If anything, even better and more absurd than the first Hitchhiker's Guide. Dinners that want to be eaten; dead for tax purposes; the Total Perspective Vortex; Golgarinch Ark B; and a melancholy ending.

The Electric Church is noir flavored scifi. Avery Cates is a gun-for-hire in a grim future. Earth has been unified under an oppressive government called the System, and the vast majority of people squat in the ruins of once great cities, committing petty crimes, living fast, and dying young. At 27, Cates is an old veteran. People over 50 are basically mythical. Cates gets drawn in a plot by the head of Internal Affairs for the System Cops to assassinate the head of a new religion called the Electric Church. The Electric Church preaches a doctrine of salvation through cybernetization, machine immortality to contemplate their sins. At their rate of growth, they'll be the biggest religion in 5 years, and the only religion in 10, if they aren't stopped.

The story moves quickly through the standard noir beats, with the coolest scifi ideas compressed into the last few chapters. My main problem is that the writing is repetitive, and commits the cardinal sin of telling and not showing. Cates's first person monologue is the only voice of the book, and he drones on about how ordinary cops are bad and the elite System Security Force are worse, how creepy the Electric Church cyborg Monks are, how crapsack the world is, and how much of tough and smart criminal he is. All words better spent showing this, rather than telling us.

Skunk Works is one of those phrases which sets aviation fans' hearts a-flutter. The secretive engineering team from Burbank was responsible for some of the most incredible planes of all times. The SR-71 was built in the 1960s, and it remains the highest flying, fastest plane in aviation. It's a marvel of engineering built with slide rules.

Ben Rich, the second director of the Skunk Works, writes a fun account of his views on aviation, engineering, and procurement politics. The Skunk Works was an elite brotherhood devoted towards the best in aviation, with rules to minimize management bullshit and keep every engineer within a stone's throw of the production floor. Rich discusses in detail his work on the F-117 stealth fighter, the U-2, and the SR-71, with dips into Navy stealth boats ("never work for the Navy, they don't know what they want and they'll break your heart"), and the red tape of military bureaucracy.

Kelly Johnson stories are another major theme of the book. I've no doubt that Ben Rich is a great engineer, but Johnson, the founder of the Skunk Works, was a legend who won two Collier Trophies and could estimate an aviation problem to 95% accuracy that'd take hours of calculation to prove. Johnson was a genius, but his abrasive personality alienated Air Force generals, who hated a man who built the best planes for the CIA and castigated their procurement efforts as fuck-ups that'd kill pilots and lose wars. The book is lived up by 'other perspective sections', with pilots describing what flying these planes was like, and five or six Secretaries of Defense talking about how vital the planes were to US national security.

Rich also tries to get at the culture of engineering excellence that defined the Skunk Works. As someone with a sideline in organizational studies, this is really hard. How do you know your asshole leader is a real genius and not a cargo-culting lunatic (see Musk, Elon)? It's a difficult challenge, and one not quite clear aside from 'get good people, give them hard but specific goals, and get the hell out their way', but Rich tries. I just wonder what he'd think of Lockheed's latest stealth wonder-blunder, the F-35...

This is How You Lose the Time War is a high concept epistolary love story. Red and Blue are mirror-images, history hopping agent provocateurs subtly shaping the tangled threads of the multiverse for their cosmological ideologies. Red for the mechanist Agency, Blue for the biological Garden. An exchange of letters begins as taunts, and blossoms into love, and than a dangerous defection.

The framing is perfect scifi rigamarol, dancing through sketches of other realities with verb and style. The love story between the two... well, I almost missed the point where it switched from taunts to flirting to proclamations of undying love. Let's just say that it's more mood than characterization.

And oddly enough, I much prefer Blue to Red. This book was written by Gladstone (The Craft Series) and El-Mohtar, who I hadn't heard of, but who crushed the 2016-2017 short story awards with "Seasons of Glass and Iron." I wonder who wrote who...

Scythe is a stylish YA dystopia, with cool ideas hampered by pedestrian execution in the small things. In the future, human immortality has been achieved, and governance handed over to the Thunderhead, an almost all powerful AI. The last enclave of the old ways are the Scythes, a cadre of killers with a mandate to gleam 250 people per year.

Citra and Rowan are teenagers from the rather aimless mainstream culture with a little bit of moral fiber, which catches the attention of Scythe Faraday (all Scythes name themselves after a historical figure). They're chosen as apprentices, and learn the practical and ethical dimensions of gleaning. How to kill with weapons, hands, poison, and who to kill. Faraday picks his targets based on pre-immortality statistics, with a kind of gentle irony. Curie chooses people who have lost a desire for life and have become stagnant. Faraday and Curie are exemplars of monastic virtue, making death personal. Against them is contrasted Scythe Goddard and his small coterie of 'innovators'. Goddard gleans in mass murders, bloody rampages every few months. He uses the natural fascination with Scythes to put himself in the center of a cult of hedonistic celebrity.

And of course, Citra and Rowan walk right into this mess. It's usual for a single master to take two apprentices, and Citra and Rowan are told that only one of them will become a Scythe, and the first thing they'll do is glean the loser. But they really like each other, and they're decent people. And after a misadventure, Rowan wins up working with Goddard, with a whole situation about corruption in the Scythes and the future of this civilization.

Scythe is a fun book, if about as subtle as a punch to the face. It's also very much a YA novel, with the semi-formed characters and pedestrian notions of good and evil that that implies, but it's a fun read and good enough to sell me on the sequels.

The Word for World is Forest is a tightly plotted novella, pitting genocidal Terran humans against a species of gentle forest dwelling hominids. Athshe/New Tahiti is a world covered in trees, where a few thousand Terrans use slavery to clear cut the forest and ship lumber back to a nearly lifeless Terra.

One of our viewpoints is Captain Davidson, a parody of the macho imperialist, a man of crude appetites who sees the local "creechies" as little more than animals to be exterminated. His rape and murder of one of the females, inspires the other major viewpoint, Selver, to lead his people in a war against the humans. The anti-imperialist plot (written in the twilight of the Vietnam War) is well done, but Le Guin is not a military fetishist.

Her true interests lie with Selver and the Athsheans. Their society is one that has almost eliminated violence, cultivating the ability to have waking-dreams. Le Guin clearly means something deep by this, but her gestures at the grandness of world-time and dream-time didn't quite connect for me. What works is the idea of Selver as a god, as he brings the idea of war and systematic murder into Athshean, and one line, a perfect epigram, "If a suicide kills everyone else, than the murderer kills himself."

Sometimes, it actually is rocket science. Clark was a leading liquid fuels scientist from the 1950s to the 1970s, and this book is a hilarious collection of anecdotes organized around rocket fuels. On the one hand, rocket fuel isn't that hard. Tsiolkovsky figured out that liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were pretty much as good as chemical fuels can get, and they're used in high performance applications today. But LOX and liquid hydrogen are horrific to work with, and as rockets move from applied science experiment to key military technology, fuels have to get a lot less cryogenic and volatile. Hence, people like Clark, and billions of dollars of research into hydrazine, nitric acid, boron compounds, and more exotic chemistries.

Clark is a great story teller, and when he injects human interest, abound funding, lab explosions, and horrible ideas like mercury based rocket fuel, the book is quite good. But it's organized by chemistry, rather than chronologically, so expect to spend a lot of time with reaction diagrams and wandering in the forest of alternatives abandoned because their freezing points were too high, density too low, or they simply failed to ignite reliably.

I want to close with the famous quote about, Flourine Trioxide, the best part of the book.

“It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

One of the things I miss most about physical libraries is serendipity. Sometimes, search weirdness can make up for that. I actually wanted to read Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Refugees, but my library didn't have it. they did have this book, which is straight literary fiction, a multi-generational story about overcoming the trauma of historical events.

The Mountains Sing follows two parallel tracks. In the present is Tran, growing up in Hanoi in the 1970s with her grandmother. Tran's mother, father, and three uncles have all gone south as part of the NVA, and after an American bombing raid, the story is about the return of the traumatized veterans in her family, or the eternal absence.

The other track is her grandmother's stories, growing up as a rich peasant in the 1940s and 50s. These were truly awful times for Vietnam. Grandma's father is decapitated by the occupying Japanese for taking potatoes to Hanoi. Everybody nearly starves to death in the post-war famine (2 million Vietnamese died). In the Communist land reform, following the partition, Grandmother is denounced and forced to flee with her five children, begging on the road and making desperate bargains to survive.

But this is a sentimental story, and things work out mostly okay in the end. There's some nice moments of tenderness with Tran, and the sensual invocation of rural Vietnam, but I've left unsatisfied with this book, like a meal missing a main course.

Terry Pratchett is one of the great fantasy novelists of the 20th and 21st century. The Discworld books are hilarious, inventive, humanistic, and remarkably good for such an extended series. The worst you can say about the weaker of the 40 odd novels is they're just okay. This collection of short fiction is worse than just okay.

We have two decent stories. The quite good Discworld short "The Sea and the Little Fishes", which features a witching competition, and why Granny Weatherwax always wins. "The High Meggas" is the genesis of the Pratchett/Baxter Long Earth books, about parallel dimensional travel. "The High Meggas" was written at the same time as The Colour of Magic and Discworld proved such a runaway success that the idea never really went anywhere. It's okay, a little punchier on action compared to character.

But the rest of this collection is junk of interest only to the Pratchett completionist. We have his first published story, written when he was 13, jobbing fiction from the 70s, and a bunch of Discworld sketches, of which you've probably seen the jokes in print in the actual books.

My overwhelming sense is on of annoyance at the editors and publishers who took the crumbs of stories from Pratchett's disk drives and figured that they'd make a complete book.

Blowout is a lot of interesting notecards, and a lot of red string, but falls short of presenting a compelling narrative.

The topline thesis should be easy enough. Oil and gas extraction is a business which has made some people incredibly wealthy and mass prosperity possible. It is also corrupt, has catastrophic environmental costs, and is willing to see the planet destroyed rather than accept any regulation or limits on its power.

Some of the cast of characters are big figures. Vladimir Putin, Rex Tillerson, John Rockefeller. But there's lots of interest in lesser luminaries, like Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon, who pioneering fracking and leveraged his company to destruction and himself to antitrust investigation and probable suicide. Harold Hamm made a lot of money fracking, and then pushed the Oklahoma legislature to enact permanent tax breaks for fracking. Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the corrupt President of Equatorial Guinea, spends millions on a Malibu shopaholic lifestyle, which his county is one of the most impoverished in the world.

The two key events are the growth of fracking in the United States, and Putin's 'energy diplomacy' policy in Europe. Fracking, the injection of high-pressure water into horizontally drilled wells to break up rock formations and liberate oil and gas, has unlocked massive new fossil fuel reserves. It also produces billions of gallons of saline wastewater laden with heavy metals and radioactive particles, and likely causes earthquakes in regions which have been seismically inert for centuries. Putin saw Russia's energy reserves as key weapon in maintaining Russia's great power status, and his personal power, but corruption and US sanctions have hampered Russia's energy policy.

There are lots of interesting pieces here, but as a coherent narrative, especially one about our collective involvement in the energy business, Blowout doesn't quite hit home. I read it, and my wife listened to it as an audiobook, and I think that the latter format might play better to Maddow's strengths, she's a good author and a great newshost, and this works better an extended special episode of her show, rather than a serious book.