Not on the same level as Green Bone Saga, Fonda’s writing excels in interpersonal relationships, and a desert avian obsession is no substitute. If you really want a book on avian obsession, Bernd Heinrich is a better choice. Still a fun and satisfying plot for a novella.
A great framework on incentives being a tuple of {utility, social signal, self signal} lost in a sea of mediocre anecdotes about cognitive biases. Worth an article, not worth a book.
A goofy interpretation of CRISPR tech in the vein of face/off, combined with a future fugitive chase like Minority Report. At his best, Daniel Suarez stretches the bounds of believability to find a thriller such as in Daemon or Critical Mass , but here he overreaches into silliness. I nearly DNFed after the face swap, and wasn’t rewarded for sticking around.
***Et tu, Brutus? *** Even if you haven’t read this play before, if you’ve gone through enough English text you’ve read this play before. As one of six Roman plays, Ceaser does the most to pull Roman sensibilities into what was about to become the British empire, and cements the wholly fictitious ties between the ancient world and English Renaissance. Most surprising was the structure, where our eponymous character dies halfway through, only for the climactic action to take place on the battlefield among successors. Like all Shakespeare, fun quips abound. I appreciated the incitement to war without daring to impinge upon the honor of the enemy, in addition to the the many pre-suicide meditations on honor and life. ...
Disappointing. A cross between Sicario and Dan Brown. A fever dream of the 2010’s, * what if all the conspiracies were true? * I’m no fan of the military industrial complex, but I’m also not a fan of simplified conspiracies that wars started to build a weapons system. Read The Last Good Soldier instead.
Apparently space-engineering-drama is a whole sub-category at this point, but Suarez is the right author for the job
TBW
**Typical Action Movie Book ** Picking up a popular scifi book is a roll of the dice. Sometimes, through pure luck you find exceptional ideas or a riveting plot. Often, you’ll find a commentary on our modern civilization through examination of a different perspective. Yet the other half, you roll mediocre, and get white male boomer wish-fulfillment instead. Consider Phlebas is in the latter category. I’m the target audience, so don’t mind reading a space-adventure. Nothing was egregious enough to set this book down and go back to reading about the Vietnam War. But by the end, nothing stood out as anything more than a GPT4 remix of other scifi novels. ...
2nd Sino-American War The US Army has not accepted the simple fact that its performance in the Korean War was lousy. This year I’ve endeavored to understand America at war. After the World Wars, where America was Johnny-come-lately with industrial-might-makes-right, Korea represents the first modern war, where American goals are muddled, local allies are weak, but airpower is dominant. The war in Korea could be the first chapter in a textbook on American military foreign policy about how the combination of paranoia, ignorance, and intolerance of casualties leads to irrational action. ...
**Dystopian Scifi ** For those of us fortunate enough to live in the developed world, dystopia is contemplated more through fiction than reality. 1984 is required reading in schools, and the Hunger Games has the ability to dominate both book lists and the box office. Still, North Korea emerges from the Korean War detritus as a 21st century dystopia. Nothing to Envy tells this story. Like Behind the Beautiful Forevers or Young China, the author conveys a handful of life stories through thoughtful interviews. This is a portrait of stark totalitarianism in the face of economic collapse and famine. North Korea’s similarities to fiction are not lost upon those who make it out, one defector’s “favorite was a translation of 1984, he marveled how George Orwell could have understood so well the North Korean brand of totalitarianism.” ...