The Raven Tower is a strange and slowly paced fantasy, with two timelines building towards a climatic conclusion.

In one, Eolo, a soldier and aide, has to navigate the political turmoil surrounding the recent death of the ruler, titled The Raven's Lease. The Lease is divinely chosen, but lives only as long as actual bird inhabited by the god, at which point he must die. The prior Lease apparently did not do that, and the heir Mawak must find where duty and power lie, before the situation spirals out of control.

The second timeline is in the deep past, following the existence of a god named Strength and Patience of the Hills, as it learns to interact with neolithic humans and becomes embroiled in a war between gods. I was fascinated by the hints played out over the story, though how the gods worked, the abstraction of "power" and the way that their spoken phrases became true, was not quite weird enough for me. Still, beautifully written and plotted.

Victory doesn't mean peace, and after coming home a hero, Black Jack Geary has just enough time to get married to Captain Tanya Desjani before being promoted to Admiral and handed the fleet again, with a new mission to cross Syndicate space, make contact with the Engima race from the last book, and establish peaceful relations, or at least figure what the hell is going on.

The fleet has old problems with morale and new problems with reliability. Because of the expected heavy losses from the war, and Geary's miraculous journey home, most of the ships are beyond their "use-by" date and experiencing systematic failures, in the same way that a T-34 gearbox could be expected to drive from Moscow to Berlin and not one kilometer more.

But the bigger problem are the Enigmas, a species paranoid beyond belief. Their ships and installations self destruct before human ships can get close. The communicate via digital avatars of humans. And they say nothing except "leave or die". The Enigma are a frustrating mystery, but beyond their territory are yet more hostile aliens.

This is more classic space opera, a journey of exploration than a journey of kicking ass (though plenty of ass is kicked), and if you're this far in, you probably know what you like a these books. That said, I do wish the relationship between Geary and Desjani had gone a little differently. Both decide that the honor and efficiency of the fleet require that they remain nothing more than Admiral and Captain, but I would have liked to see one date night.

Invincible might be my favorite of the Lost Fleet series yet, as Geary is faced with two major problems outside his experience simultaneously. The first are hostile aliens with a fleet focused around massive super-battleships and swarms of ramming missiles. And the second are potentially friendly aliens, with lighter but still superb ship handling skills.

The seizure of the Kicks super-battleship is one of the best set pieces of the book, and while they are unrelentingly hostile, the hostility of a herd species is something relatively new. The other aliens, the Dancers, are typical hideous space bugs, but at least they're willing to talk, if only cryptically.

Having completed his mission, it's back home to human space.

This novel is back to Alliance space and on to Earth for Geary and the Dauntless, escorting the Dancer ships and fending off attacks from Syndics who would take the prize of the Kick super battleship from the last book. It's sort of the first six books done in one book, with a weary human fleet making it back to an uncertain home.

The Syndic stealth marines being driven mad by a ship full of alien ghosts is a vibe, but Geary kicking over a comic opera minor power that has claimed dominion over Sol is not much. And finding that the top priority mission of the aliens is to return the corpse of a long dead human astronaut is a bit of a let down.

Steadfast has even smaller stakes than the prior books, as Geary has to take a part of the fleet to deal with some humanitarian issues in the Syndic world. The basic political instability of the Alliance in the peace is an issue that can't be solved with appeals to honor and political supremacy over the military, and things are falling apart all over the place.

The ground action, which takes place on the quarantine moon of Europa, and saves two members of the crew from an ancient super-plague, is better than most. The last fight, against an AI controlled fleet run by a simulation of Geary's own tactics, is the first real threat in a while.

Leviathan ratchets up the tension to a level that the series hasn't seen since the first few books, with Geary outgunned by the AI controlled dark fleet running a simulation of himself. Saving the Alliance and humanity will mean facing down this autonomous superweapon, which is slipping its programming the longer it keeps running. The battles here are grueling and appropriately dangerous, and this book doesn't break the mold of the series for better or worse. Geary is still Geary, Desjani is still Desjani, and victory hinges on the explosive potential of the hypernet gates.

After 11 of these books in about as many days (Goodreads says I started my reread on June 30th), I can say that they're popcorn, but they're enjoyable popcorn. I think I've had my fill, though in a while I might try the Syndic focused Tarnished Knight series, which might offer a needed break from Geary's idealism.

The Invention of the Jewish People is an often fascinating, often frustrating, account of the history and historiography of the Jewish ethnicity, Zionism, and modern Israel. Sand follows Benedict Anderson in assessing nationality as a potent and also ontologically weak framing. Nationhood is one of the things people are most willing to kill and die for, but trying to define a nation, as opposed to the political limits of a given state, or the cultural practices of an ethnicity, is an exercise in contradictions. But it is a necessary exercise, if you want to understand your own present.

The first fascinating bit was that Sand notes that every Israeli university has two history departments: one of General History which is pretty similar to a European or American history department, and one of Jewish History which has a unique intellectual orientation as the keeper of the national political mythology, and has it closest intellectual links to American Evangelical Biblical archeology. The political mythology is fairly simple. While the Torah doesn't have to be read literally as book of divine commandments, it can be read literally as history. The land between the Jordan river and the sea was home to Abraham, was conquered by exiles returning from Egypt, was ruled by the powerful kingdoms of David, Solomon, and the Hasmoneans, was taken from the Jews by the Romans, and was restored to the Jews in 1948.

Where this gets frustrating is a long historiographic dive into 19th century historians writing the history of the Jews against other Eastern European nation movements. I have no doubt that the basic question of whether a Jew could be German was of great import to these people, but I also think the matter was effectively settled by other political developments in the 1940s.

Sand then loops back to the ancient world to argue rather convincingly that Judaism expanded across the Mediterranean by conversion between the 2nd century BCE and the 4th century, making substantial progress against pagan beliefs before being forced into a subsidiary role against Constantine's state Christianity. The last great conversion was the Caucasian (in the exact sense of the mountains rather than the imprecise racial sense) kingdom of the Khazars. In Sand's history, modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars, and the people living in Palestine in the 19th and 20th century were the descendants of the common people of the Jewish kingdoms who were not removed by the Romans, as no evidence of this explusion exists, who converted to Islam for tax reasons under the Caliphate.

Those closing chapter loops around to the modern contradictions between Israel, a political and cultural entity, and the Jewish Nation, which exists everywhere there are Jews but is specifically instantiated in the borders of Israel and the occupied territories. Sand has something to say about Israeli politics around the time he was writing this book, and the politics have only gotten worse since, but I'm not entirely sure I follow. Most national mythologies are ultimately incoherent and built on racist nonsense; Israel has unfortunately chosen to double down on the worst aspects of its own mythology, since it must justify not only its recent historical existence, but the ongoing policies of the occupation.

Anybody who's lived through the past few years of The Circumstances, Covid-19, supply chain disruptions, and the shockwaves of natural disaster, war, and terrorism at various distances, probably has a sense that disasters are going to be permanent and ongoing. Kayyem has an interesting CV. While she's a professor at Harvard and a news talking head now, she was a counter-terrorism hipster, working in counter-terrorism before it became a major priority on 9/11, and she was Obama’s Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, where she worked on the response to the Deepwater Horizon book. Unfortunately, this book is scattered and under-theorized, and has a bad tendency to drop fascinating fragments without properly following up on them.

In Kayyem's model of disasters, there's the boom, the moment of crisis, left of the boom where you are going about your life and hopefully preparing for disaster, and right of the boom, with recovery. The boom is inevitable, over a long enough time scale something bad is going to happen. The only question is how prepared you are, and how you can recover.

There's actually quite a lot of literature on preparation, from The Ostrich Paradox to your local government preparedness guide, to the paranoid fantasies of preppers. From an organizational context, a few key points we've been missing are that a plan that is not tested and rehearsed is not a plan you can use at all, that stockpiles have to be refreshed regularly, and that modern efficiency drives in just-in-time logistics, cell networks, and integrated cloud computing solutions have introduced distant and complex single points of failure that we have to be aware of. This is my own analysis, the book unfortunately buries its discussion of preparedness under a jargon laden diversion into black swans and gray rhinos.

Moving on, there is the moment of the boom itself. Daily leadership and crisis leadership are different skillsets, and Kayyem is a fan of the Incident Command System as a flexible and expanding model of the crisis. My favorite factoid of the book is that many organizations have created a position for Chief Security Officer, responsible for preparedness and disaster response, and staffed that position with an ex-FBI agent, and then wall the CSO off from the rest of the organization so that they have no actual power. Oops.

I buy that crisis leadership is a unique skillset, but this book doesn't make much of a case about what exactly it is. The first goal of an ICS is to "stop the bleeding", to make sure that as a few people as possible die, and that damage from the disaster is contained as much as possible. What makes this hard in 2022 is primarily a problem of information, of a brittle reporting chain from "on the ground" to the command center, and conversely from the command center to the public. Cell phones and the internet are a double-edge blade. While in theory, they allow tremendous transparency at all levels, the book has little to say about the obvious problems of picking a useful signal of information out of a mass of 911 calls and tweets, especially when seconds matter, and of getting official response information out to the public in an age of distraction and disinformation.

The final side is right-of-the-boom, the response. One of the tragedies is that many deaths in disasters are what Haitians have started calling "stupid deaths" (and I'm curious about the Haitian source of this, given that they're a poor people who have suffered deeply from colonialism, earthquakes, and hurricanes), avoidable losses well after the worst of the disaster has passed. In blizzards, these are the people who die of carbon monoxide poisoning from poorly placed generators, in hurricanes, the deaths due to breaks in water and electrical service, rather than wind and flooding, and in Covid, it's the millions who died after vaccines and masks became widely available. These deaths may be stupid, but they are also some of the hardest to prevent, ultimately caused by poverty, under-investment in infrastructure, and outright misinformation. In theory, a disaster is an opportunity to rebuild properly. In practice, it seems to be a chance to Shock Doctrine the last exploitable wealth from the victims. Kayyem notes that leaders believe that can survive disasters and in practice, they rarely remain in power afterwards. Of course, they also rarely actually die or even suffer from the disasters they supposedly are responsible for.

This book isn't awful, but it's a missed opportunity. Every major disaster of the past decade is touched on, which means that none of the case studies are in sufficient depth, or any depth beyond a retrospective news magazine article. Where there needs to be a proper theory and argument for preparedness, information, decision, and resilience, there are generalities and an appeal to common sense.

I'll admit to being a fan of atomic kitsch, and in the decade between when I bought this book and when I finally read it, it's moved from non-fiction to its own kind of history of the Bush era. America's atomic history and present is scattered and hidden behind security fences. While some parts, like the Trinity test site, are more-or-less publicly accessible, with tours available if you're willing to follow government rules, other places, like Hanford or the Pantex Assembly Plant, are both fairly radioactive and "go-fuck-yourself" classified.

The people that Hodge and Weinberger talk to are proud of their role in national security, but also profoundly adrift. When this book was written, in the doldrums of the Bush era, everyone was scrambling for a bit of the agile, networked, counter-terrorism related money pipe. Nukes were both dowdy and tremendously expensive. There are some good laughs here, with half-empty "innovation centers" next to national labs experiencing bureaucratic collapses. My favorite part of the book was the tour of Kwajalein, a South Pacific atoll instrumented as a test range for ICBMs, and home to some of the purest forms of Homo Defensus Contractorus imaginable. A single missile shot at Kwaj costs about $100 million. Of course, it's not just beer sodden Americans there. Thousaunds of Marshall Islanders lead a tenuous existence, blasted off their islands by 1950s testing and subsisting on very unequal US aid. It's a hard life in the South Pacific.

A Nuclear Family Vacation doesn't have answers for question of what to do with the expensive and fail-deadly white elephants of the nuclear weapons complex, but it's an interesting look at them at a particular moment in time.

Aspects is preceded by a fulsome introduction by Neil Gaiman. John M. Ford was my good friend. John M. Ford died tragically young, his works largely unknown. John M Ford was a genius, who tossed off sonnets like most people toss off Facebook updates. Aspects is his unfinished magnum opus, and in my estimation its pretty good.

Aspects opens with a duel. Varic is a noble, a parliamentarian and a reformer, and for the honor of the cavalry and the stability of the realm, his enemies want him removed from the picture. And then it's on to a busy closing session of Parliament before the equinox holidays, and a romantic encounter with our second viewpoint, Longlight, and a holiday at Strange House, a grand way station for people with special powers.

This book is really closest to cozyfic. Despite opening with a duel and the promise of intrigues, the story ambles though good friends and good meals, and setting details of history, magic, and religion rather than the urgency of Varic's reforms or the conspiracy against him. Cozyfic isn't really my thing, but these people are quite pleasant, and realistically often confused or ambivalent about their lives and relationships, chewing things over as they come to a realization. The setting is very much a Europe 1850 variant, where mostly the names have changed, though it is interesting puzzling out what has diverged. I have a low tolerance for kindly liberal nobles and honest servants who are happy to know their place, but other might not mind so much. What Gaiman is 100% right about is that Ford is one hell of a wordsmith, and this book is an absolutely pleasure on a sentence to sentence level!

The story ends as its barely getting started. I do wonder if Ford could have stuck the landing on plot, or if it would have dragged around for a while and gone nowhere. I do wish I'd started one of Ford's finished novels, but I don't regret the journey.