The Nightmare Stacks is a return to a more classic Laundry novel, with a new protagonist, a new enemy, and metric shittons of style. The story follows Alex, one of the PHANGS (Vampires with sorcerous abilities from The Rhesus Chart), as he's coming to terms with his new life as a civil servant and combat mage, and an unsatisfying assignment back in his hometown of Leeds.

While Alex is scouting out squalid Cold War bunkers as a new HQ, a cold and vasty intelligence has turned it's eyes towards Earth. In this case it's elves, who Stross' perfectly casts as the post-apocalyptic remnants of a high magic civilization turned into a perfect fascist imperial machine through mind control magic. CASE NIGHTMARE RED (oh yes, there is a whole rainbow of CASE NIGHTMARES!) involves extraplanar invasion by intelligent beings, and Stross does an incredible job showcasing the Cthulhuoid bio-horror military of the elves going up the scanty rapid response forces the diminished British military can throw together. Stross's ambition in this book was to treat folklore about elves with about the same coherence as an Afghan villager's account of why SEAL Team 6 shot up his village, and it works! This is the best world-building in the series since book one, and promises a major shift of events for the next book.

That said, as a protagonist Alex is kind of a wet squib. Yet another math nerd with women issues and a developing moral compass. He's a lot like early Bob Howard, without the sarcasm or the fun. The supporting cast exceeds. "Cassie", elven spy and princess, does a great job with her confusion at Earthly mores and her very predatory alien mindset. Pinky and Brains are back, along with their refurbished Kettenkrad. And the Most Awkward Family Dinner in History adds some solid human drama.

Seveneves is a lumpy novel with a fascinating premise interrupted by long info dumps and weakened by scanty characterization. Earth is destroyed, civilization is reduced to seven women in a shattered spaceship, and we see the shape of the society created by their descendants 5000 years later. Fairly, this should be three books, or even more, but it's one brick of a tome.

At some point around the present day, the Moon is destroyed by a sudden and unknown cataclysm. All of humanity has only 700 days to build and crew a lifeboat, a distributed planetary ark of cheap mass-produced capsules centered around an expanded ISS. This first part of the story is the weakest, full of "as you know Bob" exposition about characters we have yet to care about. Psychological realism has never been Stephenson's strongpoint, but I can't imagine that a species knowing that it was about to die, except for 1500 people selected by esoteric criteria, would behave so rationally. They do their best to engineer and launch space solutions, and all the technology the survivors will need.

The second part is the lifeboat drama, which is one of the better parts of the books. The ramshackle life-support system is falling apart, the former President of the United States has hitched a ride to orbit on a X-37 against the rules of the Last Treaty and is causing political trouble, and the only chance to get enough precious water is to carry out a deep space grab of a comet using an unshielded nuclear rocket. Precious samples are destroyed by asteroid bombardment, people die from radiation poisoning and failure of algae farms, there's desperate boarding actions, and at the end seven childbearing women are left alive, finally safe in the bottom of a fault in the largest fragment of the moon. They decide to repopulate the human species, with each Eve getting to rewrite her genes in the image of who she thinks humanity should be.

And then, with a scratch like a bad DJ, the story skips 5000 years (5000 years separates us and Minoan Crete), where humanity has made a ring of sophisticated habitats around Earth, and is well through recreating a livable ecosystem on the surface. Humanity has splintered into a number of sub-races based around the Seven Eves, each with stereotyped behaviors and reactions, and two major political factions based around one of the Eves being on the very wrong side of lifeboat survival. The action here centers around first contact with two new subspecies of humans, who survived the apocalypse in mine-shafts and submarines, but is mostly taken up with an explanation of the massive orbital habs and military technology based around smart 'ambots' rather than dumb lead bullets.

There are some very cool ideas in here, and one or two moments of actual emotional tension, but mostly this book is just long and surprisingly sedate, given the scope of the disaster.

With Full Fathom Five, the Craft sequence finally lands square on its feet. Not the that the previous books were bad, but they were a little too taken with flashy descriptions of magic or pure idealism for my taste. This time around, Gladstone grounds his setting in very real and relatable concerns. The formula is much the same: a noir mystery or Grisham-esque thriller translated to high magic fantasy, but now executed perfectly.

Kai is a priestess of empty idols, a kind of divine hedge fund manager who stores wealth away from the greedy eyes of true gods and Immortal Kings. When she recklessly decides to save Seven Alpha, an over-stretched idols being torn apart on volatile futures contracts, she accidentally exposes a flaw and a crime at the heart of her Order. Meanwhile, Izza is an orphan refugee, an unwitting priestess of mayfly gods on an island cleansed of the divine. Their paths intersect through poetry, prophecy, and the tortured golem-human police officers called Penitents. Characters from the previous books return as well, the truly terrifying Ms. Kevarian, Cat, and Teo are all wound up in this plan.

It's hard to specify why I liked this one a little better. Kai is yet anther damaged workaholic, but her quest for justice seems more human than the ones that came before. The plotting is slower, taking about 2/3rds of the book to move pieces into play, but the deliberation pays off. I'm glad to see Gladstone improving, and excited to see where this series goes.

The Incas is a strong academic introduction to the Inca empire, drawing from a balanced reading of colonial chronicle and the latest in archeological research to present the political and logistical marvel that were the Inca. A little dry, but deeply sourced.

Paintwerk is a trio of linked cyberpunk stories strongly reminiscent of Bruce Sterling ("Deep Eddy", "Bicycle Repairman" and "Taklamakan"). The key technologies here are spex and augmented reality, the themes about art and authentic creation and selling out to some massive corporate cloud that can only parasitize off the raw energy of The Street.

The first story, about graffiti artists in Bristol, is by far the best, with an appropriately weird cast of characters and a wry askance glance at a future where Banksy is as respected as Picasso, yet local taggers still get nabbed and ABSO'ed by the cops. The others, which go into gaming and virtual colonization, are more style over substance but still a lot of fun.

Good quick read, which even five years later has some of that near-future gloss on it.

Goblet of Fire set several firsts for the Hugo Awards: first fantasy novel, first young adult novel. Potter-mania was in full fling back in 2001, and as always Rowling is a charming storyteller. However, in my opinion she's not much of a setting builder or plotter, and this book is where the series beings to slump under its own weight of accumulated details and questions.

Harry Potter is 14 and heading into his 4th year at the Hogwarts wizarding school, when a flash of pain in his scare reminds him that the dark lord Voldemort is increasing his power. But never mind that, because the Weasleys have invited Harry to the Quidditch World Cup. There's roughly 100 pages of prelude before revealing the real deal, a special young wizard's tournament between the top three wizard's schools in Europe. Harry is entered into the challenge by an unknown party and faces dragons, merpeople, and a maze, before it's revealed that the whole thing was arranged to get Harry out of Hogwarts and in front of Voldemort so that the Dark Lord can regain his power and body. Another Hogwarts student is killed, Harry escapes, and the wizarding world refuses to believe that Voldemort is back. Fin.

The main plot is so contrived that I continually asked why. Everybody cheats in the wizarding challenge, including Harry, who has useful items handed to him by friends immediately before the first two challenges, and then has one of Voldemort's accomplices clear his path to the "reward" at the end of maze. The side plots, with George and Fred Weasley starting a joke shop, Hermoine trying to get a House Elf liberation movement off the ground, and muckraking reporter Rita Skeeter, go in circles. The final scene, with the death of Cedric Diggory and a direct confrontation between Harry and Voldemort is appropriately tense, but comes at the end of the longest book so far, and one with few payoffs.

Harry spends the book confused and miserable, appropriately riding through the first waves of puberty and fights with his friends Ron and Hermoine (who is really the protagonist of the series). There's not much presence to the teachers, more obligatory check-ins with Dumbledore, Snape, and Hagrid that character moments. The foreigners, rather that being part of a bigger magical community, are used to make jokes about French people and Eastern Europeans. And with the gloss wearing off, its increasing clear that Rowling has no idea what magic can and cannot do in her setting, what wizards actually do on a daily basis, or how Harry is learning what he needs to know.

There are some interesting hints about what happened during Voldemort's War before Harry was born, and what it was like to have secret death squads roaming the country, killing people or throwing them in Azkaban. Many people served Voldemort, and some were left free. Anybody could've have been a Wizard Nazi, and Dumbledore was some sort of Nazi hunting badass, a "Mad Jack" Churchill or Aldo Raine who's retired to be a rather daffy educator. Of course, nobody seems to have thought of using the wide variety of spells and potions for disclosing identity, truth, or what happened in the past, to track down Voldemort's servants.

I care about setting, but the Harry Potter series is really about characters, and they're static in this installment. Harry is brave and generous, but we knew that already. The wizarding world refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat, and they continue in their ignorance. Hermoine is smart (and blossoming) yet underappreciated. Ron is the sidekick. Meh.

Harry Potter is a genuine phenomenon, and a large part of that is that this book is *perfect*. Rowling description of Potter's entry into the world of Hogwarts, the eccentricities of wizards and magic, the joy of finally finding a place that you belong, is luminescent, iridescence, funny and poignant.

I don't see much point writing a longer review, since everybody knows Harry Potter. I have a lot of problems with the setting, the over-arching plot, and the politics of the characters as the series develops, but this book is amazing, with a lightness and attention to the craft of wordsmithing that are truly amazing.

American Gods tops the list of books that I wish I could read for the first time once again. There's a storm coming, and in the middle is a man named Shadow: ex-con, recently widowed, working for the mysterious Mr. Wednesday. Shadow's dropped into a world where beings live on belief, where magic and ritual are real, and the dead are rarely gone. Gaiman's gods are very fallible supernatural beings, curmudgeons and mystics who drink, smoke, and feed off the scraps of belief left to them. America is a bad place for the gods; the Old World creatures are shambling shells of past glories, the new gods of Media, Technology, and the Spookshow (among others) anxious mayflies trembling before the winds of obsolescence.

It's a wonder how Gaiman blends the mythology of dozens of cultures with an utterly plausible explanation of how gods work, of their symbiotic relationship with people, and why America is such a terrible place for them to live. This combination of the fantastic and the logical is one of the joys of the book, along with Gaiman's evident skill as a wordsmith, and the lengthy and convoluted plot around the war of the gods. I enjoyed the frequent digressions into the lives of other goods, their journey to America with immigrants beyond the Ellis Island stereotypes.

I think this book opens some very interesting questions about the nature of belief, the necessity of having ideas and dreams about the universe, and the way that myths change shape in new contexts. That said, it is at times in love with how clever it is, and the Lakeside sanctuary plot is as slow and dull as I remembered it.

Corporate sponsorship has some upsides. When Microsoft wants to do a sci-fi anthology, it gets some of the most brilliant writers in the field. I think everyone here has at least one Hugo, Nebula, or Campbell award.

The stories lean towards hard sci-fi, and while they're generally optimistic about technology, Microsoft didn't buy loyalty. The company doesn't appear by name at all, and when a similar entity does show up (big Pacific NW tech company) its is usually as suits threatening to cut funding from the cool projects before they appear. Some guesses as to the cool tech demoed for the authors: machine translation, quantum computing, emotional intelligence, and SETI. Microsoft is more than Office and Xbox and a warehouse of unwanted Zunes. They want to remind people that they're on the cutting edge.

The stories are all solid, but my favorites came at the end. David Brin delivers a sharp and funny take on skeptical magicians debunking various types of fraudsters, and how we as a species can get better about thinking about the future (it'd be great if various speculating idiots were held to some level of accuracy in their speculation, which I'm sure we'll get around to doing in the next Critical Six Months, or Friedman), and Ann Leckie with a story about violence between two alien species variously aided and abetted by faulty machine translation.

Since last I checked this collection is free, you've got nothing to lose. Track down a link and enjoy the beneficence of the Beast of Redmond.

The Obelisk Gate falls victim to second-book syndrome, being merely very good where The Fifth Season was great. The story condenses down to two lines. Essun in the underground town of Castrima, trying to survive the beginning of what may be the worst apocalypse yet, and her daughter Nassum at an antarctic training facility for orogenes. The two are set up for a collision course, as they learn to master the ancient technology of the floating half-real obelisks, and a form of orogeny beyond orogeny that goes by the prosaic name of 'magic'.

The story is best when it stands on its characters, and the ethical impossibility of doing what is necessary to survive. This is familiar ground, but Jemisin has a sharp eye for these moments, and for how people live with their bad decisions. The story is weakest as she adds new elements to deepen the mystery. Factions of an ancient war and the silvery threads of the new magic are less realized and less interesting than the previous politics around orogeny, and the mastery of heat and force.

That said, I enjoyed it a lot, Jemisin is a hell of a talent, and I think she knows where book 3 is heading. I'm not sure I do though, and I'm not sure if these people deserve their happy ending, or if they deserve to watch it all burn. On consideration, it'll be both. Moses never set foot in the Promised Land.