The Mongoliad is maybe two solid swashbuckling novellas, burdened by a bunch of cruft. The whole series was an experiment in serialized collaborative fiction based around historical weapons-martial arts by Neal Stephenson and a bunch of other authors. The good stuff are the descriptions of melee skirmishes, which are action-packed and tactical. Of the two main stories, I more enjoyed the intrigue of Cansukh, a Mongol warrior dispatched to the capitol of Karakorum to do something about the alcoholic depression of Khagan Ogedai Khan, and his struggle to survive an atmosphere of decadence and intrigue with the help of the Chinese tutor and slave Lian. The other story is a lengthy quest by Cnan, a female messenger, and 11 knights to cross the Mongol empire and assassinate Ogedai Khan. From a structural perspective, the problem is that it takes about a third of the book for these stories to actually start moving, a long slog of subpar materials, and both plots are barely advanced by the end, leaving plenty more the sequels.

But from a bigger perspective, I hate how much stuff Stephenson and his collaborators just made up for the story. The Baroque Cycle was tightly grounded in the actual history of the the period. The fictionalized viewpoint characters were a lot like real people, and spent a lot of time interacting with real people. 1241 is a fascinating year in European history, with various medieval knightly orders at the height of their power and the Mongols conquering the world. Rather than engage with real history, Stephenson and his collaborators choose to invent a fictional society of Binder messengers (what, are actual Silk Road merchants boring?), and the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae, a knight-errant brotherhood nominally Catholic, but with secret pagan origins, and none of the actual social ties that make real feudalism so interesting. I get that this lets them stretch their story out over centuries and avoid nerds saying "gnah, actually according to this source...", but it leaves everything disconnected.

The best summary of this story might be in the story itself. One of the Mongol Khans has decided conquering is boring and runs an open call gladiatorial game before invading Europe. A knight fights a samurai. The only objective is to buy Europe a little more time by distracting the khan. It's a really cool fight, but for little purpose.

Bradford was a 20th century British popular historian who had the luck (good or bad) to get his works snatched up by a bunch of ebook publishers. I like battleships and had insomnia, so I read this book. What it is a quick skim over the history of major warships, from the first use of broadsides in battle with the Galleon of Venice in the 16th century, to the last battleship in the HMS Vanguard.

Bradford skims quickly through history, each century gets about two chapters, focused on a major action. The narrative is Britain-centric, with the Armada, Nelson, and the Dreadnought race taking center stage. Guns and armor predominate over communications, accurate gunnery, and strategic considerations. I was glad to get an origin for the odd preponderance of rams from 1865-1900; the Battle of Lissa where an Austrian fleet got in among an incompetently lead Italian fleet and went ham.

Otherwise, well pleasant way to spend a few hours for a hobbyist, but that's about it.

Fluency adds little to the dense genre of first-contact scifi, with a story that betrays its premise and the broader potential of contact across world. Since the Roswell crash in 1947, the government has been concealing an immense secret: there is an alien space ship orbiting in the asteroid belt. Now in the near present, NASA has two shots to send a manned mission to the derelict ship before an asteroid impact destroys it.

Dr. Jane Holloway is a top linguist and is shot out in a primitive capsule to the big alien ship. They discover that it is still alive, and Jane makes contact with the alien Navigator that control the ship. What follows is a mess of mandatory action sequences involving slug and scorpion-like space pests, info dumps about a galactic community of pacifistic humanoids seeded by a vanished precursor race under attack from an insectile swarm, and a romance that I would describe as ham-handed, except then I'd need another adjective to describe the book over all. Jane and Berg are perfect complements, the linguist and the engineer, and they'd be perfect for each other except that they can't admit how perfect they'd be for each other. Walsh, the cautious ex-military man, is mostly defined as villainous by how much he doesn't love our heroine.

Holloway is a linguist, but she only manages to decipher open and close buttons on a door before the Navigator telepathically hands her the works. No one else seems to make much of an effort at wonder or investigation of a ship that has artificial gravity as the least of its tricks. The ship isn't the small worldlet of Rama or a densely packed opaque cultural artifact to be explored; it's a mundane vehicle populated by 70 years of rubber-mask "aliens."

On the upside, the book reads pretty easy, but I can't see any reason to read it. Hard pass.

I'll confess to a deep fondness for The Caves of Steel, a sociological novel wrapped in a light mystery. In the far future, an over-populated Earth is dominated by giant hive Cities, and the galaxy dominated by the 50 Spacer planets. When a prominent Spacer is killed on Earth, Detective Elijah Bailey is assigned the case, and an unusual partner in the form of a nearly perfect humanoid robot, R. Daneel Olivaw.

The mystery is really an excuse to explore the world of the Cities, where humans lived crammed together in vast communal blocks linked by moving pedestrian expressways, subsisting on food made mostly from varieties of yeast. Hidden political cadres of medievalists seek a romantic return to the soil, even though modern humans are psychologically incapable of living under an open sky. Meanwhile, Spacer renegades have their own plan to use Terrans to launch a new wave of colonization.

The extrapolation of a setting is some of Asimov's best work, and the mystery good enough to keep you reading.

As an American, I'll admit to knowing only the broadest strokes of Irish history. What I do know is that Ireland served as the testbed for British imperialism, with the locals suffering from genocidal policies including wars of extermination, absentee-landlord plantations, enslavement and forced emigration, and artificially induced famine. Ireland also served as the testbed for post-colonial wars of liberation, with a gloriously failed rising in 1916 (Ireland loves its glorious martyrs), and then a guerrilla war against the British, finally followed by an even more brutal civil war between those who accepted a peace treaty that left Ireland part of the British dominions, and those who held out for a fully independent republic.

It's a big story, and this book follows one small, but important part of it. Michael Collins, the essential man of Irish liberation, knew that no force Ireland could muster could stand against the weight of British arms. This was to be a political war, and the decisive weapon would be targeted assassinations. The Twelve Apostles, also called The Squad, were the instrument of that policy. A dozen men, lightly armed with pistols, who carried out a series of brazen daylight executions. According to this book, The Twelve Apostles sowed carefully targeted terror, taking down key British intelligence officers, Royal Irish Constables, and links in the network of sources and stoolies that have could landed the whole Irish revolutionary leadership in prison.

Of course, violence begets more violence. Michael Collins was himself killed in an ambush during the following Irish Civil War. Many of Twelve Apostles had troubled postwar careers, finding themselves on the wrong sides of politics, simply aimless, or worst, running their own secret police torture shops.

Coogan does an excellent job depicting the life of a violent revolutionary, though this book assumes a fair bit of background on Michael Collins and the Irish revolution. Doing a little research on the author, it seems he's fairly analogous to Stephen Ambrose, a popular writer somewhat disdained by 'real historians' for light sourcing and partisanship rather than properly rigorous objectivity; Coogan greatly prefers Michael Collins over Éamon de Valera, who is depicted as the adversary of Irish public life. But the one great and irreplaceable advantage Coogan has is that he actually interviewed surviving Apostles in the 60s and 70s. This is a great look at the intimacy and brutality of political warfare.

An ancient terror haunts this guilty land. An unspeakable horror perpetrated generation unto generation, ambition and the desire for dominance curdling into evil. It's Jim Crow. Oh, and also Cthulhu cultists.



Ruff's novel re-imagines a version of H.P Lovecraft's Mythos through the lens of Atticus Turner and family, who's ordinary lives publishing The Safe Negro's Travel Guide is upended when Atticus turns out to be the lineal descendant of a powerful sorcerer, and the current leading American sorcerer, Caleb Braithewait, plans to use Atticus to secure a new age of occult power.

Lovecraft Country is a linked series of short stories, as Turner and his relatives advance and confound Braithewait's plans, using their hard-won survival skills to vanquish ordinary racists and supernatural foes. It's quite good, and will soon be an HBO prestige drama. And yet, I have a few quibbles. First, I'm always concerned about a white writer's handling of such an integral part of the Black experience. I think Ruff does a solid job, and it's better that these sorts of stories are told than not, but I can't be 100% sure about the integrity of the artwork. Second, Lovecraft's whole thing was cosmic horror, the idea that as human we're not special, and soon our eon will be at end. And there's goodness in subverting Lovecraft's racism, and clear parallels between cosmic horror and a Jim Crow system which says very loudly that Black Lives Don't Matter, and This Land Is Not For You, yet Ruff doesn't quite click on this. In particular, the use of human ghosts as key plot points is, I think a mistake, and lessens the impact of the story.

Still very good. But not quite great.

Red November has the verve of a good Tom Clancy novel, but it's all true. Based on the author's experience as a submariner and navy diver, along with interviews of submarine veterans on both sides of the Cold War, Red November reveals the heroism of life under the waves, and how close we came to nuclear war.

The author's father helped develop a key technology called Boresight, which triangulated burst transmissions from Soviet submarines. During the Cuban Missile crisis, four Soviet attacks carrying nuclear torpedoes represented the biggest threat to the American quarantine. Boresight vectored anti-sub warfare groups. For tense days, the fate of the world rested in the hands of four Soviet captains and political officers: men sweltering and covered in heat-rashes, passing out from CO2 levels, frightened of their failing equipment and bombardment by 'signalling depth charges'. These men had a button which would make the Americans go away, and also precipitate an all-out war. We're here because they declined to the end the world.

Even in the submarine Cold War wasn't a shooting war, it was plenty dangerous. American captain sailed extremely aggressively, passing within a handful of meters of their Soviet counterparts to collect intelligence and be in a position to destroy enemy boomers before they could launch their missiles. This resulted in several collisions, including one between USS Drum and K-324 that the author was present for.

And of the course the crown jewel of the secret war was Operation Ivy Bells, where US submarines penetrated into the Vladivostok harbor to tap a submarine cable, at least until a disgruntled NSA employee blew the entire program.

Red November is a thrilling, slice-of-life history, of a secret war!

I'm shelving Mandarins of the Future next to my Vietnam War books because this is the intellectual history behind why the best and the brightest went into a small Southeast Asian country and lost everything.

The end of the Second World War, with its victory over fascism and the next struggle against international Communism, offered a great opportunity for American academics. 1950s America, prosperous, tranquil, and democratic, clearly stood at the endpoint of history. All that needed to done was to prove this was true, and then export the American system to the newly liberated Third World before the pernicious virus of Communism got there first. This project was one of "modernization", first a universal social science to describe the trajectory of nations from a traditional past to an industrialized, democratic, scientific and stable modernity, and then a set of overarching policy projects in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, to make this vision a reality.

The three cases studies on academic units and their leaders: Talcott Parsons at Harvard, Edward Shils and Gabriel Almond at Princeton, and Walt Rostow at MIT, provide a thorough accounting of modernization theory, and its troubled and multifaceted links to American history and Marxism. In promoting an America System of modernity, these thinkers espoused a vision of 'conflict-less' progress and expansion of wealth in America that ignored the very real evils of genocide against Native Americans, slavery and the Civil War, or the struggle between labor and capitalist robber barons in the late 19th century. They conceived of the social scientist as a kind of collective psychoanalyst, a specialist that could help elites display democratic virtues without the chaotic hurly-burly of mass political participation. Abroad, modernizers conceived of a project of state-directed development that required a firm, national hand. In the absence of a robust civil society, the military could do this just fine, and there were no contradictions between modernization and authoritarian regimes.

As Gilman recounts in the final chapters, modernization theory collapsed comprehensively with the failure of liberal policy in the 60s and 70s, as the Kennedy/Jackson initiatives around the Vietnam War and the Great Society failed to produce victory at great expense, and the economy stagnated. Modernization theory, having been so close to the apex of the military-industrial-academic-complex, became an easy target from critics across the political spectrum. A resurgent Right, from old-guard segregationists to neoliberal deregulators, dismantled the modernist project of active government intervention. The counter-culture, from street-fighting youths to post-modern intellectuals, railed against the closed totalizing vision of modernity, finding solace in individual and subjective identities.

Mandarins of the Future matters, because for all that they got wrong, the conception of modernity developed by the subjects of this book remains a durable default. The welfare state, elite deliberatve democracy, and a basic optimism about technology and the future, are at the core of left-central politics today. Modernization theory was dusted off and used to justify the non-military aspects of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and the Global War on Terror. For all the battering that these political ideologies and ideals have taken in recent years, modernization is at least a productive theory, unlike the intellectual cynicism and nihilism of the various flavors of post-modernist thought, or the Darwinian accelerationism that seems to be the end-state of global capitalism.

Perhaps modernity is, to rephrase Churchill, the least bad of all our ways of existing in the 20th century. If so, it is important to understand it as an idea with a particularly genesis and background, and not an automatic endpoint of history. This book serves as important intellectual stepping stone between Marx and Weber, and the conditions of life in the 21st century.

Norse mythology has an epic grandeur. Gods, giants, and looming over all of it, Ragnarok. Neil Gaiman was drawn to Norse mythology at a young age through The Mighty Thor comics. He reinvented Odin in American Gods. And in this book, he returns to the Eddas to offer his own interpretation of the sagas.

As always, Gaiman is a pure delight as a wordsmith. In his version of the story, Loki is the protagonist, a force of chaos who gets the gods into trouble and then out of it, until they imprison him, and he turns against them in the final battle. I grew up on Greek myths, and while all true myths resonate, Norse mythology has a very different feel. The Norse gods are a family, but it's less intense than Olympus, so often defined by Zeus' lust and Hera's jealousy. The world of Norse mythology is wild and forbidding, full of giants cannier and stronger than the gods. Mortals appear infrequently, and almost almost as the subject of moralizing messages about not transgressing cultural norms.

Any modern retelling is a matter of interpretation, and an actual scholar may have some quibbles. I don't. This book is delightful.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was at one point the most important book in my life. When I was about 11, I reread the whole series monthly. My AIM screename was Zarkology1, after the great Prophet Zarquon and the exclamation 'Zark!'. So I'm only kidding a little when I say that for me, the books approach holy text.

Don't Panic by Neil Gaiman (that Neil Gaiman) is a very different approach to the story behind the story, and the career of Douglas Adams. Adams followed in the wake of a classic tradition of absurdist British humor, most notably PG Wodehouse and Monty Python (though his actual working relationship with the Pythons was minimal). At Cambridge, he was an anti-establishment figure floating around the Footlights comedy troupe. Afterwords, he drifted into radio at the BBC, where the idea for Hitchhiker finally landed. The radio show was a cult classic, the first book an international success, and then it was off to the races, with musical theater, TV adaptation, potential movie deals, and high-tech transmedia ventures.

Gaiman keeps it light and breezy, but reading between the lines, there are struggles. Adams' problems with deadlines was legendary, but where is the line between writer's block and chronic depression? The best of Hitchhiker is in the pauses and asides, the words not written, the perfect absurdity and humanity of the gestalt. Hitchhiker touched me, and it touched millions of people, and there's not much of the 'why' or 'how' except "well, Adams mixed Star Wars and Monty Python in a way that was perfect for the times, and totally beyond the ability of studio executives to understand."

It's been 40 years since the first book was published. I don't know much, except that I know I need to find my omnibus collection and reread them for the first time in a decade.