Gates of Fire is incredible. Framed as the story of the sole Spartan survivor of the Battle of Thermopylae, telling his story to the Persian Emperor Xerxes, Gates of Fire is about more than the battle. It's about the world of the warrior, and the psychology that leads men to triumph in battle.

Our narrator, Xeo, went through childhood in an unremarkable minor city until it was sacked by the Argives. He lived as a refugee in the hills with his cousin Diomanche and a blind slave, learning to hunt and track, and then went to Sparta because the Spartans were the finest warriors in all of Greece. The story moves on two tracks towards the confrontation at Themopylae, where 300 handpicked Spartans and a larger number of Greek allies fought a desperate rearguard action against the massive Persian army to give the rest of Greece time to gather forces and fight back.

The spiritual core of this book (and it does have one), is the centrality of fear in the warrior's experience, and the way that fear can be conquered. The Spartans have an entire discipline around mastering fear, and there are long and fascinating discussions of what courage is. I'll not spoil the answers, since they are worth waiting for.

On a personal level, I'm a Spartan revisionist. We need to acknowledge that they were a brutal slave state built on pederasty. So all the noble Spartan lords carping on about freedom and liberty is a kind of dark joke. But Gates of Fire is fantastic that even this revisionist loves it.

Payments is a mess. I work for a bank, I have a good friend who works for a cyptocurrency startup, and payments is a nonsensical nightmare. This book is a decent introduction to the world of ACH, credit and debit cards, but doesn't really get at the true underlying weirdness.

See, cash is easy. It's a physical object which is deemed to have worth because you can pay your taxes with it, and we believe that money has value. Of course, cash is just a physical representation of the abstraction of debt (see Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 years). To deal with a transaction, two banks have to make matching records in their ledgers, crediting one party and debiting the other. Simple enough. What makes this hard is doing this process with no errors, at the absolute minimum of cost, while avoiding increasingly sophisticated attacks by fraudsters.

There's some useful information in here, about the fundamental differences between push and pull transactions, open and closed networks, and what the Federal Reserve actually does in terms of mediating between banks. Doing payments well is hard.

Yet this book doesn't get at some hard issues. Why are credit card interchange fees still the same as they were in the 1950s, especially for smaller merchants. Why have mobile payments been so slow to take off in the US. The authors point to the payments industry as tech leaders, yet in practice it's incredibly conservative. I have to deal with 80 character fixed width formats because the spec was laid down in 1986 and has to be backwards compatible with punch cards. The daily batch processing on big iron mainframes is decades behind actually impressive tech infrastructure, thing like high-reliability auto-scaling kubernetes clusters, Kafka message queues, and distributed databases. And it has little to say about the actual work that I'm doing as a payments systems engineer.

It seems only right that the first Vietnam War novel would come out about the same time as Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Robin Moore got as close to the Green Berets as possible, going through jump school and special forces training to build trust with his subjects, and not be liability in the field. He definitely did go to Vietnam, and spend several months in a very secret war that most people didn't even know about.

The blend of first-hand reporting, war stories, and outright fiction is strongest when it sticks closest to Moore's personal experience. The defense of an isolated outpost, patrols, and helicopter med-evacs all have that live wire electricity of great reporting. The war stories are weirder: being the only white man commanding a Montagnard warrior band in Laos, or recruiting a female agent to honeypot a VC spy, and don't capture the psychological dimension of the characters. The last section of the book is an outright fantasy about setting up a guerrilla network in North Vietnam. Many attempts along these lines were made, and they universally ended in disaster against the Communist police state of the north.

Moore has some great little word portraits of the Special Forces and their Montagnard allies, a period look at sophisticated new weapons like the claymore mine and AR-15 rifle, and nothing but derision for the South Vietnamese and the remaining French. A fascinating bit of history, but one that has not aged well.

So let me preface this by saying that I love Gladstone's Craft series, this book just fell flat. It looks like science fiction, and has space opera tropes, but it's actually an alchemaical novel, and not a good one at that.

Vivian Lao is a tech entrepreneur on the run when she's transported from Earth to a prison station orbiting a giant star, under attack from malevolent robots with scorpion bodies and ken-doll torsos. A monk rescues her, and then she frees an ancient pirate queen from prison, and is off on adventures. See, it turns out the galaxy is "ruled" by the Empress, a supremely powerful being who acts in a kind of wrath of god mode, crushing civilizations that get too advanced. If she doesn't, an implacable extra-galactic force called the Bleed eats then. The Empress is looking for a real solution to her problem, and it involves Viv. So Viv has to gather a band of unlikely allies, and then the all have to learn The Value of Friendship and the Power of Abrogating The Self.

The whole thing feels unwieldy, not so much a characters and plot as a series of explanatory lessons. There's big explosive scenes, but no precision in the bombast. Gladstone has a point, but it's both obtuse and banal.

Joe Parner answered President Kennedy's call to "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" by joining the Army in 1966 and going through Special Forces medic training. He spent a tour with MACV-SOG at the triple border of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, supporting small reconnaissance teams on dangerous and illegal missions against the Ho Chi Minh trail.

First, the strengths. Parner has an astound memory for names and events. This is how it went down, with photos. One story, discussing a SOG operator who figured out how to use a 60mm mortar as a personal weapon, prompted a 'aw hell no', except there was a photo of the man firing this beast from the hip on the next page. Wow!

As a medic, Parner was adjacent to recon teams rather than on them. He spent a lot of time flying chase, waiting in the last helicopter of a mission in case someone had to be medevaced quickly. While he wasn't on many missions, aside from a few larger company-sized efforts, he showed immense bravery again and again, running towards the fire to bring out SOG operators and their Vietnamese and Montagnard allies.

The writing, with an assist from Dumont, is clear, without a lot of macho posturing. It's also somewhat characterless, closer to unit history than memoir, but still limited by Parner's point of view. And this is a shame, because a combat medic is a very rare role, and Parner hasn't quite fully unburdened him about it. A pretty good book about SOG and medics in the Vietnam War, but probably not the essential one.

This is it. This is my very favorite book, one of the immortal classics of 20th century science fiction, and a work that is as live and thrilling as the first time I read it.

Sterling captures the epic of sweep of posthuman history, following Abelard Lindsay, diplomat, playwright, scholar, defector, through centuries of adventures across the vast expanse of the solar system. Space-faring humanity has been blown apart by their technology, drifting into the major camps of the cybernetically enhanced Mechanists and the genetically altered Shapers. The two sides engage in constant covert war, pushing at the very limits of what it means to be a cohesive human community, and evolving towards something as far beyond humanity as life is beyond dead matter.

Against this incredibly imaginative cosmological speculation, Sterling tackles very grounded questions. How do much do we love? How much do we hate? Can we be freely redefined, or are some things (ideals, scars, destinies) fixed? How can we measure ambition, power, accomplishment, the value of a life? This book, with the novel and handful of Shaper/Mechanist short stories included, is Sterling's masterpiece-the high voltage work of an author at the top of his game. Read it.

***
Updated for Jan 8, 2017: Still perfect.

Write It When I'm Gone is pleasant, if a little scattered. In 1974, a then Vice President Ford was finishing up an interview with 28 year old Tom DeFrank, a reporter with Newsweek, when Ford said "When I'm President...", and then swore DeFrank to silence. With the Watergate Investigations ongoing, and Nixon wounded by not defeated, his Vice President had to be a company man, 110%. The gaffe lead to an enduring friendship and a series of candid interviews, to be published after Ford's death in 2006.

The book is best when it talks about Ford the person. He seems to have been one of the better people to inhabit the Oval Office, an unprepossing midwesterner who genuinely cared about the people around him, who didn't let the position go to his head, and had good relationships with the press and other politicians. Ford's long and happy post-Presidency retirement, golf, swimming, corporate boards, family, charity, was a well deserved second act.

There also a lot of gossip. Ford, the consummate party man, never cared much for Ronald Reagan, who he saw as intellectually incurious, and who he resented for challenging him in the 1976 primary and not doing enough in the campaign against Carter. Ford also personally liked Bill Clinton, but thought the Lewinsky scandal was a blot on the Presidency. Cheney and Rumsfeld had their first taste of Presidential authority under Ford, and he supported both of his former staffers, but was skeptical of how they had handled the War in Iraq. Of course, by then he was approaching the end of his life.

Beyond the platitudes and light gossip, there's not much there about the Presidency, or Ford's role in history, particularly pardoning Nixon. Pleasant, and helped me some at a hard point in my life, but not a must-read.

By this point, the greatest secret of the Second World War is common knowledge. The allies had broken key Axis codes, and generals and admirals were guided by signals intelligence. Reading the enemy's mail provided insight into everything from strategic thinking to the readiness levels of specific fighter squadrons. The Emperor's Code is a biography, mostly of the British efforts against Japanese naval codes. It's livened by details about being a codebreaker then, boffins and retired diplomats and WRENS and Indian auxiliaries and other fringe types crammed together in sweltering radio huts, puzzling over grids of numbers in the hopes of finding some intelligence.

Imperial Japan took a characteristically arrogant approach to cryptography, assuming that Japanese was so complex no Westerner could read it. They were almost right, but they were also careless, using crypto systems that were barely random, re-transmitting messages in secure and broken systems simultaneously, and using stereotyped formats that provided easy 'cribs' for deciphering. The Allied effort was riven by technical and political difficulties. The main British codebreaking center in the East moved from Singapore to Sri Lanka to Mombasa in the course of the great retreat in 1942, with obvious implications for efficiency. Bletchley Park devoted most of its resource to crackign the Nazi Enigma cipher and winning the Battle of the Atlantic, and then swept in and demanded a leadership role. And if there's a villain in this book, it's the American Commander Rudi Fabian's FRUMEL unit, canny bureaucratic warriors who in Smith's telling preferred turf-building over breaking codes.

This book is long, and buries some key historical moments in the mass of details. Japanese codes were constantly changing, and could only be broken after sufficient depth of messages had accumulated. The diplomatic 'Purple' cipher had been broken by the Americans, and that combined with other breaks allowed Allied intelligence to conclude that something was up prior to Pearl Harbor, but not the specifics of the initial attacks. Conversely, the Battle of Midway came towards the end of code's period, and in fact several weeks past a scheduled turn-over in codes. This meant that the entire operational order for Midway was broken. At the end of the war, in the Summer of 1945, codebreakers caught a diplomatic message to the Soviet Union attempting to negotiate peace on terms that included the continued safety of the Emperor and the political integrity of the four home islands. These conditions were compatible with the actual American terms, no matter the harsh rhetoric of 'Unconditional Surrender', but for whatever reason (Soviet duplicity, Allied paranoia about signals intelligence), this message was not brought up at the Potsdam conference, and the atom bomb was dropped.

The Emperor's Codes is best as an oral history of codebreakers, and has some structural weaknesses, but it's still a fascinating and worthwhile military history.

The Last Hero is a return to the swords and sorcery pastiche of early Discworld. Everybody knows the First Hero stole fire from the gods, and Cohen the Barbarian is on one last quest to return it with interest. His Silver Horde of aged conquerors has a keg of powerful high explosive and a mission to blow up Cori Celesti and the gods.

Of course, if the plan does go off, it will break the magical field of the Disc and everything will die. Anhk-Morpork has to improvise a mission to the home of the gods, with brilliant inventor Leonardo da Quirm, Rincewind, and Captain Carrot on a mission to stop Cohen. Their story apes the Apollo program as they launch a primitive spacecraft under the disc.

The writing is quality Pratchett, but the illustrations by Paul Kidby are sublime, mixing grand vistas, humorous caricatures, and detailed jokes of Leonardo's inventions. There's a line in the Discworld appendices that 'you can't map a sense of humor', and yet somehow Kidby does, bringing the universe perfectly to life.

In the American West, water doesn't flow downhill. Water flows towards money.

Cadillac Desert is an absolute monument, equal to any of the great damns the Reisner discusses and derides. This history, of settlement, irrigation, and the cruel legacy of dam building, is a comprehensively footnoted assassination against an ideal of the American west. The family farm is the image American democracy is built around. West of the rain line, the barrier on the Great Plains where annual rainfall is less than 20 inches annual, the family farm is cruel lie. Dryland farming can't sustain a family on the homestead of 160 acres, aside from a few sites on streams. Irrigation needs complex and expensive capital investments. Dams and canals and pumps.

The target of Reisner's ire is the Bureau of Reclamation, a rogue bureaucracy riddled with faulty numbers, blind corruption, and headless of oversight. The Bureau of Reclamation builds dams, spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to drown canyons and streams, argue that it's efforts are profitable through criminally poor accounting, and then sell power and water to immense agricultural conglomerates at prices that are basically free, a few dollars an acre-foot. Irrigated farms in California, Arizona, Idaho, and other western states have received incalculable subsidies to grow crops which farmers in the east are being paid not to grow; cotton, alfalfa, corn, and other low-value water-intensive crops. The byzantine world of water districts, senior rights, and and agricultural flows is a trillion ton beast, distorting sensible land and environmental policy in the West.

This book is detail heavy, it took me a solid week, and that's a rare thing. But over thirty years on, it reads like current events, like things that have happened yesterday. And in many ways, Reisner won. Dams in the west have come down. Three Gorges in China is perhaps the last superdam the world will ever build. This doesn't make up for the ecological impacts or the monetary waste, but he's won.

This book is vital reading for anyone who lives west of the Rockies. Reisner writes like a Jeremiah, crying out against immanent apocalypse. And if his doomsday hasn't yet come to pass, a killing Dust Bowl 2 drought, soil poisoned by accumulated salts, famine and refugees, it has not been avoided, only pushed off a little bit. And as an aside, I went to grad school in Tempe. I remember calculating that the incremental cost of a gallon of water on my utilities was something like a tenth of cent.