Minor Thoughts from me to you

Summer Knight
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 27 December 2013 – 29 December 2013

I like the realism of Butcher's Dresden Files novels. If these were mysteries, they'd be called hard boiled.

The Dresden Files tell the story of Harry Dresden, wizard, working in Chicago. Butcher uses all of the common mythical beings — wizards, werewolves, vampires, etc — in a way that fits into the world around us. He doesn't create a fantasy world. He places stories squarely in our world, in a way that feels completely real. You can picture all of the events happening around you, showing up in your daily newspaper.

So far, Butcher has methodically walked through various types of fantasy. The first book featured wizards. The second, werewolves. The third, vampires. And this one, the fourth in the series, focuses on færies. You'll meet Queens Mab and Titania, along with many other members of the Sidhe courts.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I liked Butcher's typically gritty portrayal of the Summer and Winter courts and the characters in each court. I liked Dresden's creative solutions to the various challenges he faced. I didn't like the ending battle.

I may have disliked it because it took place in the Nevernever (fairy land) instead of in Chicago. Or maybe because it involved a higher than normal number of fantastical beings. Whatever the reason, it felt too fantastic for the overall tone that Butcher has established for these novels. It felt out of place, like something from another author's œuvre.

Overall, it was a good story with a flawed ending.

11/22/63
by Stephen King

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 27 November 2013—4 December 2013

I have a habit of overcomplicating my reviews. I'll try to keep this one simple. I like this book. A lot. (I would give it five stars except that I'm still annoyed about the completely gratuitous swipe at the Tea Party that King buries in the novel.)

It's a book about the Kennedy assassination but it's not really about the Kennedy assassination. It's about Jacob Epping, an English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. In 2011, he walks through the back of the pantry in the local diner and ends up in 1958. After some reflection, he decides to stick around for the next 5 years, to stop Lee Harvey Oswald before he assassinates President Kennedy. The resulting story is focused heavily on Oswald. I learned a lot about him—his motivations, his mannerisms, and his actions prior to the assassination.

Jacob narrates the entire story, frequently using lots of foreboding foreshadowing. He calls the world of the past "the Land of Ago". Once he really commits to his mission, he's a very driven character. The eponymous date isn't the focus of the book. Jake's journey is. King uses Jake to take a loving, sentimental look at 1950's America. Most of the story takes place in small towns in Maine, Florida, and Texas. It's almost a paean to small town America, in a time long gone.

As someone who never came close to seeing the 1950's or the 1960's, it's an interesting experience. The foods were richer and tasted better. The people trusted each other more. There was much more isolation between cities, towns, and regions. It was easy for someone to start over in an (essentially) new world, just by moving several states away. Because of the isolation, most people seemed far more ignorant of the nation as a whole.

It wasn't all good though. King describes the industrial areas as smelling much worse than they do today. There are also flashes of the ugly racism that was so prevalent during that era. Surprisingly, there was less visible racism than I expected. On reflection, I think that may reflect just how segregated the races were at the time. There isn't much opportunity for daily racism when minorities aren't even around to visibly discriminate against.

As I read the book, I was continually aware of how much was missing from the 1950's, compared to now. The entertainment options were almost painfully limited. There were just three TV channels—if you were lucky enough to live somewhere with good TV reception. The VCR hadn't been invented yet. Your choices were limited to what was on, at that exact moment. There was no way to rewatch favorite movies or TV episodes.

It was harder to communicate with people over a distance, especially when half of the neighborhood might be listening in on a party line. Research and knowledge sharing would have been painfully limited. No internet. No Google searches or Wikipedia lookups. No instant access to history, news archives, or scholarly articles. There was no ability to pull the information you needed whenever you wanted. You either found it at the local library while the library was open or you didn't find it all.

King painted a very attractive, bucolic picture of mid-century America. I don't think I could go back to live in that era. The limited options of the past would feel like a straitjacket now that I've experienced the massive connectedness and resources of our time. Thankfully, I don't have to go back to that era in order to experience a small slice of it. King provides that experience through this excellent story. You won't regret reading it. I sure don't.

The Revolution Trade
by Charles Stross

My rating: ★★☆☆☆
Read From: 17 October 2013—26 November 2013

This should be the exciting conclusion to Stross's Merchant Princes series. But it's not. I found myself losing interest shortly after I started the book and it took me a while to actually finish it. I kept hoping that it'd be better than it was.

The main problem was that this book seemed to contain a lot more cardboard cutout characters than the previous two did. Stross turned Vice-President Cheney into even more of a one-dimensional villain than he already had been. He also sidelined or killed the story's more interesting characters and featured the less interesting ones.

The Revolution Trade shifted the focus towards the interworld conflicts and firefights. The development economics and interworld trade that made the first two stories so interesting were sidelined. The story ended with a literal bang that completely overwhelmed my suspension of disbelief.

Because it focused on much less interesting character dynamics and much less intelligent plot points, I found the book to be a disappointing end to a series that started out well.

Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 2013
by Sheila Williams

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 11 November 2013–21 November 2013

Novella

The Application of Hope by Kristine Kathryn Rusch—Victoria Sabin is a captain in the Fleet. Her people have traveled the stars for generations, always moving from one place to another, never settling down and never circling back to a previous stop.

Years ago, her father's ship disappeared. That loss pushed her to develop her engineering, science, and leadership skills so that she could personally be involved in the search. Now, years later, another captain has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Will the application of hope be enough to see her through the crisis?

I really enjoyed this story. Enough so that I'll be checking out Rusch's other books set in this universe. It seemed to hit some of the same emotional notes as Stone to Stone, Blood to Blood but from a different direction. Easily 4 stars.

Novelettes

Stone to Stone, Blood to Blood by Gwendolyn Clare—"Two young men living on a planet far from us in time and space take off on a desperate attempt to out run their destiny."Duyi, the heir to the Regency, and Feng, his bodyguard brother, attempt to escape from the palace. Waiting for them if they fail: Duyi's upcoming ceremony where he has to make a personality changing oath of loyalty to Duyi's sister: the Regent. They'll try to change their fates and that of their culture. 4 stars.

Arlington by Jack Skillingstead—In 1982, sixteen year old Paul Birmingham got lost above the Olympic Peninsula, while attempting his first solo cross country flight. Thirty years later, he's living alone, in great pain, slowly dying. He buys the plane he flew in 1982 and tries to retrace his earlier flight and the events that followed. What happened to him in 1982 changed his life forever, trapping him in a solo existence. 4 stars.

Lost Wax by Gregory Norman Bossert—Artists battling the revolution with their hearts and hands reveal the terrifying weapon that can be sculpted with Lost Wax. I'm not even sure how to describe this story. Steampunk? But with vats of yeast as the motivating agent instead of steam? It was odd. And interesting. And contained mechanical golems, called golethe. And possibly about what makes us human, in and among the machines. I'll give it three stars.

Short Stories

The Ex-Corporal by Leah Thomas—"It had been several weeks since the ex-corporal had replaced our father. The ex-corporal wore his skin very well, seeping right into Dad's follicles and wrinkles, occupying Dad's dimples when he smiled."

Dad abruptly started suffering epileptic seizures. After his seizures, he acted like a different man. Did the seizures propel his consciousness to different worlds in the multiverse? Did someone else visit our world, through his body? Or was it all just mental illness? 4 stars.

My Take

This may be my favorite issue of Asimov's yet. I liked all but one of the stories and I really loved several of them. I've been thinking about canceling my subscription, after reading some of the previous issues. This one really makes me question that and makes me excited to see what's ahead in September's issue. Overall, 4 stars.

Roasting in Hell's Kitchen
by Gordon Ramsay

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 13 November 2013—17 November 2013

My wife introduced me to Gordon Ramsay a year or two ago. At first, I just saw episodes of Hell's Kitchen in passing. Then I started watching episodes of Kitchen Nightmares. Finally, I made it through the final ¾ of the most recent season of Master Chef.

I was sucked in by Gordon's passion. His outspokenly blunt assessments of the weaknesses of restaurants, chefs, and restaurant food. Because of his shows, I've begun to have a more critical eye towards restaurants and the quality of the food I eat. I'm taking more of an interest in "fancy" food and the real skill and creativity that goes into high end restaurants.

When I saw that the local library had a Kindle copy of this book, I was intrigued. I've wanted to know more about Gordon Ramsay: what makes him tick, how he built his food and media empire, how he deals with the many challenges to his time, etc.

This book was published in November, 2006. It ends on his very first entry into American TV, so it's not very up to date. The vast, vast bulk of the book covers Ramsay's early life, his aborted soccer career, and his early years learning to cook.

There are only a few, short, chapters on his career after he opened his first restaurant. There is next to no information on what it took to open and manage multiple restaurants, what it took to write multiple books, run multiple TV shows, or juggle all of the different demands in his time. I got a lot of information on his early life, but next to nothing about what it's like to be Gordon Ramsay today.

On the plus side, Ramsay's voice comes through quite clearly in this book. I don't know whether he wrote it himself or if he had someone ghost write it. Either way, it doesn't seem to matter. The breezy, vulgar style of the book sounds exactly like Ramsay sounds on screen. It's akin to sitting and listening to Ramsay reminisce on his early career, challenges, and successes. I very much enjoyed the style and tone of the book.

I was struck by how very hard Ramsay worked to get where he is today. He spent years working 80-90 hour weeks in the kitchen. He endured endless abuse from senior chefs (and not so senior chefs) just to learn as much as he could. He spent several weeks literally working 20 hours a day, to earn the money he needed and to learn the skills he needed even more. Whatever level of wealth he has today, I'd find it very hard to say that he hasn't earned every bit of it.

Overall, I very much enjoyed reading Ramsay's story. I just wanted a much deeper look at it what it took to open restaurants number 2-10. And what it took to run the restaurants while appearing on TV shows. And a look at how much control or influence he has over the style and content of what airs each week. From that perspective, this book was a disappointment. From other perspectives, it was a lot of fun.

Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 2013
by Sheila Williams

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 1 September 2013—11 November 2013

Novelettes

The Art of Homecoming—I enjoy Carrie Vaughn's urban fantasy series, about werewolves. But I wasn't sure what kind of science fiction story to expect from here. I needn't have worried. This is a character story driven by very human themes. Who am I? Where do I fit in? Where is home, if I haven't seen family in decades and they live in an alien environment?

Yubba Vines—The magazine describes this story as "gnarly realism". A roving restaurant, Lifter, fattens up the guests for an out of this world slaughterhouse. Weird and a bit trippy.

What is a Warrior Without His Wounds?—A Russian war hero, an amputee, is given the opportunity to be whole again. But at what price?

This was a good story but I felt like it was fairly predictable, lessening any emotional impact.

At Palomar—This is another of Rick Wilber's "Moe Berg" stories. Moe is back in another adventure playing baseball, crossing timelines, and (as always) fighting fascists. I enjoy these stories so it was a pleasant surprise to get a new one.

Short Stories

Haplotype 1402—A dystopic near future story. A disease wiped out most of Earth's population and only the lucky few, with the right haplotypes providing immunity, lived through it. A tiny band of survivors travels between reservations where the survivors live. But there are still moral choices to confront.

This was a weak story. The title doesn't match the narrative. Haplotypes are finally mentioned somewhere near the end, but haplotype 1402 never is. There's a throwaway line about American Indians ironically having more survivors than anyone else but the author never does anything with it. Overall, it felt like Kosmatka had more ideas than he had space. Rather than fitting the story to the space, he tried to jam everything in. It didn't work.

Blair's War—This one failed to catch my interest, thus I never read it.

Today's Friends—The Grays have invaded Earth. They're not like us and that's a problem because they want us to be just like them.

A good, chilling story. TODAY'S FRIEND WANTS TO HEAR YOUR SONG.

Roma Eterna
by Robert Silverberg

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 20 October 2013—1 November 2013

In the Aeneid, Virgil wrote: "To Romans I set no boundary in space or time. I have granted them dominion, and it has no end." What if that was true? What if the Roman Empire had never fallen? What if it had been eternal? Robert Silverberg wrote a collection of short stories around that theme. The stories start in A.D. 450 and continue through A.D. 1970, covering 1500 years of Roman history.

We see the attempted colonization of North America (Nova Roma), the civil wars between the Roman and Greek halves of the Empire, the crazy emperors, and the purges. The stories are well written, as you'd expect from Silverberg. They focus on many different time periods, physical locations, and characters. Historians, court functionaries, soldiers, and provincial royalty. In fact, that was the second flaw I noted with this collection—very little focus on the common man of the Empire. They mostly focused on people of high position or people who interacted with the high and mighty. There was only one story that dealt with the commoners.

The largest flaw was right at the beginning of the book. Silverberg obviously knew that he needed a framing device to illustrate how and why his Rome was different from our Rome. He starts by having a Roman historian (in A.D. 450) deliver a monologue to a friend.

The monologue concerns a thought experiment in which the Hebrews ("you do know who they are, right?) weren't just an obscure people group but had instead escaped Egypt, founded a nation, and eventually generated a major world religion that took over the Empire, leading to its gradual weakening and ultimate collapse.

Yes, that's right. Our entire history (an unlikely chain of events in itself) is recast as a thought experiment that one Roman just happens to think up for a book he's planning to write. Once the stories get started, that matters a lot less. But it was an incredibly clunky way to start the book.

Overall, this was an entertaining book, page turner in parts. There were certainly some interesting characters and events in it. It is intriguing to speculate about all of the ways that history might have been different if the Roman Empire had never fallen, if we'd never gone through a medieval "dark ages", and if Western Civilization hadn't moved its center to Western Europe and North America.

If that interests you, definitely consider reading Roma Eterna. Otherwise, rest assured that you're not missing a must-read book.

The Traders' War
by Charles Stross

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 9 October 2013—16 October 2013

So there's a Clan of jumped-up tinkers from an alternate timeline who can world-walk between timelines. They grew massively wealthy through a simple physical arbitrage. They pick up medicinal grade heroin down in Florida or Central America. They switch over to their home timeline, still stuck in the medieval period. They load the heroin into a caravan, guarded by Clan members with automatic weapons. They transport the heroin all the way north to their home base of the Gruinmarkt. Then they switch over to our timeline and deliver the heroin to the Boston based buyers. Voila! A secure, completely untraceable conduit for drug deliveries, worth millions.

They make money the other way by acting as a super high speed courier service. Take a letter from a king or a duke or a count in the Gruinmarkt. Switch to our timeline, catch a plane to Seattle, and carry the letter with you. Pop back to your home timeline and deliver the letter, next-day post, to the recipient, neatly avoiding the bandits and the multi-week horseback trip that would be required in your home timeline.

It sounds like a neat setup, right? Good family men, good business men, providing a needed service on both worlds. But what would happen if the DEA were to find out about these untraceable heroin couriers? Worse yet, what if a highly trusted individual were to sell out the Clan to the DEA, telling them everything he knows about safe houses, transfer points, and delivery networks?

Well, let's just say that America's ever paranoid security services wouldn't react well. At all. After all, if these people can securely transfer heroin, who's to say that they're not transferring bombs? Or terrorists? Or nukes? What if they might be hostile? It'd be far better to treat them as a hostile government and take them out first, before they take you out, wouldn't it?

And so it goes for Miriam Beckstein. Right as she's establishing a toehold in her family's business and starting to gain a little freedom for herself, the Clan ends up in a clandestine war with the U.S. government. Everything goes to pieces and Miriam gets herself even more tightly restricted than she already was.

Stross once again superbly plays the realistic reaction card. You, the reader, can understand and sympathize with both the government security forces and the Clan. Their both acting rationally according to the information they have, the cultures they're from, and the interests they need to protect. And it's probably not going to end well for either of them. It's a train wreck that you see coming from miles away, drive by the logical decisions of each character. It's unsettlingly realistic and slightly depressing. There's no authorial deus ex machina to make everything turn out well for your favorite characters. There's only the inexorable march of inevitable events.

That's refreshing to read in a science fiction story. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all ends.

The Bloodline Feud
by Charles Stross

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 1 October 2013—8 October 2013

Charlie Stross puts this story squarely in the real world. Sure, it's science fiction. But that only means that it has a fictional element to it. The rest of it reads as real as history.

Miriam Beckstein is a tech journalist in Boston and the adopted daughter of sixties radicals. She has a fairly normal life writing investigative journalism (and getting fired for uncovering the wrong bit of sleaze). Normal, that is, until her step-mother gives her a locket that her birth mother had when she died. Suddenly, Miriam finds herself in an alternate universe version of Boston. One where the Roman empire never ruled the known world, the Catholic church was never dominant, and the British empire never reached North America. Instead of Boston, she finds herself in the Gruinmarkt, a semi-Danish kingdom, stuck with medieval technology.

Besides a foreign land and a foreign language, Miriam has to contend with a new family. It turns out that she's a long lost duchess, from a whole family of world walkers—the Clan. Unfortunately for her, while her family has heard of women's lib, they hold no truck with it. They may have modern amenities and they may enjoy the high tech American lifestyle, but they're still medieval underneath. Like Saudi princes in New York—they may look sophisticated and urbane but back in the Kingdom they're still patriarchal jerks.

To make things worse, every member of the Clan is expected to contribute to the family business or die. When Miriam shows up, they waste no time trying to assimilate "Duchess Helge" into their pre-existing plans. Thus Miriam gets sucked deeper and deeper into her family's affairs, almost entirely against her will. She has to fight hard to have even the slightest control over what happens to her.

There's a lot going on in this story and most of it feels completely realistic. Miriam and her family are each acting in their own best interests. It's hard to fault either of them for acting as they do, given the constraints that they each operate under. Their motivations and actions all make sense, given the worlds they live in. None of which changes the fact that Miriam's situation well and truly sucks, even as she lives out the sci-fi dream of being able to travel between worlds.

The story would be well worth recommending just on that angle. But Stross didn't stop there. He also built the story around development economics. Miriam desperately wants to raise the standard of living of the Gruinmarkt from subsistence-level medieval farming to modern industry. But how do you bootstrap an entire kingdom into the modern era? Especially given that the only cargo you can move between worlds is what you can physically carry, your family distrusts your every move lest you rock their boat too much, and the people of the Gruinmarkt consider you a witch?

This book is fun, thought-provoking, and frustrating (in the best possible way). This is exactly what good science fiction should be.

More Than Human
by Theodore Sturgeon

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 24 September 2013—1 October 2013

Theodore Sturgeon's acclaimed classic about a group of gifted misfits who discover that together they have the power to move humankind forward—or destroy it completely.

Lone is a seemingly simple young man living on the street and in the woods, dim and helpless, yet effortlessly able to read the thoughts of others. His true nature won't be revealed until the arrival of eight-year-old Janie, a telekinetic; twins Bonnie and Beanie, who can teleport easily across great distances; and Baby, an infant with a super-computer brain. Together they are the Gestalt, a single extraordinary being composed of remarkable parts (although an essential piece may be missing).

But are they the next stage in human development or harbingers of the end of civilization? It's a question that takes on a terrifying new relevance when Gerry joins their group—for though he's powerfully telepathic, he lacks a moral compass . . . and his hatred of the world that has rejected him could prove catastrophic.

This description caught my eye, when I saw it on my library's website. I'm always interested in speculative fiction about the future of humanity or people with unusual talents and abilities. When those people are actually blending together into a new life form, the concept just becomes more interesting.

The story wasn't the tightly plotted thriller or straightforward character development story that I expected. Instead, it was a series of vignettes, each focusing on different characters from different viewpoints, some from first person perspective and some from third person perspective. Some of the vignettes were beautifully and poetically written, others were more straightforward prose. Some focused directly on the main characters, others focused only peripherally on the main characters. Together, they formed a tapestry that told the story.

The book's flaw is that Sturgeon told more than he showed. He mentions, several times, that these multiple characters form one single entity. He even has one of his characters say that she can no more live without the others than an arm or a leg could live without the rest of the body.

And, yet, the story never shows that this is true. From what I saw, the characters don't appear to be that tightly linked. True, they worked well together and all of their gifts complemented each other. And they formed a tight knit family. But I never got the sense that they more than a close, devoted family. I never sensed that they were a linked entity that would truly be unable to live or operate as individuals. Diminished, yes. Demolished, no. As poignant as the book is, this flaw drags down the rest of the story.

To Live Again
by Robert Silverberg

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 20 September 2013 - 24 September 2013

I've never been a huge fan of literary fiction. Perhaps it's because I find our world to be so familiar as to be boring. These science fiction novels by Robert Silverberg were a nice compromise. They were literary in tone but set in a world a bit different from ours.

Both stories share a theme: who am I? Not in the grand mystical sense of "where did we all come from?" but in the more personal sense of "what makes me, me?"

In To Live Again, the Scheffing Institute regularly records the brain scans of the super rich. Then, after death, their scans can be implanted in someone else's brain. The host gets to experience the memories, knowledge, insight, and personality of the dead. The dead get to experience living all over again, even if just as passengers in someone else's head.

Some people have productive relationships with their implants while others live in near constant conflict with them. What does it mean to be "you" when there is someone else in your head? When you have two sets of memories and a voice constantly whispering in your mind, are you really the same person anymore? Silverberg uses this setting to explore maturity, ambition, jealousy, and loyalty.

The Second Trip features Paul Macy. Paul used to be Nat Hamlin, a famous and successful sculptor. Four years ago, Nat was convicted of multiple rapes and was sentenced to Rehab. In the story, Rehab is a process of completely purging the personality and then building a new personality from the ground up—complete with a manufactured past. Paul Macy is the new personality in Nat Hamlin's body.

Nat Hamlin is gone. Or is he? The story plays out almost entirely in Paul's / Nat's mind, as Nat struggles to regain his own life and body and Paul struggles to establish his right to exist, even though "he's" less than 4 years old without any true life experience. Again, there's the theme of "who am I?" coupled with the question of "do I even have a right to exist?". The resulting conflict is interesting to watch and spurs much thought.

The Man Who Sold the Moon
by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 15 September 2013 - 19 September 2013

This is another collection of some of Heinlein's early stories. In this case, more of his "Future History" stories. The volume is almost worth reading just for John Campbell's introduction, explaining why Heinlein was such a great writer.

Simply put, he faced the challenge of conveying the mores and patterns of a strange cultural background, the technological background that created and sustained that culture, and the characters that inhabited that culture. He managed to do it brilliantly, over and over again, without resorting to the info dumps that are so often present in literature.

These stories, "Life-Line", "Let There Be Light", "The Roads Must Roll", "Blowups Happen", "The Man Who Sold the Moon", and "Orphans of the Sky" all illustrate that part of Heinlein's talent. And they're all enjoyable.

"Life-Line"—how would the world react if someone could predict the instant of anyone's death?

"The Roads Must Roll"—Cars do not roll upon the roads. The roads themselves roll. What might force that innovation, what kind of world would it create, and what risks would come with that world?

"The Man Who Sold the Moon"—The one man who most wants to visit the moon, who will do the most to push humanity to the moon, may be the one man who never sees the moon. Poignant.

"Orphans of the Sky"—Residents of a generational starship believe that The Ship is all there is to the universe. They've systematically reinterpreted all of the scientific texts as various forms of allegory and myth. But what happens when one man is convinced of the truth and tries to act the missionary to his fellow voyagers?

This collection is definitely worth a read.

Reamde
by Neal Stephenson

My rating: ★★☆☆☆
Read From: 19 August 2013 - 15 September 2013

Start with a family reunion. Focus on the black sheep of the family. Make him wealthy. Now give him a nerdily interesting, checkered past. Finally set him up as the creator of a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game that's built around making money in creative ways that other MMORPG's find distasteful.

The MMORPG is called T'Rain, built on the back of a truly nitpicky landscape generator called TERRAIN. (Terrain, T'Rain, get it?) It's set up with the careful attention to detail , accuracy, and knowledge of geek culture that only Stephenson can provide.

This is all part of the setup and it does take a while to set up and to start the story rolling. But once stolen data is encrypted by a virus (called REAMDE) and held hostage for (virtual) ransom, things start rolling along. Stephenson sets up a story that rolls along like billiard balls or a Rube Goldberg machine. One set of characters takes action that results in then careening into a new set of characters who are then jolted into action and sent careening into a new, completely separate and different, set of characters. And the actions just bangs along from one continent to another.

Or, at least, it seems to at the beginning. But once Stephenson has introduced all of the characters, he seems to lose control of the narrative. Within a short while, the book consumes itself with the intricate details of how, exactly, characters move from one location to another. Given the sheer number of characters Stephenson introduced, that poses a bit of a problem.

The story just switched from character to character to character to character to character, showing how they were moving around. Even the action sequences, when they finally came, suffered as too many characters were doing too many things in too many different locations. It was a chore to keep track of everyone and where Stephenson last left them. The ending, when it finally came, was a blessed relief that even managed to feel rushed.

Ultimately, Reamde is a book with some good ideas about the MMORPG gaming world and how it interacts with the real world. But it's a mediocre action story that could have used a good bit of reductive editing.

Nixon and Kissinger
by Robert Dallek

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 30 July 2013 - 6 September 2013

I have a few thoughts after reading this book.

1. It felt really long. Obviously, it was long. But some long books feel short and some short books feel long. This book felt really long.
2. How in the world did we manage to elect a neurotic, insecure, narcissistic man like Nixon to the Presidency? Especially one who would work in close partnership with another thin-skinned neurotic, in Kissinger? Sure, Johnson was also a power hungry manipulator. But he wasn't actually mentally unstable the way that Nixon appears to have been.
3. Why does Dallek always refer to Nixon as "Nixon" but mostly refer to Kissinger as "Henry"? It seems very odd.
4. It's a wonder that the U.S., and the rest of the world, survived the Nixon / Kissinger partnership as well as they did. Between Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pakistan War, it was pretty bad. But it could have been a whole lot worse.
5. The book was aptly titled. It was entirely about situations that involved both Nixon and Kissinger. Dallek focused exclusively on foreign policy. He entirely excluded domestic policy from the book. Aside from the inescapable inclusion of Watergate during the last 6 months of Nixon's Presidency, you could be forgiven for forgetting that anything outside of foreign policy even happened between 1968 and 1974.
6. Even Nixon himself disappeared from the pages of the book when he wasn't dealing with foreign policy. Dallek focused almost exclusively on Kissinger's actions during the last 6 months of Nixon's presidency.

If you want an overview of the Nixon presidency combined with his partnership with Kissinger, I can't recommend this book. If you're interested in the detailed day by day account of Nixon and Kissinger's foreign adventures together, this is the book you've been looking for.

Analog Science Fiction And Fact, September 2013
by Trevor Quachri

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 16 July 2013 - 24 August 2013

There were some decent stories in this issue.

• Murder on the Aldrin Express—The hard nosed captain of a solar transport investigates a potential murder. There are more than a few references to a similarly named Agatha Christie story.
• Creatures From a Blue Lagoon—Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be an intergalactic, inter species veterinarian? Probably not nearly as much fun as you'd think. But this story was fun.
• Life of the Author Plus Seventy—Debts. Cryogenics. And statutes of limitations. Can you win against the machine?
• Wreck Support—Archaeological find of an ancient tech support document.

Wyrd Sisters
by Terry Pratchett

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 20 August 2013 - 23 August 2013

I can tell I'm reading a good Discworld novel when the humor walks up behind me with a cudgel and lays me low. It starts with a surprised snort and devolves into irrepressible giggling. I can force it down but it threatens to come back whenever I think of the offending passage.

This book had that effect on me. It may have borrowed a bit too heavily from Shakespeare (and particularly Macbeth) but it was still a good Discworld novel.

This is the bit that got me.

"Would you care to share our lunch, old...good wo...miss?" he said. "It's only salt pork, I'm afraid."

"Meat is extremely bad for the digestive system," said Magrat. "If you could see inside your colon you'd be horrified."

"I think I would," muttered Hwel.

Equal Rites
by Terry Pratchett

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 17 August 2013 - 19 August 2013

Another fun, enjoyable read in the Discworld universe. A dying wizard tries to give his staff to the newly born eighth son of an eighth son. But the new son turns out to be a new daughter and the Discworld is about to see its first female wizard. Or its first wizard witch. Or something. The result is, as you might expect, both humorous and poignant.

This book definitely has Pratchett's trademark humor. I loved his pun on Granny Weatherwax's observation that "good fences make good neighbors".

The Uplift War
by David Brin

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 28 July 2013 - 6 August 2013

This is the concluding book in David Brin's original Uplift trilogy. These stories take place in an imaginative universe.

All races in the Galaxy have been “uplifted” into sentience by a prior alien race, in a chain stretching back to the Progenitors. Humans have even uplifted dolphins and chimpanzees into sentience. But who uplifted humanity? This is a great mystery and the other races are antagonistic towards the “wolfing” human race, without patrons or lineage.

The last book, Startide Rising, dealt primarily with the neo-dolphins that humanity has Uplifted into intelligence. This book deals primarily with the neo-chimpanzees that have been similarly Uplifted.

Startide Rising dealt almost entirely with the neo-dolphins. The Galactics were in the story but we only got cursory glimpses of them and didn't become familiar with any one race. The Uplift War turns that around.

The action takes place on the planet of Garth, a human and neo-chimp colony. Garth is invaded by the Gubru (an avian species). Several of the chimp characters take leading roles. Humanity is allied with another alien species, the Tymbrimi. The story also features Athacleana, the daughter of the Tymbrimi ambassador.

I liked this focus on the chimp and Tymbrimi characters. David Brin does a pretty good job at bringing a non-human perspective to the story. (I did feel, at times, that Athacleana was acting too much like a human female though.)

Brin has hinted in the previous books about the different species, their behaviors, and Galactic customs. In this book, he moved from hints to specifics. He used this story to narrow the focus from all of the Galactics to just two or three specific species. He then dove into the details of how the races acted, politicked, and made war. It gave a lot of depth and realism to his universe.

This was a very good end to Brin's original trilogy. It didn't answer any of the big mysteries from Startide Rising, but it expanded the scope of the story and made it clear that there are many, many more stories that could yet be told.

Red Planet
by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 26 July 2013 - 27 July 2013

Once I'd finished Tunnel in the Sky (it was such a quick read), I wasn't ready to be done with Heinlein. And I had this book sitting around, checked out from the library. So I went ahead and read it. It's another of Heinlein's juveniles. It's not as much of a coming of age story as Tunnel in the Sky. It certainly has elements of that but it's a bit more focused on the line between authority and tyranny.

Heinlein hits on some familiar themes: responsibility is a matter of maturity and skill, not of age. Self-defense is the right of every person. The man asking (or requiring) you to disarm yourself doesn't have your best interests at heart. He undoubtedly has someone's best interests in mind, but it's not you. Respect for other civilizations and peoples is not only a matter of decency, it can also be a matter of life and death. Self-reliance and initiative is far preferable to dependency and trust in good intentions.

It's an entertaining story, with a necessary message about life. It's another one that I'll be recommending to my daughters, as they grow up.

Tunnel in the Sky
by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 25 July 2013 - 26 July 2013

After reading (and being disappointed by) Darkship Renegades, I decided to read something from Heinlein himself, to cleanse the palate. I'd heard about Tunnel in the Sky last July, from a blog comment on Tor.com.

Whenever you’re sitting around and thinking to yourself, “You know I could really go for a novel in which is exactly like Lord of the Flies, but only in space,” then this is your book. Funnily enough, this book was published the same year as Golding’s Lord of the Flies and if it were up to me, it would be taught instead. The primary SF conceit of the novel deals with interplanetary colonization through big teleport jumps. Naturally some younger folks get stranded and certain ugly aspects of human nature are revealed. The only one of Heinlein’s “juvenilia” that I feel gets overlooked, and easily my favorite from that period.

It's a short read and I ripped through it pretty quickly. But it's a good one. As a "juvenile" (what we'd now call young adult) novel, it's a coming of age novel. Heinlein writes a story that's character driven, moves quickly, and is entertaining.

Heinlein spends a lot of time talking (through the story's events) about responsibility, proper attitudes towards survival, and what makes civilization. He uses the story to make a strong argument that proper government is a necessary component of civilization. That sounds odd, coming from a libertarian, but I think he wins his argument.

The government doesn't have to be large, overbearing, or especially powerful. But there are certain tasks that need to be done to protect the civilization (no matter how small it is). There are certain matters of organization and defense that need to be arranged. Someone has to give those orders and everyone else has to accept those orders as legitimate and proper.

Humanity invented government to allow that to happen. The type of government will differ in different times and different places. And each group of people will need to make their own decisions about what constitutes legitimate authority. Heinlein effortlessly illustrates all of this through the story as these lost students (high school and college aged) work to build a society once they realize that they've been stranded on an alien planet.

This story works on all levels. It's both thought provoking and entertaining. The philosphy doesn't interfere with the adventure, it merely backs it up and deepens it. This is definitely a story that I'll be recommending to my daughters as they grow older.