Sapiens is a grand history of mankind from a perspective of 100 kilometers up. It is fun and readable, and ably synthesizes several theorists. It is also likely wrong in detail, pessimistic in outlook, and derivative of previous scholarship without doing much to situate itself as advancing the scholarly debate.

Harari begins boldly enough, noting that as recently as 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was just one of several hominid species on Earth, and qualitatively no different from any other mid-sized animal. We had tool use, but so did erectus, social structures, but so did neanderthalensis. And as far as food chains went, humans were pretty squarely in the middle. While anatomically modern humans existed as far back as 200,000 years ago, Harari deems the thing that changed somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years in the past the cognitive revolution. Language became more fluid, capable of encompassing a category of things that do not exist, and coordinating the actions of large numbers of loosely related groups. Culture, in all it's varieties, bloomed, and with it came massive extinctions, as the suddenly superior sapiens wiped out all other hominids, and the megafauna of the Americas and Australia.

The next revolution was the agricultural revolution. Wheat, barley, rice, and potatoes enabled settled agriculturalists to massively increase their population density. Agricultural communities had kings, laws, and armies, which they used to push back the hunter-gatherer society. This revolution was, as Harari puts it, the greatest fraud in history. Population increased 10-fold, but quality of life declined, as people worked longer hours and suffered more famine, more violence, more oppression. This greatest fraud was recapitulated again and again, in the scientific revolution which turned ignorance into a resource to be exploited, the capitalist credit revolution which made the future itself fertile terrain, and the industrial revolution, which turned the fossil resources of past eons into fuel for the capitalist engine.

The nature of scientific and technological revolutions is something which I actually know a thing or two about (at least if you trust the PhD after my name), and while the general arc of Harari's narrative isn't incorrect, in any specific detail of when knowledge and/or technology changed, and the forces behind it, his facts are firmly in the "lies for children" range of what is accepted. But even he admits that. To paraphrase, history cannot answer "why", and the more that you know about the actual circumstances of a period, the less confident you are in explanations.

I understand this a popular book, and so it's not really about being placed in any sort of scholarly discourse, but I feel like I read this book already. Here's the part lifted from Dawkins, here's Jared Diamond, hello David Graeber, nice to see you Francis Fukuyama. And this would be okay, except that Harari fails to stake out a unique position of his own. He foregrounds culture, and particularly intersubjective imaginaries (things that people as a group believe in; religions, nations, laws, corporations, scientific theories), but fails to press forward either a critique or apologia for the dominant humanist ideologies of capitalism and liberal humanism. Harari is pessimist about the basic premise of progress, but buys into Steven Pinker's framing that qualitatively things are getting better. He argues for the importance of biological and evolutionary approaches to quality of life, while saying that human happiness is both the key to everything and a neurochemical illusion.

And most of all, the overall framing is just a less ambitious version of Charles Stross' theory of history (on a blog post I cannot find right now). I love the shit out of Charlie, but he's a Scottish scifi author, and Sapiens is racking up the big awards and blurbs. Be more interesting.

Rajaniemi's fiction is the biggest, most ambitious work of visioning I've encountered since Sterling's Schismatrix. Master thief Jean Le Flambeur has escaped from Mars with more of his memories, on a course for the Jinn-haunted deserts of Earth to steal the childhood of a God. But the universe is a terrifying place, and great powers that imprison souls, enslave minds, and blast holes in space-time are on the same path as Le Flambeur, and immortality and death are two sides of the same bad bargain.

I simply can't describe this book, but if you like your writing lyrical, your scifi hard, your physics mixed with philosophy, and don't mind a hefty dose of confusion, you need to read this series.

****

The Fractal Prince is structurally more ambitious than the first book, moving back and forth across time and introducing Tawaddud as a narrator, a young woman from an important family on Earth who has fallen from power to become the girl who loves only monsters. Earth is a more deadly backwater than Mars. The catastrophes which rocked the system left the planet haunted by Wildcode, rogue nanotech that corrupts bodies with crystal intrusions and causes computers to glitch, and mind-stealing AI, among the more comprehensible dangers. The survivors live in the shattered ruins of a fallen O'Neill space habitat, mining the desert for rogue gogol AI-minds to sell to the powers of the Sobornost. Jean's target is the childhood backup of the most fearsome of the Sobornost Founders, a group of near-gods who aim for immortality, at the cost of enslaving every mind in the system to their will. The heist is less solid than the first book, but the 1001 Arabian Nights inspired post collapse human culture is still stylish as all hell.

"We have received a communication from Jean le Flambeur. He claims that in precisely 57 minutes, he is going to steal a ring of Saturn."

It's all true, of course. The system's greatest gentleman thief *almost* always gives fair warning when he's about to commit a crime. The Causal Angel takes us into the white hot cultural heart of the system, the intricate games of the quantum Zoku posthumans, who have embraced quantum narrativism as a weapon against the cold computational simulational hyperpolitics of the Sobornost Founders. At stake is the Kaminari Gem, an ancient artifact with the power to unmake and remake universes, which might be the only thing that can protect post-humanity from the hegemonic ursine embrace of the All-Defector strategic parasite.

Okay, wow. I've got almost no idea what's going in this book, but it is GLORIOUS. The Saturnian Zoku don't quite hold together as well Mars and Earth from the previous books, but the sheer awesome of the cosmological war over the very nature of existence makes up for a story that seems to be blowing itself apart at the pieces, like a combat thoughtwisp shedding its outer armor against slowgun viral parasites. What Rahaniemi says is that we *can* imagine the other side of The Singularity, and even there a few people can make all the difference.

****

Rajaniemi has been teasing about his cosmology and its relation to the story since book one, and he lays it all out here. There is something deeply spooky at the interface of quantum mechanics and computation, certain answers that come out of nanoscale blackholes that indicated that the secrets to the universe are encrypted, and whoever holds that password will be the next best thing to gods. The key is the macguffin of the series, the Kaminari Jewel. Crafted by the Zoku, a clade of posthumans descended from gamers who use quantum effects to optimize their society, the Jewel has been presumed lost. Le Flambeur's quest is to steal it, and to make himself someone who can use it. On a reread, this is more pessimistic than I remember. Both the Zoku and Sobornost are thoroughly monstrous, the jargon does not fully conceal the more or less arbitrary nature of the Kaminari as the object, and the Zoku society feels incredibly dated in an an internet culture circa 2014 kind of way, rather than hitting some eternal truth. It's a solid conclusion, but not a stunning one.

Ray Bradbury was a major talent, and this collection showcases his style of melancholy fiction to its fullest extent. Bradbury's specialty was the liminal, the moment of phase transition between the last golden summer of youth and the weary cares of adulthood, or the release of the accumulated tensions of life into the quiet of the grave. These stories are moody, painterly, and yet, even as I write this review, they fade from my mind. Bradbury is strong wine, and not to my taste.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is an absolute classic on the creation and use of graphs. Done correctly, a good graph can make complex information instantly comprehensible, reveal relationships and patterns, and both delight and inform. Done poorly, a bad graph causes eyestrain, confusion, and the deliberate obfuscation of the truth. And in a world where graphs are ordinary, Tufte provides a quick history of how they came to be, and the cognitive leaps required.

Tufte rails against the sins of bad graphics: scaling and axes that lie about trends in the data; the use of unnecessary ink to convey redundant information; visual clutter and bad aesthetics. He advocates for a kind of elegant minimalism, conveying the most information with a few well-chosen lines of varying weights, and cleverly using edges and white space to mark boundaries, while supporting information with text. The advice is for a pre-computer graphics era (at least in my signed 1983 edition), but the aesthetics still hold, even if we aren't drawing graphs with a marker and straight-edge.

The problem is that Tufte turned out to be a voice crying in the wilderness. There are the majors flaws, like the use of flashy cluttered "infographics" that combine the worst features of text-heavy articles and data graphics. But then there is the minor things. I have at my fingertips about a half-dozen data visualizations packages, from Excel (boo!) to ggplot and bokeh. And not a single one, by default, does everything that Tufte says. They get close, but the defaults are not quite minimalist enough. And truly great graphs, like Minard's plot of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with his army vanishing into the snows, still require an artist's touch.

Barsk is a novel of a many parts, let down by an inability to grasp some ineffable quality of grandeur. In the far future, science has proved the existence of souls, and a select group of Speakers can commune with the dead by taking the drug Koph, which grows only on one planet. All the humans are gone, and the sentient beings are various species of uplifted animals. Barsk, source of the drug, is also home to the despised Fants, descended from elephants. For 800 years, their world has been defined by the compact, where they provide pharmaceuticals including Koph to the galaxy, and the galaxy leaves them the hell alone, as laid out by the prophetic visions and political wiles of their long dead matriarch.

Into this mess stumbles Jorl, a Speaker of rare talent who faces a prophesied crises called the Silence. His quest involves the mysterious suicide of his best friend, his friend's troubled and gifted son Pizlo, a Senator willing to commit any crime to maintain his hold on power, and a new formulation of koph which turns the user into the next best thing to a God.

Now I read a lot of science-fiction, so this might be on me, but I can see where the main ideas of Barsk have been done before and with more style. The uplifted animals and messy galactic confederations are from David Brin, and there's a stylistic similarity with Brin beyond the uplift part, except that Brin at his best is pulpy and daring, where Barsk plods. The intermingling of precognition, politics, and a planet that is the sole source of a vital drug are the key elements of Dune, but Dune is a masterpiece which reflects some uncomfortable truths about human nature and potential, and Barsk falls into a mundane Zootopia style "species as destiny". The physical reality of souls, precocious children, and the term Speaker comes from Orson Scott Card's Ender series (though the speaking is very different, without the transgressive humanism of Card's Speakers for the Dead). And say what you will about Card, he has at times a keen eye for character and as a good a prose style as anyone in the genre. Again, Barsk is just average.

It's frustrating, because this isn't an bad book, and it kept me entertained all the way through, but it just had so little to say. There's a really good novella at the heart of this book, about a man (okay, elephant thing) who can intercede between the living and the dead, and how existing in that ultimate liminal space transforms his world. Does he heal traumas that we must learn to grieve over, or does he reopen wounds that are best left closed? Unfortunately, that novella is buried under a bunch of space opera cruft.

"What if Biden and Obama teamed up to solve mysteries?" is the very definition of high concept farce. It's also a solid regriftance sales pitch in 2018. This book was pretty solidly average. There's two major approaches that I could imagine following that tagline. One is to do an absurdist, Clancy-esque techno thriller starring someone like The Onion's Diamond Joe Biden. The other is to do a low key realistic novel. Shaffer chose the latter, and I think the story suffers.

Stripped of the presidential trappings, a 75 year old recently retired man is having trouble in life after leaving his job and losing touch with his best friend from work. The sudden death of an old friend, an Amtrak conductor, prompts him to start to investigate, leading him through the seedy side of Wilmington Delaware and a criminal conspiracy involving a motorcycle gang, crooked cops, an insurance investigator, and a chance to bond with his lost friend from work in an armored Escalade. But taken as a mystery, the story doesn't amount to much. All the investigation goes nowhere, until Joe receives a letter from his dead friend explaining the criminal conspiracy. There's a pretty good fight on an the Acela, but that's it.

And from the high concept side, as an exploration of Biden and Obama's friendship, I never really felt like it was more than a shallow caricature of these guys. The only part that really worked were the Amtrak Joe bits.

Saboteur Extraordinary McKie is back, in a much better sequel that focuses on a more interesting part of the ConSentiency universe. The planet of Dosadi has been locked away for generations, an experiment in applied social science that has gone tremendously wrong. McKei has been sent in to clean it up, though the ultimate motive behind his mission is a mystery.

Dosadi as a planet is like Dune on steroids, a punishingly deadly environment where simple survival has attuned its inhabitants to superhuman levels of competence. Keila Jedrik is the most Machiavellian of its inhabitants, and she leads an organization to break free and get revenge on whoever put her on Dosadi at any cost. Keila suborns McKie almost instantaneously, outplans her opponents with a mental facility which would put an Mentat to shame, and engineers an escape with McKie, who she merges egos with.

Then it's up to McKie to reveal the truth in a mortal courtroom drama. The toadlike Gowachins have an attitude of 'respectful disrespect' towards the law, and McKie is the only human ever admitted to their ranks of Legums. In the Gowachin court-arena, failure is punished with death, and the knife can be turned on defendant, plaintiff, witness, legum, and/or judge. The crime of Dosadi is not the intensive prison-planet environment, but that it serves as the raw material for a body-swapping immortality ring that is the real secret power in politics. The courtroom drama is quite tense, but the whole thing exists to make Herbert's points about power, and how it is too dangerous to put in the hands of mere humans, but also disastrous to hand over to any bureaucratic entity or superhuman. The whole thing feels like a cartoonish first draft of the ideas in God Emperor of Dune, and let's be real; if you're reading this book, you've already read all of the Dune books, and even some of the KJA ones.

Song of Time is a melancholy reflection of life and legacy. Roushana Maitland is preparing to die, or more accurately shed her physical body and enter digital immortality. In the middle of her preparations, a young man with amnesia washes ashore on the cliffs below her house.

The meat of the book is is Roushana reflecting on her life through the tumultuous 21st century, and the role of art in a world. A talented concert violinist, Roushana provides a frame to ask if art gives life meaning, and if not art, then what. The biography is a clever way to provide a future history that is just short of apocalyptic. A new disease claims Roushana's brother. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan almost kills her mother. Global warming threatens everything, until the Yellowstone Volcano erupts and cools the plnet, at the cost of North America. Somehow, life goes on.

The book is best when it explores Roushana's relationship with the artistic people around her. Her piano prodigy brother, the gender-ambiguous critic Harad, her husband and conductor Claude, in his talent and weakness. The glimpses of the future are both chilling and believable. The 'present' timeline, with the amnesiac young man, doesn't do as much, and the odd unlife of the digitally immortal is sadly wasted as it relates to what the world looks like. Still, this is a satisfying, sophisticated, and melancholy yet optimistic book.

90% of everything moves by ship, but these days we barely think about shipping. It's just something that happens. Rose George has written an interesting book about the human experience of maritime shipping today, but one that I wish got a little more technical.

The book is structured around a journey from the UK to Singapore on the Maersk Kendal, a 300m containship capable of hauling almost 6500 standard contains or 75000 tons of cargo. Kendal is captained by a senior Brit with 40 years of maritime experience, and crewed by a multi-ethnic group of 20 men and one woman (the cook), mostly Filipino, but with Indians, Ukrainians, and Chinese as well. The first line on being a sailor on one of these ships is "don't". Pay is miserable, conditions are worse, with long hours, bad food, and a very real risk of death.

While tradition has the Captain as sole authority at sea, these days he's the man who responsible for adjudicating costs and risks between the ship, its owners, its management charter, the sailor's commissioning agents, the cargo owner, insurers, the flag registry, etc, with many of these groups hidden behind layers of international shell companies. For the average sailor turning a wrench, this means that a job with 14 hour days, no breaks, no friends, and sub-US minimum wages can easily turn into one where you haven't been paid in months, the shipping company is demanding that you set sail in an unsafe vessel, and the people who have the power to literally save your life are insulated by so many layers of lawyers they're untouchable.

George spices up the rather humdrum voyage with pirate hunting in Somalia, work at a sailor's mission in the UK, whale biologists attempting to reduce the environmental impacts of shipping, and a history of shipwrecks and survival in the open sea. She's a skilled non-fiction writer. But what drops the book a star for me is that George can't seem to muster up any enthusiasm for the stuff of shipping. Containization and computerized cargo management have revolutionized logistics. The ships are the largest mobile objects ever created by man. But given an opportunity to go down into one of the massive maneuvering thrusters, George demurs: It's too dark, too cramped, too noisy, too clammy.

Please. You're writing 300 pages of shipping. At least see the whole ship.