though Youn Suu's Buddhism, and her fear of being overtaken by the Balrog and its purpose. The story closes by suggesting that the Explorer Corps embodies certain archetypal heroes, agents for the higher races of the League of Peoples, solving problems that are not yet clear. The xenological mystery is both spooky and a hell of a lot of fun. Even if the the essential questions of the setting never quite come together, I enjoyed the League of Peoples series as a fun space opera jaunt.

The Mongoliad is maybe two solid swashbuckling novellas, burdened by a bunch of cruft. The whole series was an experiment in serialized collaborative fiction based around historical weapons-martial arts by Neal Stephenson and a bunch of other authors. The good stuff are the descriptions of melee skirmishes, which are action-packed and tactical. Of the two main stories, I more enjoyed the intrigue of Cansukh, a Mongol warrior dispatched to the capitol of Karakorum to do something about the alcoholic depression of Khagan Ogedai Khan, and his struggle to survive an atmosphere of decadence and intrigue with the help of the Chinese tutor and slave Lian. The other story is a lengthy quest by Cnan, a female messenger, and 11 knights to cross the Mongol empire and assassinate Ogedai Khan. From a structural perspective, the problem is that it takes about a third of the book for these stories to actually start moving, a long slog of subpar materials, and both plots are barely advanced by the end, leaving plenty more the sequels.

But from a bigger perspective, I hate how much stuff Stephenson and his collaborators just made up for the story. The Baroque Cycle was tightly grounded in the actual history of the the period. The fictionalized viewpoint characters were a lot like real people, and spent a lot of time interacting with real people. 1241 is a fascinating year in European history, with various medieval knightly orders at the height of their power and the Mongols conquering the world. Rather than engage with real history, Stephenson and his collaborators choose to invent a fictional society of Binder messengers (what, are actual Silk Road merchants boring?), and the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae, a knight-errant brotherhood nominally Catholic, but with secret pagan origins, and none of the actual social ties that make real feudalism so interesting. I get that this lets them stretch their story out over centuries and avoid nerds saying "gnah, actually according to this source...", but it leaves everything disconnected.

The best summary of this story might be in the story itself. One of the Mongol Khans has decided conquering is boring and runs an open call gladiatorial game before invading Europe. A knight fights a samurai. The only objective is to buy Europe a little more time by distracting the khan. It's a really cool fight, but for little purpose.