Three misses from authors who have done much much better elsewhere.

Wolfe's "Silhouette" follows an officer with unclear responsibilities and relationships on a long-range exploratory/colonization star ship orbiting above a harsh jungle planet. The ship's computer is mad, the crew is plotting mutiny, and our protagonist has developed a relationship with his own shadow that gives him the ability to astrally project. A few moments of good weirdness in shipboard culture are overshadowed by the complete collapse of the plot.

Le Guin's "The New Atlantis" features a woman living in a failing American Empire, where infrastructure is breaking and totalitarian cops are everywhere. Her mathematician husband is suddenly released from the gulag, where he completes a theorem allowing for miraculous solar energy before being retaken. Meanwhile, new continents rise from below the ocean, in long passages written from the point of view of angler fish. It feels like a draft for several of her better stories.

The meat of the book is Tiptree's "A Momentary Taste of Being", another long range starship story. This one is better, with some delicious intrigues between factions of the crew and encounters with strange aliens, but I just finished Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, and this remains my least favorite Tiptree; a long story of despicable characters that closes on a disappointing shaggy dog of a moral.

To repeat a lesson from my "read all the Hugos for best novel" project, 70s scifi was bleak.

Imagined Communities is a transdisciplinary classic now read widely across the social sciences. Anderson's aim is to correct weaknesses in both liberal and Marxist approaches in political science to understand nationalism. This is a worthy goal, because nationalism is the water in which we swim, a mostly invisible field in which we enact Americanness, or Indonesianness, or any of the 195 countries that Google claim exists. Anderson's goal is to denaturalize the nation, to show it as particular kind of modern imaginary that only became possible towards the end of the 18th century, and only really omnipresent in the 20th.

Anderson's nations are sovereign limited communities, a specific kind of belonging such that everyone on Earth belongs to one, perhaps two nations. The nation is historically transcendent, France may fall, but La France is eternal. And despite this transcendence, the nation is also bounded by historical consciousnesses, with days of independence and founding citizens.

Anderson locates the origins of this style of thought in the late 18th century, and in the specific mode of thinking engendered by newspapers and novels that time is continuous series of causes and effects. All days are the same kind of thing, but each individual day is different. A sense of historical consciousness is required to separate the present from antiquity, while the rising class of bourgeois administrators and businessmen, who started the day reading newspapers, develop standardized beliefs based around the importance of metropolitan life in the capitol.

This shift of consciousness is one of the hardest things to write about. It's the primary topic that Foucault spent his career groping towards. It is also the least evidenced part of the book, as Anderson compares two classics of Filipino literature, the modern nationalistic Noli Me Tangere and the older Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at ni Laura sa Cahariang Albania, a medieval fantasy epic poem set in Albania. The form of the novel, that events begin at a precise moment with an assumed past, that time can pass in detailed dialog or be elided in weeks depending on the needs of the plot, rather than the smeared out Now of pre-modernity is interesting, but difficult to prove.

A second area that Anderson covers is the relationship of the nation to the state. The state, defined as the administration of taxes, justice, warfare, infrastructure, education, and welfare, is far older than nations. A key issue for nationalism was the need for educated administrative officials in the colonies, but a firm bar on their advancement beyond their home region. From Spanish South America to French Indochina, frustrated educated youths served as key agents in nationalistic revolutions.

Anderson's book is fascinating, erudite--if cursed with a tendency to assume that the reader is also fluent in French, and useful for sweeping out the cobwebs of conventional wisdom. I can see why it became such a success, and is widely taught. Yet it reminds me of two other theoretical paradigms, Jasanoff's sociotechnical imaginaries (clearly borrowing from Anderson) and Winner's politics of artifacts, in that it is seductive but ultimate explains less than it conceals. And for a junior scholar, you are simply not good enough to deploy this paradigm in your own research. Anderson offers a potent theory, yet one that doesn't not go far enough to explain the potent lure of nationalism in the 20th and 21st century. If nations are imaginary communities, they are ones which millions of people have died to preserve. Few other imaginations have that potency, only religion comes close, and if "imaginary" deconstructs the mythology that underlies a nation (George Washington, William Tell, anthems, the iconography of ruins, etc), it doesn't come close to explaining the vital relationship between the individual and that imaginary.

Agon is a gorgeous presentation of a high concept wrapped over mechanics that are decidedly average. You're a crew of heroes in weird mythic Greece (think Xena: Warrior Princess) on a journey to islands each troubled by strife. You'll interpret the signs of the gods and engage in challenges and battles to save the people of the island.

Players roll dice including their Name, Epithet if it applies, one of four Domains (Arts & Oration, Blood & Valor, Craft & Reason, Resolve & Spirit) as well as divine favor, bonds, and other bonus dice. Keep the two highest dice, plus divine favor d4s. The GM rolls for strife, taking the highest dice from his pool + a static number. If you succeed, you get glory, a big XP track, and if you fail you take Pathos and the GM narrates the outcome against you.

The system is serviceable, a simple dice pool is hard to break, but I also feel like it doesn't do much to guide the fiction in appropriately mythic dimensions. And while there are plenty of cool islands to adventure on at the end of the book, I wanted a little more heft.

Redemption Ark introduces some new twists and turns to the Revelation Space series, but has structural flaws as a book.

The A plot concerns Clavain and Skade, two Conjoiner operatives with very different views on the same mission. The Conjoiners are a transhuman cybernetic groupmind responsible for Really Advanced research in the setting. Clavain is a relic from the dawn of human space flight, four centuries old, with a life time of instincts and clever tricks. Skade is young, skilled, and following a voice in her head that says everything she does is for the greater good. They both want the 40 Hell class weapons stored away on the Nostalgia for Infinity, and are willing to go to great lengths to get them.

The B plot continues in the Resurgam system, with Ilia and Ana in deep cover as parts of the local government. The life-exterminating machinery of the Inhibitors is working on a plan to clear the system, disassembling rocky planet to turn a gas giant into a gravity weapon to destroy the local star--a terrifying Von Neumann device. Ilia and Ana have to find a way to save as many lives as they can in Resurgam while balancing local politics, the Inhibitors, their mutated and self-aware starship, and Skade and Clavain's mission to recapture to Hell class weapons.

And the C plot introduce Anastasia Bax, captain of a intrasystem freighter just barely in fuel and life support, who gets caught up in these intrigues when she deliver's her father's corpse to the Yellowstone system gas giant Tangerine Dream.

All these plot threads converge in the skies over Resurgam, with the whole idea that some favorite characters might have to sacrifice themselves to... save a couple hundred thousand people from being killed right here and now so they can be killed later by implacable machines which alter the laws of physics to eat planets!?. Pull the other one, it has bells on it.

And while Reynolds has some really cool ideas about nearlight starship combat, he also frustrating cuts away from the firework factory at least three times in the book, once with an army of uplifted pig soldiers seizing a starship (wasn't easy), and twice with reployment of the Hell class superweapons. Key moments in the book hinge on an impossibly well connected benefactor in Chasm City choosing to give our heroes everything, and the random flight of the Nostalgia for Infinity leading it towards the fate ordained for it, and one which might lead to survival. In a book pushing 700 pages, Redemption Arc feels overstuffed and incomplete. The sheer gonzo hard scifi edge of Reynolds' ideas and sentences keeps it in the good range.

Shadow of the Demon Lord is a medium crunch horror fantasy RPG, set in a collapsing fantasy empire under threat from the reality devouring Shadow Lord. Your heroes battle against monsters coming from the hinterlands, seeping through cracks in reality, and summoned by insane cultists in order to survive another day, and maybe save a loved one or two.

The system was the first (I believe) to introduce the 1d20+k +/- nd6 system used by Lancer. Static bonus are relatively small, DCs are close to 10, and circumstances give you boons and banes, d6s which cancel each other out, with the highest one rolled. Combat is quick and simple, with strict limits on actions. One clever bit of game design is that characters can take a Fast Turn, with just an action or move, or delay to later in the round and take a Slow Turn to move and attack. Characters also get one Triggered action, by default an attack of opportunity when someone moves, but later abilities can give other options.

Characters are built from novice, expert, and advanced classes from level 0 to 12. You'll start as simple magician, priest, rogue, or warrior, and specialize from there (Cleric --> Paladin --> Templar, for example). Class choices are big ones, but after that you have relatively limited options to pick in terms of talents and spells. Another part of the character building minigame, magic items, is similarly sparse. Enchanted items are weird rather than powerful. Skills are handled by a profession system: you did something before you became an adventurer, and it's assumed that your good at whatever a professional could do.

The setting has some cool ideas. Souls are reincarnated, with decent people losing their identity as shades in the underworld before returning. Evil people have corruption stripped from their souls by devils, a type of faerie, before returning. Halflings and elves exist, but are not playable, with goblins, changelings, and clockworks standing in. Orcs recently overthrew the Emperor, though the political implications are mostly left implied.

There's a lot of good ideas, but also a few half-baked ones. There's an insanity system which seems to mostly make your characters go non-controllable at the worst possible time, which is a lazy port of old Call of Cthulhu mechanics rather than a reimagining of how adventuring, horror, and mental trauma should interact. Similarly, while this is a game of grim horror and gray morality, there's also objective evil in the form of Corruption, which your character can gain by committing vile acts and learning evil spells, and the Demon Lord and his threats. The setting, while eminently gamable, is better when it leans into sword and sorcery weirdness, and spends too much time in a Warhammer Fantasy mashup.

This is a tighter game than any edition of D&D or my favorite, 13th Age, but it's also more limited and at the end of the day, still a fantasy heartbreaker. I'm becoming one of those guys who says "why not just play Blades in the Dark?", or if I were seeking the new hotness, Massif's ICON.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship is one of the foundation stones of the world as we see it today. By no means novel, the book is slightly older than I am, it still has some sage wisdom even if the specific case studies have slipped from relevance. Drucker's object were threefold: he provides a more rigorous definition of entrepreneurship that reclaims the field from its obsession with the high-tech genius inventor. He uses entrepreneurship to explain the success of the American and Japanese economy after World War 2, particularly how millions of jobs were created for men and women even as traditional smoke stack industries cratered. Finally, he offers some advice for entrepreneurial organizations.

In order, for Drucker entrepreneurship is the profitable harnessing of change to move capital from an area of low productivity to one of higher productivity. New scientific knowledge is just one of seven possible sources of innovation, and is in actually the most expensive and uncertain. The most important skill of the entrepreneur is a keen eye for incongruities and unmet market needs. One of the more moving case studies is a New York department store which "knew" that appliance sales should only be 20% of its business. It spent the consumer boom of the 60s trying to knock down its appliance numbers, and eventually lost position to a competitor who found a market in the gadget hungry Betty Drapers of the era. Novelty is also tied to entrepreneurship. While opening any business is a venture, opening yet another franchise restaurant is not really entrepreneurial.

The best section is on what kills entrepreneurial ventures. Drucker sees an entrepreneurial venture as being like a child. In existing businesses, expecting the new to carry the weight of a mature unit is like asking a six year old to march with a 60 pound pack; neither will get very far. A focus on the profitability of the present business can hinder entrepreneurship. He sees Johnson & Johnson and 3M as companies with the best practices, where a specialized division handles new businesses, which are given a few years to succeed or fail on their own merits before being upgraded to stable parts of the business. Established companies should conduct a regular audit with the aim of killing products which are not succeeding (RIP Google reader) because the time and attention of your employees is the most valuable resource you have.

The other side of innovation is the start-up, though I don't recall Drucker using that specific term. A small and new business can capitalize on doing one thing supremely well to capture a major market, but rapid growth is fraught with pain. Startups invariable run into cashflow and founder problems, and often at the most critical point when they need to rapidly ramp up capacity to succeed. Getting a solid managerial team in place before the crisis is the way to survive it, but good teams are expensive.

Drucker is full of solid 'horse sense' about running a business, and the fundamental are the fundamentals, but his focus on economics renders him somewhat blind to other aspects of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship can also be read as cognitive, as a series of decisions which bring about a new state of the world. And change is hard because it runs up against allocations not only of money, but also power and prestige. Drucker's unstated bias, that concerns about power and prestige should melt away in the face of the capital enhancing power of new ways of doing things, ignores the realities of human psychology.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship is an older book, but well worth checking out. And on a personal note of bitterness, I spent six years earning a PhD in a school which branded itself as "studying innovation" and Drucker never came up once. I'm fully for raiding and pillaging those over-endowed jerks at the B-school, and we should take their ideas along with their nice colloquium room furniture!

Hard Wired Island is a game about being Gay Communist Cyberpunks... in SPAAACE!!! The system has some nice features, with specialized rules for social situations, stealth, hacking, and combat based around "mood" environmental tags, and the quirk that you can't do the same combat action twice in a row. The burden/economic shock system is a great representation of being broke without having to run a budget (hard pass).

But the star of the show is Grand Cross, a city set in a massive O'Neill habitat at Earth-Luna L5. Grand Cross is the new frontier, but it's controlled by exploitative and stupid corporations, full of criminal gangs and prejudiced goons, and facing a consequential election. Rogue artificial intelligences lurk in the station's basements, and the cops are worse than useless.

The art is great, and there are dozens of locations, districts, and NPCs, all dripping with adventure hooks. I have a couple of quibbles: the setting leans into "fans are slans" otaku references, which may not the be to everyone's taste. And for a game which is so upfront about the need to build a political coalition to replace Cartel, and that doing this will require Cool Space Crime, there's not a lot of rules for doing so.

And I'm a little harder on Goodreads than I am on Itch. While there's a lot of content, it's not actually diverse content. There's a parade of cool and helpful bar owners with geek T-shirts, and a carousel of greedy executives and brutal cops, but it's hard to say why you should use one NPC or place over another, a negative strike compared to Blades in the Dark where the NPC gangs all have unique agendas and districts have unique vibes.

The politics is similarly floppy. The basic problem of Grand Cross is that it's a frontier that's outgrowing its first steps. Housing was initially free for the people who built the station, and could be bought Earthside with enough money or a lucky lottery ticket, but space is running short and privatized rent is crushing ordinary people. It's just the homesteader problem with a cyberpunk gloss. And while the game is very clear that capitalism and cops are the problem, it gestures at hoary ideas of being Punk and Authentic and having Solidarity rather than the criminal chaos that a handful of independent psyops can topple a political system, the awful Constitutional moment when violence breaks into the chambers of the legislature, or the transhuman technopolitics of Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix. Unfortunately, this is still form over content.

Still, this is a massive book with a lot to offer for people looking to run a cyberpunk game. I might mod in rules from BitD or W.M. Aker's Comrades, but I'm happy to have this on my shelf.

It's KSR, so the book is going to be didactic and dialectic. New York 2140 is set in a post-global warming New York City, a super-venice where old skyscrapers painted with diamond phase composites emerge from polluted canals that run through the old streets. The story is told through many viewpoints centered around a co-op apartment in the old MetLife Tower. The characters aren't really worth talking about, except that one is literally KSR lecturing at you. Literally.

The A-plot, though it takes forever to get going, is a what-if around the ongoing Collapse of Capitalism. After a devastating hurricane leaves thousands of New Yorkers homeless and staring at vacant condos owned by the global elite, some of the characters call for a rent strike and a nationalization of the bank, followed by a slew of very Bernie Sanders-esque reforms of the financial system. It's a rather cutting indictment of the limits of Democratic Socialist Utopianism that it takes another 120 years to get more than "Mr. Fed can I please haz a crumb of COVID relief", and that when the revolution comes its a wealth tax and more people on more committees.

B plots wander around through more exciting topics that are dropped: sunken gold, relocating polar bears to the antarctic, pursuing beautiful women, and so on. But at the end of the day, this book is simple too business-as-usual, too nice, and too Californian to really work.

Red Mars is brilliant, but I wished I liked his other books more.

An intro to college teaching is a big subject, and the best that I can say is that Rotenberg attempts to cover as much of it as he can. However, I found relatively little in here that's actually useful. The best specific advice is to continually assess your class (assess, as opposed to evaluate with grades), to focus on learning rather than teaching, and to be clear and fair in your expectations. Anybody who's had a halfway decent teacher and paid attention should know all of this. Overall, it's a collection of vague generalities that is most useful as a source for poaching some language for a teaching statement on a job app.

The strongest part of the book are the references to the standard texts in the field; the interlocution isn't worth your time, so just go to the primary sources.

For how adults learn: Kolb, A. Y. & Kolb, D, A. (2005). Learning Styles and Learning Spaces: Enhancing Experiential Learning in Higher Education. ACAD MANAG LEARN EDU June 1, 2005 vol. 4 no. 2 193-212 (and the rest of the Kolb Experiential Learning theory)
For designing classes: Wiggins & McTighe. Understanding by Design
For grading and evaluation: Walvoord & Anderson. Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment.

The Art of Making Memories is half breezy pop science covering how to have a memorable life, and half Wiking digressing into how great it is to be a walking TED talk and Very Special Danish boy. If I may digress, I've lived with depression for a long time, and my absolute least favorite thing about depression is how it steals your memories. I know I experienced joy in the past, but when I reach for those moments, there's a faint ghost. Meanwhile, every awkward bump in the road of life, well...


A new core memory

We still don't know how memory works, scientifically speaking, but the best memories are embodied, sensural, emotional, and narrative. By seeking novelty, by associating smells and tastes with moments, and by rehearsing those memories into stories, we can hold on to good times and build a life worth remembering.

I'm just a little lost with how to square that with days of spreadsheets, dishes, and diapers.