New Suns is what it says on the cover, and it is astonishingly good. I only recognized two of the authors, and as we all know an anthology of this type can be a mixed bag, but every story was good and several were great! I usually skip out on at least one story per collection, but even the weaker entries kept me intrigued. My favorites were "The Virtue of Unfaithful Translation" by Minsoo Kang , "Burn the Ships" by Alberto Yanez, and "The Shadow We Cast Through Time" by Indrapramit Das, but this is a strong collection.

Editor Nisi Shawl assembled this collection on the basis of identity, part of a decades long quest to get more people of color in speculative fiction, but what's fascinating is a clear thematic link. Each story is about kinship, about the kinds of people we call family, the bonds between people who are more than friends, and how those bonds linger on. This is speculative fiction descended from Octavia Butler, rather than the technocratic impulses of Campbell's vision of the genre, and the questions posed and answered are really novel.

Absolutely recommended!

The Invention of Nature is a masterful biography of the nearly forgotten explorer, scientist, and polymath Alexander von Humboldt. A Prussian nobleman, Humbolt came of age in the fervent height of the Enlightenment. After his domineering mother died, he abandoned a career as a mine inspector to live in revolutionary Paris, and then set out on an immense voyage across South America around 1800. With one companion, a few locally hired guided, and a collection of scientific instruments he navigated great rivers, climbed volcanos, collected specimens, and took copious notes.

Humboldt's genius was in a synoptic view of nature. He was the first to write fervently of the world as a connected web, to see the rich diversity of life in non-obvious places, to imagine that all things were connected, and then to daringly prove that they were with measurements showing climate zones and the interconnectedness of volcanos below the Earth. His ebullient writing made him a world-wide celebrity. He met and befriended President Jefferson and charmed scientists and salons in London, Paris, and Berlin.

Humboldt's later life met with some reversals. In the 1810s, he sought to make a second expedition to the Himalayas to gather comparative data. But along with the grandeur of South America, he had also written of the cruelty and waste of the Spanish colonial project, and the British East India Company was not about to let such a keen critic into their territory. Scientific and court obligations kept him tied to Berlin, a city which he despised. He made finally made a Asian expedition in his 60s at the behest of Russian crown, but one wonders what we missed. Financial troubles were a constant problem, even with a pension from the Prussian crown, as Humboldt spent his family fortune on expensive print runs of his books, new scientific instruments, and loans to junior scientists without regard for his own needs.

Humboldt's magnus opus was the multivolumn Kosmos, a grand scientific overviewed based on his journeys and immense scientific correspondence. Humboldt died at 89, a beloved hero worldwide. Wulf dips a little into the biographical details; Humboldt was a voluminous talker who lectured continuously, rather than having conversations. He had an acid tongue, which he turned on royal figures and lesser scientists. But he was also generous to a fault. Even after spending his considerable inheritance on exploration and publishing, he would give money and instruments to scientists just starting out. Humboldt's sexuality is also unconventional. He never married and avoided female companionship, instead forming very close bonds with a series of male friends. Wulf doesn't believe he was gay, and period mores allowed for more emotion between male friends than is typical today, but I can't see Humboldt as straight.

What elevates this book is Wulf's close examination of Humboldt's influence. He had a close friendship with Goethe. Darwin, Thoreau, and Muir all regarded Humboldt as an inspiration, and each closely annotated their copies of Humboldt's books as they developed their grand ideas. Humboldt's ideas are foundational to ecology.

So why isn't he better known today? Wulf blames anti-German prejudice in US and UK in the wake of 20th century wars, which made it bad taste to overtly draw on a German's ideas. Humboldt also faced political problems in his own life. He was simply too liberal for the reactionary politics that followed the dream of the French Revolution. A true European, he regarded Paris as his home, but was too Prussian for the French and too French for the Prussians. And finally, as a field scientist he never developed an eponymous law or experiment. The chemists and physicists who wrote the history of science were suspicious of a man who discovered things simply by being outdoors, and Humboldt's evocative and sensual prose, his perspective that one had to feel a part of nature, was alien to a field that was no longer natural philosophy, but now dozens of scientific disciplines.

The Invention of Nature is a gem.

I realized that my library has (almost) the whole Aubrey & Maturin series, and I'd be remiss as a father if I didn't read the dadliest of dadfic, so here we are. Master and Commander works best as a whole mood of an era, with the naturalist Dr. Maturin standing in for the reader as the enthusiast Captain Aubrey goes about the business of naval warfare at the end of the 18th century.

It's a dashing cruise around the Med, taking prizes and running away from bigger ships, as Aubrey tries to work his way up the ladder of promotion and wealth. Meanwhile, there's the business of managing the crew and Lt. Dillion, an Irishman who has a secret history with Maturin. The characterization is amazing, as well as the sheer richness of nautical language, but unless you know a fair big about sailing (and my knowledge tops out at the weather gauge) it can be hard to track the action. The pacing and point of view is a little lumpy, though the first entry in a 20+ book series can be forgiving. I'm excited to slip this in between my other reads.

Emily Guendelsberger was a moderately successful journalist when her alt-weekly newspaper shuttered in 2015, and she launched a project taking and writing some of the most common and most stressful jobs in America: Amazon warehouse picker, call center representative, and McDonald's cashier. Guendelsberger describes these as "cyborg jobs", a human being filling in for the messy interstices of an imperfect automated system, and blends her personal experiences of how utter exhausting and alienating these jobs are with a history of how it got this way. If you're in the 50% of Americans who don't work one of these jobs, who's time isn't tracked minute by minute, you have to read this book.

The primary enemy in Guendelsberger's story is leanness in staffing. Payroll is an expense, and businesses like to cut that to the absolute bone. So to make sure that work gets done, they institute a system of arbitrary controls and punishments, second by second analysis of action, backed up metrics, points systems, and rapid firings.

Each of the workplaces is horrific in its own way. Amazon is notorious for its physically strenuous warehouse work, with pickers walking 15 miles a day, bending over and grabbing items thousands of times, warehouses that are boiling or freezing depending on the season, and vending machines filled with free painkillers. But the real horror of Amazon is isolation. The Algorithm (and as a data scientist, I feel comfortable using caps here) which guides pickers to their targets seems to route them around each other. You're effectively alone in a cyclopean logistics space, occasionally glimpsing other people a few hundred feet away. Conversation is impossible, thanks to the constant thrum of machinery, and workers are also forbidden from listening to their own music or podcasts, for reasonable safety concerns. Amazon work is carefully designed to be just at the limits of human physical endurance. Sanity is a different matter.

Next up is a Convergys call center, doing customer service for AT&T. While most of the time is spent explaining to people data overages on their bill, the actual job is sales, trying to convince people to switch to DirecTV. Call center work is a matter of juggling balls, as doing anything requires navigating through eight different shoddy backend apps, holding personal information in short term memory, selling more AT&T products, and of course trying to actually solve issue whatever brought the person there in the first place. But any call could flip from 'okay' to a terrible Screamer, a torrent of unending abuse that sent Guendelsberger into a panic. After a Screamer, there was no way to pause, just a few seconds until the next call, and it seems like the people on the other end of the phone could sense the weakness like a shark and continue the abuse. Guendelsberger was homeless for this stretch (she stayed with relatives for the Amazon gig), and living out of her car in a North Carolina summer took it own toll. She began spending 105% of her daily paycheck on hotel rooms to maintain a semblance of sanity until a coworker took pity and offered her a cheap spare room. And while this is pre-COVID, another coworker caught MRSA at the same call center and almost died. Good times!

The last job was at a downtown San Francisco McDonalds. Guendelsberger worked the cash register, where her white skin and impeccable English skills served as an asset. McDonalds allowed better human interaction, but was physically dangerous in a way that other jobs weren't. A customer threw mustard at her, she was injured by a broken coffee machine, and she had to kick the homeless out of the store at times. There's open respect for her shift managers at McDonalds, preternaturally fast and efficient women, while immediate superiors at the other jobs are merely fortunate or tyrannical, but in many ways McDonalds was the worst job of them all.

Guendelsberger breaks up her workplace ethnography with delves into the history of Taylorism and scientific management, Henry Ford and mass production, and finally the physiology of stress and how these environments drive you insane and slowly kill you. And as a former The Onion writer, it's pretty funny too. Except for the part where it is utterly horrifying. The history of Capital and Labor has been defined by Capital's belief that Labor is stealing from it by not working as hard as possible at all times, and now with panopticonic workplace surveillance systems, they can finally prove it. Amazon has the glossiest version, with a slick backend and a palpable lust to replace its humans with robots as soon as the tech gets worked out. Convergys is just throwing humans into the a gap of terrible backend systems that won't get reengineered because there's no clear profit in it. McDonalds probably needs humans the most, though they are focusing on eliminating human cashiers in favor of automated kiosks, but they want as few as possible.

All companies have common practices. Time management is draconian, with breaks starting as soon as you clock out even if the bathrooms and smoking areas are ten minutes away, and harsh penalties for being a minute late showing up to work. This was particularly bad with the McDonalds job, with Guendelsberger arriving 20 to 30 minutes early to deal with the unreliability of BART. Convergys wound up editing worker timesheets after the fact, which is illegal, not that wage theft is ever prosecuted. Guendelsberger describes being utterly exhausted day after day, and while she could bail; she needed the paychecks, but not like her coworkers with local ties, kids, health conditions, and no other skills. It's easy to see how these jobs are traps. Almost everything that's gone wrong in America in the past fifty years can be laid at the feet of jobs like these: the decline of families and communities, mental illness, obesity, opiate abuse, politics which are simultaneously disengaged and insane.

Individually, if you ever abuse or shout at a customer service worker you are human trash and should be abandoned in the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre, but systematically what is to be done? It's real bad, Labor is groaning and dying while Capital records the highest profits yet. Off-shoring, union-breaking, and the general abandonment of the working class by the Democrats are all to blame, but financialization and the pursuit of ever high share prices is at the root of this mistreatment of employees, the idea that a corporation is a device for maximizing quarterly returns and not fulfilling a common need. It's self-defeating for these workplaces. Training is a major source of inefficiency, and yet they won't do anything to drop turnover below 100% because the environment is bad everywhere. Guendelsberger ends on an optimistic note, that something will break and an alternative will arise, but I'm less sure about the political weaknesses of Transhumanist Cyborg Capital Hyper-Fascism.

Pat Benatar - Love is a Battlefield

Perel is a practicing family therapist, and this book is a tour through the wreckage of the American marriage. European, Jewist, sex-positive, and (most exotically) a psychodynamic theorist, she brings an outsider perspective to the American Protestant marriage to help unhappy couples have better sex.

Perel has a few major points which she touches on repeatedly. The first is that comfort and desire are competing psychological drives. Sustaining a relationship and a household over the long-term requires comfort; you would no more willfully stay in a constantly uncomfortable relationship than you would sleep in a painful bed. Yet too comfort comfort smothers desire, and a sexless marriage isn't going to work over the longer term.

Erotic desire is rooted in the depths of the individual psyche, and if it's defined by anything it is a a sense of paradox compared to the ordinary life. The ultra-competent decision-making business woman wants to be taken and ravished, the man afraid of expressing needs wants to be adored, someone afraid of intimacy prefers the clear rules of BDSM. In short, while erotic desires are full of strange creatures, they are not dragons to be slain but unique wonders to be cherished.

The last point is that sustained eroticism requires play, not work. Americans are great at work, but putting sex on your todo list means it becomes just another undone chore. Whatever brought the couple together in the first place was sustained, erotic play, and you have to find that again.

Perel takes a rather accommodating view of infidelity, which I see is to be blame for a lot of the one star reviews. Americans do hate a cheater. I'm not pro-infidelity, but she makes a good point that while an affair is a breach in a relationship, a divorce is scorched earth and it might be worth trying to repair the marriage.

Mating in Captivity is interesting, very readable, and while Perel's clients are tilted towards New York 1%s, the concepts are applicable in a lot of American relationships. The pyschodynamic theories are a strength and a flaw; they're not exactly scientific, but people are complex and reading about fantasies and suppressed urges is a lot more interesting than yet more neural scientism about oxytocin.

Post Captain see Aubrey and Maturin ashore, enjoying the interlude of the Peace of Amiens and chasing after local eligible women Sophie Williams and Diane Villiers, when tragedy strikes. Jack's perfidious prize agent disappears with all his money, and Jack finds himself in debt to the tune of 11,000 pounds, and liable to be arrested at any time.

The two escape to France, and are there when the Peace of Amiens ends and it's back to war, lovely profitable war! Fortunately, Aubrey is hanging out with the French captains who captured the Sophie in the first book, and since they're such bros they give him warning. Maturin leads Jack across France disguised as a dancing bear (wait what?), and he gets a new ship, the experimental and unseaworthy Polychrest, and his career is back on track.

There's one naval action of note, but most of this book is concerned with courting, debt, political games, and the tightening and near breaking of the friendship of our leads while pursuing women. Putting Hos Before Bros, as the saying goes, only leads to tragedy. Still having fun, still dadly as hell.

Intelligence journalism is an odd trade, writing on people who would prefer to keep everything classified forever. And this book from 2008, prior to Edward Snowden's revelations, is very much a peace of history, that while dated is still worth reading.

Bamford tracks three major threads. The first is the absolute failure of the NSA to connect the dots on 9/11. Various parts of the US intelligence apparatus knew something was coming, but despite copious intercepts, they were unable to figure out that these terrorists were inside the United States and communicating with an Al Qaeda safehouse in Yemen. Most startling to me was how Tom Wilshire, a CIA liaison to the FBI, halted alerts on the 9/11 plots several times in the months prior.

The planes hit the towers, and the NSA went to war. This is the second thread, an effort spearheaded by the Bush administration and Dick Cheney to void legal protections against arbitrary wiretapping that had been set up in the 70s. The careful charade of FISA warrants was cast aside in terms of national security letters and persons of interest. Now the NSA could listen in for almost any reason, justified retroactively. Thousands of rapidly surged analysts and translators spent hours a day in complexes in Georgia, listening to every phone call in Iraq. The first Bush-Cheney system almost went down due to the surprising resistance of a senior FBI agent named James Comey (famous later for other reason), but a Democratic congress eventually passed a national security wishlist, for fear of looking weak on terrorism.

The third challenge is technical. The NSA's job used to be very easy when signals moved over radio or electrical cables. With the internet and fiber optic boom in the 90s, what the NSA could eavesdrop on fell precipitously, until they invested in a series of expensive public-private partnerships to design high capacity splitters and place them in major internet nodes, essentially suctioning everything transmitted across the internet into a shadow realm of NSA data centers for analysis. The NSA was big data before big data was hip. But the NSA was drowning in data, unable to turn even an infinitesimal bit of into actionable intelligence. This is where a host of Orwellian programs to develop a digital analyst come into play: Trailblazer, Turbulence, Total Information Awareness. But America's cyber spooks were hamstrung by more mundane concerns. When the book was written, the master 'No Fly' list was kept on an Oracle database, and due to interoperability problems, names had to be printed off and retyped on secondary systems. I've worked with some janky software, but nothing that bad.

The pieces of information in this book are fascinating, if obsolete, but where this book falls short is in analysis. The NSA is tremendously expensive, a multibillion dollar agency with deep pockets. Yet it's hard to point to successes, terrorist plots stopped and lives saved. Similarly, the ability of the NSA to listen in on everybody is a shotgun pointed at the head of American democracy, but the harms also seem pretty theoretical. This is 2020, we ask our wiretaps for pancake recipes, take selfies in front of blazing police cars, and run for political office while espousing conspiracy gibberish about satanic cabals of child murderers. What could the NSA do that isn't "seen it already?".

Don't answer that. I've read Stross' The Laundry series.

How did the Holocaust happen? Not the antisemitic ravings of Hitler, or the careerist banality of Eichmann, but the physical labor of liquidating the Jews of Poland. Someone had to round up the Jews in ghettos, herd them onto trains to the death camps, shoot the ones who couldn't walk or evaded. Ordinary Men asks what happens to the people who perpetuate a genocide.

The 'someone' in Ordinary Men were the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, about 500 middle-aged, working-class men from Hamburg. Most of them had ambitions in local policing, writing traffic tickets, dealing with drunks, and other very ordinary policework. About a quarter were Nazi party members. And while deployed away from home, Poland in 1942 was hardly facing Zhukov's armored shock armies on the Eastern Front. At the start of 1942, they were not by any standards, killers.

That would change. The first massacre was at Józefów in July 1942. It was a fiasco. The Jews of the town were marched into the woods, paired up with Nazis from the 101, and executed with shots to the neck. The men did poorly. Offered a chance to refuse, a handful did. Others dodged behind trucks or otherwise out of sight of NCOs. Major Trapp, the commander, apparently broke down weeping.

Blooded, the 101 became a group of hardened killers. The methods became more efficient, more impersonal, the worst tasks handed over to the death camps or local HiWi volunteers, who tried to out-Nazi the Nazis. A handful of men were truly enthusiastic, delighting in the sadism of the exercise. Another handful evaded. Most concluded it was a dirty job, but that someone had to do it, and the military virtue of 'toughness' meant it was them. None resisted. By the time the unit left Poland for Russia 18 months later, they had been party to something like 80,000 murders.

The point is not that Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made of monsters. The point is that if they could commit a genocide, so could almost anyone, given only a few minor tweaks to an authoritarian and racist worldview that is not terribly far out of the mainstream today. Decide that the tough thing to do, the necessary thing to do as a group, is to shoot a defenseless human being in a shallow grave, and ordinary men will do it, and do it gladly.

Oh, and what happened to the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101? Many died on the Eastern Front, as safe Jew hunts became something more like actual combat. Major Trapp and another officer were deported to Poland in 1946 and executed. And the survivors of the unit were tried in an unusually honest and thorough investigation in the 1960s, which saw five men out of over 120 imprisoned for sentences under 10 years. The rest of these ordinary men went on to lead ordinary lives, many of them collecting police pensions in Hamburg.

There were two Cold Wars. The first was an apocalyptic technowar, eyeball-to-eyeball-to-thermonuclear-mushroom-cloud; a war of research and development which thankfully never went hot. And then there was the war that was actually fought, the competition for the loyalties of the Third World, the arc of countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where billions of people lived. In this second Cold War, the United States had a secret weapon, one which it deployed repeatedly with great success. No, not rock and roll, Coca-Cola, the transistor radio and color TV. It was mass murder carried out by local anti-Communist death squads with covert support from the CIA, Army Special Forces, and multinational corporations based in the US.

Bevins aims to recover this largely forgotten history, focusing primarily on the 1965 Indonesian genocide as experienced by its survivors, recounted between the broader sweeps. The immediate period post-WW2 was one of immense optimism in the decolonized Third World. These countries were young and poor, but they knew that the future was their's to take. And often, Socialist and Communist parties played a major role in these countries new politics. Communists were the only ones taking colonial subjects seriously in the 1920s and 1930s. Socialism provided a plan to build a prosperous egalitarian society without the racial hierarchies and extractive violence that characterized colonialism. And finally, the USSR was one of the superpowers, and these countries were too poor to turn down Moscow's aid. But tolerating Communist organizers and having diplomatic links with Moscow were seen as dangerous steps away from capitalism, steps which America would not permit Third World nations to make.

In 1960, Indonesia was the 6th most populous country in the world, with the third largest Communist party after the USSR and China. It was ruled by Sukarno, a charismatic leader who blended political philosophies in a syncretic fashion, and who mediated between the state-within-a-state of the armed forces on the Right, and the Communist party of the Left. A leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, Sukarno had slowly become estranged from Washington, which cultivated relationships with senior generals. In the early hours of October 1, a group of soldiers calling themselves the 30th of September Movement assassinated six senior generals, and then were brutally eliminated themselves. The armed forces used this as a pretext to seize power, installing Suharto as the new dictator. They they proceeded to liquidate the Left, killing approximately one million Indonesians and imprisoning a million more in concentration camps for years. After the bloodshed, Indonesia was opened for business, with US firms taking prime contracts in fishing, rubber, and other extractive industries.

Indonesia was the bloodiest of these actions, but the pattern was repeated in 24 other countries across the Third World. Black propaganda was used to build up a Communist threat (it is unclear the 30 September movement wanted, or even who they were), Left wing democracies were subjected to economic sabotage, and then when the time was ripe, the military took power and started killing. "Jakarta" was used by the bloody hands responsible for disappearances and mass killing in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile to explain their actions and plans. The killing continued until the Cold War ended, with only a brief slackening under Carter.

The basic facts of history are not in doubt: the right wing coups, the American training of those responsible, the approving diplomatic cables for each incident, and finally the dead and vanished. The pattern that Bevins lays these facts is also potent. Those responsible knew each other and traded lessons learns across brutal counter-insurgency. The violence fit American foreign policy goals and Manichaean anti-Communist outlook. It was a racist campaign that excluded white Europeans, where Communist parties sat in parliaments and whole nations enacted social democratic policy. What Bevins doesn't have are the receipts, the red string connecting a specific decision by an American President to a killing field in Bali. Those receipts, if they exist, are still locked in a CIA archive. But conversely, Hitler never gave an explicit order to exterminate the Jews of Europe; all the Nazis just understood the task to be done. Bevins closes by asking "was it worth it?", and in many cases, the answer is a resounding no. While absolute wealth has risen, global inequality has barely budged since the 1960s. Most of the Third World is still locked in impoverished crony capitalism, ruled by flawed democracies. The exceptions are China, Taiwan, and South Korea.

This is a hard book. The mix of personal reporting and history doesn't always work, though it is a brave attempt to give an empathic anchor to what is so often an abstract atrocity. Bevins is a journalist, not an academic, and I'm sure that an actual political scientist or historian will take asides at his theoretical framework and method. But I've read several books like this, and The Jakarta Method is the best. Kinzer's The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War is a great book, but focused on the perpetrators rather than their victims. Chamberlain's The Cold War's Killing Fields is systematic but dry, avoids Latin America and Africa, and forces a conclusion that is not warranted by the evidence. Blumenthals' The Management of Savagery is more contemporary, but also conspiratorial in approach.

The Jakarta Method is an important book, a sober reminder of grim truth that Americans would like to forget. We are an empire, and our prosperity is built on bones.

Good space opera is an indulgence: rich, creamy, flavorful, slightly embarassing but hard to stop eating. Unconquerable Sun is low-fat frozen diary space opera product. Technically dessert, and mostly unsatisfying.


Frozen yogurt

Princess Sun is heir to the Chaonian Republic, three systems with a host of valuable jump points caught between the much larger Yele League and Phene Republic. But Chaonia has two edges. First, the ruling Queen-Marshall is a skilled commander and has built up a powerful navy. Second, Sun is inspired by Alexander the Great and is destined to conquer a whole bunch of shit. I'm not spoiling anything, because that the main tagline and some of the references are painfully obviously, like Sun's battlecruiser named Boukephalous, but the whole book totters under the weight of historical analogies and a sense of capital-D Destiny rather than actually doing any world building or characterization.

We meet Sun coming back from her first victory, but still unable to earn what she truly wants in her mother's approval. Court intrigue swirling around her, connected to her foreign father and a secret project to gain the loyalty of the Phene empire's most fanatical soldiers. But it's not really actual intrigue so much as stagey Intrigue, characters making outlandish boasts, threats, and declarations of secrecy. Worse, the primary point-of-view swerves to Persephone Lee, a daughter of one of the seven great houses that rule Chaonia (it's a very flawed Republic). She's ducked out from family responsibility by enrolling in the military academy as a commoner under an assumed name, but is called back to replace her assassinated brother as one of Sun's Companions. Perse is an utter wet blanket, who mostly is around to admire Sun and be doubtful of her place near Sun. There's roughly 200 pages of slogging filler, dribbles of slice-of-life which seem to mostly be about an idiotic propaganda show called Channel Idol, and then the Phene empire mounts an impossibly bold attack. There's another 200 pages of serviceable action with land and space battles, though again it is so incredibly generic that it could come from literally any science fiction written since 1960, and Sun wins. Hooray.

Space opera is full of military geniuses. Ender Wiggin, Miles Vorkosigan, and Honor Harrington spring to mind. But I believe their genius because the story tells us the rules of warfare and how they break them. And even when they win crushing victories, it hurts on a personal level. Neither is true here, and it absolutely robs the military action of any tension or drama. The other major flaw is personal. All these characters feel like American kids, not militaristic noble scions. The "fun" part of fiction is that the fate of worlds is in the hands of hormonal erratic kids barely old enough to legally drink, as opposed to decrepit and senile gerontocrats. Sun's Companions and the nobles of Lee House are a wasted group of stock characters who mostly stand around to say "wow Princess Sun, looking good." I firmly believe that the stories of chivalric societies are so full of things like courtly love and undying loyalty because the actually reality was lots of adultery and betrayal, which are much more interesting subjects for a book. Again, Red Rising and theNew Moon series handle larger than life emotions and coming of age in a much more engaging way.

There are decent moments in this book, which serve to highlight how dismal most of it is. An actually sparking confrontation between two Yele admirals who disagree about how to contain Chaonia. An escape from massive sea monsters on boats. The Riders, the Janus-faced hivemind that holds the Phene Empire together with psychic FTL communication. And while Princess Sun is a lesbian, or at least female favoring bi, it barely comes up. Chaonia has Asian influences in names and cuisine, but it's P.F. Chang Americanized orientalism with nothing below the surface. Yoon Ha Lee, Aliette de Bodard, and the whole contemporary Chinese SF movement are actually writing non-Western scifi and a lot of it is quite good. While I'm all for more diversity in fiction, it feels so ham-handed here.

And ultimately, this book is just too long at 500+ pages. Even if you want to read pap, there's better pap. Serves me right for taking book recommendations off Twitter.