Microscope describes itself as "a fractal role-playing game of epic histories." This is a big claim, perhaps insanely ambitious, but Microscope might just be able to pull it off. I haven't had a chance to play Microscope, so this based just on reading the text, but that said:

I've theorized roleplaying games as about Structured Negotiation. In that regard, Microscope gives you a very powerful and elegant way to narratively generate histories. The nested structure of Period-Event-Scene intuitively let players control the scale of the game. Scenes, the core roleplaying bits, are cleverly framed by use of a Question which must be decided. The rules themselves give a lot of power to each player in turn, demanding contributions from everybody in the hotseat, and discouraging collaboration and play by consensus. Your epic history is supposed to be a spiky mess.

Where I am less sure about Microscope is it's ability to resolve impasses, when players disagree or have no good idea. The game is a little shaky on how long (in real time) everything is supposed to take. Like most story games, tMicroscope needs a high trust, imaginative groups.

Regardless, I'm very excited to get a chance to play Microscope and see how it works.

Do you love Archer? Of course you do, because if you're reading this, you're my friend, and all my friends have excellent taste in everything. How to Archer is pretty much what it says on the tin: a perfectly in-character guidebook from Archer himself where he talks about how awesome he is. Don't expect useful advice (well, except maybe the cocktails) or more insight into the world of Archer. On the other hand, if you can do a decent H. Jon Benjamin impression in your head, it's fairly hilarious and worth the $2 I paid for my copy.

This book is unbelievable. Not the numbers; White does an admirable job seeking reasonable consensus views based on a variety of sources, and explains the limits of his knowledge and the biases of the historical record. Not the basic fact of man's inhumanity to man; as a species, we are horrific monsters. What's unbelievable is that anybody could write such a book and not wind up insane/dead/torn from reality by Yog-Sothoth.

Each of the 100 atrocities (minimum 300,000 deaths) is covered in a brief section from 2 to 21 pages, with longer sections for bigger atrocities. The tone is ironic, detached, somewhere between Wikipedia and Cracked.com. Not that White makes light of megadeaths, but poking fun at the stupidity and insanity around them is the only way to make trudging through endless torture, stabbing, shooting, starvation moderately bearable. The statistical insights are worthwhile, but at the end of the day, this is a painful book, perhaps not as respectful as the subject deserves, and not interesting enough for people who are not totally hardcore to read.

EDIT: After a few months, I bumped my review up to 4 stars. The book is still horrifying, but more impressive from a distance.

What happens when a Seattle Venture-Capital Futurist falls in love with a Brazilian-Italian Voodoo Priestess? More to the point, what happens when a Texas Cyberpunk Design Guru married to a Serbian Feminist Novelist decides to write a romance?

The end result of that could only be Love is Strange, which is about what you'd expect; a little clunky, a little awkward, characters that are both totally unbelievable and absolutely real. People like the characters exist; I've met them and they're on the same conference circuit as Chairman Bruce. And occasionally some high quality near-future-past-present-perfect weirdness (the extended rant on Carla Bruni, for example, all of which you can independently verify. On Wikipedia).

As for the book itself, the first act is a little rough, and the final act strange and confusing, but I greatly enjoyed the middle act, as our star-crossed lovers figure out what they're supposed to do with much philosophical angst. It feels a lot like being in love, or at least, I imagine it's a lot like being in love if you're that aforementioned Texan cyberguru pursuing strange witchy European activists.

So why am I only giving this book three stars? First, from a literary perspective I've heard that characters need to grow and change and experience some kind of arc. In Love is Strange, the characters simply react; brilliantly, explosively, and fascinatingly, but without really changing. And they deserve some sort of real introspective moment of clarity, because they represent important modern archetypes. Because the future is being made by poorly dressed cybernetic Seattle accountants and the conflicts between their innate conservatism and demands for ever more Economic Creative Destruction. And the future is mostly going to be lived in by globalized favela-dwelling pop superstar with immense skills and no traditional career prospects. More to the point, The Future (and futurists, and futurismo) are central to the book, and even after reading Gothic High Tech, I'm still not sure what Sterling thinks The Future is. Is it a holy transcendent calling? The province of uber-capitalist TED talk hucksters? Tomorrow's history? An early 20th century Italian art movement obsessed with speed and movement? Maybe it's too much to ask for a single definitive definition, and a (romance) novel is probably not the proper place for this kind of weird philosophy, but I think this central idea deserves more consideration.

I enjoyed this book, being a certified Bruce Sterling acolyte and a 26 year-old futurist with a comparatively dull life (and love-life, natch), but it has some significant problems from both literary and idealistic perspectives.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a political satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift or Lewis Carroll. While the biomechanical inhabitants of Inner and Outer Horner are quite amusingly described, (I particularly enjoyed the depiction of THE MEDIA), a good satire should attempt some higher statement than "politics is a pursuit of incompetent and absurdist blowhards" or "petty nastiness leads to great evil." Not that this is a bad book per se, it could just use more ambition.

Starr's book is one of the landmarks in the history of medicine. Using a framing theory of professional authority and a desire for independence, he examines medicine in America from the late Colonial period up through 1980. This book is sometimes overwhelming, but rarely obscure, and useful for both scholars and interested laymen. Starr explains the major periods of American medicine (disorder and disrepute to about 1870, standardization and professionalization from 1870 to WW2, and specialization and conglomeration after WW2) and their broader social and political contexts in education, public health, hospitals, and how doctors are paid.

Obviously, this book doesn't cover the past 30 years, and Starr is interested more in the character of a defined era than the actual moments of transformation, which to be fair, may be too elusive to really observe in a historic sense. But for anyone interested in why American healthcare is so expensive and why it is so resistant to reform, this is a definitive history.

Skocpol covered the decline of the Civil War Pension system during the late 19th century, and the rise of pensions for mothers and widows in the 1910-20s. It's a fascinating look at a very different political climate, with patronage rather than programmaticly oriented political parties, and a very weak and amateur Federal government. This book has a strong theoretical explanation of how women excluded from the vote managed to exercise political power through moral education and a unique conception of the public role of Motherhood. This book is also mind-numbingly dense and detail oriented, and covers policies which left no standing institutional legacy, so while a classic in feminist history, not something I can really recommend to the layperson.

This is basically The Hero With a Thousand Faces turned into a self-help guide for aspiring screenwriters. Vogler is deeply experienced in how Hollywood makes stories, having worked as a professional narrative-smith for several major studios including Disney and Fox, and the advice is pragmatic, flexible, and surprisingly robust. Each chapter is concluded by a set of questions that a keen professor might ask of a story. Vogler would be the first to admit that the Hero's Journey is not a prescription for a good story, and that many films fall outside of its Archetypes and Steps, but if your story can't be described by the Hero's Journey, you probably have some work to do.

Some of the example movies are a little dated in the Year of Our Lord 2013 (Romancing the Stone, what's that?), and there isn't much said about the more complex stories typical of extended trilogies or television shows, but for all that, this is a critical book for writers looking to improve the structure of their stories.

I'm inclined to be generous to be new science-fiction, but for some reason this one didn't grab me. vN puts a feminist-cyborg spin on the age old questions about human created life (Frankenstein) and programmed limits to morality (Asimov's Laws of Robotics), but I found it both too clever and not quite smart enough. The setting and the forces at play never quite jelled, in the way that Neuromancer, for example, feels immediately real and present.

It might be because the vN, even the protagonists, are too creepy by half. Emotional humanoids that replicate by eating trash and live a shadow, migratory existence manage to hit about all my white male eurocentric fear buttons. The good guys make me want to reach for my trusty pistol-grip pump, and the bad guys are truly monstrous.

This is an amazing collection of contemporary space-oriented scifi, mostly bent towards the weird, optimistic, and humanistic. Mosts fans will probably pick this up on the strength of a favorite name or three, since a good chunk of the last few decades is represented, but I enjoyed every story. All of them deal with space as a canvas for our ambitions, and ways in which those ambitions mix and collide. The stories are set within the solar system, so no FTL and only a few aliens, but that only increases the wonder of gas giant skies and Titanian snow storms. As with all of these collections, some stories are stronger than others (I'd like to give props to Cadigan, Rausch, and Reynolds), but even the "bad" stories are worth your time.

First five star book of the year!