Empire of Gold turns dials on the Daevabad trilogy to 11, but demonstrates that more is not always better.

At the start of the book, Nahri and Ali are on the run together, back in Egypt. They've got Suleiman's Seal, but the vengeful Manizeh has the city, where she and ancient returned warrior Dara have pulled off a rapid conquest, and are comprehensively failing to win the peace. Removing the Seal from the city has broken magic, and djinn everywhere have lost their abilities. Dara and Manizeh's ifrit allies are the exception, and Dara is a terrifying war criminal, while the ifrits are insane slavers with hostile agendas all their own.

Ali and Nahri have to go on a quest to fix the world, which involves the water-demon marids (Sobek and Tiamat being the two most notable of the their member's), and Ali's hidden legacy as a descendant of the marids. As the book races towards final conclusion, Nahri is granted a weapon of incredible power from the non-inventionist peri air spirits, with instructions to use it to kill Dara, who's growing power is a blasphemous threat to all of creation.

I think for me, the moment that sums up the book is towards the end, where Nahri is dueling Dara and Manizeh while riding a flying shedu (a sphinx like creature), and Ali leads a fleet of recovered shipwrecks in an amphibious assault on the royal palace while an army of marids and ghouls fight in the seas below, and cursed blood rains from the skys. It's epic, the FX budget is through the roof, and it has all the impact of a DC movie showdown. There are good guys and bad guys and hidden legacies and bloodlines, and it all clashes together in sound and fury signifying nothing.

This series really blooms in the quieter character driven moments, and they're still here, but fewer and interspersed with generic fantasy action and tropey romance. Where City of Brass was clever, this book plays it straight, to its detriment. Still okay on a page-by-page level, but 25% too long, and a stock end to the series.

Atlantic Nightmare is a frustratingly flawed history of the long Battle of the Atlantic during WW2. For over 2000 days, Nazi U-boats faced off against Allied convoy escorts, sinking 3500 ships at the cost of near total destructions. The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the few things that made Churchill nervous, and if it had gone the other way, Britain might have been starved of precious raw materials, the Soviet Union's lend-lease equipment would be at the bottom of the sea, and the Nazis might have won.

Freeman centers his narrative on U-boat commander Admiral Karl Donitz, which is a good choice, as Donitz drove the battle. From the start, the Nazi effort was hampered by the usual weaknesses of fascism. Hitler had told Admiral Raeder, his Naval leader, that war would come in 1947. When it started in 1939, the fleet was half-constructed. U-boats were a tertiary concern behind prestige projects like Bismarck class battleships and Admiral Hipper class heavy cruisers. There were only a few dozen U-boats. They rapidly racked up an impressive list of kills, but their numbers were too low to cripple British shipping.

At the same time, British escorts were sadly insufficient in numbers and quality. There simply were not enough destroyers and frigates to cover every ship, and U-boat attacks mounted a devastating toll through 1942.

Spring 1943 was the decisive moment of the war. Admiral Max Horton had taken over command of British convoy escorts. Horton finally had sufficient ships, along with new technologies like centimeter radar and long range patrol planes. But the real advance was in training and morale. Horton formed permanent hunter-killer groups of ships trained to work together, stopped promoting successful officers out of convoy escort, and directed his ships to seek out and destroy the enemy rather than protecting merchant ships. The months of battle ripped the heart of Donitz's U-boat fleet, and they had a peripheral role for the rest of the war.

In Freeman's view, the Allies triumphed because they adapted faster and more successfully. Convoy escort was a priority from Churchill on down. New technologies, like centimeter radar, hedgehog mortar depth charges, the Leigh light, and ULTRA codebreaking, in combination with doctrinal advances in tactics and operations research, meant that the Allies were able to develop a decisive advantage in attrition and win the battle. Conversely, while Donitz was a skilled fighting admiral, he had a parochial view that the goal was tonnage sunk, and relied on a handful of skilled aces. As these experts were killed in combat, the U boat fleet suffered a fatal decline in efficiency. U-boats were only prioritized too late, after showpiece surface raids, the Battle of Britain, and then all-encompassing maw of the Eastern Front. And while Allied interservice rivalries were a problem, with heavy bombers diverted to the strategic bomber offensive rather than coastal patrols, it was far better than the Luftwaffe, which refused to support the German Navy as a matter of Goering's pride.

Good history is hard, and Atlantic Nightmare assumes you already know a fair bit about weapons and tactics in the period. The best example of a clear description of how the battle worked is an aside on operations research, where studies revealed that convoy defense was a matter of density of destroyers on the perimeter. Since the number of ships in a convoy is a matter of area, this meant that paradoxically, bigger convoys were easier to defend. A 100 ship convoy required 66% of the escorts of two 50 ship convoys. At the same time, it skips over figures who deserve more recognition. Dontiz is famous (partially because he was Hitler's successor and finally ended the Nazi regime), but I'd never heard of Admiral Horton, or a Captain Frederic John Walker, who developed tactics of the Western Approaches command, and while they're mentioned these Allied commanders deserve more space and consideration. These flaws, in combination with enough typos to be bothersome, drop this book down to three stars.

Westside Saints is noir tropes shoveled fast, with little of the artfulness or magic that characterized the first book. 'Small detective' Gilda Carr is back, drowning her unresolved trauma from the last case with cheap gin, and looking for a particular shade of blue ink and a saint relic, when a con-artist and preacher returns to life, after 34 years.

What follows is a confusing journey through drink, darkness, and winter blizzards in the magical New York of 1922 and the mundane New York of 1888, centering around the strange prophecies of the Byrd family and their Electric Church, and an amnesiac woman who may be Gilda's deceased mother, also returned from the dead.

The closing Saints gets to clever is the Roebling Company, an aggressively Taylorist criminal syndicate that times everything. Otherwise, I just feel depressed and let down by this book.

Six Wakes takes a fascinating premise and utterly blows it. Six people awaken on a starship. They're clones of the recently murdered crew, who are floating messily in various places around the ship. An unknown saboteur has also disabled the gravity spin, shipboard AI, and wiped the past 25 years. The last that anyone remembers, they were all getting aboard for their tour, before the long duration colonization mission with a cargo of cyrogenic sleepers.

But there's a twist. Each of the six members of the crew is a criminal. And their crimes relate to the development of the Codicils on Human Cloning back on Earth. Making people is easy, and making people better is also easy, with genetic code and mind maps helpfully annotated in a Visual Studio Code style interface. Except that it is also incredibly illegal. A ban on human hacking, along with prohibitions on multiplicity and clones having children, define the use of clones on Earth.

It's an interesting premise, let down by floppiness in execution. The background of cloning and clone crimes which is ostensibly supposed to drive the narrative feels more like theatrical set dressing than a scifi premise. Sleaving in Altered Carbon is handled with infinite more interest.

Worse, a mystery depends on hidden knowledge and a good use of point of view, which is not the case here. A third person PoV drifts from character to character without much distinction between who the camera is on, or past and present. The criminal pasts of the crew is known to each individual, while the reader is left in the dark. What could have been an interesting game of trust and shifting alliances as the crew seeks to uncover the initial sabotage and mass murder is instead a clumsy whodunnit.

I'd like to be more generous, but honestly, the book was poisoned for me from line 1, which was a dedication to Connie Willis, my absolute least favorite author. Lafferty is a better writer than Willis, but still hits many of the same dull beats.

The Billion Dollar Spy gets at the crushing paranoia of running intelligence operations at the height of the Cold War in Moscow, right under the nose of the KGB. Adolf Tolchakev was a Russian radar engineer who had grown disenchanted with the Soviet Union, a country that crushed liberty and failed to provide for its people. This middle aged engineer with impeccable credentials began passing notes into the windows of American diplomatic cars (by chance his first target was a CIA officer and not an actual diplomat). It took years for the CIA to decide that Tolchakev was for real, and not a KGB gambit.

They provided cameras, and Tolchakev delivered thousands of page outlining the latest in Soviet R&D for radars, especially high-tech look-down/shoot-down designs which would give Soviet interceptors much better odds against the American bomber fleet. The US Air Force estimated the value of Tolchakev's intelligence as billions of dollars saved in R&D costs.

This book has two themes. The first are the Moscow Rules and operating "in the black". Americans in Moscow were routinely followed by the KGB. Any meetings with agents or transfer of items by dead drop had to be proceeded by breaking surveillance, going black in CIA parlance. Where the Mendez' book Moscow Rules presents this as sleight of hand, entertaining war stories, Hoffman focuses on the isolation and paranoia that agents experience. You could never know if you were clear, and failure would mean the arrest and execution of your agent.

The second is the psychological pressure of being a spy. In being a case agent is hard, being a spy is much harder. Most agents are abnormal in some ways, and the CIA had to balance Tolchakev's demands for cash, a suicide pill, and then consumer goods and medicine only available on the black market, with their fears that he would be unable to explain where the money or goods came from, or take the pill in a moment of weakness. But Tolchakev's desire to hurt the USSR, inspired by dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov and defector MiG-25 pilot Viktor Belenko drove him to stay on the job.

I avoided googling anything from this case, because I hoped that Tolchakev would make it out alive, but he was down in by betrayal from within the CIA, as two officers turned traitors, Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames, turned over information revealing a high level source in the radar institute. The KGB was able to identify Tolchakev as the source, and he was arrested and executed. I've read a fair number of books on the spy game, and this is one of the best.

I really like Blades in the Dark, so much so that I'm running two games of it right now, and it's my go-to system. But it's tightly focused on a group of scoundrels doing crimes to survive. Band of Blades stretches the BitD core to cover a gruesome game of military horror and survival, and does so with aplomb.

You are the Legion, a military unit with a storied pedigree. The world is beset by an army of undead lead by the Cinder King. Your unit, along with the divinely gifted Chosen, must brave the hazards of Aldermark to make it to Skydagger Keep. The setting is low magic gunpowder fantasy inspired
by Glenn Cook's Black Company series and Game of Thrones, where muzzleloading muskets, swords, and unsettling and uncertain magic face off against human and inhuman foes. It's nicely generic, easy enough to say "oh, this is like that from popular culture", while still having its own unique flavor.

The mechanics are inspired. Players serve as the major officers of the Legion, commander, marshal, quartermaster, lorekeeper, and spymaster, making strategic decisions about where to advance and what missions to pursue. On the front lines are squads of rookies and soldiers, aided by elite specialists. This is emphatically not a game about getting attached to people. War is hell. War against the undead is literal hell. Casualties will be high. Your job is to get the mission done.

The core of the game is much the same as BitD (d6 pools, Stress & Pushes), but characters are more fragile with only 6 Stress. Gear has to be picked before leaving on a mission, you are not devilishly lucky scoundrels. To compensate, Specialist actions aren't rolled-they're just declared. But you'll need these abilities to even stand a fighting chance against powerful Elite undead and fearsome Lieutenants.

Scene to scene, it's BitD and it's going to be good. Having read through, I can't be as confident in the meta level of casualties and resources. Secondary missions seem particularly punishing, given that they're resolved with a single toss of the dice and can have whole squads and specialists killed and missing. There's a fine line between 'desperation' and 'death spiral', and this may be a game where failure even on the campaign scale is an option. The Legion solves problems in part by throwing bodies at them, and the game requires a fair bit of buy-in for people who will likely be playing a different character every session. This is also a combination rulebook and campaign; you will be making your way to Skydagger Keep, and assuming you survive, you'll be scored (possibly for a future Season 2 expansion), so GMs looking to tell a 100% original story will have to do more work, compared to the more sandbox nature of other BitD variants.

But it looks good, reads great, and has lots of neat ideas. In particular, X-COM the RPG is a definite possibility.

Clarke is the acknowledged master of the Outside Context Problem novel. In Rama, the solar system is visited by an immense interstellar spaceship, a giant metal cylinder that comes to life as it approaches the sun. The novel combines the cosmic speculation of 2001 and Childhood's End with the macro-engineering wonder of Ringworld. While the space science is right up there with the classics, the human element is lacking, with most of the characters being competent, knowledgeable types who are rarely at a loss for the proper action, even when faced with something that dwarfs human comprehension. The few hints of something beyond the narrow scope of the novel, such as the Fifth Church of Christ-Astronaut, do not make up for the relative flatness of the characters. But hey, it's Clark at the height of his powers, and it's a hell of a lot better than 3001 (Yes, 3001. What a lousy sequel).

"Cold War? Hell, it was a hot war!"
--Robert McNamara, The Fog of War

McNamara isn't wrong. While the soldiers of the superpowers rarely engaged each other directly during the 45 year long confrontation between Communism and Capitalism, proxy wars blazed across the world. Chamberlin's book is a survey of those proxy wars, which killed 20 million people between 1945 and 1990. The My Lai Massacre is perhaps the most infamous incident, but the average death toll was 3 My Lai's a day. Some of the wars are famous; Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, but some of the bloodiest incidents are almost forgotten in the West, like the Indonesian genocide of 1965, orchestrated by Suharto with CIA assistance, or the bloody war of Bangladeshi independence.

Chamberlin organizes his book into three chronological section dominated by historical themes. The first was the rising triumph of Communist China, from their victory in the Chinese Civil War to their intervention in Korea. Maoist successes came with heavy casualties and were ultimately stemmed in Korea with UN soldiers, though the war stopped short of General McArthur's desired nuclear attack.

The second phase was "war of national liberation", of which Vietnam was the centerpiece. The widening Sino-Soviet split also ruptured into an absolute breach, with the killing fields of Cambodia representing the nadir of the Communist desire for utopia.

The third phase was one of religious and nationalistic wars. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and American funding of Islamic guerillas was key to this period of the Cold War, but the long Iran-Iraq War was a bloody version of WW1 in the Middle East with far higher casualties.

All theoretical perspectives draw boundaries, and while Chamberlin's focus on 'the Asian rimlands' brings forward overlooked events, it also means that this history of the post-colonial order ignores Africa and South America, which saw their own bloody killings and wars. And if this was your only book, you wouldn't know that there were ideologies or nuclear weapons involved, which seems important. The theoretical lens says that mass deaths in Asia have a common thread, which seems tenuous in some cases. Bangladesh and Iran-Iraq in particular don't seem to be Cold War killings. It's clear that the superpowers were absolutely willing to support almost any murderous faction that made the right noises about Marxism. Compared to Lowe's Savage Continent, Killing Fields is a chronology without much analysis.

Concrete Island is a near perfect embodiment of Ballard's favorite themes of modernity and its detritus. Maitland is a self-satisfied architect with a career, family, and mistress. A sudden automobile crash stands him in an interchange island, cut off from the world by a triangle of highspeed bypasses.

The limited terrain of this wasteland, scattered with wrecked cars and ruined structures, rapidly becomes a projection of Maitland's decaying psyche. Unable to climb to freedom due to his injuries, Maitland is tries to convince the other inhabitants of the island, a mentally damaged acrobat named Proctor and a young prostitute named Jane, to aid his escape, but the material leverage of modernity means little to these liminal barbarians. Ultimately, Maitland is redefined in terms of sustenance relations to the broken building blocks of the world.

The Dead Hand is an account of Soviet biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons through the end of the Cold War, and how these weapons drove superpower politics, that manages to be sprawling without being comprehensive. The many interesting moments add up to less than the sum of their parts.

One chain is Biopreparat, the Soviet agency in charge of biological warfare. Biopreparat spent billions of rubles weaponizing anthrax, plague, smallpox, and a host of other diseases. There was infrastructure to produce plagues to kill nations. Accidental discharges from weapons labs sickened and killed Soviet citizens. And since biological weapons were banned by a treaty the Soviet's were party to, the whole thing was officially denied for decades. Most of what we know comes from defectors, including the memoirs of scientist Ken Alibek.

Another front was the dream of Reagan and Gorbachev to reduce nuclear arsenals. Mutually Assured Destruction kept the fragile peace of the Cold War, with the risk that the slightest accident could end the world. Some classes of weapons were worse than others. The Pershing II intermediate range missile could hit Moscow in less than five minutes, opening the possibility of a decapitation strike against Soviet leadership. Against this, the Soviet's deployed a system called Dead Hand, a semi-automatic response, which in a grim parody of Dr. Strangelove, which centered on a similar automatic response, was kept secret.

Hoffman doesn't get into the grimy details of the technology, preferring instead a diplomatic history of negotiations between the superpowers. At several points, efforts which might have eliminated nuclear weapons foundered because Reagan wanted to keep the Strategic Defense Initiative. In Reagan's mind, this was a shield to protect the world from missiles. Pragmatically, it was a way to spend billions trying to prove Edward Teller's thesis that the H-bomb was good for something.

The Dead Hand is frustrating, because it brushes up against some key issues in the technology and logic of nuclear weapons which are being forgotten as the Cold War fades from memory. MAD relies on the assumption that both parties are capable and willing to respond to a nuclear attack with one of their own. This requires a chain of command which will always drop the bomb when properly ordered to, from the supreme commander down to a junior officer carrying out the actual mechanism of delivery, and will never do so under any other circumstances. Orchestrating this always/never duality is a terrifying problem in safety, and one discussed in the American context in Schlosser's Command and Control. Hoffman doesn't really get at the Soviet solutions to the same problems, or lack thereof, instead focusing on an artificial line of 'semi-automated retaliation'. The basic problem, that a relatively junior and underinformed person in charge of a mobile rocket system, ballistic missile submarine, or alert bomber can trigger nuclear apocalypse, is present in both systems.

The book is redeemed by a terrifying coda about the 90s. The Soviet WMD system was sustained by the full force of the police state, and when the USSR fell, there were thousands of sites and scientists now without support. Iran and North Korea tried to hire specialists in rockets and biological warfare. Plutonium weapon cores and enriched uranium ingots were stored in shoddily maintained facilities guarded by starving soldiers. It is a wonder that proliferation in the 90s did not end with some kind of horrific incident.

The Dead Hand tries to straddle two world: a technical focus on the actual Evil Empire of an autonomous military industrial complex procuring tremendously expensive weapons that will never be used; and the collapses of the Soviet Union as a social and political entity, and manages to do neither full justice. But the partial history is still engaging, and worth reading.