Yoon Ha Lee is rapidly becoming one of my favorite new talents. This short-story collection contains 16 of his favorite works, covering the usual themes: weapons and war criminals, betrayals and apocalypses, symbols and shadows, a high-tension mixture of math, calligraphy, and Eastern mysticism.

If you like what Lee is about, you probably like a whole lot. It feels a lot like H.P. Lovecraft meets Alistair Reynolds, but Lee is by far a better writer than the two of them. If you don't like it, you'll probably find the stories bleak and abstract. And we're all free have different opinions, but if you can't enjoy a story about a gun that erases the target's ancestors from history, leaving the shooter in an alternate universe, than I don't even know what.

Robot Dreams is a collection of stories from the latter half of Asimov's career, studded with some genuine gems (The Last Question, The Ugly Little Boy, Franchise, Hostess), and display his considerable amount of talent. There are a few robot stories at the beginning, but this book centers mostly around Multivac, the great mainframe computer, and a tingling sense of cosmological alienation. Humankind repeatedly turns over vital creative and communal tasks to invisible and arcane machinery, separated from the great masses by a cadre of technician-priests. Or it turns out that our whole civilization is an experiment by cold and vasty intelligence, and we are nearing the point where they decide data collection is over. Asimov is usually seen as one of the cuddlier of the 'greats', less militaristic than Heinlein, less mathematical than Clarke. A more thorough assessment reveals a stark and chilly author, with a deep streak of misanthropy.

And for my own records, that Asimov story about using humans trained in mental math to replace expensive military computers is "The Feeling of Power."

ADHD Nation is an important look at the history and widespread use of stimulant medication to treat ADHD. Schwarz delivers a detailed historical account, punching up what could be a rather dry narrative by focusing on the career of Dr. Keith Conners, an elderly childhood psychiatrist who was a key figure in popularizing the widely used Conners Scale for diagnosing ADHD and who has since turned against the disorder, and Jamison Monroe and Kristin Parber, two young adults who's diagnosis of ADHD served as an entry point to substance abuse problems, and who recovered to run a rehab center.

The story bounces across America, and from the 1930s onwards, but always returns to two main themes. First, the medications used to treat ADHD are potent stimulants which are frequently abused by patients seeking stronger highs. Second, ADHD itself is a product of Big Pharma, an artificial market by barely-legal ploys involving hidden payments to influential doctors, consumer advertising that bypass FDA regulations by not mentioning drug names, and scientific malpractice via poorly designed studies.

I literally wrote my dissertation on this topic, and on the one hand, Schwarz isn't wrong on any factual particular. He's right to target "ADHD is both under-diagnosed and over-diagnosed" as a meaningless cliche, and his expose of the very fragmentary system whereby serious stimulants can be prescribed indefinitely on the basis of five minute interview. On the other hand, he's not an academic, and that means that he lacks a strong idea of how medical research should be done, or what counts as trustworthy information about psychiatry for the public. The focus on a handful of very serious cases of drug abuse obscures whether an initial prescription of stimulants lead to ongoing problems (post hoc ergo propter hoc), or the systematic effects on millions of kids who are neither ADHD wrecks, nor stimulated into amphetamine psychosis. A similar focus on ADHD purely as a product of marketing ignores the fact that it fits into a very real hole in our society, an anxiety about merit and competition and fairness that would exist with or without the drugs.

A good book, and one which I wish had come out a few years earlier, so I could have included it in my diss, but not the last word on ADHD.

Obviously I'm a fan of Cordwainer Smith, though I as mentioned, his longer works left me cold. Nostrilia is the keystone in the Rediscovery of Man arc, 15000 years in the future when the Lords of the Instrumentality return Old Old Earth to danger and vice, and the Underpeople (animals made to look like humans) rise to join the community of sentient beings in their own way. This book is almost indescribably strange, a picaresque romp through the dark of Jungian soul, and the heights of human ambition.

I don't know what Star Maker is, but it's sure not a novel. An Englishman lying on a hillside is mentally carried into deep space, where after frolicking with the stars, he enters into telepathic communion with a member of a race of Other Men, intelligent aliens with a society based on taste as our is based on sight. From this initial point, Stapledon explores a diverse galaxy of intelligent aliens evolved on different lines, using the expanding collective consciousness as lens. Each society is beset by a kind of industrial crisis, taking different forms, but generally a conflict between anarchic individualism, tribal primitivism, and oppressive totalitarianism. Species which transcend their crisis enter into a utopian society, and telepathic community with the galactic whole, which defeats war itself, has a brief conflict between planetary species and the living star, and then settles into perfecting its collective mentality in an attempt to reach the supreme being, which the collective intelligence deems the Star Maker. Eventually, this immensely wise intelligence finds its creator, which is immensely greater, and has created many universes operating on many laws of good and evil.

It's a fantastic cosmological voyage and speculation, but almost entirely devoid of plot or character. And in the end, it's shockingly conventional. The Star Maker is... basically the Christian Gods. Capitalist societies reach a historical crisis, which either kills them or transforms them into Marx's utopian communism. A lot of ideas which have become stock in scifi seem to have appeared here first, and it's an ambitious book, but one which I can't honestly recommend.

On the upside, The Hangman's Daughter nails 17th century Germany in a way that say, 1632 absolutely did not. The world of this small German town, its dense web of rumor, honor, misdeeds, piety, and magic felt very alive and very real. The protagonists were more 'modern' in the sense they wanted evidence for their actions, to marry for love, and the like, but they were not just 20th century attitudes implanted in the 17th century.

The story concerns a series of murdered children, and allegations of witchcraft which could tear this city apart. It's up to the hangman, Jakob Kuisl, the physician's son, and the hangman's daughter Magdalena, to get to the bottom of the matter before Walpurgisnach, and an innocent women dies. Another review described the plot as a "scooby-doo", and it's basically that. Old men, (admittedly lethal) scares, and a fair amount of money at the bottom of everything. I thought the translation was basically fine, and that the problems with the novel were more structural.

The Pentagon's Brain is a decent overview of DARPA's long history of being 10-20 years ahead of the technological curve, that unfortunately trends towards the most sensational angle on DARPA's operations, rather than developing a more nuanced understanding of the complexities involved in military R&D. Jacobsen lays out the book in four broad arcs:

The early Cold War focused on hydrogen bombs and rockets. The Vietnam War saw a shift towards gimcrack gadgets, some of which were highly successful (the M-16), some which had massive unintended consequences (Agent Orange), and some which were billion dollar failures (McNamara's electronic fence). Early attempts to understand the minds of Vietnamese villagers are almost played for laughs, with nuclear physicists overseeing social science programs. The late Cold War saw some of DARPA's biggest successes, with the ARPANET and stealth aircraft, but also a diversion into biological warfare defense that has yet to pay any concrete dividends. The post 9/11 era is dominated by fiascos. The public collapse of the Orwellian Total Information Awareness program, which would sluice through electronic data for terrorist signatures, and which was publicly shut down, but privately classified and divided out to the NSA, CIA, an FBI. Enhancing Human Performance is use to convey Frankensteinian fears of super-soldiers and mind control, with little discussion of what was actually deployed in 15 years (basically nothing). The Human Terrain Team project is an unethical boondoggle. Robotics are one bright spot in recent years.

Jacobsen is best when she sticks to her sources, getting old war stories out of 90 year old atomic physicists and the like. She's weaker at detailed documentary analysis, but the synthetic overview of almost 60 years of R&D breakthroughs is a useful first stop.

So this is it?

There's a quote that I think sums up the series pretty well, from one of the characters in the first book, something along the lines of "Who cares about the Obelisks? Just another deadciv ruin."

The story runs on three parallel tracks. Two are familiar, one follow Essun as she journeys with the comm of Castrima across the wastes, and towards her destiny of recapturing the moon and ending the Seasons. A second follows Nassum and Schaffa, heading towards a similar journey and apotheosis. And the third is a prequel starring Hoa, a child bred to be the initiator of a great arcane engine, and who's rebellion starts the war between mankind and a living Evil Earth.

The precision of the language from the first book is kicked over in favor of densely woven descriptions of crystals and magic and chaos, burying the reader in a rockslide of details. The clinical, exacting webs of pain and retribution are tangled into generalized outrage against the universe, and a new system of power that demands sacrifice by transmuting sorcerers like Essun and Nassum into rock.

The first book in the series had an almost magical tension between circumstance and individuality, and an ironic and acid ethos: your story doesn't matter vs one person can break the world; just do what is necessary vs necessity is never just. Great writing is ineffable, and the second book slipped and the third one just fell flat for me, for reasons in the characters, settings, and words. It's okay, I just wish the whole thing ended in a better epiphany.

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

With The Delirium Brief, Stross reaches an aggressive midgame of The Laundry series. The past five books were setting pieces on the board, moving pawns, feint with a knight or bishop. Now, he savagely uses those pieces, cutting down whole swaths of the setting. Expect to see all your favorites from the series to show up, don't expect them to survive, at least not with all their parts...

In the wake of the CASE NIGHTMARE RED incursion in Yorkshire, the Laundry is very much blown and very much in everyone's bad graces. With thousands dead, and billions of pounds of property damage, it's hard to point out that hey, without us you'd be talking megadeaths. The situation is so bad that Bob Howard is running PR, since everyone else is too disgraced. The Laundry might have a full arsenal of banishment rounds and SCORPION SCARE basilisk guns, but they're no match for a new breed of cultists, chanting horrific words like "privatization", "outsourcing", "reorganization", "efficiency", and "ISO compatible."

Yes, friends, The Laundry is summarily shuttered on a Monday morning, pending a new occult intelligence agency provided by an American company, Golden Promise Security. Golden Promise is an arm of the Church of the New Flesh, the baddies of The Apocalypse Codex, who somehow survived being stranded on a lifeless planet with a dead elder god. The Reverend Raymond Schiller has a new parasite that's even creepier, and a new plan to suborn the British government, either in service or in fear of whatever nasty has taken over the United States.

The first two thirds are a slow burn of bureaucratic intrigue and contingency plans, but the last section explodes in kinetic and arcane violence, as the underground remnants of The Laundry throw in everything they have against Schiller, including making a bad alliance with a Lesser Evil Elder God, on the basis that the thing that just wants to be adulated is better than the one that wants to eat your soul.

As always, it's a pleasure to be back with Bob, and the whole Mahogany Row or Deeply Scary Sorcerers finally makes sense. I actually enjoy Stross's cutting remarks on bureaucracy and the drugs-and-sex-and-corruption at the top echelons of society. Nobody gets mad like a Scottish Socialist. That said, I feel like this book could have used another edit for style, and a more judicious use of call-backs. I like this series a lot, and I often thought "who was that, and when they did first show up?"

As the introductory essay makes clear, California is a state at home with the uncanny. Defined by generations of seekers and dreamers, from the Gold Rush to Hollywood to Silicon Valley, California is the kind of place where strange and normal are neighbors in the same ticky-tacky subdivision. What you get in this collection are 26 stories (and beautiful cover artworks) about California ranging from horror to fantasy to scifi, but mostly in that liminal gothic slipstream genre pioneered by (adopted) Californian Ray Bradbury.

The stories are universally strong, by well-known masters of short form fictions. I particularly liked S. Qiouyi Lu's "From Something Emerging" and Laura Blackwell's "The One Thing I Can Never Tell Julie", but everybody will have their own favorites. The settings and themes of the story vary, but are biased towards ordinary working people, small towns, and the suburbs of San Francisco. There are no starlets and venture capital unicorns to be found. Strange California is a little outside my usual reading, but it's quite enjoyable. Although as an Angelo, I wish we'd had more than one story set in L.A. So it goes.