Well, that was certainly a book.

Dune: Chapterhouse is mostly empty sand, with a few bits of melange in original thoughts about tradition, power, and survival. The main character is Odrade, Bene Gesserit Mother Superior, who faces the destruction of her order at the hands of the rampaging Honored Matres. Only secrecy, and a Reverend Mother's willingness to die before betraying the order, can buy Odrade precious time to figure out a strategy for survival, a multipronged plan involving a ghola of the Bashar Miles Teg, renegade Honored Matre Murbella, and the ecological transformation of the planet Chapterhouse into another Dune via sandworm.

But here's the thing, a protagonist requires a character arc; a heroic protagonist requires a flaw (at least in the classical sense), and the Bene Gesserit in this book provide neither. The are history embodied, through the thousand of other memories that live in the Reverend Mothers. the Honored Matre are a kind of twisted mirror of the Bene Gesserit, all of their vaunted control and power with none of the tempering of wisdom. But what faces Odrade is not barbarians, but what Iain M Banks deemed an 'Outside Context Problem'. What has returned from the vast Scattering of human space and evolution, and how is it beyond the memories of the Bene Gesserit. However, the Bene Gesserit are too unruffled, to serene even in the face of extinction. They're a far cry from the subtle shapers of people and events of Dune, and strangely unaffected by the failure of their 10,000 year program to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, which lead to Muad'Dib and the Tyrant Leto II.

Dune was at its best when it balanced the grand forces beyond human control, the Fremen Jihad, prescient powers, Bene Gesserit plots, etc, with the fact that it mattered that it was these humans, in this time and place, Paul and Jessica and Chani and Stilgar, on Dune, when the power of the Atreides has been broken.

Herbert died before the true conclusion of the series. Duncan foresees an enemy that the Honored Matres are fleeing from, which in perhaps the ultimate example of anti-climaticism, are Face Dancers named Marty and Daniel who have absorbed so many identities they have become super-human.

If Heretics were fragments of a better book, Chapterhouse is those fragments ground to dust.

Heretics of Dune is many interested pieces scattered on the sand, waiting to be assembled into a coherent whole. 1500 years after the events of God Emperor, the universe again teeters on a knife's edge, as dangerous humans from the Scattering return to the old Imperium, the Bene Gesserit and Tleilaxu battle for supremacy, and new potential superhumans undergo their training ordeals.

Let's start with the superhumans. Sheeana is a young girl from Rakis (the planet formerly known as Dune) who can control the sandworms, possibly communing with the dreaming pearls of Leto's consciousness in each worm. Miles Teg is a commander in the Bene Gesserit army, a soldier-diplomat called out of retirement to oversee the training of the latest Duncan Idaho ghola. And Duncan himself has been thoroughly upgraded, and may have hidden potential of his own.

The Tleilaxu are a new viewpoint. Master genetic manipulators, their politics is defined by an unbroken succession of ghola masters (Scytale from Messiah still lives) and hive-mind Face Dancer mimics, who serve as infiltrators, assassins, and soldiers. The Honored Matres, returning from the Scattering, are like the Bene Gesserit squared. Rather than ruling from behind the scenes, they hold power in their own hand, using a form of sexual dominance to control their slaves.

The sex stuff is of course where the book gets weird. Basically, the Honored Matres have pussy game so strong they can enslave men. Duncan Idaho can do the same to women. The Bene Gesserit hate the Honored Matres and call them all 'whores'. Love is treated as the ultimate heresy, something which can upset the most delicate political plotting. It's weird, and not in a good way.

This book is at its best in tense confrontations between the Tleilaxu master Waff and others; the subtle designs of the Bene Gesserit and the unbounded threat of the returners, the feral Honored Matres. One side gains an information advantage over the others, and presses it. Yet, there's the matter of the information advantage over the reader. Herbert tells us that these characters are subtle and crafty and bold and wise and dangerous, and yet they rarely exhibit these qualities in the story (aside from the last one: all characters are quite lethal.) Dune and God Emperor had me quite convinced that they covered pivotal times and pivotal people. Heretics has a sense of "why not now, with them?"

Smokejumper is a compelling memoir by one of America's firefighting elite. Smokejumpers have one of the most insane jobs in the world, parachuting near (definitely not in) wildfires in inaccessible terrain to cut lines and put out blazes before they grow into firestorms. Ramos discusses his career as a smokejumper in the context of the history of wildland firefighting, with a focus on those rare tragedies where firefighters die in the context of their duties.

The trivia is fascinating. The smokejumpers originated in the 1930s, and as America's first parachute deployed force, served as a model for the famous Airborne units of the Second World War. Every smokejumper is an expert tailor, since they have to custom-make their jumpsuits and packs, working with gnarly fabrics like kevlar and nomex. Fire is deadly and unpredictable. Flamefronts can melt cars to puddles of slag, and leave water containers a few dozen feet away unscathed. Working uphill of a fire is inadvisable, since fire moves up hills, but working downhill means risking flaming boulders and other projectiles coming down the mountain.

Ramos has a few hobbyhorses that he is a little obsessive about. He thinks smokejumpers are consistently underused by incident managers who consider them primadonna mavericks. I can't speak to the jurisdictional concerns, and while smokejumpers have a definite macho attitude, it's a matter of degree rather than kind compared to their peers on hotshot teams and helitack crews, who do much of the same things by truck and helicopter. He has a real bug about equipment, and particularly inadequate fire shelters, though given that's its his life on the line, he's right to care. But overall Ramos is a charismatic and charming writer, and an excellent ambassador for his profession.

Stross's Laundry series is one of those concepts that is maddeningly obscure and yet awesome: Take equal parts Lovecraft Mythos, James Bond, and Bastard Sysop From Hell, season with British black humor and computer science jokes, pulp and that's the Laundry and it's brilliant.

In this novella (post-The Jennifer Morgue, pre-The Fuller Memorandum), Bob is up against flesh-eating alien parasites that look like horses and spread via mind-controlled girls. In short, unicorns, and they're out for murder. A novella is the perfect length for a Laundry series: Stross can spin a great yarn where the stakes of a small English town (and Bob Howard's tasty brain) is enough to keep you reading, the absurdity English bureaucracy is on full display, and the world-ending tension of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is safely backgrounded.

War is hell. Giant robots are fricking rad. And a great crunchy RPG is a rare beast in 2019. LANCER is all three of those things.

In the far future, humanity is spread out over the galaxy, and life is thoroughly weird and dangerous. 3-D printing means that core systems are basically post-scarcity, but there are plenty of threats from rogue AIs, local warlords, space pirates, mega-corps, and a host of baddies. You are a squad of mech pilots, the tip of the spear in the next generation of war. Characters get just enough distinctions to set them apart, but the real meat of the game is tactical combat with an almost infinitely customizable set of mecha. Pick a chassis, pick guns and melee weapons, pick special equipment and bonuses, and then win your battles with skill and luck. There are lots of buttons to press, with standard and electronic warfare attacks, bonus actions, deployable drones and defenses, managing heat, hitpoints, and limited ammo, and firepower ranging from automatic rifles to heavy howitzers, swarms of nanobots, plasma whips, and causality violating guns from the future.

There are a lot of moving parts, so LANCER keeps the core mechanics simple. 1d20+a single digit modifier +/- max(nd6). The most common mods are accuracy and difficulty, which each give +1d6 and cancel each other out. Rolls over 20+ are critical hits. This bounded accuracy makes it hard to break the game, there's only so much the probability curve will let you get away with (though accuracy matters a lot, with success on a 10+, that first bonus die is a 10% improvement in the odds, and turns crits from a 5% chance to a 17% chance).

I've only read the free player-facing rules, so I'm guessing at the implied setting, but it sounds pretty wild and gamable. I fell in love with the Omnigun, which defies physics and maybe comes from the future. The mechs are engagingly quick, with the standard Size 1 chassis at 3 or 4 meters tall, going all the way up massive Size 3 behemoths. It's a good middle ground between the ponderous stompers of Battletech, and the impossibly large and graceful machines of anime.

The rules look good, the art is of course glorious, but what caused my jaw to drop was the CompCon character building software. Coming from D&D Beyond, which is barely better than flipping through rulebooks like it's 1986, CompCon is a fully integrated character builder and encounter manager. The interface is a little utilitarian, but it's also almost entirely frictionless, and better than anything the indie RPG world has to offer.

EDIT: So I resisted about 2 days before buying the full book. The GMing support is decent. Suggested tactical map sizes are very big, 40x20 hexes, and a mission has between 3-4 combats, fewer than D&D4e. I need to see how the system works in play, but having run the numbers, I'm a little concerned that accuracy is too high and defenses too low. The whiff factor sucks, but with typical numbers it seems like attacks almost never fail. There are 30 enemy mechs, which come in 3 tiers and can have a variety of optional subsystems, which seems decent, equivalent to at least a stock Monster Manual.

That said, having read all of the setting guide, I'm not sure it works together. The fiction depicts a prosperous post-scarcity universe, with worlds linked together by key sets of instantaneous Blink Gates. But the galaxy is a big place, and getting anywhere not on the Gate network means sublight travel, so there's a massive Diaspora of planets where physically going there involves incurring years of time debt, though since ships cruise at .995 c and typical lifespans are few centuries, subjective travel times are not that bad. The current government of Union is radically egalitarian and utopian in outlook, the past is full of imperialist horrors, and I love the truly weird temporality violating AI stuff.

But here's the rub. The setting is very much Ursula K Le Guin Hainish cycle space opera, with long range diplomacy and lots of weird human cultures. But the praxis of the rules is that four strangers with mechs show up in town, solve problems by wrecking a few dozen bad dudes with mechs, and depart. The key criteria for an RPG setting is that it is gameable, that it provides a pretext for an adventuring party to make a difference, and as cool as the setting of Lancer is, I need to do a lot of bending to get it to fit my understanding of how an adventure works. I'm not going to knock it down a star, but I'm a little annoyed.

Kotkin is a leading Russian historian and author of a well-received book about everyday life under Stalin, so his biography of the man himself can be expected to be deeply researched, comprehensive, and groundbreaking. And all of those expectations are well-met.

More than a biography of Stalin, this is a book about the fall of the Tsars and the rise of Communism, a sprawling journey across two continents and decades. A biography of a figure like Stalin is innately challenging; how do you balance the man, the leader, and the mass murderer? Kotkin avoids a straightjacket theoretical paradigm, showing Stalin as a canny tactician and theorist, who turned the chaos of the Russian revolution into a personal dictatorship, using the Communist Party as an instrument to extend his power down to the lowest levels.

Vol. 1 of the three volume series covers Stalin's childhood, rise to power, and the decision to 'de-Kulakize' farming in 1928, forced collectivization which sent millions into the nightmare of the gulag system, and killed millions more through famine. Kotkin argues that the collectivization was a distinctly Stalinist move, based on his understanding of the nature of class warfare, and the availability of secret police power against 'internal enemies'. A second major innovation in scholarship is Kotkin's evaluation of Lenin's Testament. This short document, produced at the end of 1922 when Lenin was crippled by strokes, provided negative evaluation of top communists, including Stalin. Kotkin argues the document was written by personal secretaries around Lenin, not the man itself, but it was treated as credible by the Communist Party, and hung like a sword of Damocles over Stalin's power.

So this book is deeply researched, and as good as scholarship gets. It's also a slog, 740 pages of text and another 200 or so of footnotes. And while individual anecdotes sparkle, there's a layer of distance from the times and the man himself.

I guess I'm up for the next two books, but I'm not exactly looking forward to it.

Steel Frame is a triumph of style over substance, somewhat ironic given that the style is building sized 'frames, futuristic humanoid spacefaring war machines equipped with battleship scale guns. Our narrator, Rook, is a frame jockey and convict. She's pulled out of the chain gang and assigned to a squadron on the NorCol dreadnaught Horizon, orbiting a vast storm in space called the Eye. Somewhere inside the Eye is a hostile force that is both powerful and incredibly dangerous, and it's up to Rook and her squad of Hail, Lear, and Salt, to fight and survive.

There's a terse grandeur to the writing. These are profoundly broken people in a screwed up situation, and Skinner keeps the action moving. The close quarters battle is truly kinetic, and the steel immensity of the Horizon is a evocative setting. But the plot, involving a horrific computer virus that takes over machines and turns them against fail humans, is a mystery that never really pays off. The desperate corporate war on the edge of human space feels pro-forma. There's a really good retro-cyberpunk milSF story here, something like Walter John Williams Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind, about the pain of surviving, but Steel Frame doesn't have the emotional core to bring through its themes.

Richard Burns had a unique war, as befits as unique MOS. The Pathfinders have a storied history; they were the first units to jump into Normandy, setting guidance equipment for the main waves of paratroopers to arrive later. Burns was a Pathfinder in the 1960s, and as well as paratroop techniques, he was trained in the management of a helicopter landing zone, the delicate dance of landing and extracting troops as quickly and safely as possible under fire, in bad weather, or any other circumstances.

Burn's memoir is a chronological account of his time as a Pathfinder, from training stateside through his first deployment. There are plenty of interesting pieces, from him refusing an order from a Colonel to execute an extraction from an unsafe firezone, a unit dog named Torch, helping build firebase Bastogne near the A Shau valley, and training at the Recondo school, where graduation involved a deep patrol against the active enemy. As a special unit, the Pathfinders wen't a lot of places and did a lot of things, and Burns volunteered for more duties, including Recondo school and a couple of runs as a Huey door gunner.

Burns is clear, journeyman-like writer. Better than many, while not quite in the top tier of truly great memoirists. But this is still a good book, and well worth a read.

The Scar is my favorite of Miéville's books, a tour de force journey through a very weird world. Bellis Coldwine is a translator, exiled from the cruel metropolis of New Crobuzon and captured by the pirates of the floating city of Armada. There's she a witness and participants in a grand magico-scientific scheme to catch an immense undersea beast, journey to the edge of the world, and unlock incredible powers.

As always, Miéville excels in bringing across the New Weird. The people of Bas Lag are delighfully strange and diverse, the sea grand and threatening in it's immensity, the occult sciences of the world fitting together like a mosaic. The words and discoveries of the setting are simply a delight, with the standout being Uther Doul, a man from the city of the dead, who has unlocked a sword of possibilities. There are battles, betrayals, grand plots and failures.

Of course there are also flaws. Bellis isn't much of a protagonist. A translator, she's on the fringes of important events. Her choices are manipulated by more politically adroit allies. She's a cold and distant figure, a harsh woman who refuses to connect with anyone, even herself. But she's authentically herself, even if she's outmatched by the forces at play, and the setting is as good as it gets.

Winchester's The Perfectionists is one of my favorite books of the year. Unfortunately, Atlantic has all of the enthusiasm and little of the charm, being a scattered collection of anecdotes about the ocean, vaguely structured around Shakespear's seven ages of man. It's best as a travelogue, with Winchester accounting all the wild place he's being along the Atlantic coast, from Patagonia to the African desert to Greenland fjords, but even then, this book is hampered by tiny pictures and scattershot connections.