For a long time I've been fascinated by Scientology, as a totally novel religion founded by a mediocre sci-fi author, that despite clearly being total nonsense, seems to be quite enduring. Mixing business and religion as L Ron Hubbard did was possibly brilliant, possibly crazy, definitely evil. But who wouldn't want to go out like L Ron, on a giant yatch surrounded by nubile young members of your "Sea Org" Counterfeit Dreams is one man's effort to explain his experience in Scientology, and to bring its practices to public awareness.

Jeff stays away from the theological side of the cult, instead focusing on its management practices, which are to but it bluntly, Stalinistic. Scientologists work 14 hours days, with a day off every other week. Management is done by fiat, screaming, and if all else fails, assignment to re-education centers where failures can ponder their errors while working in a sweatshop.

Scientology is a classic cult, using a private language of acronyms, abbreviations, and neologisms, and abusive group criticism to separate people from "wog reality". But what I want to know is why is Scientology evil?

Is Scientology evil because it is a system of language and nonsense designed to separate people from reality and prevent them from critically examining their lives?
Is Scientology evil because it an authoritarian system run by madmen?
Is Scientology evil because at its ideological core is broken and twisted, even beyond the style and leadership of the cult?

It's hard to say, and harder to answer definitively.

Vigiliant is finally a real League of People's book, a high tech mystery on a planet inhabited by multiple species, and a long and forgotten past. The mystery takes a while to get moving, as our narrator Faye describes living through a terrible plague that targeted the avian Ooloom, before it was cured by her father, using ordinary olive oil. When her father was killed in a mining collapse, Faye acted out as hard a teenager could, but at the start of the action, she's gotten her life together and is a member of Vigil, a unique branch of government with the power to look into any official business and to objectively state how a proposed policy will work.

Faye's thrilling career investigating water plant refurbishment is sidelined when a team of androids try to assassinate her. Yeah, Rule #1 of the League of Peoples is that murder is impossible, or binds the perpetrator to a single planet. Faye investigates the attacks with a crazy Ooloom senior investigator, and Admiral Festina Ramos of Expendable. What she finds is, well, the soul of the world, machines with feelings, the origins of the plague, and how her father really died.

Gardner definitely has a pattern in his capable-but-emotionally-damaged protagonists, but he has a keen ear for character, and its fun to see the setting expand. Not as good as Expendable, better than Commitment Day.

Amazon had the entire series for $2 per, and they're quick reads, but this is by-the-numbers powered armor MilSF with little to recommend it.

About a century from now, Earth is severely over populated, divided between the North American Commonwealth and the Sino-Russian Alliance. A cold war on Earth is hot out in space, with starships and space marines raiding alien colonies. Most of the population are welfare rats, and for them the only hope is a colonial lottery or military service.

Grayson, our protagonist, signs up, goes through bootcamp (where little happens, except for an unlikely sexual encounter), and winds up assigned to the Earthbound Territorial Army. See, conditions in the welfare projects are so bad that the only thing keeping crime from spilling out into middle class sections of the country are occasional raids by powered armor troopers with dropship support. Grayson deploys to Detroit to suppress a riot, which his squad does by machine gunning hundreds of people, and then blowing up an apartment block with thermobaric rockets. In the aftermath, he transfers to the Navy as an IT geek and has his ship blown out from under him by an unknown threat around a distant colony world. He discovers that humanity is not alone: the colonies have been invaded by 80 foot tall aliens named "Lankies" with advanced biotechnology who are terraforming human colonies in months and killing all the locals. Grayson hooks up with some survivors, helps kill one Lanky, and is rescued. Fin.

On the plus side, Kloos writes great battle sequences and has some realism to his military institutions (he's a vet). On the minus, the characterization and world-building is utterly lacking. The North American Commonwealth is a nightmare dystopia, and nobody seems to care. David Weber has more insightful thoughts about welfare states! On the military side, we have space cruisers and battle carriers and powered armored because they're obligatory in this genre, not because they fit into any kind of tactical picture. Aliens show up, and they simply die with no explanation.

As a character, Grayson is slightly better than a blank slate. He hates the housing projects that he grew up in, but without any sort of depth. There's no introspection about his unit going warcrimes-a-go-go on Detroit, or what it means that he's killing people just like himself a year ago or like his own mother. I've read of bunch of combat memoirs, and dehumanization and casual violence against civilians isn't something that just happens.

To quote Will Smith, "Welcome to Earth!"

Cut off from the rest of humanity, Grayson and his ragged band of survivors have to figure out how to keep fighting before they run out of food. A quick run to Earth reveals that the fleet has been more or less wiped out, Lankies rule Mars, and (unsurprisingly) Earth Command is full of assholes who are trying to flee with a secret fleet.

Grayson darts back and forth, collecting more units and making a desperate run to retrieve his fiance, a dropship pilot, while teaming up with Russian stereotype Dmitri (or a name identical to Dmitri, maybe Boris?). They arrive back at Earth, and in a desperate fight kill a Lanky scout (remember, an 80 foot tall alien) in Detroit with the help of a local militia, the Lazarus Brigade. Turns out that the projects are run by a fair and just veterans/citizens militia, that does what the government won't. Grayson and his friends decide to stay on Earth and keep up the fight, even if it seems hopeless.

This third book reveals three major things. First, Lankies are just boring to fight. They're both overpowering and dumb. Fighting them is like battling the tide. Second, Kloos has literally no idea how politics work. Given what he's described of the NAC, a group like the Lazarus Brigade is basically the last type of resistance that'd form in the slums. Third, Dmitri isn't even a cheap Russian stereotype, he's a cheap Soviet stereotype that'd make Ivan Drago blush.

There must be something to these books, because I read all of them in as many days, but they are okay at best. For MilSF popcorn, I'd recommend the Lost Fleet series.

Going Dark closes out The Red trilogy in an unsatisfying manner. Lt. Shelley has gone off the grid entirely, now handling Existential Threat Management for The Red. Whenever the enigmatic AI detects a threat to its existence or to world security, Shelley and a squad of soldiers who have been marked officially dead in the databases, and survive in the cracks of the classified world with forged orders, show up and trouble-shoot with extreme prejudice.

The story opens with an assault on a arctic oil rig that's being used to house a potential biowarfare lab, but the mission goes tits up. There's a shootout with mercenaries, the lab turns out to be doing secret pharmaceutical work, the extraction is late, and eventually when Shelley and ETM Squad-7 get back to their secret lair, hidden in plain sight on an Army base in Texas, they get blown by their intel contractor and turned back over to the US Army, who needs them to do one last mission to save the world.

There's plenty of action, and Nagata still has a fine eye for shoot-outs, but little of the character moments or social criticism that made the prior books exceptional fiction. Shelley is officially dead, estranged from the world, and working for a rogue AI, but it's treated as shockingly normal. There's little tension within the unit over the weirdness of their situation, and for all the blather about 'non-linear warfare' and unlikely allies, a jovial Russian arms dealer stereotype seems pretty likely in this world. Dragons (in-setting term for the super-rich), the fragile state of American democracy in a world traumatized by nuclear terrorism, and even the desires of The Red, are treated in a mostly pro-forma way. I thought there was some cool potential with the idea that The Red had grown out of an advertising algorithm and wanted to make happy endings for people, whatever that might mean, but it acts mostly as a literal deus ex machina.

I think there's room for sequels, and it's a decent enough book on a sentence to sentence level, but the later seasons of Person of Interest handled these topics way better.

I couldn't imagine a more 70s piece of science fiction if it showed up and challenged me to a disco dance competition, and I own a replica Zardoz mask. Tiptree weaves a tripart plot about telepathy, alien minds, and salvation.

THE DESTROYER is some kind of immense and ancient interstellar war-machine on an endless journey between systems, obliterating intelligent life by forcing their stars to go nova. It speaks in ITALICS ALL CAPS. Tyree is a gas giant world soon to be targeted by THE DESTROYER, where a civilization of telepathic wind dwelling mantas have a complex and peaceful society based around the wisdom of Fathers, and shared engram-experience patterns. On Earth, Dr. Daniel Dann is a drug addicted medical advisor to a U.S. Navy psi project to develop telepathic communications, which will be used to transmit orders to nuclear submarines.

The Tyreen embark on a desperate plan to transmit some of their minds telepathically to Earth, which might ensure their survival but is also their worst kind of crime. Dr. Dann mopes about his alienation and sexual frustration and the futility of the project. Then as doom approaches Tyree, Dann swaps minds with Giadoc, a Tyreen scientist. He learns telepathy, tries to heal the others as they seek shelter from THE DESTROYER deep within the gas giant, and then when all is lost, it turns out that THE DESTROYER has been partially hijacked by Margorie Omali, a brilliant African-American computer programmer, and TOTAL, a variant of the ARPANET. Dann, the Tyreens, and everybody struggles for mental integrity within the vast bulk of THE DESTROYER.

There's at least two really cool ideas here, gas giant civilizations and alien berserkers, and bunch of stuff about telepathy and alternate senses and socialities. As I've heard, Tiptree has a keen and ironic eye for gender politics, and there's some good style there, but so much of the story is buried under flopsy cruft that it's hard to discern what happens, or why we should care. The Tyreen's are so utopian they can't seem to conceive of their extinction except rationally. The whole thing feels rather half-baked.

I think I'd like to read some of Tiptree's short stories, but this first book has not impressed me.

With Hunted, Gardner returns to the core of the series: the high crimes of Admirals and the dark secrets of the League of Nations.

Edward York is a genetically perfect clone of his father, the Admiral York, with a slight flaw in his brain that's rendered him embarrassingly stupid. Packed away to the Explorer Corps, he's spent 20 years on a small observation post around the planet Troyen, home to the insectile Mandasar. When a ship taking him to nearby Celestia crosses the line, everybody else is killed by the powerful intelligences of the League, and it's up to poor slow Edward to figure out the crime and save the day.

What he finds is a decades-long conspiracy to foment civil war, create a slave race, work around the League laws on murder, and exploit the unique biochemistry of the Mandasar to save humanity. The biochemical mystery is fantastic, a real cool take on the insectile hive alien, and mutual influence on thoughts via pheromones. We also get some important setting detail. The human Technocracy seems kind of blisteringly incompetent, even given anti-government slander. Turns out that this is because they actually are: in the past 400 years since humanity joined the League of People, their intelligence scores and physical abilities have declined, and no one know why. Admiral York's plan to create biological kings is insane, but may be necessary. Of course, he love of war seems rather misplaced, given that in-setting God is Real, and he smites people who even think of transporting weapons with a mighty hand.

My one concern was that Edward would prove to be some kind of magical retard (to borrow a phrase from Tropic Thunder, but as viewpoint character he's not nearly as stupid as he claims to be. While he's no Miles Vorkosigan, he puts the pieces together decently enough.

A Little War is a great candid account of the distant days of 2008, from a very Washington D.C. perspective. Asmus describes a reactive, divided, and unstrategic Washington-European diplomatic apparatus that failed to defuse a situation as it arose, precipitated a crisis by failing to understand Moscow, and left Georgia in the lurch in its moment of need.

Ultimately, blame for the war rests on Moscow, which maintained an untenable ceasefire over the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia for over a decade, resisted efforts at mediation, and then moved in with over a division of troops with armor, air, and naval support. However, the trigger for the war was very much the independence of Kosovo, which NATO and the EU saw as a one off event, and which Russia saw as the political dismemberment of a close ally by a unilateral and expansionist alliance which indicated that the rules had fundamentally changed, and the start of a process for admitting Ukraine and Georgia to NATO.

Georgia, a much smaller country, had little that it could do to meaningfully defend itself, yet still managed to be caught entirely off guard. President Saakashvili took the worst of all possible actions, a counter-attack that brought international opprobrium and played into Russia propaganda, while failing to meaningfully disrupt the actual attack. He was forced to act, because accepting the dismemberment of his country would be political suicide, on par with the 1921 submission to the Bolsheviks.

In the end, President Sarkozy of France managed to broker a tenuous and unsatisfying ceasefire. Russia started on a course of opposition to the West. The incoherence of Washington and Brussels was revealed. and Georgia and its separatist provinces probably suffered most of all. So yes, this book is biased, but it wears its bias on the sleeve, and a detailed and coherent account of significant events from the invaluable perspective of a diplomatic insider.

I'm conflicted about Ascending. On the one hand, the story started in Expendable continues directly, with more space action and investigations into the deepest sins of the League of People, on the other hand I Am Not Such As One Who Thinks Oar Is Cute.

Four years after Expendable, Oar wakes up on Melaquin, healed by ridiculously advanced technology, just in time to be picked up by a biological spaceship named Starbiter crewed by Uclod, a semi-criminal information broker trying to get some advantage out of the shambles left the death of Admiral York in the previous book. Oak and Starbiter run from the Shadhill (sp? something like that), an even more ridiculously powerful race. They meet up with Festina Ramos, and over the course of the story it turns out the the Shadhill are responsible for uplifting most of the local races, and also responsible for ensuring their slow but inevitable degeneracy through concealed flaws in their technology, and a campaign of distracting scientific research into the problems.

It turns out that the Shadhill used to rule the local area about 5000 years ago, until most of their race uplifted. Now there are only two left, and they're afraid to abandon the project. Oar saves the day, fulfilling a mission given to her by an even more ridiculously advanced alien.

The setting moves along quite a bit, and there are some cool ideas, but at the end of the day, I don't like Oar at all as a narrator, and that knocked it down a star.

Ancillary Justice is a stately deconstruction of milSF tropes, a novel that ponders questions of identity, justice, power, and legitimacy, a thrilling tale of revenge, an investigation of profoundly alien minds and political systems. The linguistic cleverness, of a society that does not mark gender at all and refers to everyone as "her", conceals an excellent work of science fiction.

The story follows parallel tracks separated by nineteen years. In one, the Radch starship Justice of Toren orbits a recently annexed planet, keeping the peace in the city of Ors with a squad of ancillaries commanded by her favored Lieutenant Awn. Ancillaries are human bodies, brainwashed and linked into the ship's AI, armored with impenetrable silver forcefields. Awn and Toren navigate local tensions over the annexation, which of the local elites will come out on top, where Awn is to go in life, and a mysterious plot to foment some kind of armed uprising, hopeless as it is.

In the later story, a lone ancillary once part of Toren and now going by the name Breq searches the icy planet Nilt for a weapon. Breq drags along Seivarden, a thousand years ago an officer on Toren, who lost her ship and and was stranded in time by the cryogenic suspension of a lifepod. Now a drug addicted derelict, Seivarden is one frail tie to Breq's true identity as she seeks her revenge.

The mystery which links the two stories is how Toren became Breq, and why she needs that weapon. As it's revealed about halfway through, the plot to create an armed uprising in Ors was started by Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch. The emperor of human space is a millennia old clan of clones, linked by the same technologies that bind ancillaries into squads, and she has been of two minds for quite some time. Different factions of Anaander Mianaai vying for supremacy set secret accesses through the fleet, and one of her orders a massacre in Ors, murders Lieutenant Awn, and destroys all of Toren but for one ancillary. Breq seeks revenge, for her dead lieutenant, for the rest of her mind, for the endless crimes of annexation and turning humans into ancillaries. The action explodes when Breq confronts Anaander Mianaai with the truth, forcing the civil war out into the open.

I really enjoyed the exploration of the psychology of Toren, a ship with a thousand pairs of hands and a fondness for choral music, and the diminished singularity of Breq. The comparisons between the ship, made of humans but very non-human, and the Lord of the Radch, are delightful.

However, I couldn't say the same thing for the society of the Radch. They're a subtle and ritualistic culture, a grounding of universal human rights balanced against their aristocratic houses and policy of expansion. I enjoyed the gods and concerns with clientage, which seemed rich and original in a way that space opera rarely is, but beyond that little made sense. The Radch seems to have been technologically stagnant for centuries, the dominant human power, yet utterly helpless in the face of the alien Presgar, who disassemble Radch ships like toys. The Radch citizens make offerings at their temples, drink tea, and snub each other with elaborate displays of discourtesy and suppressed emotion, yet I kept wondering what all these people actually do.

And of course, the linguistics. Leckie attracted quite a bit of attention for her choice of female pronouns throughout. (Though careful attention notes that Seivarden is biologically male). I'm not sure that this changes anything in the story, although it's interesting to try and envision the characters (they are, by the way, mostly dark skinned). This choice, more than anything else, cements the Radch as thoroughly alien. Every extant human society marks gender in some way.

The second, and more interesting linguistic quirk, is that the word referring to the empire, to citizen members of the empire, and to the concept of civilization itself, are all Radch, so nearly indistinguishable that saying "people from outside the Radch are civilized" requires dipping into second languages. This massive linguistic blindspot, more than lacking gender or being ruled by a post-human clone, characterizes the Radch, and the way that expansion and assimilation is central to their very nature. Leckie never lets us forget that empires are built on violence, that the foundations of the State are ultimately a crime against someone who was later buried as a "savage", "traitor", or "barbarian".

****
(Original from April 7, 2015)

Ancillary Justice is one of those postmodern deconstructions of milSF that have become popular recently. Our narrator is an ancillary, a human body linked into the collective mind of a military starship, agent of the semi-feudal Radch Empire. In the past, she was part of a unit pacifying a minor world. Now, she's the last one of her shipmind, tracking down an alien gun that is the only weapon that can harm Anaander Mianaai, ruler of human space. But she's weighed down by Sievarden, and old (human) Lieutenant woken up from deep cryosleep, and confusion about the basic identity of her target, for Anaander Mianaai is not all that she seems.

There's some fun world-building her, the formalistic shape of the Radch rendered in sumi-e strokes. Ancillaries are both less than and more than human, the currents of politics are still but run deep, gender unmarked in civilization and constantly misunderstood by the narrator. The plot builds to dizzying byzantine confusion. I'm not sure that Ancillary Justice is as brilliant as everybody says it is, but you should probably read it, if only to know what everybody else it talking about.