The Space Opera Renaissance is the kind of book that deserves to drift in stately orbit around a gas giant while "Also sprach Zarathustra" plays. It's a massive tome of a book, 941 pages, 32 stories, close to 90 years of science fiction history. There are some very good stories in this collection. With this much diversity, you're sure to find something that you love, and the authors read like a who's who's of the field.

Space opera has always been something of an archaism, as science fiction tried to carve out a niche as serious literature. While early pioneers like E.E. 'Doc' Smith and Olaf Stapledon could imagine mythologies of cosmological scope, much of the early pulps were filled with poorly written adventurous tripe, the 'horse operas' of cheap western fiction redone on the Red Hills of Mars, rather than the Dakotas. Serious science fiction in the vein of Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction could discuss the engineering challenges of rocketry as a venue for a kind of Heinlein-Clarke 'competent hero', a man handier with a slide rule than a ray blaster. New Wave and cyberpunk turned defiant against outer space, conquering new realms of inner space and cyberspace. Yet the flame remained alive in the hands of M. John Harrison, and then a host of British retro-scifi writers (Banks, Hamilton, Reynolds) who imagined new kinds of post-imperial space opera. As fans, we love space opera, even as we're embarrassed by it.

Yet there's also an unbalanced quality to this collection, editorial choices that I found puzzling. No stories by Doc Smith or M. John Harrison, despite their status as grandmasters of the genre. Cramer and Hartwell use the page count to include complete novellas, but the early stories are some very rough pulps that outstay their welcome. Lois McMaster Bujold is represented by "Weatherman", which is a fantastic character study but entirely planetbound, while David Drake gets a fragment of a story about a Roman legion kidnapped and used as intersteller mercenaries, another mud bound adventure.

Space opera is a big tent of a sub-genre, but if I were to define it, it'd be about a certain grandeur of scope, of clashing planets and galaxies at stake, as well as a larger-than-life quality of its characters. It's a big universe, but with a fast spaceship, they can make it their own. There's lot of room to construct, parody, deconstruct the genre, to generate that necessary sensation of awe. There's a spot for a really great thematic collection, one that links the history of the genre to it's future, and frustratingly this is not that. I doubt anyone knew more about science-fiction than Hartwell, and Cramer was his partner of almost 20 years. So it's not enough for them to pick good stories. I want perfect stories, and this collection is about 500 pages overweight for perfection.

"The gate will only open somewhere interesting."

Or so I paraphrase the keywarden, as he opens a path from the artificial axis universe stored within the generation ship Thistledown to the planet Lamarckia, and ushers our protagonist, Olmy, on a secret mission to scout a renegade colony of anti-technology utopians. The problem is that the keywarden lies, or at least only partially tells the truth.

Greg Bear's whole thing is a kind of Ultra-Orthodox Hard SciFi, a dazzling display of ideas where the characters and plot take a back seat, and this book delivers. Lamarckia, the centerpiece of the book, is a planet dominated by the ecoi, continental scale organisms that express themselves as scions, sub-organs ranging from tree-analogous to mobile tenders and spies to stranger creatures that influence whole weather systems. The renegade utopians were 5000 colonists under the leader Able Lenk, but his community has fractured politically, and is riven by famine, war, and threatened by the ecoi, which they lack the scientific base to understand.

Olmy's ostensible mission is to find a clavicle, a device which would open a gate back to Thistledown, but instead he arrives in the middle of a war between Lenk and the renegade Brion, and then signs up on a scientific voyage to circumnavigate the world. The book takes on a tinge of Moby Dick, with a captain obsessed with finding a queen of the ecoi, a mythical self-aware center to the landscape. The actual plot wanders, and Olmy is a cipher as a protagonist.

I read this book because it came first in my Eon collection, which probably was a mistake. I'm looking forward to Thistledown as a setting.

If you want to mark the start of 'modern' literature, The Canterbury Tales are a strong candidate. About thirty poems and prose pieces, framed as pilgrims to Canterbury telling stories to amuse each other.

In theory, Chaucer is readable by someone fluent in English with a little help. I say in theory, because spelling and word definitions have changed, along with syntax and grammar. Middle English is very different from what we speak, and I'm here to enjoy myself, not to puzzle over a poem with a dictionary. The problem is that poetry in translation always suffers. I read the 2008 Raffel translation, and he does his best, but the result is still middling, if you'll pardon the pun.

Some tales are shockingly good. Anything bawdy, involving sex or butt jokes, comes through just fine. There's a shocking degree of women's agency in some stories, particularly in the Wife of Bath's tale, as well as an exploration of society in the late 14th century. I enjoyed the sheer erudition of Chaucer's knowledge, as his story-tellers shifted between Classical allusions, Christian theology, and contemporary geography to make their points. Apparently each of the narrators speaks in a distinct regional dialect, which doesn't really come through in this. Some characters quote Seneca, some Saint Augustine, some no one at all. The problem is that the good bits are sandwiched between long passages blathering on about virtue. Chaucer may be a deserved classic, and the starting point of modern story-telling, but old does not mean I'm automatically impressed.

Let me tell you about Pandas DataFrames. DataFrames are wonderful pythonic objects that support clever programming and fast execution via numpy. DataFrames can be masked, joined, manipulated, and plotted however you want. DataFrames rock, and Python is fun.

Unfortunately, real businesses run on SQL. Now, my workflow as a data scientist would be to load all my data into memory and work on in Pandas, and if I don't have enough memory, start a bigger instance on AWS. But sometimes you have to use a 70s vintage DBMS, and that means knowing SQL.

Forta's book is a solid introduction to SQL concepts, and how to do selects, filters, and joins. Your exact database will vary, but I find this book to be clear written, a good place to start, and a worthwhile addition to your knowledge base.

Eternity is one very good novella, intermixed with an okay novella, and a mediocre one. Unfortunately, the mediocre one is the most important.

Roughly 30 years after the events of Eon, the characters are trying to make sense of what comes next.

The good part is Rhita, granddaughter of Patricia Vasquez from Eon, stranded on an alternate Earth dominated by Ptolemaic heirs of Alexander the Great. A gifted scholar, carrying the strange artifacts of her grandmother, Rhita lives in a deft, Greek inspired alternate Earth, and has to negotiate a way to open a gate back to the Way, without understanding the consequences. I loved the glimpses of alternate history, and wished there were more of that.

The okay novella follows Olmy, as he investigates the great secret of the Jart War. It seems that at some point, Hexamon Defense captured a Jart and hit it away in Thistledown. Olmy's last mission is to interrogate the Jart, a combination of diplomacy, cryptography, and mind-to-mind combat. It turns out the Jarts a cybernetic collective, with a goal of archiving every lived experience. They are interesting antagonists, though the military aspect of the series has always been a weak point.

The mediocre novella follows Lanier, now an old man who has refused regenerative medicine, and the political struggle between rebuilding Earth in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and reopening the Way. Pavel Mirsky reappears, an avatar of a godlike intelligence at the end of time, with a dangerous message. The Way must be destroyed for the universe to reach its fulfillment. The politics and cosmology are scattershot, and the meditates about death and the growing distance between Lanier and his wife Karen little more than cliches.

The sequel to The Three Body Problem has humanity facing some serious problems. A trisolarian invasion fleet is en-route and due to arrive in 400 years, and intelligent subatomic particles called sophons created by the trisolarians mean that strategic deception and advances in physics are impossible.

The Dark Forest follows astronomer and cosmic sociologist Luo Ji, as he attempts to come to terms with what is going on. Luo is the target of repeated assassination attempts by the fifth-column Earth-Trisolar Organization, and then is promoted to Wallfacer, one of four senior strategists with an unlimited remit to create private defense against the alien threat. While the other Wallfacers have plans, as well as ETO operatives to break them, Luo retires to a luxury villa to live a life of peace with his literal dream woman. After all, victory is impossible.

Then his wife and child disappear into long-term hibernation to prompt Luo to action. He comes up with a plan to cast a spell on a star, to reveal it's location to the galaxy, and goes into hibernation as well. He emerges in a utopian future, where after a climate disaster that killed billions, humanity lives a life of plenty in underground cities, while powerful battlecruisers patrol the solar system. It seems like humanity will vanquish the oncoming ETO fleet, when a single trisolarian probe destroys all but a handful of ships. It turns out fundamental advances in physics are desperately needed.

But at the last minute Luo finds out that the spell he cast worked, the star was destroyed. The solution to the Fermi paradox is that the galaxy is a dark forest, full of predatory species that pounce on any species foolish enough to reveal itself in preemptive self-defense. Luo has a plan to reveal the location of Earth and the trisolarian world. The two species would join each other in death. With this mutually assured destruction in place, the trisolarians sue for peace.

There are some parts of the book I thought worked quite well. The build up of the might of Earth's fleet, and its destruction, was quite emotionally effective. The idea that the space force would have political officers to ensure faith in victory across centuries is both sensible, and a distinctly Chinese approach to space navies. Liu Cixin touches on weighty ideas beyond the titular dark forest, including future politics, ecological collapse, underground cities, and limited mind control, but the story has a little more room to breath. Almost too much room to breath, as chapters are wasted on Luo Ji's indulgences. I much preferred Ye Wenjie as a protagonist.

The Last Full Measure is contemporary military social history in the style of John Keegan, travelling most well-trodden examples of how soldiers die. In some sense, the task is impossible. No historian, however able, can conjure up Achilles' shade to ask "So what was it like to die?"

Stephenson starts with some insights from anthropology. Indigenous people worldwide, and our near cousins in chimpanzees, practice a similar form of 'raiding' warfare, based on ambush and sudden violence against the isolated and unweary. From this he moves into 'Western warfare', based on a close analysis of the Iliad and historical accounts of phalanx and legionary warfare. There's a clear distinction between 'heroic' combat between champions of similar social status and ability, the random mass crush of arms, and the hit-and-run tactics of nomadic horse archers.

A clear break with the past is the introduction of gunpowder weaponry, which change combat from the duty of a martial elite to the levy en mass, with new ways of dying from lead shot and cannons. Stephenson discusses the bayonet debate, following the conventional wisdom that almost no bayonet casualties arrived to be recording at field hospitals, but allowing for the alternative that bayonets were a secondary weapon used to finish off the wounded in close assault.

From there it's a leap to the best section, a discussion of death in the industrial abattoir of the Western Front in World War I, where men were murdered and mangled by the millions by high explosive shells, machine guns, and poison gas. Sections on the Second World War, and war since, round out the book.

I'm torn, because this is a very good history within its bounds, and has a great selection of excerpts. But Stephenson doesn't have an explicit thesis or argument about death in battle. His choice of sources is thorough, but also entirely conventional. There's nothing about how, say, Vikings saw death, or the mercenaries who ravaged Europe in the 15th-17th century, prior to modern explicitly national armies. Death is horrifying, and killing the central aspect of war, but there's an element of pornography to this book, and how it shows men in their last and most vulnerable moments. Call it a four, but a low four.

Westmoreland is a scholarly murder. Sorley does a masterful job showing the meteoric rise and fall of General Westmoreland, a man propelled by his ambitions beyond his capabilities. I don't think there was single person with a negative opinion of Westmoreland who did not get a chance to stick a knife in by the end.

From youth, Westmoreland was marked for success. The child of a South Carolina mill manager, he was an eagle scout and chief of cadets at West Point in 1936. A field grade officer during World War 2, his active and aggressive style as commander of an artillery battery saw him promoted to colonel, mentored by airborne commander General Maxwell Taylor (later chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ambassador to South Vietnam). As he cycled through command of elite airborne units and a stint as commander at West Point, Westmoreland knew how to play on his looks, bearing, and political connections, and was tapped to take command of the war in Vietnam in 1964.

There, Westmoreland met the test of his life, and failed. Sorley describes Westmoreland's defeat in detail as a commander over the next four years: Neglecting ARVN in favor of fruitless search and destroy missions; requiring optimistic assessments from his subordinates, regardless of the truth; the whole fiasco of removing entire classes of Viet Cong guerrillas from the order of battle; focusing on selling the war in '67 instead of fighting it. The Tet Offensive shattered what remained of Westmoreland's credibility, and he was failed upwards to Army Chief of Staff.

There, Sorley is even harsher, recounting a tenure that ignored major problems in the army to focus on protecting Westmoreland's reputation in the official history. Westmoreland in retirement seemed a broken man, with a farcical run for governor, and an ill-advised libel suit against CBS for a special report on the Order of Battle. Westmoreland appears to have done good work for Vietnam Veterans, but none of that is mentioned, aside from a quote from his New York Time obituary.

The picture of Westmoreland that emerges is a man with a planetary sense of self-importance, a narcissus captured by being the image of the modern four-star general at the expense of actually winning a war. Sorley uses the ample archives of Westmoreland's actions to contradict the man's memoirs and later testimony. Westmoreland the strategist is one behind step events and trying to take credit for other people's work. His personal warmth and loyalty to his friends is countered by repeated accusations of gross stupidity, of an inability to learn, or clearly discern significant elements in confusing circumstances.

My other reading on the Vietnam War has focused on Westmoreland as a central figure, as the man who set American tactics in South Vietnam, who had the best opportunity to "win" the war, if it could be won, and who instead escalated it to a futile meatgrinder. This biography is a strong negative assessment of the man, but dances around two key issues: First, why was Westmoreland selected for such a key role as commander in Vietnam? It seems no one made the affirmative decision to send him there, he was merely a rising star in the right place. Second, search and destroy became a self-justifying mission for the war. Why did Westmoreland choose this set of tactics, and persist in it despite clear evidence of its inefficiency? Sorley is silent on Westmoreland's affirmative qualities.

The events of Dune were a tentative step towards the superhuman. Paul Muad'Dib was the Messiah, gifted with prescient powers, trained to a razors edge, and rising from renegade ducal heir to conqueror of a galaxy. But his visions revealed something terrifying, something which lead to his defeat in Dune Messiah, and a dangerous pathway.

Children of Dune is a return to Dune, in a way that is both more rewarding than Messiah, but also a reflection of the initial book. Young Leto II Atreides has to find his own path, against the conspiracies of his Aunt, St. Alia of the Knife. Alia's regency has become corrupt and calcified, and Alia herself fallen into possession by an ancestor, a state both the Fremen and Bene Gesserit deem 'abomination', and correctly so, since her possessor is the Baron Harkonnen.

Whereas Dune was obsessed with the future, with the power of Paul's visions and the potential of the Fremen, Children is haunted by the past, most directly by the genetic ancestral ghosts that Leto, Alia, and Leto's twin sister Ghanima have access to. These genetic memories are a wellspring of experience, and a threat.

Leto escapes an assassination plot, and thought dead, falls in with the outcast Fremen of Jacurutu, reviled as ancestral water stealers. There he is tested with massive amounts of spice, confronts the mysterious Preacher, a charismatic blind prophet who rails against the deification of Muad'Dib, and embarks on the start of his Golden Path. Leto merges with the sandtrout, becoming a hybrid human sandworm. He will rule for thousands of years, a force which will make humanity evolve.

As a kid, I really loved the weird ambition of this book, and the fantasy of Leto's sandworm power armor. As an adult, well, it's Dune with more weird bits.

The car bomb, or VBIED (Vehicle Born Improved Explosive Device), if you have an MSAF (Milspec Acronym Fetish) is the guerrilla smart bomb. In its more basic form, it marries the mundane infrastructure of urban life like trucks and driveways, to easily available explosives like ANFO and diesel fuel, to a deadly weapon. Whether abandoned in a parking garage or brazenly crashed through the front gates of an embassy by a suicide bomber, the car bomb is a way for poor organizations to hit sensitive targets with precision.

Davis rolls through the long history of the car bomb, from its invention by Italian anarchist Mario Buda, to its perfection by the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, to its proliferation across the world in the hands of the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, and Al Qaeda in Iraq. There's an odd tonal disconnect between coldly clinical history and near-conspiratorial glee at CIA blowback, as car bombs disrupt French, British, and American imperialism, but in a short and breezy book the style mostly works.

Davis is by training a Marxist urbanist, and he's best in noting that car bombs are more than cheap precision weapons used to hit hard targets like embassies and barracks. The generalized threat of car bombs is paralyzing, demanding a 'Ring of Steel' to protect downtowns and upper class districts. Indiscriminate in their death, car bombs can be used against soft targets like schools and markets to foster ethnic violence and sidetrack peace negotiations. Finally, given the ease by which vehicles circulate through cities, there's no way to ensure security. Buda's wagon is the hotrod of the apocalypse.

There's not much original research in this book, and in some ways the threat of car bombs has been supplemented by the pure kinetic energy of ISIS vehicular attacks. Still, afun little military history worth a read.