From a group of RPG authors and contemporary sci-fi standouts (Ken Liu, Madeline Ashby, Karin Lowachee), comes a solid collection of stories set in the dark cosmos of Eclipse Phase.

I've got mixed feelings on Eclipse Phase the RPG. On the one hand, the setting a cool mashup of my man Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, The Singularity, and H.P. Lovecraft. On the other hand, the rules are a mess that actively oppose the fiction of the game. And on the third augmented cyborg hand, it doesn't do a good job of giving people comprehensible and cool things to explore and do, or the sense that there's much life in transhuman culture. This collection does a little in that direction, but mostly just hits on the familiar tropes of action and horror. Firewall team investigates weird events, finds mutilated bodies, there's a shootout, reboot from backups and try again. On the plus side, there's a strong editorial vision that maintains consistency with the setting throughout. The flip-side of that is that the stories wind up feeling and sounding very similar, and I felt that a few could have been trimmed.

The two stories that stood out were "Prix Fixe" by Andrew Penn Romine, where wealthy gourmet follows a celebrity chef to a hidden asteroid restaurant to discover that the next leap in cuisine is more than she bargained for, and "Stray Thoughts" by F. Wesley Schneider, which dials down the hypertech to focus on a noir story about a Venusian private eye and her son. "White Hempen Sleeves" by Ken Liu, leads the collection and puts the rest of the standard tales to shame.

Fans of Eclipse Phase will like this collection, sci-fi fans in general less so.

The Game Inventor's Guidebook is a decent and breezy--if outdated--guide to how to go from a games hobbyist to a games inventor. Tinsman has the games business chops, as the acquisitions guy for Wizards of the Coast, he worked on Magic: the Gathering and Curses and played about 150 new games a year. This book is his attempt to look inside the business of games, and help people break in. As with most business how-tos, it's only a fraction of what the author knows, but's it an important fraction. This book provides a basic overview of the major players and types of companies in the business: I enjoyed the interview with Rob Knizia, and how hopeless publish an adult casual game with a major company seems. Just knowing how to think about agents and publishers is useful, even if the specific lists are a decade old.

What's most useful is the knowledge that 90% of games are thrown away unread. Many amateurs tend to design heartbreakers ("It's just like Monopoly, but...") or over-complicated monsters that are too expensive to produce and impossible to learn. Creativity and elegance are things that any aspiring game designer should strive for, along with an awareness that this is not career for people in it solely for the money.

Ultimately, the problem is that this is a perishable book. Tinsman isn't quite insightful enough to provide eternal wisdom for a changing industry.
The two biggest changes that an updated version would have to take into account are the rise of euro-style games in the US (They're mentioned, along with Spiel de Jahres, but they've exploded since then), and Kickstarter/crowd-funding as a way to publish indie games.

Callaway didn't write this book for us. He wrote it for his sons, and for himself. But it got published, and I read it, so here we are with a review.

The long introduction to this book is Callaway's childhood in Alabama, which he regards as idyllic despite segregation, and then a middle-class adolescence in New Canaan, Connecticut, which he found alienating and pointless. Callaway drifted through high school, and after flunking out of college for the third time, joined the Army because he was going to be drafted anyways. He finally found his talent at bootcamp, went to Officer Candidate School, and then Vietnam as a platoon leader with the 9th Infantry Division.

The writing is, well, serviceable is about the kindest way I can describe it. This memoir was written nearly 40 years after the events it concerns, and memory gets worn smooth. I was idly flipping through, when on page 68 Callaway describes a soldier under his command getting shot in the jaw in front of him, which was the first moment in this book with gut-wrenching immediacy. Callaway lost a lot of friends in Vietnam, and writes movingly about grief in a combat zone, but these are short passages buried in a mass of memories that have lost their finer details and generalities about the war.

It's a shame, because Callaway had some unique experiences. He was a better-than-average platoon commander, with all the duty, courage, and tactical skill that entails (note: I've railed against the six month Vietnam combat tour for officers in other places, but Callaway argues he was totally spent at the end, and continuing in command would have gotten himself and a lot of other Americans killed from sheer exhaustion. Hard to disagree with the man.) Afterwards, Callaway joined the Special Forces and had a REMF job in the midst of absolutely insane luxury and financial corruption. When he retired from the Army and went back to college, he protested the war and co-taught a class on Radical Marxism under the guidance of Howard Zinn. All of this is super interesting, but Callaway doesn't have the chops as a memoirist to bring these stories back to life in the way that they deserve. I applaud him for writing this book, but I can't honestly recommend that people beyond his friends and family should read it.

Fields of Blood is an add on for fantasy d20 that describes a system for realm management and mass battles. Overall, the realm system is comprehensive and workable, if clunky. With provinces generating different amounts of resources based on improvements, tax rates, government styles, and random events, it immediately has me reaching for a spreadsheet. I'm not sure that there's a way to do this sort of thing elegantly, particularly in the d20 system, but expect to do a lot of calculation to watch your realm grown.

The second part of the rules are a mass battle system. Regular d20 stats are translated into Field of Battle stats through yet more formulas (the phrase "divide by five and round down" appears several times), soldiers are group in companies of 100 men, generals are assigned, and battle takes place in a kind of Warhammer-like framework. This is where I start to get have doubts about balance. Dealing damage is a two-stage attack roll, first to hit and then to toughness, and most units can take take two hits. The game gives example default stats for a regular medium infantry unit, your basic trained soldiery, who hit each other on a 14 and deal damage on an 11. This means that any attack between identical example infantry has a 16.5% to go through, which means that standard infantry combat is slow, maybe 10 rounds of attacks. Worse, the example heavy cavalry unit, which costs twice as much the medium infantry, is effectively invulnerable to the medium infantry with about a 1% chance to get hurt. And these are the examples printed in the book! I need to look at the system in more depth, but I'm fairly sure that it can be broken like dry spaghetti.

The last third of the book has lots of familiar D&D spells and monsters translated to work with Fields of Blood, but I would've have really liked to see more examples of troops that might actually show up, as opposed to stats for armies of Achaierai, Driders, every type of Giant, Golem, and Elemental, and outsiders from Astral Devas to Vrocks.

I have some design disagreements as well. This book doesn't handle magic items gracefully. That standard medium infantry unit costs as much per season in upkeep as a Wand of Fireballs. I don't think I need to say what the equivalent of a modern grenade launcher would do to a shield wall. For all the focus on magic and management, there's little about how communication spells and Decanters of Endless Water would change warfare. The system for assigning heroes to lead units is clunky, even by the standards of Field of Blood. And the math errors may make the battle system completely unbalanced.

Not by the Book is a short memoir, leavened by above-average writing (Smith became a reporter and cartoonist after the war) and some humor, but ultimately slightly misleading. An ROTC cadet from Georgetown, Smith found himself funneled into the very bottom of the military intelligence apparatus. He was lucky. He had a "safe" job at the HQ of the Americal Division (later notorious for the My Lai Massacre), which was about the safest spot for a green Lieutenant to be I Corps in 68-69. Safe is of course relative, with regular rocket attacks, sapper infiltration, and Vietnam in general. Of Smith's friends, one lost an arm, one went insane, and one was imprisoned for raping a child.

The actual job was, well, bored with interludes of terror covers it well. First there was a lot of paper shuffling, where it turned out that captured document exploitation was being handled by one overworked Private who didn't and couldn't care about the difference between propaganda leaflets, diaries, and high-valued captured orders. Smith worked up something that got useful information down to the Combined Document Exploitation Center in Saigon and intelligence back up in less than a week. This system processed between 30,000 and 50,000 pages in his time with the Division, although never to the standards of Smith's COs. The bad part of the job were the interrogations, and separating out the handful of VC or NVA from the masses of innocent civilians caught up in battalion sweeps. With his broken Vietnamese, Smith could stumble through some of the interrogations. The ugly parts where when his CO assigned him to conduct interrogations in a abattoir of a field hospital, trying to get information out of wounded VC before they died. When Smith was rotated to his next assignment, this job was split across three officers to spare their minds.

There was plenty of Vietnam Chaos. Smith was assigned to lead a convoy of clerks and translators on Route 1 (The "Street Without Joy") so Division could demonstrate to Battalion that it controlled the vehicles. He was sent into a hot LZ to secure the vital intelligence of Vietnamese grave scrolls under the assumption they were secret Chinese orders. The entire "black list" of high value VC commanders in I Corps turned out to be bunk, because American typewriters lacked the diacritic marks to indicate Vietnamese tones. Smith also wound up in command of a Battalion Military Intelligence Team nicknamed "The Dirty Dozen" because of their partying and black-market thieving. For the most part, they seemed like they were trying to do their job with a minimum of violence (some violence, as Smith and one of his subordinates both wound up beating a prisoner severely).

The best moment is Smith's description of "combat" during his convoy. He saw and heard his unit under fire, went for the radio, and regained his senses three hours later, everybody fine, nobody looking at him like he had been gibbering nonsense. No one else saw that they were under fire. But for three hours on a dangerous mission, Smith was commanding purely by reflex and no one noticed. The mind plays tricks.

The book closes with some simple lessons learned, which were promptly ignored. The best "simple" interrogation technique (as far as any of this is simple) is to demonstrate to a prisoner that you already know everything, so it doesn't hurt if they give you a few more pieces. Interrogators need close access to order of battle info. Translators are unreliable, and the Army needs to get language capacity as close to the front lines as possible. Soldiers need to know what happens to prisoners, so they'll treat them correctly, which means that interrogators have to send reports back to capturing units. Currently, all HUMINT is classified unless otherwise specified, which means the people who need it most can't see it.

Supercarriers is a beautifully photographed coffee table book of a variety of American carriers in the mid-1980s, with blurbs explaining daily life. Today, in an age of Google images and HD video on your phone, military photos are cheap, but the authors managed to capture naval aviation at one of its most diverse times, with nine planes and two helicopters, some still in traditional bright colors as opposed to low-visibility grey. The star of the show is the F-14 Tomcat (cue Danger Zone), but there's plenty of love for A-7 Corsairs, EA-6B Prowlers, and the less glamorous support planes that keep the carrier safe and supplied.

Fluffy sci-fi inflected urban fantasy, where your usual naive young woman stumbles into a world of magic and mystery. In this case, that world is the ability to sense the memories of dead people around powerful objects, as mediated through a cranky old Chinese woman, and pursued by a Glass-wearing tech start-up. There's a nice sense of Seattle as a place and Joanna as an amputee, but mostly things just happen, young women are cutesy and confused in a way that seems very XOJane, and the mystery of the secret world and its war doesn't really go anywhere.

mid-70s British popular history book about the bomber. As might be expected, it focuses almost entirely on Bomber Command and the Nazis in WW2, with some decent background on the development of specialized bombers during WW1. Clark argues that the strategic bomber as a unitary war-winning force never really had an honest chance to prove itself, with both the Luftwaffe and the Allies diverted away from the "strategic" objective of leveling enemy cities to tactical missions like smashing rail-lines in France prior to Operation Overlord. Even so, low accuracy and high attrition rates meant that the pre-nuclear strategic bomber doctrine of Douhet and Mitchell might not have been workable, given the psychological resilience of civilians. Carriers in the Pacific get a mention, along with the weakness of airpower in Korea and Vietnam, but this book misses important and interesting stuff about tactical and nuclear bomber missions. Lots of photos, the best of which are borrowed from Nazi propaganda, and lots more blurry messes.

I'd have really enjoyed this book when I was 12, but it hasn't aged well.

Bodyguard of Lies is a massive brick of a book focusing on the deadly game of deceit and espionage between British and German intelligence agencies around the D-Day Landings. While Fortitude North, the well-known creation of a fake army under the command of General Patton to pin Nazi reserves as Pas de Calais during the invasion of Normandy, is the climax of the book, Brown covers everything, from the early days of the Phony War, through the desperate aftermath of Dunkirk and the clever ruses in North Africa. His command of the facts is impeccable, based on dozens of interviews and (at the time) recently declassified reports. The only area where I think material has been made available today is Bletchley Park, which was Top Secret right up until Bodyguard of Lies was published.

Brown takes a rather unique tack, focusing on the deception operation as the province of a small group of Etonian elites, the true masters of the British Empire, who orchestrated the movement of millions of men to produce a coherent and false picture for Hitler. Against them were matched the Prussian old guard, exemplified by the Abwehr spymaster Canaris, loyal to Germany and trying to move against Hitler. While the SOE was "setting Europe ablaze", a cadre of anti-Hitler German generals tried again and again to set up a coup with assurance of some sort of free Germany in the aftermath. This Schwarze Kappelle--Black Orchestra, made multiple attempts on Hitler's life, all thwarted through unlikely chances, but never achieved their political ends. The Allies already had all the intelligence they needed on Nazi intentions thanks to Ultra radio decryption, and FDR's policy of unconditional surrender made it hard to offer terms. I've divided on this stance. On the one hand, shortening the war with a surrender would have saved millions of lives. On the other hand, Aldo Raines has some good points on what Nazis deserve.

I wish there had been a little bit more on the early special forces, the SAS and SBS and SOE, and commando warfare. For all it's key importance, the XX Committee and the fact that every single Nazi spy in England was turned into a British agent didn't get a chapter to itself. But over all, Bodyguard of Lies is a detailed compilation of a very secret war.

"Neoliberalism" is a slippery word, perhaps most prominently deployed as an insult against the target of a Medium.com thinkpiece. This scholarly collection takes a new and well-evidenced line of reasoning, that the forms of hybrid governance called 'neoliberal' extend rather than inhibit State power, and the origins of neoliberalism as practice stretch back to the Early Cold War, rather than the 80s Reagan/Thatcher revolution.

The chapters on theory, aside from the first one, are a little floppy for my tastes. Yes, the State maintains the right of decision and arbitration on property, yes the State is a 'specific form of arrangements' (almost impossible to parody). The empirical chapters, on biological warfare and the biotech revolution under Nixon, sovereign wealth funds, and private military contractors and the "securitization" of foreign policy provide interesting looks on pressing issues, and how the State can create private markets and actors to achieve their ends.