Jordan McKell is a freelance smuggler, taking jobs in dingy spaceport bars when he's offered a contract to take a strange ship with a seal cargo of alien artifacts to Earth. When one of the crew is murdered by a saboteur, and alerts are put out for him and the ship, McKell realizes that he's stumbled into something big. The cargo of the Icarus could upend an interstellar transport monopoly, and a lot of people want to make sure that they get the benefit. It's up to McKell to figure out who to trust in his crew of strangers, along with his partner, an alien Ixil who's a composite being.

Zahn blends gritty smuggler space opera a la Firefly or Han Solo with an Agatha Christie parlor murder. It's okay, though nothing to write home about. The setting seems cobbled together out of scifi tropes, rather than a cohesive vision of anything. And as a mystery, the alien tech allows for deus ex machina explanation of what happens, rather than a careful piecing together of clues. Finally, there's the twist. McKell isn't actually a smuggler, he's a deep undercover cop trying to bust a galactic crime lord. This makes some of his personality traits make more sense, but I'm not sure I like a bait and switch that big.

Sin in the Second City is salacious historical non-fiction about Chicago around 1900, starring the sisters Minna and Ada Everleigh, madams of the infamous Everleigh Club, the grandest brothel in a city of sin. The sisters ran a premium service, cultured girls at $50 a night plus drinks and tips, the almost legitimate tip of a vast enterprise of vice. Aldermen, European royalty, and millionaire heirs all came to party in a mansion with rooms decorated in mirrors, precious metals, and oriental fantasies.

But no party could last forever. Crusading reformers worked against 'White Slavery', where innocent girls were corrupted into prostitution with lies, drugs, and force. Preachers and prosecutors waged a decade long battle against corrupt political machines, and finally started putting the prostitutes in jail. The Everleighs got out just ahead of the crowd, taking their money and retiring to obscurity in New York, where they walked along Central Park, had a small literary circle, and obscured their past.

Abbott perhaps strays a bit too far into literary non-fiction here, inventing details which are probably right but also unverifiable. She does a masterful job making Chicago, and the sexual weirdness of the age, come alive.

Lyle Peripart is an average astronomer, an American ex-pat living in New Zealand and making a pretty good go of it, in a world where the Nazis won WW2 and Twelve Reichs divide the globe. He's got a steady relationship, a nice house, and a talking suborbital rocketship. When he accepts a new job with a mysterious industrial tycoon his life gets seriously weird. He starts running into a Gestapo agent, his fiance is a gun-slinging international assassin rather than a history professor, and there are gaps in what Lyle can say and think: worlds and phrases that trigger headaches and amnesia. The biggest problem: no two people agree on what history looks like, and no one has every actually communicated with America. An entire country has been missing for decades, memory is a lie, and something is very fishy.

What follows is a thrilling quest into the empty heart of America, the weirdness of Many Worlds Quantum Mechanics, and what it means to really Pursue Happiness above all else. Finity is a strange strange book, a breezy picaresque tied to quantum speculation and a brutal death march, but it's quite cool and an under appreciated gem.

You're probably familiar with the late 70s military interest in the Human Potential movement as written up by Jon Ronson in The Men Who Stare At Goats and adapted into a movie. The basic gist is that a few renegade officers envisioned a unit of tuned in Warrior-Monks, who would dominate the battlefield with ESP. The whole thing got funded with the DoD equivalent of spare change, and went nowhere because it was mostly nonsense.

One of those efforts which actually went through in 1985 was a six month school to teach 25 Green Berets the basics of Aikido and Zen meditation. Strozzi-Heckler was one of the instructors in the Trojan Warrior Program (logo: a trojan horse over crossed lightsabers, with the motto "May the Force be with you" in Latin.) This book is structured as a journal of the school, and Strozzi-Heckler's own thoughts on the relationship between his warrior tradition, the profession of arms as practiced by his students, and Reagan's America.

Strozzi-Heckler is evangelical about Aikido, and the benefits of its "way of harmonious spirit." Rather than opposing strength on strength, Aikido is about entering and blending with the attack, an using its energy against the aggressor. Martial arts are a relatively easy sell to the Green Berets, but Zen and meditation are much harder. Strozzi-Heckler and his fellow teachers endure mockery and deception as they try and get their soldiers to become comfortable with their feelings, with sitting quietly, and with emptiness. And even though he's in good shape, Special Forces training is hard, and Strozzi-Heckler is injured several times in the dojo and in ruck marches. Maritime training along the Atlantic Coast seems very dangerous.

The description of the course is interspersed with essays on warrior culture, machismo, the potential of honor in the atomic age, and the ethics of teaching New Age techniques to men who will likely be deployed to a dirty war in Latin America. These essays can get repetitive, but Strozzi-Heckler circles around to two basic core ideas: Warriors are authentic in thought, word, and deed; and warriors strive for self-knowledge and self-improvement in a holistic sense. The students know the value of the warrior ideal, and it pains them to fall short, to be caught up in machismo posturing and military careerism. Yet those transcendent moments of physical excellent, of measuring oneself against the Ultimate in battle, make up for lousy pay and a chance of death. Strozzi-Heckler learned a lot from this book, and his students did too, although not enough to make aikido and meditation part of Army Basic, or even Special Forces training.

My edition is the 1992 paperback, with an afterwards about the Gulf War. I'm interested to see what's changed in light of the Long War on Terror.

This is an odd and uneven book that's more about games publishing than game design per se. Tom Vasel is the head of the Dice Tower podcast, and in this book puts together a bunch of interviews with game industry professionals, all conducted around 2005. There's a solid cross section of the hobby here, from Avalon Hill grognard wargamers, to Essen-style German family game designers, from big publishers like Steve Jackson to people who run monthly email lists about games. There are dips into collectible card games and roleplaying games, but the focus is primarily on board games and strategy games.

Interviews are a tricky business, and at over a decade's remove this feels like a whole different universe. Not a word to be said about Kickstarter (though GMT's P-500 system for preorders before a game is published is an interesting twist), andBoardGameGeek.com is just one site, instead of an 800 gorilla. It's the internet as a faster version of mail-order businesses, not social media virality. The interviews require a fair bit of prior knowledge about games. I consider myself a hobbyist, and I was somewhat lost.

This leads to my main problem with the book, which is that in theory it's set up as one component of a college course on game design. There are study questions in the front, and an example syllabus from George Phillies in the back, but I honestly couldn't see using much more than Greg Costiyikan's essay "I have no words and I much design" as assigned reading. The rest is too unfriendly, or too uneven in quality.

Worth your six dollars, maybe not worth the hours it takes to read, an certainly hardly modern by this point.

Few authors are as like themselves as Roger Zelazny, and as hard to explain why they are like themselves. This collection encompasses the short fiction of the middle 1960s, when Zelazny was at the height of his power (his two novel Hugos were awarded in this time.) The stories are lyrical meditations on great themes of life, death, change, and small moments of humanity in the face of the absolute powers of the universe.

The stories are all solid, but the clear standout is "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", which follows a genius poet on a mission to understand Martian religion and culture, and translate the who sense of that dying race.

Walter Jon Williams gets spookiness, writing a sci-fi espionage thriller that rivals vintage Le Carre. The protagonist, Stewart, is an old insurance policy, a clone with the 15 year old memories of his original, recently murdered on a space station. Last thing he remembers, he'd finish mercenary training with the Icehawks before a mission to Sheol to recover alien artifacts. After that, well, his original was a busy man with a lot of unfinished business.

A little less stylized than Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind tracks Stewart across the solar system and into a deadly game of corporate politics and biological warfare against the alien Powers, an advanced race that holds the key to massive wealth, and possibly an escape from the brutal cycle of corporate Darwin Days and ideological entropy. It's also not as compelling, but one chapter alternating Stewart making a drug connection in LA with an account of the war on Sheol, is as fine a writing as anything in scifi.

Harry Flashman is perhaps the most despicable protagonist in all of fiction. A scoundrel, coward, bully, rapist, racist, and all around bad egg, he is (in fiction) setting down his honest memoirs after a career in the service of the British Empire. Despite his thorough horribleness, the Flash is at least amusing in his base animal appetites for wine, women, and the esteem of his peers.

As a soldier of Empire, Flash was present at any military disaster of note in the 19th century. The first book starts off with a bang with the first Anglo-Afghan War. Flashman, rapidly expelled from Rugby, and exiled from Lord Cardigan's 11th Cavalry, is dispatched to India, where a talent for languages sees him assigned to Elphinstone's expedition. If you read wikipedia, you know how the main story goes, with a British army cuts to shreds in the high passes. Flash narrowly survives, and comes out a hero through repeated instances of sheer dumb luck.

Quick reading, action packed, and delightfully cynical, the Flashman series is historical fiction that holds up.

Arthur C. Clarke is known for bone dry science fiction, so it's only appropriate that he takes us to the Sea of Thirst on the moon, a massive lake of lunar dust traversed by the tourist cruiser Selene. When a sudden burst of lunar activity buries Selene under 15 meters of dust, it's up the passengers and crew to survive until rescue by heroic scientists and engineers.

There's some psychological drama among the crew and passengers, as they deal with escalating threats from oxygen starvation to heat, but the star of the book are the escalating threats to the buried craft, and the repeated last minute rescues. If you like Clarke and hard scifi, you'll like this, but don't come for complex characters or thrilling action.

Space 1889 is a planetary adventure in the vein of Verne, Wells, and H. Rider Haggard. It's the 1889 that you vaguely remember from history, with a European peace and a scramble for Empire, trains and factories but only the most experimental cars. There are a few teensy differences. First, Thomas Edison invented a device in 1870 called the ether propeller, which allows travel in space. Mars, Venus, and Mercury have all been explored. Mars is populated by a decadent race in dusty cities along canals, with bands of wild nomads. Martian liftwood allows the creation of ships that can fly to an altitude where the ether propeller takes them into space. Mars is mostly dominated by the British. Venus is a swampy planet with dinosaurs, lizardmen, and efficient German plantations. Mercury has a livable river separating regions where lead vaporizes and air freezes. The setting seems ripe for adventure, with vast wildernesses to explore, principalities both human and alien to conquer, and many treasures to exploit.

The system is Ubiquity, a stat+skill dice pool where even results count as a success. There's an automatic success rule, which is good because the system seems extremely punishing. My analysis shows a decent chance of success at half your total rating, bad odds (p=0.3) one above that, poor odds (p = 0.1) two above that, and beyond that, forget about it!

I haven't yet played this game, so I do have some skepticism about the setting. There are hooks everywhere, but how do they catch? I'm not running the game, so less concerned. And as for Ubiquity, it's serviceable, but for a game based around expeditions and/or social status, could use some more mechanical heft there. Also, combat by the book involves rerolling initiative every round, which why?