Season of the Witch is all about the human interest stories of San Francisco, in that tumultuous time from 1967 to 1982. This was when Haight-Ashbury invented the hippie counter-culture, and then that brief glimpse of utopia curdled and imploded in a mass of drug addiction, racial violence, and finally a brutal political assassination.

At it's base, San Francisco was a blue collar town, run by a machine of Irish and Italian Catholics. The police force was on the take, the unions were strong, and the stolid families and fringes of Barbary Coast dissolution had their nicely separate spheres. But the arrival of thousands of teenage runaways in the Summer of Love was something else, entirely. As many turned from sex and LSD to harder drugs, 'heavy hippies' organized free clinics and alternative civic services for people the city wanted to push into the Pacific Ocean.

But the scene turned bad, and turned bad hard, as speed and heroin ate the heart out of the movement. A few 'heavy hippies' held on, but most burned out or fled to the country. Predators in love beads took over the Haight, with the Altamont Rolling Stone show definitively ending the 60s.

Then the terror started in earnest. The Fillmore district had long been home of San Francisco's Black middle class, but an urban renewal project shuttered the businesses and left it a wasteland. Prisons served as pressure cookers for radicalism, including the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Zebra killers, serial killers who targeted white victims for alleged mystical purposes.

As the hippies were winding down, gay liberation was winding up, with the Castro becoming the epicenter a bold uncloseted homosexuality. Harvey Milk was elected to the board of supervisions, with the administration of Mayor George Moscone breaking the old guard Catholic machine to represent the city's diversity. Both men were deeply tied to cult leader Jim Jones, who's People's Temple was an octopus in the city's progressive movements. The Jonestown massacre and political assassination of Moscone and Milk by ex-supervisor Dan White was a comprehensive shock, the worst day since the 1906 Earthquake.

Talbot ends on a happy note, arguing that the 1982 victory of the 49ers healed the city, but the epilogue, on the scything effects of AIDS on San Francisco's gay community, is the real story of the end of the period, a new batch of horrors. Talbot's book is flawed as sociology, and it overlooks the city's Asian and Hispanic residents in favor of charismatic White boomers of various stripes. But it's also a fantastic story page-by-page, and a vivid, fun book.

Agency is a card trick masquerading as a novel. Pick a chapter, pick any of the 110 short chapters, shuffle it back into the book, pick a San Francisco techie stereotype, some postmodern melding of start-up and intelligence tradecraft jargon. Is this your plot? Rinse, repeat. Compared to The Peripheral, Agency is more artful, more authentically voiced as kind of urban technocracy story, but way less interesting.

Two timelines. In one it is the 22nd century, after the Jackpot, an event which killed 80% of humanity and a whole lot of animals, and where the most potent surviving political organization are 'klepts', criminal families. The 22nd century can reach back in time through an unspecified anomaly to interfere in alternate pasts. In one alternate past, a stub in the terminology of the book, it is 2018 or so, futuristic meddling means Hillary Clinton is President and Britain is in the EU, but things are still one minute to midnight, with nuclear war threatened over an escalating Syrian Civil War.

Verity, our main character (I decline to say protagonist. Protagonists make choices and exhibit a character arc), is couchsurfing in SF, hiding from the media after her breakup with charismatic tech CEO Stets, when she's given a new job to beta test an app. The app is strong AI, going by the name Eunice, with expertise in counter-insurgency and hybrid warfare courtesy of the US military.

Verity is plunged like a pinball into a world of crowd-sourced spies, next generation drones, and Silicon Valley couture. Meanwhile Netherton, a public relations flack in 22nd century London, and his new wife Rainey act as of kind of Greek chorus, bemoaning nuclear war and the worse prospects of the Jackpot ahead for the stub. They have their own troubles. Netherton's eldritch spy/police employer Lowbeer is being conspired against by a senior member of the klept, and the whole thing could be very dangerous.

But there's no so much a plot as a series of events, orchestrated by entities so powerful and enigmatic that they might as well be gods. The characters are thin, even by Gibsonian standards. Gibson's best work has a lot to say about the nature of power, the power of obsession, and the thin tissue of humanity in the hurricane of power, technology, and obsession. I follow Gibson on Twitter, and his Twitter, plus the premise of this novel (an alternate reality where the alt-right crest broke just short) signals a terminal case of Lib Brain. There's this notion that the world is going to hell because of klepts, spooks, hidden networks that run counter to democracy. And it's true, deliberative bodies of democratically selected representatives have no place in that Gibsonian cyberpunk nightmare that is our present. But the thing about all the enemies is the triumph of the private over the public, of personal interest over the public interest. And it's not like this takes genius. You can do it with a half dozen guys with AKs in the back of pickup truck, or a half dozen bought judges on the Supreme Court and a cast iron gall. These enemies of the world are not so much superior, it's just that we're unwilling to fight them. And as a counter, Gibson imagines a distributed conspiracy of highly-paid experts coming together to deliver... some kind of fucking illegal art happening in San Francisco.

I'm not sure if it's being played straight, or incredible deadpan irony. Either way, not a fan.

What better way to celebrate the 8000th day of the actual year 2020 than reading a vintage technothriller from 1990 about 2020? The War in 2020 holds up on the basis of solid character work and some decent futurism.

Peters imagines a future with a declining America and an ascendant Japan, using next generation electronic warfare and lasers to crush an ill-planned 2005 expeditionary force in Africa. In the first dozen or so pages our protagonist, Taylor, is shot down, escapes back to friendly lines over thousands of miles of plague ridden anarchy, and survives a bout with the fictional Runicman's Disease, a complex and deadly viral infection. The action skips forward in time, though quelling riots in Los Angeles and counter-insurgency in Mexico, before again finding solid ground.

It's 2020 in Central Asia, and things are bad. The Soviet Union is falling back before a vast Muslim army consisting of Iraqi Sunnis, Iranian Shiites, and people from the various -stans. The army is slaughtering refugees with nerve gas, and the whole thing is being masterminded by Japan, which is supplying weapons and senior leadership. The last, best hope of stability in Central Asia is Taylor and his 7th Cavalry, reconstituted with M-100 gunships. The M-100s are tiltrotor VTOLS along the line of the V-22, but armed with a miniature railgun. Taylor and his men have to deal with Russian obstructionism and the friction, of combat, but they launch a sweeping cavalry raid that destroys the Japanese depots, and then when there's retaliation by a secret terror weapon (which I'll not spoil, because it's pretty good), Taylor has to launch one more desperate raid to hack the Japanese command computer. As he puts it in one of the book's better lines, a lot of wars are lost by the first side to give up, because you know how bad you're hurting, but you have to guess at the enemy's circumstances, and they might be even worse off than you.

As I said, the characterization is solid. Taylor is a stoic, classic soldier, but the bonds between his command staff feels very real. Peters has a talent for pacing, and not getting lost in the technical pornography of violence. He knows how to make the victories feel earned, because winning hurts.

An author's note at the end places this book as a serious attempt to grapple with the possibility that America might lose it's military-technological edge, and how that might resolve. As such, the Japanese are the adversaries, but there's very little of the worst kinds of 90s yellow peril. It's also an attempt to grapple seriously with political fundamentalist Islam (good foresight there), but it leads him down some Islamophobic roads, As the Muslim characters are universally murderous fanatics incapable of dealing with modernity. Finally, as a military thriller, this book is heavy on male perspective, and two women featured as viewpoint characters see themselves primarily through sexual bargaining. They're whores, whether in Moscow or Washington DC. The inability to form real relationships with women is a key psychological subtext. It's not great, but about par for the genre.

I picked this book up at an outdoor booksale and carted it around with me for years. Not sure this battered paperback will survive another bookshelf purge, but it's been a fun read.

"This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle — you know who you're killing"
--USAID advisor Lt. Col John Paul Vann

War is an atrocity. Murder is an atrocity. The Phoenix Program, as documented in this book, is an atrocity. And unfortunately, it is one which undergirds the present national security state. As we've all learned since 9/11, the political terrorist does not fit neatly into the categories of Westphalian order. The terrorist does not wear a uniform or fight in ranks, so he is not a soldier. And while acts of violence are crimes, an ideology of violence is not, making judicial convictions difficult to obtain. Phoenix is about the gray area between war and crime, and America's complicity in both in Vietnam.

Writing about the Phoenix Program is difficult for several reasons. First is one of bureaucratic confusion over the 20 year stretch of the Second Indochina War, with dozens of paramilitary action groups and even more diversity in funding and organizations. The best thing to do is to avoid hair-splitting and unwarranted precision; the Phoenix Program was an effort to eliminate individual civilians in South Vietnam as communist agents, and support for communism as a political phenomenon. The second difficulty is one of official evasion. Much of the program is and was classified. Official testimony, particularly by CIA director William Colby, is full of obfuscation and outright lies. The third difficult is one of conspiracy. Valentine alleges that records have been doctored to make some of his sources look insane, to say that they were never even in Vietnam. Still, even discounting the conspiratorial, there is plenty in the public record and his on-the-record interviews to document Phoenix.

As Ngo Dinh Diem tightened his grasp on power in the late 1950s, the basic problem his regime confronted was one of unpopularity. Guerrilla warfare experts, most notably Ed Lansdale, suggested an aggressive program of counter-terror. Small forces would attack pro-Communist villages dressed in VC black pajamas and make public spectacles of murder. Assisted by intelligence from the rural grievance survey, these programs attempted to dislocate the Viet Cong. Of course, getting people for these units was a problem. The Viet Cong could rely on large numbers of ardent nationalists and Party members for their squads. The government turned to the dregs of society, Nung mercenaries and the sweepings of hardened criminals in Saigon jails.

As the war expanded after 1965, the Phoenix Program fell victim to the characteristic American mistake of the war: bad metrics and short-term careerism. Robert "Blowtorch" Komer used all his powers to organize a national system of Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) assassination teams, and district and province interrogation centers. Interrogation centers were rated on prisoners taken in and processed, frequently involving torture, while collating usable intelligence took a backseat. The overburdened South Vietnamese judicial system couldn't process thousands of detainees, who languished in jail on flimsy pretexts. US advisors varied wildly in quality, with the unconventional warfare experts of the early years pushed out in favor of junior counter-intelligence lieutenants and CIA case officers.

The Phoenix Program also suffered from the typical South Vietnamese weakness of public corruption. PRUs were used as the personal goon squads of province governors to eliminate business and political rivals. Diversion of materials into the black market and drug trafficking were rampant. The detention system became a source for bribes and shakedowns.

Money, primarily from the CIA black budget, poured into the system, but to little effect. There were dozens of agencies and informer networks, and rather than combining information, most officials assumed that the South Vietnamese internal security system was thoroughly riddled with Viet Cong agents (it was), and so acted unilaterally. One branch of Phoenix would assassinate a man which another branch of Phoenix had been cultivating as an internal source.

In my favorite "fractally fucked up" story from this book, Komer spent months pushing the phrase 'Viet Con Infrastructure', which got befuddlement from South Vietnamese partners to his endless frustration. This was because when translated, 'infrastructure' means roads, bridges, canals. This was not South Vietnamese incompetence, their secret police understood the enemy, but they called them 'cadres'.

Valentine was writing in the mid-1980s, at the height of dirty wars in Latin America. This book has aged like wine. Maybe Vann is right, and killing with a knife is better than killing from the air. I wouldn't know. But the creation of secret kill lists is anathema to liberty. The fact that when pressed, the American government and American people will take the kill lists over 'disorder' is an enduring indictment of the evils of empire, and how its corruption always returns home.

This review was supposed to go up on H-Net, but has been mired in limbo for several months. Since their reviews are covered under Creative Commons, and I'm the author, and I prefer Goodreads, I'm posting here. Expect more words than usual.

It is cliché to say that the current era is an information age. The objects, processes, and consequences of digital computing are omnipresent, built into everything from toys to weapons to domestic appliances. While the prefix cyber- signifies this vision of digital modernity, the field of cybernetics is a marginalized fringe, rather than a mainstream science of information. Ronald R. Kline traces the intellectual and social trajectories of cybernetics and information from their linked origins in 1948 to the present. Two geniuses of applied mathematics, Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon, formalized an insight that information could be mathematically described in a form like the entropy equation, a standard measure of disorder in a physical system that related to the thermodynamic capacity for work. Moreover, human being and machines could be described as interacting components of a larger system with emergent characteristics not merely capturable in the performance of machines or the decisions of men. From this insight, Weiner, Shannon, and luminaries in the biological, psychological, and social sciences hoped that a new interdisciplinary language would arise uniting multiple fields of study and providing a scientifically rigorous description of the contours of Second World War II life. But cybernetics never rose above the status of analogy for a range of scientific phenomena and faded as a field. Through a detailed reading of the personal correspondence of involved scholars, proceedings of interdisciplinary conferences, and the popular press, Kline provides an invaluable account of how scientists and humanists came to understand the potential and pitfalls of increasing interconnectedness between humans and machines and the polymorphic meaning of the word “information.”

Arguments over the true father of information are a feature of histories celebrating both Weiner and Shannon. The first chapter works around this priority dispute by describing the near-simultaneous origins of Weiner’s and Shannon’s ideas from their World War II work, and contacts among a common circle of collaborators. Weiner developed an automated anti-aircraft sight at the MIT Radiation Laboratory that could calculate lead and direct the gun to ensure a hit as a human operator tracked a target. For Weiner, information was represented by a time-series of measurements, and as those messages became more random less information was transmitted. Imagine an oscillating dial settling on a value, and one captures the essence of Weiner's thinking on information and entropy. Weiner’s 1948 book Cybernetics was an extension of the insight that men and machines could be described in terms of information and feedback loops. Shannon’s work, also published in 1948 in a two-part article “A Mathematical Theory of Information”, described information as positive entropy: as the receiver becomes more certain of what to expect next from a transmitted signal, the less information they receive. Though the underlying mathematics were similar, two theories of information were inverses of each other. For Weiner a steady signal transmitted maximum confidence and maximum information; for Shannon, a steady signal sent nothing new, and transmitted zero information. Though Weiner has been largely written out of the official history of information theory, Kline notes that Shannon visited Weiner several times at MIT in 1941 and 1942 and, according to Weiner’s collaborator Julian Bigelow, they discussed the statistical basis of information. Combined with Shannon’s acknowledgment to Weiner in his article, this suggests a greater degree of similar thinking between the two men than the later divergence between cybernetics and information theory indicates.

The second chapter follows ten interdisciplinary conferences funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation from 1946 to 1953 on cybernetics. The premise of cybernetics was that “the nervous system was deemed to work like a feedback-control mechanism, the brain like a digital computer, and society like a communication system” (pg. 45). Behind these analogies was the idea of negative feedback, a system which maintains a set level by correcting deviations from its outputs. Thermostats are a familiar use of negative feedback, a device which turns on a furnace when a room is cold, and turns off the furnace when the room reaches a comfortable temperature. The Macy conference attendees hoped that complex behavior such as biological and social phenomena, could be treated scientifically by cybernetic models. Despite significant support over seven years from the Macy Foundation, the conferences failed to develop their analogies and ideas into a research program. Data from the social sciences was too messy to fit into cybernetics equations and models, and personal feud between Weiner and conference chair Warren McCulloch over laboratory support at MIT interfered with the intellectual project.

While the scientific side of cybernetics floundered, the ideas gained increasing relevance in the public sphere. The third chapter explores an explosion of cultural interests in cybernetics in the early Cold War. Weiner’s book Cybernetics became a campus favorite and attracted glowing reviews from the press. Weiner’s 1950 book The Human Uses of Human Beings, a non-mathematic treatment of his theories, attracted further popular attention to the potential of "thinking" machines. The course of cybernetics quickly ran away from Weiner, as his books were advertised alongside science-fiction novels like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). Weiner’s name was even appropriated without permission by L. Ron Hubbard to promote the pseudo-scientific cult Dianetics, a precursor to Scientology. What scientific progress there was in the cybernetics was by applied military projects for guided missiles and radar systems, rather than the interdisciplinary vision of the Macy conferences. Weiner was leery of military domination of science, even as he was taking military funding for his work on a glove that translated sound into vibration for the deaf, and publicly distanced himself from military work in a letter to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. While cybernetics became strongly associated with thinking computers and automated factories in the public eye, for academics it remained a diffuse program of mathematical models in the social and biological sciences which had not yet produced novel results or integrated disciplines across the social and natural science.

The contrast between cybernetics and information theory in the years after 1955, as presented in the fourth chapter, became even more stark., Kline’s analysis of the papers and conferences organized under the aegis of the Institute of Radio Engineers Professional Group on Information Theory (PGIT) shows that this group cited Shannon’s definition of information over Weiner’s. Although the first PGIT conferences were highly interdisciplinary, featuring papers on automata and the social sciences along with communication engineering, by 1959 their focus had narrowed to the emerging technology of digital computers and the technical details of analog signal processing as applied to radar and telephones. By the 1960s, scholars cited either Weiner or Shannon, but rarely both. The academic community split between cyberneticists pronouncing sweeping theories, and information theorists working on discrete technical problems. Participants in the information theory conferences eventually separated their work entirely from the ordinary semantic definition of "information" as conveyed meaning to focus on analog signal processing and the storage and manipulation of digital data.

The fifth chapter and sixth chapter return to cybernetics as science, by examining the influence of cybernetics in the origins of artificial intelligence and the work of six behavioral scientists from 1954 to 1959: Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, Roman Jakobson, Talcott Parsons, and Gregory Bateson. These researchers used concepts from cybernetics and information theory to mathematically model human behavior and social interactions. Information theory had applications in psychology and linguistics, measuring the thresholds of humans to distinguish phonemes, the basic unit of speech, in a noisy environment. Miller’s adage that human working memory consists of seven items, plus or minus two (now a commonplace observation linked to the length of telephone numbers) has its origins in this research. Although cybernetic thinking influenced research agendas and the formation of new interdisciplinary centers, its outcomes were distinct from the visions of a universal science that had surrounded the movement in the early 1950s.
No discussion of cybernetics is not complete without its avatar, the cyborg. Kline analyzes the 1960 articles of Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, a pair of doctors working in aerospace medicine, who coined the term cyborg to describe their ideal astronaut, a symbiont of human intelligence and machine durability capable of operating in the vacuum of outer space. The original cyborg, a cybernetic organism that could consciously adapt to its environments, has since come to mean any implantation of mechanical or electrical components in a living organism. For Clynes and Kline, the cyborg went beyond a solution to the immediate problem of space exploration to mark a spiritual leap in mankind’s self-directed evolution. For reasons of practicality, the Air Force rejected the cyborg in favor of life support capsules, but the idea lives on. Through science-fiction fantasies and Donna Haraway’s ironic criticism of the military-industrial complex, the cyborg has become an evocative symbol, standing for both inhuman perfectibility and the indivisible tangle of social and technological systems in ordinary life.

The seventh chapter follows cybernetics through its decline in the 1960s and 1970s. The biologists and social scientists that had given the initial series of Macy conferences on cybernetics their deeply interdisciplinary character returned to their original fields, and cybernetics was abandoned to researchers in computers and electronics with heterodox inclinations. Cybernetics found a home in the Soviet Union, where feedback-control mechanisms had a natural alliance with the Communist command economy. Out of concerns of a ‘cybernetics gap’, the Central Intelligence Agency sponsored the founding of the American Society for Cybernetics in 1964, the year of Nobert Weiner’s death. The organizers of the ASC and a separate Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Group for Systems Science and Cybernetics attempted to recast cybernetics as a modern science capable of solving social problems but had little success in the tumultuous late 60s. The dreamers and visionaries of the counterculture actively co-opted the terminology of cybernetics, embarking on a legitimacy exchange that gave a gloss of respectability to their vision of a liberated technological utopia, while leaving the scientific project of cybernetics disordered and discredited.

Chapter eight returns to the meanings of information beyond the technical non-semantic definition arrived at by the information theorists, the relationship between information in and of itself, information technology, and the information age. The term information technology originated in the management jargon of the 1960s, and evolved from referring to statistical techniques for managing business processes such as operations research, to referring to a slew of new devices for storing, communicating, and analyzing digitized data. Information technology gained credence as an ever-expanding budget item, another necessary expense for managers looking to root out inefficiency and coordinate global businesses. The term information age has a separate genealogy, one rooted in futurism and critique published in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Daniel Bell and Marshall McLuhan. This rhetoric of radical transformation was picked up by government economists in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other advanced countries, but in the absence of agreed upon definition of information in a social sense, the idea of an information age become an empty label to denote recent decades, without capturing the magnitude or consequences of the immense investment in information technology.

The Cybernetics Moment closes by reading Stewart Brand’s journalism on cybernetics and computers as how a case study in how an influential believer in the liberatory potential of Weiner's cybernetics became an information age guru. Brand wrote about the birth of the ARPANET in Rolling Stone as “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums” (1972) and interviewed Margeret Mead and Gregory Bateson in 1976 about their time at the Macy conferences on cybernetics. Brand was perhaps the last person to attempt to organize a social movement around cybernetic principles with his Whole Earth Movement. But Bateson's death and the rise of the commercial possibilities associated with the personal computer lead Brand to instead evangelize the liberating power of information at the MIT Media Lab. Despite the failure of cybernetics to provide answers or even progress on its major premises, the questions raised then remain provocative even today: that something about ourselves can be seen in devices that adjust to their surroundings; that information is a fundamental part of the universe on par with energy and matter; and that there might be a spiritual component to computers.

The Cybernetics Moment is an in-depth study of the field of cybernetics. It is historical account of how researchers clarify the questions and boundaries of a field which offers an explanation for the success of information theory and the relative lack of success for cybernetics in terms of legitimacy exchange. Finally, for scholars studying the social implications of computing, algorithms, and automation, this is a thorough review of the first formulations of those questions and how they were dealt with at the dawn of the information age.

The gods smile on some people.

Linda Baer / Nyugen Thi Loan (I'll use her American name going forward, since it's on the cover), was born in a small village in North Vietnam in 1947. Her early life was marked by tragedy, her father was killed by the Viet Minh, her mother remarried a wealthy but distant and abusive doctor of Chinese medicine, and the whole family moved to South Vietnam in 1954. Cut off from his community, her stepfather's practice decline and the whole family was reduced to penury.

Despite the hard times, Baer writes engagingly about the small joys of childhood in the countryside, with lots of animals, moments of good food against a general background of near starvation, and a few valuable friendships. As a girl and a non-biological child, Linda wasn't allowed to go to school, and as a teenager she started working in Saigon as a maid. These few years are one continuous period of 'how are you still alive?', and I'm genuinely astounded that a 14 year old girl frequently sleeping rough on the streets of Saigon wasn't victimized worse than she was. At this point, she seems about as street smart as small dog wearing a sweater.

In 1963, when she was 16, Linda had one of her first major strokes of luck. She met a woman named Lynn who wanted help to run a meat stand. This was stable work, and Lynn's all female household was safe from predatory male employers who were starting to take an interest in Linda. Lynn had an eye on the main score, and as Americans entered the country in increasing numbers in 1964 and 1965, helped Linda learn English and started a club. By the time she was 18, Linda was an experienced manager and bar girl, well-versed in spending time with Americans while drinking Saigon Tea, expensive faux-whiskey with the profits split between the girl and the bar owner.

Of course, it was still war. Linda was arrested several times for being in the wrong apartment without her papers and on suspicion of being a prostitute (which she wasn't). Friends and relatives died from random and omnipresent violence. She was engaged by her stepfather to a worm of a man. Even worse, she was raped and bore a child. And while she was pretty capable at being a bar girl and playing the black market, at some point the dance would end and she'd be left with nothing.

The last stroke of luck was a chance meeting with Don Baer, an American Air Force officer. The two of them fell in love, and when Don's tour ended and he was rotated stateside, he returned and they got married. The two of them went to the United States, then returned to Vietnam on unspecified civilian business in 1973. In a final stroke of luck, they were supposed to be on a C-5 flight out of Saigon, which they missed due to traffic. That plane crashed, killing over a hundred people, mostly Vietnamese orphans being evacuated.

Linda and family returned to the states, where she earned a GED and a degree in cosmetology, opened a beauty salon, has been married for 46 years, and wrote this book and a sequel.

The Billion Dollar Spy gets at the crushing paranoia of running intelligence operations at the height of the Cold War in Moscow, right under the nose of the KGB. Adolf Tolchakev was a Russian radar engineer who had grown disenchanted with the Soviet Union, a country that crushed liberty and failed to provide for its people. This middle aged engineer with impeccable credentials began passing notes into the windows of American diplomatic cars (by chance his first target was a CIA officer and not an actual diplomat). It took years for the CIA to decide that Tolchakev was for real, and not a KGB gambit.

They provided cameras, and Tolchakev delivered thousands of page outlining the latest in Soviet R&D for radars, especially high-tech look-down/shoot-down designs which would give Soviet interceptors much better odds against the American bomber fleet. The US Air Force estimated the value of Tolchakev's intelligence as billions of dollars saved in R&D costs.

This book has two themes. The first are the Moscow Rules and operating "in the black". Americans in Moscow were routinely followed by the KGB. Any meetings with agents or transfer of items by dead drop had to be proceeded by breaking surveillance, going black in CIA parlance. Where the Mendez' book Moscow Rules presents this as sleight of hand, entertaining war stories, Hoffman focuses on the isolation and paranoia that agents experience. You could never know if you were clear, and failure would mean the arrest and execution of your agent.

The second is the psychological pressure of being a spy. In being a case agent is hard, being a spy is much harder. Most agents are abnormal in some ways, and the CIA had to balance Tolchakev's demands for cash, a suicide pill, and then consumer goods and medicine only available on the black market, with their fears that he would be unable to explain where the money or goods came from, or take the pill in a moment of weakness. But Tolchakev's desire to hurt the USSR, inspired by dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov and defector MiG-25 pilot Viktor Belenko drove him to stay on the job.

I avoided googling anything from this case, because I hoped that Tolchakev would make it out alive, but he was down in by betrayal from within the CIA, as two officers turned traitors, Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames, turned over information revealing a high level source in the radar institute. The KGB was able to identify Tolchakev as the source, and he was arrested and executed. I've read a fair number of books on the spy game, and this is one of the best.

"Cold War? Hell, it was a hot war!"
--Robert McNamara, The Fog of War

McNamara isn't wrong. While the soldiers of the superpowers rarely engaged each other directly during the 45 year long confrontation between Communism and Capitalism, proxy wars blazed across the world. Chamberlin's book is a survey of those proxy wars, which killed 20 million people between 1945 and 1990. The My Lai Massacre is perhaps the most infamous incident, but the average death toll was 3 My Lai's a day. Some of the wars are famous; Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, but some of the bloodiest incidents are almost forgotten in the West, like the Indonesian genocide of 1965, orchestrated by Suharto with CIA assistance, or the bloody war of Bangladeshi independence.

Chamberlin organizes his book into three chronological section dominated by historical themes. The first was the rising triumph of Communist China, from their victory in the Chinese Civil War to their intervention in Korea. Maoist successes came with heavy casualties and were ultimately stemmed in Korea with UN soldiers, though the war stopped short of General McArthur's desired nuclear attack.

The second phase was "war of national liberation", of which Vietnam was the centerpiece. The widening Sino-Soviet split also ruptured into an absolute breach, with the killing fields of Cambodia representing the nadir of the Communist desire for utopia.

The third phase was one of religious and nationalistic wars. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and American funding of Islamic guerillas was key to this period of the Cold War, but the long Iran-Iraq War was a bloody version of WW1 in the Middle East with far higher casualties.

All theoretical perspectives draw boundaries, and while Chamberlin's focus on 'the Asian rimlands' brings forward overlooked events, it also means that this history of the post-colonial order ignores Africa and South America, which saw their own bloody killings and wars. And if this was your only book, you wouldn't know that there were ideologies or nuclear weapons involved, which seems important. The theoretical lens says that mass deaths in Asia have a common thread, which seems tenuous in some cases. Bangladesh and Iran-Iraq in particular don't seem to be Cold War killings. It's clear that the superpowers were absolutely willing to support almost any murderous faction that made the right noises about Marxism. Compared to Lowe's Savage Continent, Killing Fields is a chronology without much analysis.

The Space Between Worlds is a stylish and emotional debut, full of rage and hurt. The high-concept scifi is travel between parallel universes, with two catches. First, we can only travel to universes that are pretty similar to our own. And second, if you're alive in a parallel universe, going will kill you. This means that sheltered PhD types make poor candidates. You need someone who's dead almost everywhere else to make a good traverser. Someone like Cara.

And that's where this book shines, in the depiction of Cara and her social reality. Her own Earth is a planet divided, between the steel and glass city-arcology where she works, and the mudbrick toxic slum of Ashtown where she was born, lived, and mostly died. The racism, classism, and Foucauldian biopower of the setting isn't so much subtext or text as supertext. Cara wants to fit in, want's to be secure, want's to be valued for something other than dying a lot. And it isn't going to happen.

The basic form of this book is the confession, layers of secrets and crimes. The first confession is that Cara isn't the original. Our narrator is from Earth-22, an imposter for the dead prime. Prime was a good girl raised in a harsh environment. Cara-22 was the abused partner of the Emperor of Ashtown, a warlord named Nik Nik who commands a force of gangsters driving Mad Max death machines (in a utopian detail, almost all universes have banned guns and edged weapons. Even in hell, they kill up close.) Prime died on her first journey, and Cara-22 has been impersonating her for six years.

When a routine journey to Earth-175 goes wrong, Cara comes face to face with an alternate Nik Nik, and learns that her job as a traverser is based on another layer of lies. The genius who invented traversing is another warlord. His sole power over traversing is maintained by corporate buyouts on Earth Prime and assassinations across the multiverse. As Cara's dreams break apart, she drives a bargain of monstrous revenge.

The Space Between Worlds is stylish, polished, and thoughtful. It upholds the highest values of science-fiction, to hold a mirror of estrangement to our own world and say, "This is who you are, but it doesn't have to be like this."

Sextant is an ode to the craft of nautical navigation, and the instrument which enabled the navigators of the Age of Sail to find their way across the seas. Barrie frames his history around his own crossing of the Atlantic in a small sailing yacht, which gives a human touch to his history of famous voyagers: Bligh, Cook, Vancouver, Fitzroy, and Shackleton foremost among them.

Picking up from Sobel's classic Longitude, Barrie demonstrates that even after the invention of the chronometer, celestial navigation was preferred as more reliable than mechanical gimcrackery. With a sextant for measuring the angles of the sun, moon, and key stars, along with a table of ephemera in a nautical almanac, a skilled navigator could get a fix of a few hundred meters.

But navigation is more than the best route between ports. These are stories about cartography, strenuous missions to get trigonometric fixes on the mazes of channels that make up the Pacific Northwest, the islands of the South Pacific, and the horrific shoreline of Tierra del Fuego. These explorers were an austere crowd, at least compared to the genocidal conquistadors of the Age of Exploration, or the mercantile interests that would follow the initial mapping. Barrie presents a rather uncritical view of what was a vital part of the British imperial project, but he has a talent for turning the logs of these taciturn men into thrilling adventurers, invoking the magic of sailing by your senses and little bit of spherical trigonometry in an age when precise coordinate to anywhere are in your pocket.