Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a clear phenomenon, a richly texture tome of literary fantasy that also happens to be a mass-market best seller adapted by the BBC. The plot is almost simple, at the dawn of the 19th century, English magic has been reduced to a handful of elderly eccentrics discussing dry and inaccurate histories. Mr Norrell, last of the practical magicians, seeks to restore English magic to its rightful place, first by winning the war against Napoleon, and then by putting all of magic on sound rational principles. He takes on a student, Jonathan Strange, but of course nothing is as easy as it seems.

Mr. Norrell makes a secret deal with a fairie lord, who enchants away Lady Pole, wife of an important minister that Mr Norrell restored to life to prove his powers as a wizard. Strange and Norrell fall to quarreling, and Norrell's high-handed habits of secrecy destroy all efforts to educate other wizards, and Strange goes mad and is enveloped in a pillar of perpetual night as he attempts to find his own wife, stolen by the same fairie lord. The plot, in my opinion, does not really matter. Clarke delights in little character sketches, and in devising an immense history of English magic, based around the ancient king Jon Uskglass and his magical Kingdom of Northern England.

Clarke has been compared to Dickens or Austen, but I think this is a mistake due to the shared settings of 19th century England. Clarke is really the heir to Tolkien, in her love of setting building, of magic as something truly strange and awesome and terrible, and of not giving a fig for conventional notions of plot or pacing or protagonists. This is a long book, Jonathan Strange doesn't show up for the first quarter. Mr. Norrell is the most dis-likable main character I've encountered in this Hugo's project, and that includes Gateway's Robinette Broadhead, who abandons his friends and lover to eternal damnation in a black hole to save his skin. I found myself reading chapters and putting the book aside with little desire to see the story through, at least up until the final confrontation between Strange and Norrell and the unnamed faerie king of Lost-Hope.

So about magic. Magic is sadly deprecated in modern fantasy. Perhaps its presented as another branch of science or martial arts that anyone can learn. Or maybe it's a matter of being of the right bloodline, and being born with talent. Or magic is simply willpower, or the willingness to bargain away something precious for temporal power. In Clarke's world, magic is a matter of attunement, of being able to speak to the trees and the stones and the sky, and skilled magicians really do become Something Else, concerned which what's beyond the sky and behind the rain. Though in many ways Strange & Norrell was a week long, 750 page slog (plus footnotes), those moments of true eerie glory redeem a lot of rather pointless parlor scenes.

College is broken, and anyone with an ounce of insight knows it. I know it, as someone who attended two rather elite institutions, and who's attended and taught at a much more mundane one that nevertheless brags about its 'innovation'. Students are disengaged in their classes, with attitudes ranging from bored to outright rebellion. Despite decades of work on student support and learning, the state of higher education remains dismal. I doubt students remember much of anything from beyond the end of the semester. This status quo would be, well, accepted as much as we've accepted everything else in higher education, except that these days college is ruinously expensive, online courses are lurking to demolish the already precarious structure of academic labor, and as a society we're counting on college graduates to solve so many looming social and technological problems.

Carnes thinks he has discovered the solution, in his Reacting to the Past series of games. Reacting to the Past replaces several weeks of traditional curriculum activities (lectures, papers, etc), with an interactive simulation where students take on the roles of key figures around major historical events (The Trial of Socrates, The French Revolution, and many more), break into factions, and try and persuade the other students to favor their cause, with a little help from the dice as arbiters of uncertainty. In character speeches, debates, and papers drive the class, with students driven to research above and beyond their packets by the desire to impress their class.

When it works, it works astoundingly well. Anecdotes from students describe an almost obsessive level of engagement with the class, life-changing experiences that taught them about empathy, leadership, and resilience, and improvements in critical thinking, teamwork and subject expertise. Carnes also has a strong synthesis of the history and psychology of the failure of college, dating back the 1880s Ivy League, and the way in which his theory of "subversive play" describes why students drop out.

However, there's markedly little systemic research on the Reacting to the Past curriculum (just Stroesser et al 2009), and this book sometimes takes on overly defensive, hard-sell attitude. Fair, since it's wildly different than what colleges have been doing, but this may turn off some people.

My more substantial criticism comes from the serious direction of tabletop roleplaying game theory. While I haven't had a chance to delve deeply into a Reacting to the Past unit, from what I understand, it's a cross between a GURPS source-book and a history course reader. I'm a strong proponent that System Matters in tabletop games, and there have been a lot of impressive work done since the mid-90s on system design, particularly lighter systems for narrative play. The second, related criticism, is that I play a lot of RPGs, I consider myself pretty good as a GM, and I've seen a lot of games utterly fall apart. With the much bigger and messier historical simulations of Reacting to the Past, I'm sure there's a lot more places for things to get derailed, and I hope Carnes is engaged with the messy details of the simulation in his guidebooks for teachers.

That aside, this is a serious criticism of college as practiced today, a strong theory as how to improve it, and an extremely impressive collection of anecdotes. In a worst case scenario of just 1% of Reacting to the Past students having the kinds of experiences that Carnes describes, implementing this curriculum is the only ethically sound choice for educators.

Noli Me Tangere, along with the sequel El Filibusterismo, are the national books of the Philippines; required reading in high schools across the country. Written by martyred revolutionary Joze Rizal and published in Europe, Noli Me Tangere is a cutting anti-clerical satire, a rich depiction of life in the colonial Philippines, and a clarion call to action and reform. It's also flawed as a novel, and while this may be the fault of my 1922 translation, I think the issues are structural, in the characters and plot rather than the language.

The plot, for all its circumlocutions, is simple. Ibarra is a good and ambitious young man, recently returned from seven years in Europe, to find that his father has died alone and disgraced in jail due to his independent mind and feud with the Catholic church. Ibarra continues his engagement with his childhood love, and embarks on a peaceful plan of reform through education, which runs afoul of the Church and the cabal of wealthy and corrupt landowners who control his home town of San Diego. He narrowly evades an assassination attempt, but is unable to stop his enemies from tying his name to an attempted revolution. Ibarra is exiled, his fiance Maria Clara enters a nunnery, and even his enemies wind up destroying their reputations and lives. In the end, it all comes to naught, and Ibarra is a mostly reactive protagonist, who only lets his ideals and passions drive the plot in a few instances.

The major questions that Rizal opens and does not adequately disclose, and "who pays for the sins of our ancestors?", and the relationship between the Philippines and the modern world. Ibarra and his young friends are pawns in a game played by their fathers and grandfathers, seemingly all the way back to Magellan. The question is-what separates these young nationalist revolutionaries from the sins of their fathers? How might their ideals be better from the Catholic ideals that made the nation? Rizal is relentless is criticizing Catholicism as the source of all evils in the Philippines, the greed and the hypocrisy of the priests, and the indolence and arrogance of the colonial authorities, the hopeless lives of the peasants. And while I will not defend the Church, modernity is no better master.

Noli Me Tangere is a novel obsessed with patrimony, giving fathers due respect, with finding the necessary independence from your own father, with correcting the sins and errors of the past. As with all such matters of the soul, and answers that it provides are partial and obscured. And at the distance of 130 years, a history of colonization by Spain, America, and Japan, of exploitation by the Marcos family, and now with Duarte, it seems that the issue of national fatherhood is still unresolved.

As I write this review, Fifth Season has not yet won the 2016 Hugo. I am however, confident that is will (caveat: haven't looked at Seveneves yet, still have a week to vote UPDATE: The Fifth Season did win!). This is a powerful masterpiece in the vein of classic Ursula K. LeGuin, a rich character and sociological study in fear, control, revenge, and above all survival.

From the opening lines, "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things." Fifth Season draws the reader into the strange world of Stillness, smashed in the opening scene by the rage of a mad sorcerer, and the institutions that humanity has create to survive its harsh and regular cataclysms. Stonelore, the ancient pragmatic wisdom of survival, and the harsh rule of the Sanze Empire, where enslaved orogene sorcerers provide a fragile security from minor catastrophes like earthquakes and tsunamis. Orogenes have the ability to control the earth, which they can use to protect their friends or summon catastrophe. Hatred of orogenes is an instinct bred deeply into the people of Stillness, control of their power the basis on which their civilization lies.

The non-linear story follows an orogene woman named Essun, hunting her daughter and husband through the start of the end of the world. Her husband killed their son when he found that the boy had inherited her terrible and hidden power. The other two tracks follow Essun in a previous life, in training and in the fullness of her power, and her search for some basic humanity despite her power.

Jeminsin is relentless in following utilitarianism to its logical conclusion, to the reduction of human beings to uses and tools, to the brutality of the necessity of survival and false heroism of 'hard men making hard choices'. Communities are closed against outsiders, wisdom consists in shedding the weak, society rests on the enslavement and ability to instantly kill those who threaten it. For all the cruelty of the world, its complete destruction is an even greater crime. Revenge is no fair reason.

This book is also deeply weird in the best possible way, with a rich invented vocabulary, orogene 'magic' that is simultaneously fantastic and scientific, and artifacts from dead civilizations ranging from unrusting metal roads to immense floating obelisks. A race of statue-like Stone Eaters and the anti-orogene power of the Guardian orders provides further mysteries.

I've not read any Jemisin, but she is definitely on my radar screen.

Loosely based on a famous fairy tale, The Snow Queen is a story about good, evil, power, and love above all else. The planet Tiamat is defined by two cultures, which alternate power over centuries. When Tiamat is accessible by the black hole based FTL drive, it is part of the Hegemony, the Snow Queen ruling over Winter with technological tricks from the stars. For the century of Summer, when the stars of the planet orbit close on the black hole, Summer rules, a luddite culture that rejects technology. Tiamat is also the only source of the immortality drug the Water of Life, murderously extracted from the local mer, a seal-like species.

The cycle has endured for centuries, but the current Snow Queen, Arienrhod, a woman of tremendous power and evil, plans to break the cycle and uphold Winter. The first step of her plan is to clone herself, and have the clone raised as a member of the Summer culture. But then everything goes awry, as the clone, Moon, and her cousin and true love Sparks, refuse to fit neatly into the plan. Moon becomes a sybil; a semi-legendary breed of oracles, and winds up leaving the planet with idealistic tech-smugglers trying to help out Tiamat in their own way. Sparks falls into the orbit of Arienrhod and becomes her right hand, the masked hunter Starbuck. Most of the novel concerns the arc of degeneration around Arienrhod, her city of Carbuncle (an immense shell-like spiral constructed by the fallen Old Empire), and the moral degeneracy that is connected to the immortality drug. Meanwhile, Moon discovers the extent of her powers and returns to set things right.

Vinge is the first self-consciously feminist writer to win the Hugo for best novel, an opinion confirmed by the front and backwards material in this version. Ursula LeGuin is a great writer, but concerned more with Humanity than with women. Vonda McIntyre wrote an adolescent fantasy, and a bad one at that. I think Snow Queen is a female counterpart to Dune The similarities are clear: a chosen one with the power of prophecy; a harsh and primitive world valued for its immortality drug; themes of moral decay and personal salvation; along with inversions like water for sand, and lust instead of revenge as the prime driver for personal politics. One of the viewpoint characters, the interstellar cop Jerusha PalaThion, is a clear analog to the stark discrimination women faced in the late 1970s.

I was surprised by how much I liked this book, given that I'd never heard of Joan D. Vinge before. She had a checkered career, doing novelizations to make ends meet in the 90s, and then spending most of the 00s down with medical problems. The way that minor uses and abuses on human dignity add up to a complete lack of empathy and great evil in Arienrhod and her minions, is as good a picture of evil as any that I've read (comparable to Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone). Vinge is vividly imaginative and solid on the world-building. For example the FTL drive involves plunging into a black hole, so starships are disc-like to minimize tidal stresses, while the cultures of Tiamat and the Hegemony are brightly painted. She's an enthusiastic writer, and a great describer of place and character. If I have any strike against this book, it's that it's actually too quickly paced. I think the story could've been done better as two volumes or a trilogy, with a little more room to breath.

Not that my audience needs any reminders, but The Snow Queen is proof that great stories can be written by women, about women, for everybody.

There's a certain shame in going back to books which were important in your adolescence. How did I think this was wise? How did I even think this was good? Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is an incredibly uneven book, written on the downslope of Thompson's meteoric career but still showing a guttering flicker of his genius. Stapled together out of a year of Rolling Stone columns, Thompson covers the '72 Nixon-McGovern campaign in his own inimitable style: a mix of drug fantasy experiences, rumor, straight-shooting opinion, and (verbatim?) transcripts of tape recordings with senior people.

Thompson picked Senator McGovern as his man early, the last decent man in Congress, a staunch opponent of the ongoing atrocity in Vietnam, and the catalyst of a new Youth Movement-centered democratic party to finally sink the crusty and corrupt bosses in Big Labor, ethnic machines, and imperialist warmongering before going on to crush a weak President Nixon. The early primaries are a slog, but once the convention hits, Thompson really gets into his groove. Forget the facts, nobody captures the sheer edge and obsession of a presidential race like the master of Gonzo Journalism, along with the gritty details of 1970s convention procedures and retail politics.

Of course, at the end of the day the facts do matter, and McGovern's youth coalition failed to materialize. McGovern was beaten like a dog by Nixon, losing even his own state. What's weird about this book is the way that the patterns seem to repeat in slight variation: The embattled incumbent, the decrepit party establishment, the anarchic new idealism candidate, the racist spoiler, or the way the 'thought leaders' seem to have no idea what is going on. Just change the name and the dates, and this book works in 2012 or 2016.

There's a lot of cruft in F&L '72, but when Thompson hits home, he hits home, and I'd like to preserve a few quotes here where I can find them.

"The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip each other on with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics."

"There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition... The other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that they have a *duty* to vote."

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Hell. Yeah. Always more, always worse.

Plaxco is a strong introduction to astrobiology, an undergraduate level textbook that is on the 'science' side of 'popular science'. Defining life as "a self-replicating chemical system capable of evolving such that such that it's offspring might be better suited for survival", Plaxco and Gross launch into a history of life on Earth from the Big Bang, and the prospects for the future discovery of life.

As a chemist, Plaxco is biased towards chemistry as the most important part of the question about life. Starting from the fundamental constants of the universe, he argues that elemental abundance and the energy required for chemical reactions means that life will likely be carbon-based and require liquid water. From that, the chemistry gets rather complex. The Miller-Urey 'primordial sludge' experiments show that amino acids are spontaneously generated from pretty basic elements, but doesn't explain how they can link into self-reproducing chains. There was probably a primitive 'RNA world' which has been entirely erased by the exponentially more potent metabolisms and evolutionary capacities of modern bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. The sections on the evolution of metabolism and genetics are a slog of chemistry. The last bit, surveying the potential for life on Mars and gas giant moons is a good run down of contemporary science, although this field advances one probe at a time, and some observations may be substantially updated since then.

The over-all impression is that some kind of micro-biological life is probably quite common. Detecting it, particularly at stellar distances, is another matter entirely.

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be plausible.

Pham Xuan An was the man every reporter knew in wartime Saigon. From his favorite coffee house, the Givral, An had a deep network of sources at the highest levels of the government, and a talent for explaining the complexities of Vietnamese politics to American reporters. He wrote under his own name for Time, and checked the work of a decade of legendary journalists. At the same time, he was also the focal point of Intelligence Network H.63, a lone agent providing top level strategic intelligence to the Viet Cong, three times Hero of the People's Armed Forces, and a Colonel (later General) in the Communist intelligence system.

Berman focuses his biography on two major topics. An's Vietnamese patriotism contrasted against his love of America and Americans (An regarded the best years of his life as the ones he spent at Orange Coast College in California in 1958 and 59), and his ongoing relationships with his friends after the war ended and he shed his cover. The relentless justification of An as a good man can be somewhat wearying--and I agree with the assessment that he was essentially a good person. He told the truth to both Americans and Vietnamese, and his strategic intelligence was about the direction of American strategy and the personal qualities of ARVN commanders rather than tactical intelligence that would lead directly to Americans getting killed. (With one notably exception of An personally reconnoitering Saigon for the 1968 Tet Offensive). General Giap put it best, due to An it was as if the Communists were in the American War room. There was no such insight on the American/GVN side. Intelligence didn't shift who died, or why, but it made those deaths matter for strategic ends.

The Fall of Saigon was the most fraught time for An. He sent his family out of the country on a Time plane, and helped his old friend Tran Kim Tuyen, head of counter-intelligence for Diem, escape on the last helicopter out of Saigon. Resolutely American in his style of thought, An didn't thrive under the hard-edged North Vietnamese Cadres who ruled the united Vietnam. He escaped the worst of the re-education camps due to his service, and brought his family back in 1979 ("The worst decision of my life", An says), but never reclaimed his contacts or position of influence.

I wish Berman had done a better teasing apart the similarities and differences of being a reporter and a spy, and gone a little bit more into the actual business of intelligence work. But I can also sympathize with difficulty of pinning down a subject who spent his whole life living with two loyalties, or really driving the question home on an old friend and old man dying of emphysema. This book didn't grab me as much as I wish it had, but it's a fascinating picture of who really won and lost the Vietnam War.

Expendable is a clever twist on the Star Trek Away Team/Red Shirt. Being the first person on an unexplored planet is very dangerous. Deaths impact crew morale. Except if the dead person is different, disfigured, or otherwise odd, then people are happy to see them go. The human Technocracy uses people with unsightly but non-crippling birth defects as Explorers, Expendable Crew Members. It's all for the greater good.

Festina is one such Expendable. She and her partner are assigned to take a senile admiral to Melaquin, a sure one way ticket to out of contact. The story unveils the hidden crimes of the Fleet Admirals, the brutal logic of "that's what Expendable means", and the strange rules of the interstellar League of People, which enforces strict non-violence on humanity. What she finds on Melaquin is an exile community of Explorers, trying to get back into space, and a strange and dying primitive race of transparent humans, created in the distant past by super-powerful aliens.

I loved the style of the short chapters, and Gardner's keen eye for frailties of human nature, from Festina's unrequited romantic problems, to calling the alien super tech drive system the Sperm (sailors. sailors never change), to the simple brutality of the "Oh Shit!", an Explorer term for dying on mission. Explorers all listen to audio-recordings of other away teams, but the Technocracy doesn't bother to inform the Explorers if they're about to listen to a friend's violent death.

Commitment Hour is a removal from the galactic exploration and politics of Expendable, towards an investigation of a very unusual small town. Tober Cove is a unique town, where children switch genders each year until they age of 20, where they must commit to one gender for the rest of their life. Fullin is a talented young musician, trying to avoid his soon-to-be jilted lover, when on the night before commitment he's visited by a powerful Spark Lord and a hated Neuter exile from his village, come to investigate the nature of Tober Cove.

The investigation of gender roles is in scifi in inextricably linked the Ursula K LeGuin, and Gardner builds on that tradition with a surprisingly egalitarian examination of the differences between men and women, and the benefits that experiencing both sides of the gender duality might bring*. Tabor Cove slots cleverly into the larger League of People's universe as an unethical science experiment set up on Old Earth and abandoned. I really enjoyed the details of the 400 years of history since first contact, and the authenticity of the small town culture.

That said, while the protagonist of this book felt believable as a person, Fullin was also a miserable brat. Fullin was so much obviously better as the female self, and his partner Cappie likewise as a male, that it was almost painful watching them walk towards locking themselves into the wrong gender. The actual timeline of the book was only a day, perhaps the worst day in anyone's life, and I'm surprised Fullin kept it together as well as he did. The book ends with a titanic shift in the nature of the Tabor's Cove, which is left unresolved.

This book is stylish, but I'm not sure how much I enjoyed reading it, or what exactly it had to say.

*Note: some people with really strong opinions about the Right Way that genders are may be offended, particularly trans activists and/or opponents, or gay people, of whom there are none in the novel. Fullin lives under the rule of particularly shitty patriarchal religion, but I'm not sure that Watsonian explanation holds up.