The Moscow Rules is the story of a real world Q Branch, the CIA's Office of Technical Services, where authors Tony and Jonna Mendez devised the devices and techniques that made some impressive intelligence breakthroughs possible.

Soviet Moscow was as hostile an environment for intelligence tradecraft as could be produced, short of an actual prison. Americans were tailed whenever they left diplomatic compounds, all contacts between Russians and foreigners was logged, and the embassy buildings themselves were riddled with bugs and Russian servants working for the KGB. A simple matter of getting intelligence back from an agent, let alone making a meeting, seemed impossible.

Mendez found ways to elude surveillance, using the techniques of stage magic and some Hollywood special effects. The trick was to be able "go into the black", to evade KGB surveillance using misdirection such that the KGB didn't know they'd been tricked. Tactics included a device called the jack-in-the-box, which mimicked a passenger in a car, allowing an officer to bail out, and quick change disguises to turn CIA officers into Moscow civilians. Mendez and his team could perform miracles, swapping everything including race and gender.

This is a breezy and quick read through spycraft. It's a lot of fun, though not particularly deep. Recommended for fans of The Americans, and the Jennings' wig game.

The simplest way to describe Involution Ocean is Moby Dick meets Dune. A sybaritic drug user signs up with a whaling ship that sails on an ocean of dust to obtain a sure supply of the exotic drug Flare. No book could match up to greatness of those two, but Involution Ocean moves quickly, and sketches out a fascinating and mysterious world in the Great Dust Sea.

****

Reread 2021: Involution Ocean wears its homages on its sleeve, so much so that I wonder how much is below the surface. The style is great. While this is Sterling's first novel, and he hews closely to Melville's nautical anachronism, the bones of the patented cyberpunk eyeball kick style are still there. The protagonist John Newhouse's addiction and masochistic love for the bat-wing alien lookout Dalusa give the book an emotional urgency that leaps over otherwise simple characterization. And the alien ecology of the dust sea, with it whales and sharks and cannibal anemones delights in its opacity weirdness. The conclusion, a heretical voyage in a submarine made from a whale carcass and John's revelation of what lies under the sea, feels unearned and disconnected from the rest of the novel, but the journey is short, swift, and very interesting.

Absolution Gap is a decent novel on its own merits, but a disappointing conclusion to the Revelation Space series.

The best parts of the book follow Rashmika, a 17 year old girl on the frontier pilgrimage world of Hela. Hela orbits a gas giant that occasionally vanishes, revealing hints of some immense machinery inside. An entire religion has grown up on Hela, centered around moving cathedrals that keep the gas giant perpetually at zenith and the strains of an indoctrination virus floating through the population. Hela has it's own xenoarcheological paradox, a local culture of extinct scuttlers who seem to have been killed by something other than the inhibitors. Rashmika is driven to find out why the scuttlers are extinct, what's happened to her brother, and the true nature of the church, all of which seem to center on a immense bridge of unknown construction over a massive canyon, the titular absolution gap. Meanwhile, the survivors on Ararat are trying to make sense of their mission, as the Inhibitors and Conjoiner war catch up to them and Captain Brannigan takes over the Nostalgia for Infinity. The plot lurches along towards a conclusion that has about three simultaneous deux ex machinas.

It's a shame, because while Reynolds sets up a fascinating universe, he never quite figures out how to tell good stories in it. The paradox of the Inhibitors is that they're a lot like zombies, an unthinking horde that can be slowed but not stopped. The point of zombie movies is not the zombies, but the survivors. Who do you become in a moment of survival? Who will betray you? The paranoid BDSM war criminals who populate the Revelation Space universe would space each other with more ease than drinking a cup of tea, so there's not much depth to be found there. The universe is also populated with enigmatic hints that the Inhibitors are not as all powerful as they seem. Tinned apes, as space faring H. Sapiens are, might not have a spitting chance, but there seem to be civilizations which have foiled the Inhibitors through migration into alternate biological forms, cybernetic uploads running on exotic substrates, or para-dimensional spaces. The theme that transcendence is salvation pokes up again and again in the series, but is ultimately dropped.

Instead, survival is assured by two previously unknown hyper-powerful alien societies. Our heroes pick the 'right ones', and survive the Inhbitiors, buying a few centuries for another form of rogue terraforming mechanical life to threaten the galaxy.

These books have their moments, but those moments are buried in ideas that should have been cut in the draft.

All Systems Red is a great modern scifi novella. Our narrator is the unnamed Murderbot, a security cyborg guarding an exploration team on an uncharted planet. When technical glitches start putting the team's lives at risk, the question is if this is more lowest-bidder failures from the profit minded Company, or if something greater is afoot. The team's survival depends on their ace in the hole. Murderbot is no simply security unit. He hacked his programming governor is an autonomous unit who's been obeying commands because the charade keeps anyone from looking at him.

This first novella and the narrator are ironic, acerbic, and warm at heart. While I wasn't totally satisfied with the resolution of the initial mystery (the potential profits of alien artifacts inspired a rival team to eliminate the competition by any means necessary), the main characters has a lot of promise. Looking forward to the next one.

***

2021 reread: I got the first four books of the series, so started with one since my memory was flaky. Still pretty damn good, especially MurderBot's voice, with promise on the other elements.

Spire is a New Weird RPG with a heavy setting a light system. You a drow revolutionary, a guerilla cultist in the Ministry of the Hidden Mistress. You home, the mile-high city-building Spire is ruled by cruel Aelfir, high elves who cannot feel sadness, pain, or empathy. Your own people will sell you out, and you life will be short and awful, but perhaps in that time you can strike a blow for freedom.

The system is simple, d10 based with the highest counting. You get 1d10 for being you, +1d10 if you have the skill, +1d10 for domain/background. Difficulty subtracts dice, and the highest result counts. Most successes are partial, stacking stress. Whenever you take stress to one of the attributes (Blood, Mind, Silver, Shadow, Reputation), there's a roll-under chance of triggering fallout, something awful that will happen.

Most of the book focuses on the strange abilities of the character classes, and then the meat of the setting itself. There are dozens of districts, each weirder than the next, grouped thematically by background. Along with the drow and high elves, there are dueling occult and technological traditions, orders of brawler knights, a grinding war of attrition to the south, against demon-summon gnolls, and hundreds of heretical cults. The Spire is itself something alien, perhaps an embryonic god waiting to be born, as the most mundane of possibilities.

The clear comparison to Spire is Blades in the Dark. There's a lot to love about the sheer atmosphere of the Spire setting, but I think I prefer BitD's more structured play-cycle, crew sheets for collective advancement, player empowering Push and Resist mechanics, and greater degree of accessibility. Duskvol makes more sense. Even the artwork of the book has trouble making sense of the scale of the city, of the way that districts should be both claustrophobic and parasitic on the alien architecture. Connolly's One Man novel makes the concreteness of living in a dead god's corpse a presence on every page, and Spire doesn't quite grab that.

The silver, shadow, and reputation resistances are inspired ideas, representing your character's financial state, cover over subversive ideas, and actual social ties, but much of the game is tied up with the specificity of the setting, which is wonderous, but not particularly gameable, in my opinion.

Murderbot #2 sees our titular character heading back to the scene of the crime, a mining installation where it killed 57 humans and feels profound guilt for what it did. Along the way it teams up with a Research Transport cargo ship, and a group of three humans looking to recover some data. Mysterious malefactors keep trying to assassinate Murderbot's clients, and it finds out that someone hacked killware into the mine. It wasn't responsible.

But there's starting to be an odd tonal disconnect between an interstellar cyberpunk dystopia where assassinating low level researchers who stumble onto something corporate doesn't want them to know is super common, and the incredibly naïve humans around Murderbot. There's maybe a point that we're so reliant on the machinery around us that our best defense against it not killing us all is that it likes us, but it's clumsily made. As always, the sardonic tone continues to excel, with plot, character, and setting just hanging off it.

Vietnam War memoirs have a pretty similar structure, imposed by the facts of history. Here's a young kid who doesn't know anything, basic training, a battle or two, becoming a hardened veteran, hijinks in a rear area that don't disguise the psychological wounds of war, a dissatisfying return home, and at some point a book. In this collective biography of the men of Charlie Company, Wiest elevates this story into the tale of a generation in the popular history vein of Stephen Ambrose.

This book is exceptional in depicting each of the men of Charlie Company as unique individuals; California surfers, Southern farmboys, Navajo shepherds, athletes and drag racers and factory workers and young fathers from across America. All of them were drafted (with the exception of one voluenteer) sometime in 1966, the course of their lives forever altered. In 1966 the Vietnam War was quiet news, something happening far away. Most people, if they thought of the war at all, thought that it was worth fighting and would be over soon. For the children of WW2 veterans, service when drafted was assumed.

While the men of Charlie Company were anybody and everybody, Charlie was a unique unit. It was part of the new 9th Division, which was being slated to fight in the populous Mekong Delta. Charlie was trained and deployed as a unit, unlike the stream of replacements which defined the American fighting experience, and the old hands were a closely knit band of brothers.

In the Delta, Charlie was part of the Mobile Riverine Force, Army troops deployed on small boats from floating bases on Navy transports. While close support from the Navy had some advantages, like showers and mess halls on base and close support from river monitors, WW2 era landing ships converted into a close support fire barges armed with everything from 105mm cannons to flamethrowers, by and large the terrain was awful. Patrols had to cut through leech infested channels and impassable mangrove swamps. Good routes on the tops of rice paddy dikes were sure to be mined.

The first few months were almost contactless patrols, 'walks in the sun' marked by attrition through mines and snipers, but soon Charlie walked into the nameless ambushes that characterized the war. In these battles, Charlie gave as good as it got, with small units suffering heavy casualties until American artillery and airpower suppressed Viet Cong bunkers, allowing one of the platoons to flank and destroy the enemy in close assault.

If there's a hitch to this book, it's that Wiest hasn't quite figured out how to write combat. I'm not sure how you get across the utter confusion of battle, but there's a level of historical dispassion to the combat that cuts at cross purposes to the rest of the book. But the final chapter, on the men's lives returning home and the post-1989 reunions save the book. This is about people, not war, and it works.

The ultimate tribute is that of the 134 original Charlie Company soldiers, only 14 returned stateside alive and unwounded.

Intelligence journalism is an odd trade, writing on people who would prefer to keep everything classified forever. And this book from 2008, prior to Edward Snowden's revelations, is very much a peace of history, that while dated is still worth reading.

Bamford tracks three major threads. The first is the absolute failure of the NSA to connect the dots on 9/11. Various parts of the US intelligence apparatus knew something was coming, but despite copious intercepts, they were unable to figure out that these terrorists were inside the United States and communicating with an Al Qaeda safehouse in Yemen. Most startling to me was how Tom Wilshire, a CIA liaison to the FBI, halted alerts on the 9/11 plots several times in the months prior.

The planes hit the towers, and the NSA went to war. This is the second thread, an effort spearheaded by the Bush administration and Dick Cheney to void legal protections against arbitrary wiretapping that had been set up in the 70s. The careful charade of FISA warrants was cast aside in terms of national security letters and persons of interest. Now the NSA could listen in for almost any reason, justified retroactively. Thousands of rapidly surged analysts and translators spent hours a day in complexes in Georgia, listening to every phone call in Iraq. The first Bush-Cheney system almost went down due to the surprising resistance of a senior FBI agent named James Comey (famous later for other reason), but a Democratic congress eventually passed a national security wishlist, for fear of looking weak on terrorism.

The third challenge is technical. The NSA's job used to be very easy when signals moved over radio or electrical cables. With the internet and fiber optic boom in the 90s, what the NSA could eavesdrop on fell precipitously, until they invested in a series of expensive public-private partnerships to design high capacity splitters and place them in major internet nodes, essentially suctioning everything transmitted across the internet into a shadow realm of NSA data centers for analysis. The NSA was big data before big data was hip. But the NSA was drowning in data, unable to turn even an infinitesimal bit of into actionable intelligence. This is where a host of Orwellian programs to develop a digital analyst come into play: Trailblazer, Turbulence, Total Information Awareness. But America's cyber spooks were hamstrung by more mundane concerns. When the book was written, the master 'No Fly' list was kept on an Oracle database, and due to interoperability problems, names had to be printed off and retyped on secondary systems. I've worked with some janky software, but nothing that bad.

The pieces of information in this book are fascinating, if obsolete, but where this book falls short is in analysis. The NSA is tremendously expensive, a multibillion dollar agency with deep pockets. Yet it's hard to point to successes, terrorist plots stopped and lives saved. Similarly, the ability of the NSA to listen in on everybody is a shotgun pointed at the head of American democracy, but the harms also seem pretty theoretical. This is 2020, we ask our wiretaps for pancake recipes, take selfies in front of blazing police cars, and run for political office while espousing conspiracy gibberish about satanic cabals of child murderers. What could the NSA do that isn't "seen it already?".

Don't answer that. I've read Stross' The Laundry series.

Good space opera is an indulgence: rich, creamy, flavorful, slightly embarassing but hard to stop eating. Unconquerable Sun is low-fat frozen diary space opera product. Technically dessert, and mostly unsatisfying.


Frozen yogurt

Princess Sun is heir to the Chaonian Republic, three systems with a host of valuable jump points caught between the much larger Yele League and Phene Republic. But Chaonia has two edges. First, the ruling Queen-Marshall is a skilled commander and has built up a powerful navy. Second, Sun is inspired by Alexander the Great and is destined to conquer a whole bunch of shit. I'm not spoiling anything, because that the main tagline and some of the references are painfully obviously, like Sun's battlecruiser named Boukephalous, but the whole book totters under the weight of historical analogies and a sense of capital-D Destiny rather than actually doing any world building or characterization.

We meet Sun coming back from her first victory, but still unable to earn what she truly wants in her mother's approval. Court intrigue swirling around her, connected to her foreign father and a secret project to gain the loyalty of the Phene empire's most fanatical soldiers. But it's not really actual intrigue so much as stagey Intrigue, characters making outlandish boasts, threats, and declarations of secrecy. Worse, the primary point-of-view swerves to Persephone Lee, a daughter of one of the seven great houses that rule Chaonia (it's a very flawed Republic). She's ducked out from family responsibility by enrolling in the military academy as a commoner under an assumed name, but is called back to replace her assassinated brother as one of Sun's Companions. Perse is an utter wet blanket, who mostly is around to admire Sun and be doubtful of her place near Sun. There's roughly 200 pages of slogging filler, dribbles of slice-of-life which seem to mostly be about an idiotic propaganda show called Channel Idol, and then the Phene empire mounts an impossibly bold attack. There's another 200 pages of serviceable action with land and space battles, though again it is so incredibly generic that it could come from literally any science fiction written since 1960, and Sun wins. Hooray.

Space opera is full of military geniuses. Ender Wiggin, Miles Vorkosigan, and Honor Harrington spring to mind. But I believe their genius because the story tells us the rules of warfare and how they break them. And even when they win crushing victories, it hurts on a personal level. Neither is true here, and it absolutely robs the military action of any tension or drama. The other major flaw is personal. All these characters feel like American kids, not militaristic noble scions. The "fun" part of fiction is that the fate of worlds is in the hands of hormonal erratic kids barely old enough to legally drink, as opposed to decrepit and senile gerontocrats. Sun's Companions and the nobles of Lee House are a wasted group of stock characters who mostly stand around to say "wow Princess Sun, looking good." I firmly believe that the stories of chivalric societies are so full of things like courtly love and undying loyalty because the actually reality was lots of adultery and betrayal, which are much more interesting subjects for a book. Again, Red Rising and theNew Moon series handle larger than life emotions and coming of age in a much more engaging way.

There are decent moments in this book, which serve to highlight how dismal most of it is. An actually sparking confrontation between two Yele admirals who disagree about how to contain Chaonia. An escape from massive sea monsters on boats. The Riders, the Janus-faced hivemind that holds the Phene Empire together with psychic FTL communication. And while Princess Sun is a lesbian, or at least female favoring bi, it barely comes up. Chaonia has Asian influences in names and cuisine, but it's P.F. Chang Americanized orientalism with nothing below the surface. Yoon Ha Lee, Aliette de Bodard, and the whole contemporary Chinese SF movement are actually writing non-Western scifi and a lot of it is quite good. While I'm all for more diversity in fiction, it feels so ham-handed here.

And ultimately, this book is just too long at 500+ pages. Even if you want to read pap, there's better pap. Serves me right for taking book recommendations off Twitter.

Everybody wants to ride a unicorn, take their IPO to the moon, party on the Playa with Elon, and generally be lauded as a genius. But the fact is, most startups fail. And while studies of some notably fraudulent failures have had a great deal of success: Theranos, WeWork, FyreFest, most companies fail for more mundane reasons. In the summer of 2015, Krubner was a software developer working at a startup in New York. The startup had a clever idea to allow salespeople to interface with their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database with a slick smartphone app using natural language processing (NLP) instead of doing incredibly tedious data entry. Krubner expected, well, a job that made sense. What he got was a six month journey into a vortex of deception and psychological abuse. Most of us have been in situations that were kind of messed up. Krubner took notes, and then he took the gloriously self-destructive step of publishing this book. The names have been changed to protect the guilty, except for his own.

I actually know a little bit about NLP, and while getting "okay" results out of NLP is pretty doable, getting perfect results is incredibly hard. Like, "the best minds Google can hire with all the cloud compute they want" hard. Listening to the business statement of the startup makes me want to reach for my gun. Hearing that anybody would rely on this for major deals makes me sure to save the last bullet for myself.

Krubner was hired for a pretty standard dev role, plugging an iphone app in development into an NLP model and then Saleforce's CRM database. The hard bit was the NLP model, and a quote-unquote "brilliant data scientist" Sital had been hired to build it. But Sital spent all day watching weight lifting videos on Youtube and had mediocre coding abilities. Two of the 'cofounders', including the Chief Technology Officer, vanished to Silicon Valley internships.

Krubner put in long hours, but bugs derailed demos and core pieces of the software simple didn't work. And this is where the pyschodrama began to unravel. The CEO was a young college grad named John, and his typo-ridden messages became increasingly erratic under pressure from the board of directors. It seemed that John was just the front for the most active member of the board, a man by the name of Milburn. Milburn was a middle-aged salesman who had taught himself enough Visual Basic in the 90s to claim to be a programmer. He'd had an idea, and picked the malleable John, the son of a friend and former intern, to implement it. As John failed, because the task was beyond the team's capabilities, Milburn became increasingly involved and manipulative, finally confronting Krubner in a barrage of insults and accusations that Krubner was sabotaging the company. That was the end for their relationship.

I've searched some other reviews of the book, and an older essay that had some of the same story. There is an air of incredulity from some of the commenters. There's no way Sital could be so incompetent, Milburn so Machiavellian, or Krubner such a stereotype of the stolid software engineer. I would sincerely like to have these people's blessedly competent lives, because I'm at a boring suit and tie company with good processes and stable cashflow, and I've seen everything he written about here in software development. And as for why he stuck with it. Well, apparently the incubator was really fun, and it beat the hell out of his previous job as a developer for a serially failed founder.

This little startup was likely doomed from the start, but some advice generalizes nicely. A startup has to be a radically transparent learning organization or it is dead. Lies and deception are fatal. A team is only as strong as its weakest member, and weak links have to be cut mercilessly. And the real leader has to be involved and accountable to the process, having enough strength of will to bring something new into the world while not being so caught up in ego that they're unable to admit mistakes.

And Lawrence, if you ever decide to do a PhD, please take some good notes.