I picked this up on a whim, having heard Deighton described as a master of the understated spy thriller. This is all that, and more. Even in alt-hist Nazi occupied England, people are shot and murders have to be investigated. But this being an espionage novel, nothing is simple, and our protagonist, Douglas Archer, finds himself drawn into a deadly web of intrigue between factions in the SS, Wehrmacht, and the struggling British Resistance.

The characters and plot are nothing that stands out, but that's all part of the subtle English charm of the book. It is a very, very gray novel. Even the Nazis refuse to be cast as genocidal monsters; merely self-interested conquerors who are taking advantage of the moment to loot everything not nailed down. And of course, there is little honor or glory in collaboration--even collaboration which might soften the iron grip of the Third Reich.

And as for the setting, it's great alternate history. It skips the part when Operation Sea Lion works (military history consensus: lol, nope), to focus on the bitter aftermath of life under occupation, and trying to salvage some sort of dignity from the wreckage of defeat. Great book, lots of fun, if that level of grimness is your thing.

Claude Shannon's theory of information is one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, up there with general relativity and the structure of DNA for things that reshaped the world. But the man himself was oddly self-effacing, an undoubted genius who cared little for the trappings of academic prestige and power, and who spent the latter part of his life tinkering with odd one-off devices while his disciples invented the practical applications of computing. A Mind at Play is a great biography of an unconventional past.

Shannon was born and raised in upstate Michigan, and was a strong if not top performing student. A chance fellowship for graduate work at MIT put him in contact with Vannevar Bush, and Bush's rooms of analogue computing machinery. Shannon had a magicians touch with devices, and more importantly the ability to see through the complexities of a problem to an underlying mathematics. Shannon was the first to apply a previously obscure branch of formal logic, Boolean operators, to electrical circuits, turning circuit design from an art to a science. Bush pushed him to do a PhD in genetics, where Shannon's equations for the evolution of traits in populations were far ahead of the field, and then saw him to a position at Bell Labs.

Shannon worked on military projects involving automatic gunsights and cryptography, was briefly married, and spent his evenings enjoying jazz and working on a private project on the fundamental nature of communication. His paper, when published in 1948, was like a starting gun, providing a formal basis for the new technology of computers which had been kick-started by the second World War.

Having created a field, Shannon entered a playful semi-retirement. He became a professor at MIT and worked on problems of interest, including a mechanical mouse that 'learned', a chess AI, wearable computers, and juggling and unicycles. By nature shy, he had little interest in leverage his intellectual authority for power and empire building, or even anything like a coherent research plan. He worked on what was interesting, and have advice to colleagues and students by asking provocative questions. Shannon life was made better by his wife Betty, a formidable mathematician in her own right, and children. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1983, and lived until 2001, in what can only be described as a pitiful shadow of his abilities.

A Mind at Play is a good, loving biography of a subject, whom for all his genius, had a clear purity. But the reason why I didn't give it five stars is that it seems clear that Shannon's tinkering was a clear mode of thought for him, and that his work at Bell Labs provided the impetus for information theory, and for whatever reason, this book fails to convey the joy of thinking with your hands.

God Emperor is a sharp bend in the Dune series. The intricate plots, politics, and prescient visions of the first three books are replaced with Leto II Atreides, emperor of human space, over 3000 years old, ruler, tyrant, and above all, The Worm That Is God.

Through absolute monopoly on the precious spice, as well as control of religion and an all-female army of fanatic warrior-priestess, Leto has remade humanity in his image. He is the ultimate predator, and humans are reduced to space-faring peasants before his power. Yet this all has a plan, Leto II's Golden Path, a hard course to ensure the survival of the species. And to get there, Leto II, in this most pivotal moment, must confront and be confronted by four people.

The first is Momeo, his majordomo, trusted adviser, and long-time survivor. The second is Momeo's daughter Siona, a product of breeding program as extensive as the one that created her distant ancestor Paul-Muad'Dib. The third is a Duncan Idaho, latest in the line of gholas produced by the Tleilaxu, and the last is Hwi Noree, the Ixian ambassador who has been trained and educated as a snare for a god, a last reminder of his lost humanity.

This is a weird, lumpy book, as a very alien Leto II tests his human companions with puzzles and paradoxes about the nature of reality, perception, humanity, government, justice, and more. With the right mindset, he is appropriately terrifying, a god made flesh. He might also be a long-winded author self-insert. And there are some bits of genuine 'old scifi author pervness'. Idaho gives a woman an organism by climbing a wall. Siona must drink spice-water teased from Leto's body.

But on the balance, this book presents a very interesting argument about the nature of human evolution, and about what it might mean to survive as a community on a cosmological scale. And interestingly for me, it's presented as a straight history, chapters proceeded by Leto's secret journals, book-ended with histographic essays on their discover thousands of years later. Dune was guided by Irulan's many histories and quotations. Messiah and Children caught up in apocrypha. In a series that has always been about the blurry boundaries between reality, history, and myth, God Emperor is a return to proper form.

Personally, I run hot and cold on ptbA games. I love the simplicity of the system and the clarity of design that a good execution of pbtA enforces. But Apocalypse World 1e had some rough edges and some fuzziness about its version of the wasteland that made it hard for me to see how I'd ever play it. Dungeon World is alright, but if you want to have high fantasy adventures, why not just play D&D, or 13th Age, the best version of D&D? And while Night Witches is absolute masterpiece of design, I'm never going to find another person to play it with. Comrades is the antidote to my all my problems with pbtA.

Comrades distills both pbtA and revolution down to their essences, and what remains is as close to a utopian ideal of an RPG as I can imagine. This is a game about your revolutionary vanguard, about a small band of comrades who are willing to dare everything to bring about a better world. You'll throw down with thugs from across the political spectrum, out-manuever splinter factions in your own movement, suffer under the oppressive tactics of the secret police, hear a dying comrade's last words, raise a mob, and strike a blow for revolution.

The moves and playbooks are wonderfully calibrated to revolutionary action: I especially appreciate the inclusion of a universal Start Something move to incite a mob, and the perceptive list of questions on the What's Going On Here? move to read a situation. The GM advice helps develop the ideology of the comrades, and put them under pressure from adversarial fronts, which work through a series of steps that cause the world to crumble. I particularly like the Pathway Moves, end of session rolls which describe how the comrades are advancing towards revolution on five tracks, ranging from a democratic victory at the ballot box to assassinating the head of state.

Nearly a decade on from the release of Apocalypse World, designers have a good sense of how pbtA works. W. M. Akers has written one of the best examples of the ruleset, perfectly calibrated for telling a thrilling tale of revolution, with plenty of examples on how to make the game the your own. Comrades includes a fully-fleshed out setting for Khresht 1915, a fictional country inspired mostly by the Russian revolution, and thumbnails settings for New York 1776 and Callisto 2219. You also get 10 playbooks for comrades from Artist to Worker, and great advice on running the game, and building your revolution. The visual design is spare and evocative, with well-chosen black-and-white prints standing out against a red and yellow color scheme. Comrades is inspired by the radical leftists of the 19th and 20th century, but there's not a set ideological stance in the game. This game is about anybody who is willing to die for their ideals, to fight bravely for a better world, and bring down the evil SOBs in charge.

Changer is an urban fantasy with an interesting idea that is an enjoyable read, if not quite a classic. The athanor, an immortal race of beings with supernatural powers live among us. Their presence in history is the source of myths and legends. Changer, one of the oldest athanor, is living as a coyote in New Mexico when an unknown adversary kills his mate and all but one of his pups. He seeks the aid of Arthur Pendragon (yes, that Arthur Pendragon) in gaining revenge, which brings him into contact with a plan by Loki to overthrow the reign of Arthur and the current policy of non-interference in human affairs.

Changer is pleasant enough on a chapter-by-chapter basis, but the overarching plot has a lot of threads and sidetracks, including South American eco-radicals, Merlin's second head, the king of the seas, and Sasquatches tired of living on the fringes of society. The closest comparison is American Gods, but American Gods is about mythological figures who are people, and Changer is about people who happen to be mythological figures. The four star rating has a bit of rounding up, but hey, a fun book is a fun book.

After Hieroglyph and Everything Change, perhaps the inevitable next destination for the Center for Science and the Imagination is outer space. There 2017 offer, Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities is a collection of seven short stories from leading fiction writers, a dozen scholarly essays from the ASU faculty, and a dialog between scifi great Kim Stanley Robinson and Mars scientist Jim Bell.

These stories don't shy away from how hard life in space will be. That's hard as in hard vacuum, hard radiation, the tyrannies of the Tsiolkovsky equation, and the lag of merely lightspeed communication. But yet, space is still the final frontier, and even if the economics of space exploration are not there, and may never be there, we still dream of what we may find and become out in the black. The best story, in my opinion, is Vandana Singh's "Shikasta", about an encounter between a multicultural exploration team, their AI probe, and an alien life form closer to sentient volcanism than anything we might recognize. Madeline Ashby brings a taut small world story about choice and responsibility in "Death on Mars", while Karl Schroeder does a little buzzword mashing, but tries to find a way out of the thicket of property rights in "The Baker of Mars". All the authors bring a good game, and the accompanying essays provide criticism and context (with footnotes).

This is a great collection of hard science-fiction, meshed with science and science policy. Fans will enjoy this book, and I could easily see slotting some of the fiction and essays into a course module on space and space related issues. And for the price of free, the ebooks are well worth your time.

*Disclosure Notice: I am a graduate of ASU, and know many of the contributors as friends or colleagues. I was not part of the project, and received no compensation for this review.

The Bear Went Over The Mountain is about as niche as books get. It's an account of 49 tactical engagements by Soviet forces in Afghanistan, as collected by the Russian Frunze Military Academy, and then translated and commentary added by Dr. Grau.

Each of the vignettes is short, accompanies by a tactical map and stripped of irrelevant information by the multiple layers of translation. What's interesting is seeing what lessons the General Staff at Frunze drew, and Grau's commentary on those lessons. Soviet doctrine and equipment was oriented for maneuver warfare on the irradiated plains of Central Europe. Infantry was an adjunct to the armored arm, and tactics were stripped to simple plans that would enable higher commander to rapidly concentrate mass and fire against NATO forces as cities vanished under mushroom clouds. Afghanistan was a classic counter-insurgency nightmare, with mountain terrain restricting the use of armor, and years of bloody attritional warfare against agile mujaheddin fighters. Generally, small groups of Soviet infantry lacked initiative and aggression, especially in night fighting and patrolling. Cordons for sweep and clear operations were leaky, convoy security an ongoing problem, and even the poor Russian loadbearing gear worked against success, as troops were tied to road-bound infantry fighting vehicles for resupply.

Agressive helicopter insertions showed some success, but airpower cannot control the ground or protect the population. Expensive helicopters were always in short supply, and rarely worked at their best in the mountains. Grau criticize the Russians for inadequate reconnaissance, using reconnaissance troops as combat infantry, and ad hoc special units for missions, rather than establishing proper combined infantry and support units for the ongoing counter-insurgency warfare.

I grabbed this book and the sequel from the Afghan side for $3 apiece, which was a steal. I see they're back up to $40 now, which is a lot (unless you can get the DOD to buy it for you). Still a cool bit of history.

The Black Company is one of the foundations of modern gritty fantasy, and a classic in its own right. The titular company is a band of mercenaries who find themselves under contract to an empire ruled by 300 year old sorcerers: Soulcatcher, The Lady, The Limper, Stormcaller, etc. With the northern front falling apart, they're the only effective unit fighting against the Rebels and their sorcerer-generals, holding the line in a desperate retreat and last stand at the fortress of Charm.

Our viewpoint is Croaker, field surgeon and company annalist. He has a wonderful tone balanced between cynicism and the limited morality of mercenaries: honor the word of the contract, pay for supplies, don't fight to the death if there's another way (because that death might be yours). There are no heroes in war, just various shades of grey, as he chronicles the soldiers and wizards of the Black Company.

The best part is the magic. Sorcery is terrifying, literally dehumanizing. The hedge-wizards attached to the company and their little illusions and feuds are merely odd. The top figures of the The Lady's empire, the Ten Who Were Taken, are monsters out of myth, their deadly intrigues cutting back and forth with the company in the center. Though magic melts stone to lava and sends poisonous clouds racing across the battlefield, sorcerers mostly cancel each other out, and it's up to poor bloody infantry to save the day. And behind it all is the legend of the White Rose, a young girl who will lead the Rebels to victory, and the undead hand of the Dominator, a sorcerer-king who would break the world.

What a book!

I enjoyed this book a lot more when it was called Heirs of Empire.

The premise is pretty cool. At some point in the future, interstellar humanity encounters a genocidal alien empire. Overmatched by sheer numbers, they come up with a desperate plan to plant a secret colony, hinder its technological development until the threat has passed, and then tech back up and kick alien ass. The plan gets highjacked by the high command, who brainwash the colonists to regard them as divine entities and set up an even more brutally stultifying theocracy. Internecine fighting wipes out these 'archangels', and 900 years later a contingency plan of an AI based off a young officer wakes up in a robot body with instructions to kick off the scientific revolution.

That's the first three chapters, and then the rest is a slog though Weber's usual themes. The superiority of enlightened despotism; using 18th century military technology to beat up more primitive weapons; adoration of Nelsonian England; multiple points of view, including the antagonists. The story pits Merlin and his chosen maritime power of the Kingdom of Charis as the seed for the industrial revolution. We get descriptions of ships of the line, intrigues, swordfights, etc, as Merlin and Charis build a navy that outmatches anything on the planet. Galleons armed with carronades and backed up by satellite recon and bugs in the chambers of the holy alliance against them give Merlin's forces an incredible advantage, and they win a lopsided victory that took the Honorverse five books to settle into. The king is dead, but his sacrifice creates a noble example against the harsh repression of the anti-innovation Church.

This book basically mashes up a bunch of Weber's previous works, and it's overlong and melodramatic to boot. I got this book for free, and I still feel like I overpaid. The only reason for two stars is that Weber is still a decent writer on a sentence to sentence level, and hey, you didn't expect to do much thinking. I'll be passing on the rest of the Safehold series.

Radiant closes out the League of Peoples series in classic style. Youn Suu is an explorer disfigured by a weeping sore on her cheek and a narcissistic mother. When a diplomatic mission goes awry, she is infested with the hyper-intelligent Balrog spores, teamed up with Admiral Festina Ramos, and sent to rescue a survey team from the post-human Unity clade.

What we have is a mystery of a deadly alien world and a transcendence program gone horribly awry, as framed though Youn Suu's Buddhism, and her fear of being overtaken by the Balrog and its purpose. The story closes by suggesting that the Explorer Corps embodies certain archetypal heroes, agents for the higher races of the League of Peoples, solving problems that are not yet clear. The xenological mystery is both spooky and a hell of a lot of fun. Even if the the essential questions of the setting never quite come together, I enjoyed the League of Peoples series as a fun space opera jaunt.