If you're looking for thrilling tales of bravery and action, this is not your book. If you want a sober, factual account of one of the most secretive and significant elements in the US government today and the Global War on Terror, read on.

Ambinder uses his unparalleled access to JSOC personnel to explain how JSOC pioneered a fast and lethal combination of intelligence and action that broke the back of the insurgency in Iraq and lead to the death of Osama bin Laden. Delta Force and the Navy SEALS are one of the success stories, adapting quickly to collect intelligence, share it across agencies and units, and use it to roll up terrorist networks. But beyond the Middle East, JSOC operators have conducted missions in China, Peru, and Africa.

Ambinder is perhaps a little too favorable to JSOC, and minimizes the contributions of conventional forces and the CIA. He also believes that JSOC operations are legal, and that the peopel responsible for torturing detainees in 2003 and 2004 have been appropriately punished (yeah, right). But that aside, this is about as objective as anybody is going to get on America's shadow military force.

Like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson has stopped writing about the future, and started writing about the present. I can't tell if this is a common condition that afflicts aging authors, or if our present is best seen through cyberpunk goggles.

What I can say is that this is both Stephenson's most mature novel, and in some ways the most shallow. The characterization is little heftier, the writing a little darker. Not in a grim in a gritty sense, but the tone shades away from whiz-bang coolness to a more considered and nostalgic meditation on life and accomplishment. There are still the kinds of brain-explosions that made Snow Crash an instant classic, but they're spaced further apart; punchlines rather than mainlines.

Some of the characters and topics will be familiar to Stephenson junkies; hackers, soldiers, spies, and spunky hostages; virtual worlds, electronic finance, international intrigue; China and the Pacific Northwest. But they're Stephenson's natural raw materials, and there's no searching for the right voice like there was in Anathem or The Baroque Cycle.

And of course, being Stephenson, he knows how to keep the plot moving. Reamde is much lighter on the long diversions into math, philosophy, and Sumerian mythologies which punctuate other Stephenson novels. Extended multi-POV gunfights take their place, and if you're not a big fan of firefights (I love gun crap, personally), this might not be your cup of tea. This isn't a novel about Big Ideas in the classic SF sense, but on the other hand, sometimes we just want some nice easy novel that manages to tie everything up in a big, climatic, gunfight. Huzzah!

ludicrously cute

This book was a fun little treat. The Doctorow novella (Knights of the Rainbow Table) was my favorite work of his yet, and it poses some very deep questions about what we might want to allow on networks when anybody can be Wikileak'd. The short stories created using the Science Fiction Prototyping methodology are a little more varied in quality, but all of them raise some really provocative questions. And the interview with will.i.am that closes out the book is simply a pleasure. I guess I should've known that he was a futurist after seeing the Black Eye Peas superbowl show, but the guy really cares about what tomorrow is going to be like, especially for the ordinary Americans in the ghettos and exurbs who are already falling behind.

To quote will.i.am. "I'm a wannabe geek in the geek. I can hear OG geeks saying, "He ain't real. Get him up out of here." Those gangsta geeks can be hardcore. Those dudes are like gangsta geeks, those guys are worse than Crips and Bloods.

Beautiful.

This book is a masterpiece. Sterling takes a single seed of an idea, radical life extension, and grows it into a mighty tree of a setting, with eminently realistic politics, economics, and design centered around the status quo of a world controlled by very responsible, very kind, and very old women. It a world that has gone through a great Crisis, and come out in some ways a utopia, but in other ways a perfectly padded prison that eats its own young like Saturn. And around the setting, Sterling builds an entire ecosystem of thought on youth, age, ambition, art, aesthetics, and what it means to be a human being.

Books like Holy Fire are why I read science-fiction.

Latour manages a book that is both highly theoretical and intensely detailed. Written at one of the high points of the post-modern turn in STS, and deeply involved in the Strong Programme to explain successful and unsuccessful science in the same way, Laboratory Life shows how abstruse theory and ethnography can mutually support each other. Latour spent 21 months as a participant-observer in a neuro-endocrinology lab, and from his time develops a comprehensive picture of the scientific process as an act of rhetorical destruction--eliminating alternatives until only one is left, scientists as economic-strategic actors seeking to increase their stock of 'credit' in the community, and science as a difficult struggle to make Order out of Chaos.

It's interesting seeing the evolution of Latour's thought from Laboratory Life to Science in Action to We Have Never Been Modern. You see facticity as an historical construct assembled out of a whole textus of inscriptions, but the later Latour dropped the idea of 'credit' as a reward (perhaps it is not analytic enough, but to me, it does describe the difference between a decent scholar and great one), and the whole notion of We Have Never Been Modern, that the Enlightenment goal of separating the world of science from the world of politics, and the world of humans from the world of nature is doomed to failure, is not yet evident. Though Latour still makes it very clear how contextual science is, in this book at least, he seems to believe that the work of science might yet succeed in making the entire world legible.

Gibson is the master of subtle melancholy and nostalgia. His non-fiction is idiosyncratic collection of book introductions, random musings, and half-aborted magazine articles. There are motifs here: memory, technology, Japan, and the place where writing comes from, but no theme. It's a melancholy and nostalgic collection, and Gibson himself comes off as a very strange and slightly sad man who managed to resonate to the fears of 1984 and produce Neuromancer, and since then has occasionally re-opened the door to that place, but not, mostly in this collection.

This is not an essential book, but it's an interesting piece of cyberpunk nostalgia, and nobody turns a phrase like William Gibson.

Everybody loves The Hunger Games, and guess what; I love them too.

I'll skip over all the usual stuff about how good the writing is, because it's pretty good, and at minimum maintains the pacing and suspense and doesn't insult the reader (*cough*, Twilight, and yes, the later Harry Potter books). The tyranny of Panem and the brutality of the Games by which they terrorize the provinces wonderful sketch out a plausible trajectory of American decadence.

All of that stuff is good, but what I really appreciated about the book was it's moral core, which is about obligation. Great books speak to their readers, and teenagers are people who are deeply confused about what they owe: to their families, to their peers, to their own protean self (how often have you described a teenager referred to as 'ungrateful'). Katniss' struggles with obligation, her desires not to owe anybody anything, yet the love for her sister which causes her to volunteer for almost certain death, and the role that she must play to win the games, speak to the anxieties and uncertainties of teenagers (and older people who don't feel entirely secure with their place in the world, i.e. everybody). The book doesn't hammer this at you, but if you're paying attention, it comes through. It's moral, without being moralizing.

I cannot wait to read the rest of the series.

Middles are hard, and the more I think about it, the more this one doesn't quite satisfy. Hunger Games #1 got by on the fun of making new friends, as we met Katniss, the villainous nation of Panem, and all the rest of it. I haven't read three, but I know that it will derive it's story-telling impact from the satisfaction of seeing Katniss give President Snow what for, and destroying the corrupt and evil antagonists.

Catching Fire has to move us between the introduction and the finale, and while the plot ticks along neatly enough, the emotional maturity and change are not quite there. The tension between Katniss' basic humanity and the artificiality/bestiality of winning the 74th hungers games doesn't quite ring true. Things happen, but Katniss is not a part of them, and neither are we.

Well, let's see how it all ends.

Well, that was intense. Props to Collins for not flinching away from the universe she created. I'm not sure if this a great book, or even a good one, but it's the necessary finale to the series.