Wild Seed was the last book written in the Patternmaster series, but the first book chronologically, and has prequel problems in that it exists to set up plot, rather than have one of its own.

Anyanwu is a 300 year old shapeshifting Igbo witch. Her happy life at the center of a cluster of villages which understand the proper deference due to her is interrupted by the arrival of Doro. Doro is 3700 years old, a body hopping immortal with even more uncanny powers than Anyanwu. Doro collects her for part of his breeding program. Bodies with psychic abilities taste better, and Doro has collected villages of witches in the New World.

Doro and Anyanwu could be worthy partners for each other, two immortals together forever, but the basic problem is that she's still a person and he's an abusive asshole obsessed with his breeding program. The two of them bounce between partnership and hatred, Anyanwu unable to kill Doro and Doro unwilling to kill her until he's wrung the last bit of potential out of her genes.

The story ambles through the centuries, from 1640 to 1840, against the backdrop of slavery and colonialism without seriously engaging with it. These superhumans are as far beyond imperial politics as imperialism is beyond traditional societies.

As always, Butler is a solid prose stylist, but this book is weaker than its pieces.

I'm years late to the party, but On the Run is a tour de force. Based on ethnographic research done in the early 2000s, Goffman describes the lives of a handful of young men and their families under the full repressive apparatus of the war on drugs. The obvious parallel is with Simon and Burns' The Corner, but while Simon and Burns are journalists and look for the story, Goffman is an academic and she's looking for the theory. There's no hope that any of her protagonists will escape.

What this book is about is about being on the run. The protagonists, Mike, Alex, Chuck, and Reggie, are in their late teens or early 20s. They've all been in and out of jail. Most have outstanding warrants. They've never had basic parts of the straight world like a driver's license or a bank account. If they have money, it's because they're selling drugs. And any stability in their lives is purely provisional before they have to run from the cops in earnest, spend years in jail, or wind up dead or crippled from violence that is their stock in trade.

Fugitive life as Goffman describes it is a life of paranoia, of knowing how to spot the cops and outrun them. It's a pattern of unpatterns, since stable residences, relationships, and jobs are just places to get caught. It's knowing that friends, lovers, and relatives will turn you in to the police, and trying to figure out who can be relied on in extremity.

I'm a Foucauldian by training and orientation, so for me the purpose of power is to normalize deviance; to correct it and render it safe. Instead, what Goffman reveals is the opposite of a panopticon. State power for these young men operates in a kind of wrath of god mode, where any interaction is liable to be negative, given that they're by default wanted men for anything from unpaid court fees to possession of drugs to attempted murder. You can run for a long time, for years even, but the odds of making it to 30 free and alive are basically nil. And the path starts at a very young age. Power here, the police and courts, don't deter or correct anyone. They just let you keep going until a bad break, and then it flattens you.

A lot of the negative reviews seem to misunderstand both the scope and limits of this book. While the topic is adjacent to a study of race in America or the sociology of mass incarceration, what this actually is is an ethnography of a few young men and their relations at the bottom of the war on drugs. Goffman did most of the primary fieldwork as an undergraduate; she started tutoring a young woman on the border of the street and got sucked in to the primary. And yeah, she's the white child of academics writing about black criminal men, but this book is nowhere near as unreflective as the critics claim. She got as a close as a person could get, and if it's not the Truth, I dare you to find a better mirror. The official story from the police ain't it. The self-posing gangster biographies (apparently an enter genre of literature I was unaware of) aren't it either. On the Run is fascinating and challenging and well worth the read.

It's 1952, and Elma York is enjoying a vacation with her husband Nate when a massive asteroid slams into the Atlantic ocean and obliterates Washington DC and most of the Eastern seaboard. The Yorks are just outside of the radius of absolute destruction, and make their way via her Cessna to Wright-Patterson Air Force base, where Elma uses her mathematical skills (she's a computer for NACA, when that was a profession and not a machine) to calculate that while civilization is rebuilding, the impact was an extinction level event. The problem is not asteroid winter. Rather, enough water vapor has been lifted into the upper atmosphere to trigger a greenhouse effect cascade. Humanity has a matter of decades to go extra-planetary or go extinct.

What follows is Elma's personal journey through an alternative history space race. It's both pretty good and oodly mundane. Elma is thoroughly modern, practically Mary Sue-ish in her intellectual abilities, her amazing rocket scientist husband, and her circle of friends. The two threats are her crippling stage fright and anxiety, and Stetson Parker, the lead astronaut who bears a grudge against her from WW2 when she tried to get him cashiered for harassing WASPs.

I'm torn about the book, because it starts strong and then has a great touch that living through history doesn't feel historical, it just feels like work, but it also feels bogged down. Rebuilding from the asteroid and the international (though non-Soviet) space effort are mostly not used. The space program tracks closely to actual history, diverging in the construction of an unspecified large space station. The 1950s setting is used mostly to highlight the main character's feminist and mostly colorblind attitudes against period norms.

And the basic conflict of the book, why does Elma want to be an astronaut get spotlighted in a direct conflict with Stetson Parker, and also lost in a moral generalities about... I can't even remember why, except that no one has stopped Elma from doing what she wants before.

I'm interested enough to check out the next book if the library has it, but this book is less than the sum of its parts.

Spies in the Family is a memoir that intertwines the career of Dmitry Polyakov, a senior GRU officer and spy, with her own childhood as the daughter of Paul Dillon, the CIA case officer who managed key parts of Polyakov's career.

The memoir has a kind of sepia tinged romanticism, the privileged life of a child of American empire in Rome, Delhi, Berlin, and Mexico City. Dillon has a breezy attitude towards the world of espionage, which makes this approachable but also leads her to just brush past some astounding history, like that two presidents of Mexico were CIA assets (see LITEMPO for details).

Polyakov is by far the more interesting part of the book. By Dillon's telling, based on interviews with surviving CIA case officers and Polyakov's family, Polyakov was a war hero who was disgusted by Krushchev's erratic and brutal behavior, on top of the inefficiency and oppression of the Soviet system. He believed that accurate information would help the Americans, who in his estimation were decadent and unstrategic, avoid risky moves which could escalate the Cold War to a hot one.

At first, Polyakov's attempts to make contact were deflected by the paranoia of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton who believed that every defector was part of a massive plot to feed the US fake intelligence. Once Angleton's iron grip was broken, Polyakov began producing massive amounts of valuable information. He was the CIA's crown jewel, until he retired, and was eventually betrayed by both Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, and executed for treason.

This book is interesting, but I think the attempts to blend the memoir with the intelligence journalism weaken the story, which is strong enough to stand on its own. The Billion Dollar Spy is twisty and paranoid enough to be a le Carré thriller. The Moscow Rules is another breezy memoir, but one about spycraft by people who did it. Because as both Polyakov's career and death illustrate, intelligence work is about the people who keep the secrets, and what happens when they decide their ostensible cause is not the one they care for.

This book definitely delivers on the "concise" part of the title, coming in a little over 150 small pages, but concision means making choices on what to exclude, and in this case, that's most of the technical detail. Ceruzzi's thesis links computing to four major concept: digital representation of characters and logic as binary 0s and 1s; the combination of data and control in a unified representation, communication between computers, and the increasing fluidity of the user interface.

Proto-computers, calculating machines of one sort or another had been around for ages, using punched cards to tabulate census data, automate business accounting, or help solve scientific problems. The Second World War revealed an astounding number of scientific problems which needed hefty numerical overhead, from code breaking to ballistic tables to the atomic bomb, and visionary engineers began thinking of a single flexible machine which had the ability to solve all these problems.

Computing did not immediately catch on after the war. The early ENIACs and similar machines were science projects that ran on thousands of balky vacuum tubes, with up times measured in hours. Even as solid state transistors replaced vacuum tubes, computers were still massively expensive installations tended by elite operators, with users submitting programs on stacks of punch cards to be run in batch. The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer was the first break away from this model, a machine cheap enough ($120k in 1960, about $1 million today) that regular people at labs could use them.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the relegation of mechanical input via punched cards in favor of much faster electronic inputs like tape decks, experiments in networking on ARPANET, and the golden bullet, the integrated circuit, which was a computer on a chip rather than painstaking assembled components on boards. Integrated circuits lead the personal computing revolution of the 1980s and the triumph of the mobile internet that we know today.

As a first pass, this book is fine, and I look forward to delving into the sources, but I think I need a complete history, rather than a concise one.

A Bitter Peace is the definitive book on the diplomatic side of the political war, and the lengthy process of negotiating the Paris Peace Accords. Practically a day by day account, Asselin compares how the negotiating positions of the various side shifted over the course of years-long negotiations. It's not exactly light reading, but it's an important look at how diplomacy functioned.

For Nixon and Kissinger, the goal was "peace with honor", a withdrawal mandated by the turn of American public opinion that would also return the POWs and not lead to the immediate collapse of South Vietnam. For Le Duc Tho and North Vietnamese government, there were memories of 1954 and the betrayal at Geneva, where the victory of Dien Bien Phu was wiped away by third party negotiators leading to partition and another 20 years of war. And in South Vietnam, President Thieu was acutely aware of the weakness of his government, and the need to hold the line against Communist infiltration.

In general terms negotiations can only succeed if the parties believe it is a better option than the alternatives, and the overall tempo of the negotiations were driven by North Vietnamese strength on the battlefield. The 1972 Easter Offensive saw initial gains that got bogged down by the overwhelming airpower of Operation Linebacker. Devastation on the home front encouraged Tho to be more flexible in his terms over language. This was also true in the Christmas Bombings, which helped convince Thieu that the treaty was the best alternative available to South Vietnam.

While the final Paris Accords were less than what North Vietnam hoped for (Theiu's resignation, open elections, and likely political reunification on Communist terms), it was also far from a guarantee of South Vietnam's territorial integrity, and indeed the county would survive less than 18 more months.

Gunpowder Moon a taut hardish blend of classic sci and airport thriller. In the year 2072, Helium-3 mining on the Moon provides vital fuel for a devastated Earth. Geopolitical tensions between the United States and China spill over to the harsh surface of the Moon, and when a miner is killed by a bomb, the cold war threatens to explode. A bureaucrat from the back office arrives to take control, and then a squad of Air and Space Marines, and the entire command structure is ready to start a war. It's up to mining supervisor Dechert to get to bottom of the plot before missiles fly.

The story moves quickly, and Dechert has an appealing voice as a narrator, an ex-Marine who saw combat in the Bekaa Valley and doesn't ever want to see more again. The tech is worn down and gritty. It's thematically offshore oil rigs in space, which isn't exactly novel, but it's well done.

The flaw in the book is the secondary characters. Even though this story takes place in a bottle, with maybe a half-dozen people in the mining outpost and a few more over comms, I had difficulty distinguishing them aside from The Girl (fortunately a surrogate daughter and not a love interest). Characterization is admittedly hard, but Gunpowder Moon does it in a rote way, like this is a novel therefore it must have characters. Still, speed is a virtue, and the tension carries the story.

Perilous Fight focuses on the naval side of the War of 1812, and especially the character of the American officers and sailors. The war had been brewing for years over the issue of impressment, taking sailors off of American ships and enrolling them into the Royal Navy and American ships carrying trade between blockaded France and her colonies. However, the Navy was in an awful state, due to the doctrine of President Jefferson that an expensive navy was a step towards debt and tyranny.

The US Navy was anchored by the six "super-Frigates" of the Constitution-class (see Toll's Six Frigates for details), which started the war by winning a series of sharp single-ship actions against the British Royal Navy. Some of this was due to larger more heavily gunned ships, but the key element was human. American sailors were well-paid volunteers and their officers promoted by meritocracy. The British Navy was a colossos that strode the world, but their ships had been sailing on blockade duty for years, the sailors were impressed by violence and trickery, and gunnery practice was discouraged.

Single-ship victories could raise morale, but Secretary of Navy William Jones recognized that the war was an economic one, and the path to victory would be in causing enough damage to British trade that mercantile interests would force a treaty. Fast sailing sloops of war wrought havoc across the Atlantic. The frigate USS Essex made the long journey into the Pacific, leading an epic campaign against British whalers that had them interfering in Polynesian tribal wars, before finally being sunk by the British in Valparaiso.

This economic warfare was also carried out by privateers, private ventures to capture ships with a government license. Privateers made a mixed contribution, while they amplified the power of the small Navy, their profit-minded mission meant capturing ships rather than burning them, and privateers and their prizes were often recaptured. Thousands of American sailors wound up in Dartmoor Prison, with some of the better sections focusing on their experience.

Toll's Six Frigates is a better picture of the era, though one focused more on the Barbary Corsairs than the more consequential War of 1812. As a naval history, the land campaigns get short shrift, with the raid on Washington DC the only land battle with significant page count. Still, this is a great book for the era.

Foundryside should be right up my alley as a fantasy heist story, but it just didn't click for me. Sancia is a very good thief in the city of Tevanne, heart of an empire built on magic called scrivings. Scrivings alter the rules of reality, convincing a cart that it is rolling downhill, or a forge that it is red hot with no fuel. Sancia's edge is that due to horrific experiments, she can hear scrivings and has a sixth sense that lets her find weaknesses in buildings. She's hired to steal a small item from a safe for a king's ransome, and the item turns out to be an ancient sentient artifact, a key that can open anything. A bunch of people want her dead, and Sancia has to find unlikely allies to survive.

There is some good thieving and characterization, but much of the supporting work of the book falls flat. The setting isn't nearly as weird as it deserves to be, just of cyberpunk gloss on renaissance fantasy. The plot was too slow to develop, and at a sentence to sentence level the writing swung between pedestrian and groan-worthy. It's a shame, since I loved Bennett's other books, but Foundryside is pretty middle of the road.

Before there was Bezos or Gates or even Silicon Valley, there was IBM. The Monolith of computing, one of the largest companies in the world, and one that exhibited decades of double digit growth. And IBM was very much the creation of one man, Thomas Watson, who was succeeded by his sons Thomas Jr and Arthur Watson. It is a fascinating subject.


The IBM HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Think is a odd little bit of business ephemera that suffers from being 50 years old, though any book which last half a century is a worthy classic, but more seriously from somewhat scattershot organizational approach.

The first key point is that while IBM for most of the elder Watson's tenure was groping towards what we'd recognize as information technology, it was really a sales organization first and foremost. Watson learned business in John Henry Patterson's Nation Cash Register company. Watson was assigned a special mission at Patterson's direction, "[A] heady, aggressive, and palpably criminal plan involving espionage, money, and the assignment of secret agents to clear the field and take possession of the secondhand [cash register] market across the country." Most business biographies don't describe their subjects in such colorfully piratical terms.

After being fired from NCR, Watson moved to the sales division of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which was a conglomerate of companies producing time clocks, recording scales, and most important for the future, Herman Hollerith's line of punched-card sorting and tabulating machines. Watson reorganized the sales department, setting strict quotas, producing sales pitches, proselytizing an austere Protestant morality, and improving morale. He ascended to the presidency of the renamed IBM in 1924, and made himself the focus of the business.

There's an odd tension between Watson's personal moral stridency , which he imposed on the company in a mandated culture of dark suits and tee-totaling, and the cult-like atmosphere maintained by mass meetings with speeches and singing of the truly weird corporate anthem Ever Onwards IBM.

For reasons, likely Watsons emphasis on sales skill and sincerity, but not adequately explained, IBM secured a commanding position. The New Deal and WW2, with demands for vastly improved methods of statistically analysis, provided a massive boost to the company (Rodgers elides IBM's involvement in the Holocaust). IBM was working on more efficient machines, with a big improvement being a mechanical gizmo that could multiply two numbers rather than doing repeated addition, and there was sideline in academic number crunching for astronomy and ballistic calculations.

IBM actually missed the early ball of computers, producing a mechanical monstrosity called the Mark I while GE made the vacuum tube based UNIVAC. But as the elderly Watson Sr. stepped back and his sons assumed command, the company made several ambitious and effective bets, culminating in the IBM 360 mainframe (fun fact, the latest IBM z-model mainframes are still backwards compatible with software from a 1965 vintage IBM 360). Rodgers manages an astonishingly accurate prediction of the future of home computing, but this is a field where despite IBM setting a key standard with the IBM compatible personal computer, the company itself failed to maintain its massive position.

As a fan of historical computing, I enjoyed some of this book, but it's more about culture than tech, and as I mentioned, Rodgers doesn't seem to have the tools to write analytically about IBM's company culture and why it mattered so much.