The Space Between Worlds is a stylish and emotional debut, full of rage and hurt. The high-concept scifi is travel between parallel universes, with two catches. First, we can only travel to universes that are pretty similar to our own. And second, if you're alive in a parallel universe, going will kill you. This means that sheltered PhD types make poor candidates. You need someone who's dead almost everywhere else to make a good traverser. Someone like Cara.

And that's where this book shines, in the depiction of Cara and her social reality. Her own Earth is a planet divided, between the steel and glass city-arcology where she works, and the mudbrick toxic slum of Ashtown where she was born, lived, and mostly died. The racism, classism, and Foucauldian biopower of the setting isn't so much subtext or text as supertext. Cara wants to fit in, want's to be secure, want's to be valued for something other than dying a lot. And it isn't going to happen.

The basic form of this book is the confession, layers of secrets and crimes. The first confession is that Cara isn't the original. Our narrator is from Earth-22, an imposter for the dead prime. Prime was a good girl raised in a harsh environment. Cara-22 was the abused partner of the Emperor of Ashtown, a warlord named Nik Nik who commands a force of gangsters driving Mad Max death machines (in a utopian detail, almost all universes have banned guns and edged weapons. Even in hell, they kill up close.) Prime died on her first journey, and Cara-22 has been impersonating her for six years.

When a routine journey to Earth-175 goes wrong, Cara comes face to face with an alternate Nik Nik, and learns that her job as a traverser is based on another layer of lies. The genius who invented traversing is another warlord. His sole power over traversing is maintained by corporate buyouts on Earth Prime and assassinations across the multiverse. As Cara's dreams break apart, she drives a bargain of monstrous revenge.

The Space Between Worlds is stylish, polished, and thoughtful. It upholds the highest values of science-fiction, to hold a mirror of estrangement to our own world and say, "This is who you are, but it doesn't have to be like this."

Scientists and Scoundrels is a piece of popular science ephemera, a kind of long-form Cracked listicle repackaged for reasons I can't divine. This book came out in 1965, at a time when according to Wikipedia Silverberg was writing and selling 50,000 words a week (and a decent novel is between 70k and 120k words). So it's the kind of thing that summarizes twenty or thirty books your little local library might not have into one book about scientific frauds. The stories are short and mostly tragic, the only one that sticks in the mind is the alleged North Pole expedition of Frederick Cook, which may have just hung around Greenland for several months. There are many motivations that drive scientific fraud (fame, wealth, to bring down a rival), but it seems to always end poorly.

And for someone getting this book in 2020 because a Grandmaster of Science Fiction's name is on it, well, Silverberg's name is on a lot of better things too. I don't regret the afternoon I spent with it, but there's not much to keep a second look.

Sextant is an ode to the craft of nautical navigation, and the instrument which enabled the navigators of the Age of Sail to find their way across the seas. Barrie frames his history around his own crossing of the Atlantic in a small sailing yacht, which gives a human touch to his history of famous voyagers: Bligh, Cook, Vancouver, Fitzroy, and Shackleton foremost among them.

Picking up from Sobel's classic Longitude, Barrie demonstrates that even after the invention of the chronometer, celestial navigation was preferred as more reliable than mechanical gimcrackery. With a sextant for measuring the angles of the sun, moon, and key stars, along with a table of ephemera in a nautical almanac, a skilled navigator could get a fix of a few hundred meters.

But navigation is more than the best route between ports. These are stories about cartography, strenuous missions to get trigonometric fixes on the mazes of channels that make up the Pacific Northwest, the islands of the South Pacific, and the horrific shoreline of Tierra del Fuego. These explorers were an austere crowd, at least compared to the genocidal conquistadors of the Age of Exploration, or the mercantile interests that would follow the initial mapping. Barrie presents a rather uncritical view of what was a vital part of the British imperial project, but he has a talent for turning the logs of these taciturn men into thrilling adventurers, invoking the magic of sailing by your senses and little bit of spherical trigonometry in an age when precise coordinate to anywhere are in your pocket.

The Moscow Rules is the story of a real world Q Branch, the CIA's Office of Technical Services, where authors Tony and Jonna Mendez devised the devices and techniques that made some impressive intelligence breakthroughs possible.

Soviet Moscow was as hostile an environment for intelligence tradecraft as could be produced, short of an actual prison. Americans were tailed whenever they left diplomatic compounds, all contacts between Russians and foreigners was logged, and the embassy buildings themselves were riddled with bugs and Russian servants working for the KGB. A simple matter of getting intelligence back from an agent, let alone making a meeting, seemed impossible.

Mendez found ways to elude surveillance, using the techniques of stage magic and some Hollywood special effects. The trick was to be able "go into the black", to evade KGB surveillance using misdirection such that the KGB didn't know they'd been tricked. Tactics included a device called the jack-in-the-box, which mimicked a passenger in a car, allowing an officer to bail out, and quick change disguises to turn CIA officers into Moscow civilians. Mendez and his team could perform miracles, swapping everything including race and gender.

This is a breezy and quick read through spycraft. It's a lot of fun, though not particularly deep. Recommended for fans of The Americans, and the Jennings' wig game.

I'm a scifi fan, Cold War history buff, American-style Leftist, and Terminally Online Shitposter (TM), so when the memes of the DSA Posadist caucus started filtering across my feed a few years ago, my immediate reaction was "What is this premium content that was made specifically for me?" More than any specific analysis, the juxtaposition of imagery is a whole damn mood, as the kids say. Gittlitz has written the authoritative biography of J. Posadas, with an analysis of why it has recaptured contemporary imaginations.


Selection of DSA Posadist Caucus buttons

For decades, Posadism has served as the butt of jokes for the increasingly marginalized Trotskyite Left. Like, we might all be irrelevant coffee table revolutionaries, but at least we aren't members of a UFO cult. And it's hard to deny that Posadism as a movement was a cult, centered around the veneration of the increasingly eccentric Posadas, with strict discipline and centralization of thought. UFOs and our Intergalactic Socialist Comrades were actually a tertiary concern for Posadas and his movement. The central tenet of Posadist beliefs was that the Revolution was Immanent and capitalism was in its last stages of collapse, a perpetual optimism that coincident with Posadas' personal maniac charisma, explains much of the movement's durability.

Where it gets weird is that the second tenet is that a global thermonuclear war would be good for Communism. Apocalypse, the deaths of billions, and the destruction of industry and society would smash the bourgeois in the single blow which proletarian revolutions could not deal. The Party would rise from the ashes, instituting a socialist utopia. And after that, the positions gets increasingly heterodox. Communion with dolphins, following the work of Igor Charkovsky, was a far greater part of the program than UFOs. The rest of the Posadist program can only be captured as stridently oppositional to the mainstream, whatever it is, including support for Peronisn, Baathism, and the 1968 invasion of Prague by the USSR.

If this book has a flaw, it's that it is a serious history and biography of Homero Cristalli, the Argentinian agitator who adopted the revolutionary nom de guerre J. Posadas. This isn't Gittlitz's fault, it's a truth of the historical record that rarely has anything mattered as little as the Trotskyism.

Born into poverty in Buenos Aires, Cristalli's energy propelled him to a failed socialist political campaign, and then into the revolutionary world of the Fourth International. In what is the story of Trotskyism, the movement failed comprehensively, fragmenting into dozens of almost identically named subparties who purged their ranks and denounced each other, published newsletters (the basic activity of the Trot, it seems), were picked off by CIA-backed right wing death squads, and who failed to make any meaningful alliances with either mainstream trade unions or actually Communist countries from China to Cuba. When the moment of worldwide breach came in 1968, Posadas initially denounced the mass youth movement as "unwashed bohemian bourgeois", and while he came around eventually, Trotskyites were bystanders to events, unable to capitalize on the global wave of energy.

1968 marked a major transition for the movement. Cristalli/Posadas had organized movements in Latin America for decades, and for all his many faults was a genuine regional power on the Left. In 1969 he and his top cadres were arrested in Montevideo and exiled to Italy. Over the following years, Posadas denounced and expelled the old South American organizers who had been with him from the start, replacing them with sycophantic young Europeans who looked up to him as a guru and father figure. Posadism had always had a heavy emphasis on discipline and his eccentric ideas. Now it completed its transformation into person-centered cult, as Posadas rejected his previously austere personal morality to begin affairs with young women in the group, first a comrade by the name of "Ines", and then his young daughter's nurse "Rene". He died in 1981, after several heart attacks. None of this second group of Posadists agreed to be interviewed for the book, an astonishing level of devotion four decades on.

To return to the analysis, in 2020, at what feels like an absolute nadir of Global Leftism, why does Posadas matter? As Gittlitz gets at in his survey of the phrase "Fully Automated Luxury Communism", if even the most incremental change is impossible, why not demand everything? The arguments between realists and utopians is one of the oldest splits in the Left, with a distinct scifi turn through Alexander Bogdanov, recaptured and reflected in Posadas strident revolutionary sermons, in the lifestyle Counterculture consumerism of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and the fuzzy post-scarcity of Star Trek. Perhaps the most salient feature of contemporary politics is the anti-factual alliance between New Age mystics, conspiracy theorists, and right wing authoritarians: the anti-vax, Flat Earth, QAnon crossover. Current Posadist social media accounts are sadly inactive, but why shouldn't the Left have an anti-realist wing? There are too many crazies to ignore, and your boss, landlord, the cops, TV, and The Algorithm are genuinely conspiring to ruin your life and extract all your precious surplus value.

Posadas as a man was a sad mentally ill authoritarian. Posadism as a program is a hodgepodge of Marxist exegesis with little useful to say. But The Future is too precious to cede to neoliberal bureaucrats, fascist streetfighters, and billionaire tech titans, and that's where the shocking discontinuity of neo-Posadist imagery serves as a flag to rally around. Slap a Lisa Frank dolphin in front of a mushroom cloud and open your definition of 'comrade' to include all people everywhere, the aliens who are definitely not visiting us, and even objects defined by their social relationships (hello Bruno Latour). Posadism is bad theory and worse praxis, but I love it anyway, and really appreciate Gittlitz for doing the hard work of researching and writing this book.

Oh, and VIVA POSADAS!

This is God Emperor of Dune, a book that might be profound, but is definitely a turgid mass. Where the prior books in the series delighted in a striptease of revelation, The Will to Battle has a single message, and that is "HAVE YOU READ HOBBES!"

In the wake of the assassination and resurrection of J.E.D.D. MASON, the world is heading towards war. Bridger is gone (how? I really don't remember Seven Surrenders very well), and replaced with Achilles. You know, that Achilles, wine-dark seas, bronze spears, walls of Troy; the Achilles. A war is coming, but the long peace leading to the 25th century means that no one knows how to fight it.

There's rich pathos. How do we distinguish between communities, mobs, armies? What does a person experience as they move from between memberships in these states, and how is their precious individual subjectivity changed. War demands a mechanization of murder, that the apparatus of politics and economy be directed towards lethal force. And when a supreme commander can so obviously decide the fate of millions, war forces us to ask if our leaders are truly making history, or if they are merely in the front ranks of the mob.

There's an interesting book in the premise, the chance for more revelation of character as we move from peace to war. But instead, the alliances and characterization are conventional, static rather than radical. The main plot is concerned with a sideshow of a trial and an Olympic Games, a pause before the actual fighting. And then when it does happen, the Utopian Hive reveals what any student of war in the 21st century knows, rapid kinetic action is very very powerful.

The divine nature of J.E.D.D. MASON, fully acknowledged by the book (he's a God, visiting from another universe), is another wasted opportunity, a rehash of theodicy rather than an exploration of what it means to face the Ultimate. What a shame. I'm probably going to give the whole series a reread when the last book drops, but this book is a stinker with few redeeming qualities. Even Palmer's renaissance erudition has changed from charming quirk to cloying affectation.

***

On a re-read, I like this book a little better, though I still don't like it much. There's a lot going on in this book, to wit the declining political situation as the world of the Hives slides towards open warfare, various intrigues between parties to shape that war, our narrator Mycroft's mental implosion, as he pleads with himself, other characters, Hobbes, and you the reader, and finally the Outside Context Problem of J.E.D.D MASON walking around in his divine flesh, pronouncing his desire to remake the world without limits and damn anything in his path.

What gets squeezed out is any warm characterization, and much of the sense of mystery. We know who all these people are, how the major components of the setting work. The new elements are at the fringes, the precise workings of the various legal machineries present, a new editorial voice in the Ninth Anonymous who takes over from Mycroft at various moments. But much of this book feels like vamping before we actually get to the fireworks factory, and what I hope will be a satisfying conclusion in book 4.

1/3 wacky adventures of the Unseen University, 2/3 popular science, The Science of Discworld is not the best of either, but it manages to be moderately funny, and moderately informative. Since it's about a decade old as of this writing, it's mostly interesting to see how our knowledge of exoplanets and the outer solar system has changed.

But really, why isn't there a Philosophy of Discworld?

****

On a reread, I'm less impressed. Having done a PhD in the interval, the faculty of the Unseen University are a lot less funny. Another decade on more or less and we've found the Higgs boson, but otherwise the popular science writing is much the same. One weird thing is the equivocal take on climate change. The science authors are of the opinion that climate has varied a lot over Deep Time (likely true), and that's varying now due to human industrial activity, but it's really not a big deal. Topics hit the usual pop science big ones: Why is there a universe as opposed to nothing? How did life emerge on a single ball of rock? And how does life evolve? The treatments are okay, but nothing groundbreaking.

And most tellingly, I completely forgot I'd already read this book.

The People in the Trees is a literary novel structured on the actual career and crimes of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. Like Gajdusek, our narrator, Norton Perina is a doctor who makes a major medical discovery in the South Pacific, winning the Nobel Prize in medicine. He then adopts over fifty children from the place where he did his fieldwork, before his life is undone by verified accusations of systematic sexual abuse of his adopted children. I don't know much about Gajdusek beyond the Wikipedia summary, so I can't say what's lifted aside from these major points, but it's a clear inspiration.

Norton is born in Indiana, drifts through medical school, and as a adventure finds himself on a three person expedition to a remote island in the South Pacific. There, deep in the jungle, he discovers a tribe of primitive people who have achieved a limited kind of immortality. The flesh of a turtle halts aging, except for the brain. People can live for centuries, but experience severe mental decline. Norton parley's his discovery into immense scientific success, but the new notoriety of the islands destroys them in a medical imperialist goldrush. As a matter of amends, Norton finds himself adopting a child or two from the islands on each one of his yearly trips, but his beneficence conceals a lust, which is his undoing. The book is structured as a series of letter's to Norton's closest friend and scientific collaborator, who adds commentary in footnotes, and they're monstrous, arrogant, banal, and utterly compelling.

Literary fiction is not my thing, and the basic outlines of Norton/Gajdusek's life are strong enough to hang a lot of story on, but this novel feels blinkered by its points of view so close to the narrator, and it's sense of Norton's righteousness even in the face of his sins. I'm not sure what the right balance of sympathy for a monster is, but this novel doesn't quite hit it. Very good, a hair from great.

Having read some fiction about the South Pacific, I decided to switch up to some history. Lord is one of the titans of popular history, having written a widely read history of the Titanic sinking in the 50s, as well as an account of the Pearl Harbor attack. Like is says on the title, this is about the Coastwatchers in the Solomon Islands.

In 1942, with Japan on the advance everywhere, the last vestiges of British colonial authority in the Solomons were a handful of men attached to Australian Naval Intelligence. They were equipped with "portable" radios weighing 300 kg, plus batteries, generators, and fuel, and had little other support beyond that which they could wring from personal connections with the natives. Their mission was to elude Japanese patrols and report on naval and air activity. When the Americans landed on Guadalcanal, this mission became critical. The geography of the Slot between Rabaul and Guadalcanal constrained the Japanese to one strike a day at about noon, but the Coastwatchers could report how big the strike was and the exact timing, enabling the defenders of the Cactus Airforce to reach interception altitude and disperse their own bombers. In the long attritional campaign, this defensive intelligence advantage proved key. The Americans lost something like 120 aircraft, the Japanese 250 (fuzzy numbers from memory). As the tide turned, and the Americans began advancing, the Coastwatchers and their native allies turned into a vital resuce service, saving over one hundred pilots, and even more sailors. Americans knew that if they were forced to bail out or abandon ship, there were decent odds they would be found by friends, rather than the Japanese or fabled cannibal headhunters.

Lord wrote his book in the 70s, which has the advantage that many of the Coastwatchers were still alive. There's a vivid quality to the anecdotes which purely textual histories fail to capture. However, this comes at the expense of thematic unity or a real thesis.

The Cortex system was developed over a long series of licensed games: Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, Smallville, Leverage, Marvel Heroes, and Firefly. Licenses expire, and many of these books are basically impossible to obtain. Cortex Prime is the unified, license-free, generic Cortex system.

Generic systems are tricky beasts, because there really isn't such a thing. Roleplaying games are about fiction, and mechanics help us support that fiction by providing accessible questions and answers detailing "what happens next." Cortex's DNA is heavily inflected by its TV license history. What should happen next is what would make for a good episode, which most broadly means a face of successes and complications until our heroes win the day, or suffer a painful lesson.

Where this gets complex is that Cortex Prime isn't a game book, so much as a game toolkit. Characters are built around mandatory Distinctions, and then at least two of the Prime Sets: Affiliations, Attributes, Powers, Relationships, Reputations, Roles, Skills, or Values. Resources and Assets round out the stuff that a character will be able to draw on. Each trait is rated from d4 to d12, rolled in a dice pool, and then the highest two are kept, with the biggest die not totaled counting for effect. Plot Points enable you to add more dice to your total, trigger cool SFX, or increase the impact of your action. By page count, Powers get the most space, covering the gamut of comics inspired superhero abilities. This makes sense, we know how drive or fight work as skills, while elemental control or flight might need some more explicit rules. And Powers serve as a decent framework for thematic high-concept scifi gizmos, fantasy magic, or TV treatment of forensic science or computers.

Cortex falls in an odd place where it's not a simulationist or gamist game, but it's also fairly divorced from narrativist RPG design styles. And while the mechanics are not hard, the dice pool manipulation is fiddly. I've had to explain how Resistance rolls work in BitD literally every session. I have no idea how my groups would ever master the intricacies of calculating effect size, dice doubling, stepping up, or any of the other dice tricks Cortex relies on (and on a side note, calculating probabilities in this system is a nightmare. Working on some Python to do it via Monte Carlo simulations, but ugh!).

At the end of the day, Cortex Prime has a lot of options, and both players and GMs will need to do a lot of work to get the game they want. GMs have to select which suite of mods will form their version of Cortex. And players need to absolutely nail their Distinctions. Good Distinctions mean characters interacting with the PP economy and driving the story. Bad ones mean the game is poorly designed.

I still really like Cortex, though I've yet to play a session, and it's good to have a live version of the rules not tied to either Leverage (though I could go for a Leverage rewatch about now) or the incredibly idiosyncratic organization of Firefly. But Cortex has to beat several options, such as other generic systems like FATE and GURPS, a specific system for the game you want to play, or the baseline energy of just doing it poorly in D&D. And I'm not sure Cortex Prime is elegant or compelling enough to clear those barriers.