Music, murder, magic. Lauren Beukes blends up a classic post-cyberpunk novel set in South Africa, where people's sins are made visible in the form of magically bonded animals. It's an interesting conceit, and the action moves along well enough, but somehow it lacks the pulse-pounding intensity of the original stuff, like Neuromancer or George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails trilogy. But hey, a new voice is a rare thing these days, and a few flaws can be forgiven.

Sir Terry at his best! One of my favorite books in the Watch series, by this point Vimes and Co have grown into a multi-dimensional cast of crime-fighters, ready to deal with wayward clues and seriously Prod Buttock. Which is good, because two harmless old men are dead, someone is trying to kill the Patrician, and something abominable stalks the night. The action is paired with some of the best Discworld philosophizing on power, politics, and the conflicting desires between the Void of Freedom, and the Cage of Sovereignty.

Davis does an admirable job demonstrating that prisons are racist, unjust, and a central component of a system of exploitation that damages American democracy and economic opportunity. But the fact that prisons are terrible, both in their effects on society and at achieving their stated mission of reducing crime and reforming criminals, does not mean that they are obsolete. The strengths of this book, in linking prisons to endemic American racism and a toxic nexus of political-corporate-senesationalist media power, are undermined by its failure to grapple critically with ideas of security, the failures of the court system, and how prisons both reify and 'correct' various forms of social and psychological deviance. At least its short.

Disclosure time: Sarewitz and Allenby are two of my favorite professors, and I generally believe that they're very smart. That said...

The Techno-Human Condition starts by examining transhumanism, the belief that human being can and should improve their bodies using technology, and the common arguments for and against it. Allenby and Sarewitz soon drop the idea, as both sides hold flawed and simplistic views about technology and its ability to solve problems. They advance a theory of Level I, II, and III technologies. Level I technologies imply a simple cause-and-effect relationship: cars allow you to get from Point A to B easily. Level II, technosocial systems, have more complex effects: many cars create traffic and a lack of parking. Level III, Earth systems, are almost unknowable in their implications: cars redesign cities and ways of life, create foreign entanglements in pursuit of gas, and change the composition of the atmosphere with unknown effects.

Coping with Level III technological conditions is the aim of the book. Allenby and Sarewitz propose flexibility and options above all else. Since the effects of technology are prima facia unknowable, we must be ready to change direction at any moment, not to forestall debate, and to always be prepared to reflexively examine our values. This is an ambitious program, and its ambition and ambiguity weakens its real-world relevance--people with simple solutions will always implement their plans faster than those with more complex ideas. But it also might be the only way to survival.

John Scalzi is always fun to read, but this was in many ways not a necessary book. A retelling of "The Last Colony" from the point of view of Zoe, the 16 year daughter of the principles of the last story. On the one hand, Scalzi at least avoids "The Ender's Shadow" trap of completely undermining the other side of the story, on the other hand, there's isn't much there. The last 50 pages are vintage Scalzi, but the rest wanders. And of course Scalzi has trouble finding the voice of a 16 year old girl, but at least he errs on the side of making her too precocious, not too superficial.

Agent to the Stars is a cute book, that's the only way to describe it. Kind, professional, sarcastic Hollywood agent Tom Stein gets the ultimate job, introducing a race of blob-like aliens to the world, while at the same time dealing with every egomaniac, diva, and paparazzi in LA. The characterization is more charicaturization, but the plot pops and sizzles, and Scalzi is at his best taking wacky ideas and throwing them at the wall. And hey, it's a free ebook, so what do you have to lose?