Magic Bites is a step outside my standard tastes in speculative fiction, a southern urban fantasy set in the magitech ruins of Atlanta. Kate Daniels is a saber-sling merc who winds up pulled into a investigation when her mentor is assassinated. Her style is pretty straight forward: Start asking questions until someone tries to kill her, and that's the suspect. What she finds is a plot to set the vampires and lycanthropes of the city at war, and then pick up the pieces.

On the upside, any scene where Kate stares down some high level supernatural being is ace, and well worth it for that alone. On the other hand, I don't much care for this version of a magical setting, or how ordinary humans get along in it. Kate has a Mysterious Bloodline that's hinted at repeatedly, but for people without a magic sword and uncanny reflexes, life seems pretty grim. Magical elements are included because this is a genre book, and they have to be there, but they don't really fuse into a cohesive setting.

"There is a war... for your Mind!"

That's the slogan of InfoWars, the incendiary conspiracy news network and nutritional supplement marketing firm. And while Alex Jones is wrong about almost everything, he's right about that. In LikeWar Singer and Brooking ably synthesize a sophisticated picture of information warfare in 2018, drawing from sources as diverse as Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, and ISIS, to argue that the internet has lead to a blurring of lines between consumer, citizen, journalist, activist, and warrior which threatens the foundations of liberal democracy. The tech companies which built these platforms and profited from them must grapple with the politics of their technologies, before we all reap the whirlwind.

Computer networks and smart phones connect billions of people, allowing ideas to flow faster than ever before in history. Sometimes, the results can be impressive. The Chiapas Zapatista movement in 1994 was a dial-up and fax version of a network insurgency that managed to bring enough international opprobrium on Mexico that the government blinked, and reached some kind of political accord (Chiapas is complicated). More recently, Eliot Higgins and a team of open source analysts at Bellingcat managed to track down the exact BUK missile system and Russian soldiers responsible for shooting down MH 17 in 2014.

But there are a lot of dark sides. When people connect, the emotion that spreads most rapidly is anger. Lies spread five times faster than truth. Musicians can use social networks to directly connect with their fans, and ISIS uses it to connect with alienated Muslim youths worldwide. Social networks sort diverse citizens into filter bubbles of people who think alike. Eliot Higgin's careful open source intelligence has a paranoid fun-house mirror version in the QAnon conspiracy, where Qultist decoders find hidden messages from an alleged 'senior white house source'.

And then there is the matter of information war, an area that even now, after years of offensive cyber operations, liberal democracies still don't understand. Hostile propaganda slips into Western news networks and major platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are infested with bots. LikeWar can even take a personal toll. Over the course of writing this book, General Michael Flynn went from forward looking full-spectrum commander to head Trumpist conspiracy cheerleader to indicted and plead out felon. Flynn's fall is complex, but it can't be separated from the internet. If the trolls got him, what chance does your idiot cousin stand? The counters, 'citizen truth teams' and senior emissaries to groups vulnerable to recruitment, seem like thin reeds against the coming maelstrom of noise.

LikeWar starts with Clausewitz's dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means, and there are clear links between cyberspace and physical space. Intensity of hashtags impacted the subsequent intensity of Israeli airstrikes during attacks on the Gaza strip. ISIS used propaganda to create an aura of invincibility that outflanked the defenders of Mosul, while Russia denied that its 'little green men' were even in Ukraine. But the difference is that cyberspace is constructed space rather than natural space. The networks are built, maintained, and owned by real corporations and real people. The internet grew from an anarchic specialized scientific network to a major engine of commerce and communicate with little deliberate government oversight. Section 230 absolved American companies of responsibility for policing content, with major carve outs for copyrighted IP and pornography. Yet as concerns over cyberbullying and counter-terrorism rose, major networks adopted digital constitutions that were permissive towards speech and censorious towards erotica. Policing content is and was possible, but always took a back seat to growth and engagement, the guide stars of Silicon Valley.

The future is if anything, darker. Advances in machine learning and AI allow ever more realistic bots, computer generated DeepFakes where a politician can be programmed to say anything, and personalized targeting of people with exactly the propaganda they'll believe. There are defensive counters, but if I might draw military analogies, what we saw in 2016 was armored warfare circa 1918: clearly the future, but not yet a mature system. Given the pace of technology, we only have a few years before digital blitzkrieg.

I'm extremely online, and I've been following this space for years. I've presented at multiple conferences on this topic, including Governance of Emerging Technologies and Association of Internet Researchers. LikeWar is the book I wish I'd written. Cognizant, forward looking, and deeply researched, it is vital reading for anyone interested in technology or politics.

My only reservation is that I wish the sources were better linked in the text, instead of being buried in static endnotes. Maybe the next edition will push an update.

If science-fiction has a name, it's John W. Campbell. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction during the crucial Golden Age of Science Fiction from 1937 until the end of the Second World War, he defined the form and tropes of the genre. He was responsible for nurturing it as a serious endeavor, as real literature, and as a form distinct from fantasy, horror, adventure, and other speculative fiction. Even as the genre grew beyond the control of any one man, and Campbell slipped towards crankdom, he was still the Institution, the editor who authors measured their ambition against. Nevala-Lee links Campbell to the three most important men in his life: Asimov, Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard, and provides a fascinating story of the immense work of these visionaries, and their equally immense flaws.

Campbell had an unhappy childhood, caught between an authoritarian father and a manipulative mother. At worst, the cruelty of his mother and her identical twin sister provided the inspiration for his story "Who Goes There?", adapted in film as The Thing. At best, they provided him with drive and editorial skills. Certainly, Campbell's recollections of his childhood display a deep ambivalence and surety that his parents wounded him psychologically. Large, intense, almost friendless, with the ambition to be an engineer but without the talent, Campbell was hired as editor of Astounding Stories almost as a fluke. It was the job he was born to have.

As editor of Astounding, quickly renamed to Astounding Science Fiction, Campbell created a new form of literature for modernity, centered around advances in science and technology, rational extrapolation of those advances, and the figure of the 'competent man', the engineer-hero who analyzes problems and arrives at solutions through mastery of rational thinking. Campbell cultivated a stable of talented writers. Robert Heinlein was probably the greatest literary talent, with an eye for character, detail, the sweep of history, and perfect pacing. L. Ron Hubbard had raw charisma and an engaging style, even if his biography of adventure was a mutable facade over constant reversals and defeats. Isaac Asimov was an awkward youth, unable to fit in and desperate to please; his actual genius would see him advance the furthest of the group. As editor, Campbell shot ideas off the proper writers, a continual shower of sparks and a demand for higher standards right when the genre needed it most.

World War 2 provided a critical test for the group, and one which by many measures was a failure. Campbell thought his readership could serve as a super-lab for the US military, but failed to gain traction with the bureaucracy. Asimov and Heinlein worked together at the Pennsylvania Naval Shipyard, in important but mundane tasks, but they were too different personalities to be good friends. Hubbard was an abysmal failure as a naval officer. Campbell baited the censors with a story in 1944 that "predicted" the atomic bomb. The gamble, which could have closed Astounding, paid off, and became an element of Campbell's personal mythology.

The post-war years were marked by Campbell's fall into crankdom. Obsessed with the atomic bomb, and with the need for men to master themselves before they ended the world, Campbell became the leading proponent of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. The readership of Astounding served as the testbed for the process of auditing and generating "clears", humans free of negative memories with supposed superpowers. Campbell is apparently responsible for much of what is borrowed from cybernetics in Dianetics, but he and Hubbard soon parted ways over financial matters. Hubbard went on to turn Dianetics into the Church of Scientology, though there is no evidence that he founded the religion as part of a bet from either Asimov or Heinlein. The most parsimonious story is that he did it as a tax dodge, and to avoid lawsuits from medical licensing boards.

So what of those flaws? Campbell became increasingly domineering, a "universal expert" who lacked actual knowledge, lectured people at length, and became fascinating with psychic powers and supernatural phenomenon. As the civil rights movement advanced, he became harshly reactionary in his views on race. Heinlein's politics also turned rightwards (he had campaigned as a socialist in the 1930s), and the last truly great book he wrote was The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, as he believed he was too good to need editing. Isaac Asimov has perhaps the dirtiest feet, for all his talent. As he became a prolific science writer and institution in fandom, authoring over 400 books, his initial social awkwardness became a love of seeing his name in lights. His behavior was defined by constant sexual harassment, from pinching butts to public passes. Hubbard, of course, founded an authoritarian brainwashing cult and wrote Battlefield Earth, but expectations were low.

In an interesting bit of parallelism, all the men had deeply important first marriages that defined how they grew, and once they achieved success, they discarded their wives and remarried. The circumstances varied. Doña Campbell grew frustrated with John's obsession with dianetics and left him for another man. Leslyn Heinlein experienced a nervous collapse. Gertrude Asimov grew tired of Isaac's philandering. Hubbard tried to murder his wife Sara, have her committed, and deny her custody of their children. And while early scifi was very much a man's world, Astounding's assistant editor Catherine Tarrant was by Campbell's side the whole time, and so important that when she fell ill, it took five men to replace her.

But for their flaws, these were still great men. They wrote stories which will resonate for centuries. Campbell turned a tiny literary niche into a cultural juggernaut, and cast a mode of heroic futurism that is still at the heart of science-fictions. Nevala-Lee's book is deeply sourced, comes from an authentic love of the genre, and tells us who these men were, and why their ideas matter today. Campbell saw his mission as creating a literary 'Sword of Achilles', stories so appealing that boys who would grow into the men who would build the future would embrace it on sight. In that, he had absolute success.

This is a great book! If it doesn't win best associated work at the next Hugos, I will eat my hat.

Okay, the President has not technically been kidnapped. Rather, the Operational Phenomenology Agency, aka the Black Chamber, aka the Nazgul, has worked a geas across the entire United States to make them forget that the President even exists. Mhari Murphy, Laundry Officer, PHANG, (oh, and Bob's ex from book 1) is the Bad Dude responsible for getting him back, along with a team of high-level Laundry agents doing old-school 'Set Europe Ablaze' style SOE sabotage.

This being The Laundry, nothing is simple or easy. The new Prime Minister, an avatar of Nyarlathotep, has taken a personal interest in Mhari's mission. Failure means that her skull, and the skulls of everyone she loves, will decorate the sacrificial arch Nyarly is building in the center of London. Success means advancing the plans of an Elder God, who's only virtue is that it finds humanity amusing. And messing up means getting caught in the United States, which is now run by the NSA crossed with mind-hacking Cthulhu cultists. There are fates worth than death, and being used as a fleshy avatar of Cthulhu is one of them.

Some parts really worked. Nyarlathotep is supremely creepy as Prime Minister. The Americans protecting the President, the last little cells free of the Nazgul's geas, feel properly paranoid and oppressed. They forget their mission every time they sleep, and are running on modafinil and fear. The ultimate plan of the Nazgul, a brute force attempt to wake Cthulhu by the inner solar system into a Matryoshka brain of orbital computers running invocations, is a nice call-back to Stross's first Singularity books. And the final set-piece, which involves a Concorde from 666 Squadron, is properly badass.

That said, while Mhari is decent enough as a protagonist, her concerns about being a bloodsucking vampire working for an inhuman monster, never felt more than obligatory. Yes, yes, she's a nice English girl so she doesn't like living by murder, and doesn't want to be an advance agent for an Empire that'd make the people who did the Opium Wars, mustard gas in COIN, and multiple famines in the name of the Free Market look like innocent schoolboys. But I don't really believe it. Stross is still only so-so about writing about America, though better than he was back in Book #4, as he sketches in a National Treasure style occult history of the US.

And finally the bad, and this is a thing where an editor should have put a foot down. The central human relationship of the book is between Mhari and Jim/Officer Friendly from Book 6. Jim is a super-powered flying tank, senior police officer, and silver fox of a man. Mhari has a "strictly physical, seriously guys" relationship with him that grows over the course of the book, and she also consistently calls him Fuckboy. Which, and Urban Dictionary will back me up on, is an entirely different species of lameass loser. I totally believe that Mhari would have a deeming nickname for Jim, but I'm roughly the same age she is, and there's no way an ambitious career-minded woman of my generation would use that specific phrase for someone who she ever wants to see again, even if she is a self-loathing monster.

There's also a doubt growing the in back of my mind about the long-term direction of The Laundry series, and the role of humans. Stross has always been concerned with the relationship between people and superhuman entities, whether they've been AIs running Economics 2.0, the Eschaton, corporate and government bureaucracies, or Lovecraftian entities standing in for any of the prior. His best heroes have dealt with these entities by being clever, basically by the hacker ethos. Mhari is not a hacker, she's a people person (or at least was). But Mhari solves her problems with superspeed, superstrength, and a basilisk gun. If the series going forward is just about PHANGs, that's a bad joke played on the readers.

Tomorrow, the Killing refines the formula from the first Low Town book, without breaking much new ground. A few years on, Warden is still in his comfortable niche as an independent operator, when his old commander, General Montgomery, asks for a favor. The general's daughter Rhaine is missing in Low Town, poking around the old murder of her brother Roland, and Warden should see her safely home. Of course, nothing is simple.

Roland Montgomery was the founder of the Veteran's Association, a political radical who was assassinated to protect the crown. Worse, Warden had a part in that. The Veteran's Association is just another mob these days, a gang of toughs. Out of what passes for justice in his cynicism and bitterness, Warden starts a multisided gang war between the veterans, the mafia, and the secret police.

It's a noir pastiche, but it's a fun noir pastiche, and Polansky is a little firmer with the secondary characters than he was in the first one. I'll keep reading.

Captain Kel Cheris is having a very bad day. A loyal soldier of the Hexarchate, she's been paired with the undead, insane, and genocidal General Jedao, imprisoned for 400 years after betraying his own command and killing one million people. Evil though Jedao may be, he's never lost a battle, and Kel Command keeps him on ice to take down major threats, like the heretical corruption of a key border fortress protected by impenetrable shields. If Cheris can keep her sanity and accomplish her mission, power and promotion await.

Lee's first novel (he has an accomplished body of shorter fiction) is a dark byzantine military adventure. The Hexarchate runs on a combination of math and belief called the high calendar, which allows its military to access exotic quantum effects through the right formation. Life is an endless bulwark of rituals against the madness of the Hexarchate leaders, and a multisided history of atrocity and torture. Their military makes a fetish out of loyalty and suicide, while the intelligence services see everything as a game, and lives as nothing more than tokens to be spent in pursuit of victory. The people in charge of doctrine actively demand torture to keep the whole thing working. Super bleak, super stylish, and a strong debut in the weird tradition of The Quantum Thief.

***

On a reread of all three books, Ninefox Gambit is still damn near perfect, chilling in the implications of the setting and characters, the interplay between Cheris and Jedao, and occasional interjection of other viewpoints, most of whom serve to die horribly to illustrate some point.

1903 is one of those dates that is etched into history: The year that men flew in the persons of two brothers from Ohio. McCullough is one of the deans of historical biography, and an expert on America circa 1900, so this book is of course quite good.

The picture of the Wrights that he paints is one of methodological devotion to their dream of controlled flight. While men had been dreaming for ages, it was the Wrights who finally achieved that dream, recognizing that the first step had to be controlled flight, then powered flight, then aviation. The Wrights obsessively studied the flight of birds, built a wind tunnel to find the proper shape for an airfoil, and finally launched their Flyer at Kitty Hawk.

Some men, like Teddy Roosevelt and John Adams, seemed destined for greatness, their steps already marked by stars. The Wrights were the exact opposite, and most creditably, even as they became the center of the world they did not become infatuated with fame and with power. Flight itself was the thing, and what they wanted was enough money not to prove a burden to others.

What this book reveals, which I didn't know, was that the birth of flight was far spottier than might be expected. After their first flight in 1903, the Wrights didn't fly again until 1905, and it took several years to convince the American governments and European powers that flight was worth investing in, even as the brothers collected accolades. MCCullough stints the patent battle with Curtis that shaped early American aviation, and ends in a melancholy sense. Neither Wright brother, nor their sister Katherine, ever married. Wilbur died of Typhoid fever in 1912. Orville lived until 1948, but suffered from the effects of a 1908 crash, and ceased to fly in 1918.

Tahir Shah likes to play the fool, but behind the jokes is a sharp observer of people. Trail of Feathers is actually a fascinating adventure and serious work of ethnopharmacology masquerading as yet another dumb European travelogue (as a Pakistan Brit raised in the West, I count Tahir as Western, at least compared to indigenous Amazonians). A chance encounter with a mysterious Frenchman at a London auction for shrunken heads gives Tahir the bug of an idea. The Inca flew, and he's going to find evidence of pre-Columbian flight.

The first part of the book takes Tahir through the Peruvian tourist trail: Cuzco, Machu Pichu, Puno, Nazca, where encounters with other seekers and Peruvian shamans push him towards his ultimate destination, the Shuar tribe of the Amazon rainforest. The second half of the book is intense, a long journey by water in the Amazon, guided by a Vietnam Veteran and crewed by a handful of superstitious Peruvians on a leaky boat, towards the deadly Shuar headhunters. When he arrives at their village, he find that evangelical missionaries have gotten there first, but a few shamans hold to the old beliefs. Tahir convinces one of him to let him participate in the ayahausca ritual, which is a potent and truly awful hallucinogen, and yes, he meets the Birdmen.

For all that Tahir's quest is weird and exotic, it's also firmly grounded. He has no patience for those who say the Nazca lines were created by ancient aliens, and besides the lines are boring compared to Nazca mummies, which are nothing next to Peruvian textiles. I'm engaged to an Andean archaeologist, so I know Peruvian textiles are Serious Business. I've done a fair bit of the Peruvian tourist trail, and while it may have been grittier 20 years ago, any combi ride you walk away from is barely a hardship. Tahir exaggerates the standard Lonely Planet stuff for effect. That said, I've never been to Iquitos, and the whole jungle voyage thing seems like a real venture, with some real danger. On the last trip, the one by ayahausca is indescribable, and if you expect birdmen, you'll find them. While these days The Onion can crack jokes about the commodification of shamanic voyaging, Tahir's book holds up as a great adventure.

Across The Fence is a top-notch memoir and history detailing one of the most hazardous jobs in the Vietnam War. In order to gain intelligence on and disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, small teams of Americans and Vietnamese were secretly inserted into Laos and Cambodia under the umbrella of MACV-SOG (Studies and Observation Group). Wearing sanitized uniforms without emblems and carrying weapons without serial numbers, SOG teams were ghosts, in countries that were officially off-limitsoperating beyond artillery range with whatever air support that they could scrounge up.

Meyer has a fine ear for action-filled writing, and a keen memory (skills sharpened by a post-war career as a reporter and editor). The stories are incredible, with six and eight man teams facing off against entire NVA divisions, a tale I'd be inclined to say was exaggerated except that when writing the book Meyer managed to get in touch with the retired NVA general who commanded the other side of the battle. There are fraught ambushes, desperate firefights, and harrowing last minute rescues. SOG teams were half American, and half Vietnamese, and Meyer has a deep and true fondness for his Vietnamese comrades and their fight against Communism, particularly the ice-cold pilot Captain Nguyen Van Tuong, who flew the team into and out of danger in his elderly H-34 helicopter.

Across The Fence is a top-notch memoir by an exceptional soldier. It doesn't aspire to make a grand statement amount the nature of the war, but it meets its aims and then some. The only flaw is that while there are plenty of pictures, the publisher screwed up and made them postage stamp size. Meyer has his comrades deserve better than blurry pixels. I hope a new edition fixes that problem.

Elizabeth Holmes wanted to be the next Steve Jobs. She wanted to remembered as an entrepreneur who changed the world, with a glowing biography of her insight and toughness by someone like Walter Isaacson. But her company was an immense fraud that is still tumbling down around her, SEC fines filed and real charges pending. This is The Soul of a New Machine as done by Joel and Ethan Coen. Arrogant people, machines that fail constantly, and an intricate web of lies and threats that, finally, implodes spectacularly in the face of reality. Short of the Coen Brothers, Carreyrou is the best man for the job, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story that killed Theranos and turned Holmes into a byword for a meteoric fall from grace. Bad Blood is thrilling. I stayed up past 2:00 AM reading it.

Holmes had ambition, I'll give her that. She dropped out of Stanford to chase a dream of a whole new spectrum of blood tests, which would use a few drops of blood milked from a finger to do instant full spectrum lab workup in the comfort of someone's home. No more needles, no more visits to the phlebotomist. Just a sleek, iPhone like-portal to a word of personalized on-demand medical monitoring.

The ambition was grand. There was just one minor problem. The test didn't work, and never did. Microfluidic capillaries jammed, software bugged out, readings swung wildly. As Ludwig Fleck said, "A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking," and whatever Holmes and her investors thought, as long as the various models of analyzers returned inaccurate, Theranos was nothing but a dream.

That didn't stop Elizabeth Holmes. If she had any real talent, it was bending (mostly older, mostly male) investors to her vision. Theranos moved from one round of venture capital funding to another, becoming the highest valued unicorn in Silicon Valley, despite repeated failures of their basic products. The Theranos board included right-wing ghouls like Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, and George Schultz, along with General (now Sec. Def.) Mattis, and Darth Vader of the legal profession, David Boies. Holmes also buddied up to Democrats, including Vice President Biden and Candidate Hillary Clinton.

The real action of the book is the insanity inside Theranos. Senior executive Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, also Holmes' much older boyfriend, must have studied Beria as a leader. Information was tightly controlled to prevent 'leaks'. Skeptics and bearers of bad news were fired. The victims of sudden and summary firings were slapped with massive NDAs and followed by private detectives. Meanwhile, Theranos bodged together a lab out of commercially available equipment, operated in total violation of best practices. The Theranos tests were a far cry from what was advertised, and were wildly inaccurate to boot. The harms were real. One Arizona woman, on receiving a Theranos test with Potassium levels that indicated an immanent stroke, spent Thanksgiving in the ER, paying thousands of dollars out of pocket for totally unnecessary brain scans. The emotional damage is just as real, if harder to quantify. The only thing that limited the negative consequences were the relative small number of roll-out sites in Phoenix.

As a handful of whistleblowers made contact with Carreyrou, and he began investigating. The whole house of cards that was Theranos began to collapse, months after Elizabeth Holmes made her mainstream PR debut and the company's valuation soared to over $9 billion. Reading the failures of management in detail is astounding. Regulatory strategy was to slide between the FDA and the smaller agency that manages lab tests, which is absurd. The basic research was driven by design wish lists: a final box no larger than this, a few drops of blood and no more, rather than an actual research agenda. It must have been terrifying to work for Theranos, realize it was all a fraud, and that you were powerless against Elizabeth Holmes' political and legal connections. Ian Gibbons, a key scientist, committed suicide rather than be deposed as a witness against the company.

In the end, the system worked, sort of. Theranos was shut down, Holmes and Balwani are disgraced and charged with numerous crimes. The company eagerly exploited a gray and under-regulated area to always surf ahead of their promises. They lied and bullied relentlessly. In retrospect, the final crash was never in doubt. But it is astounding that Holmes and Theranos got so far, with little more than intense charisma and a slick sales pitch.

I wonder how many other Silicon Valley unicorns are made of plaster.