War

**Mathletes v. Machos ** I used to be good at math. Not ‘A student’ good, I mean win the competitions, calculate faster than friends with a calculator good. As part of a young math team, and as competitions progressed through 8 years of scholastic competition, I watched as the trajectories of the mathletes diverge. The girls drifted away from math team, and focused on areas outside of STEM. The boys prided themselves on calculus grades, picked up video games and code, and went straight into tech. ...

** Defeat is More Interesting ** One of the most satisfying elements of a fantasy or sci-fi sequel is the opportunity to explore the consequences of the original story. Usually, the protagonists saved the world, but whatever the danger was had to have some sort of impact right? In Wrath of Empire, the protagonists lost the battle for the city they hoped to protect. Effectively, Napoleon has invaded Russia with easy early victories, but now rather than Kutezov needing to draw the French army out, there is a treasure hunt to find the remaining godstones. Tolstoy this is not, but I enjoyed the tactics and tone, which kept the pages turning far beyond when I should have been sleeping. ...

** 46th book of 2021: On Wish-Fulfillment Station ** On Basilisk Station promises to take an exceedingly competent protagonist through harrowing circumstances and overwhelming odds to inevitable victory, and does just that. The prologue starts out revealing the dastardly plan of the nazis-in-space villains and the first few chapters show us that the protagonist’s civilization is essentially interwar England. Armed with little more than Chekov’s gun Honor has to save the day and prevent world war 2 a galactic war. ...

** 36th book of 2021: Body Politic ** Everybody had politics, even if only some people had sex. * Narratives of collective action and dissonance are so often unsatisfying that mainstream culture has abandoned them. This is true in fiction, journalism, and even history. Politics and bureaucracy are dirty words. Individuals serve as the node for every story, and the anonymous and transparent cultural context reinforces a collective fundamental attribution error, hobbling our ability to understand ourselves and the world. Martine focuses on the blank spaces between individuals, and this is where A Desolation Called Peace shines. ...

72nd book of 2020 - Nice Escape. It’s November 3rd, as the American republic follows perilously close to last days of the Roman republic: a contested election, extreme partisanship, and cries of criminality. I’m having flashbacks to 2016 when my candidate didn’t get elected and my girlfriend at the time left without warning. But wait! What is that coming in outside of the object of Jupiter? Surely, just because we can’t explain the strange trajectory or lack of spin that doesn’t mean life… but when the photos come back the evidence is clear. ...

54th book of 2020. ** tl;dr: ** Read the cover, read the appendix, skip the rest. ‘Destined for War’ introduces the Thucydides trap, named after Thucydides’ recording of the war between Sparta and Athens. In this pattern, rising powers (e.g. Athens) can end up at war with dominant powers (e.g. Sparta) even though the outcome is against the interests of both parties. According to Graham, in 12/16 cases over the last 500 years, similar shifts in power balance have led to war. The book relies on practical history, using past examples to try predict future events. Indeed, this method seems to be the most effective means at predicting political outcomes, and is so simple that it’s baffling we don’t see more of it. Tetlock’s book on political predictions has good evidence on how this method is one of the best ways to make predictions about complex systems (i.e. politics), with repeatably better outcomes than what specific expertise (i.e. professors at Harvard) can achieve. ...

27th book of 2020. You would think that the narrative of a grumpy antisocial robot who just wants to get back to watching TV serials would get boring after a while. It doesn’t. I keep reading these books as they come out.

Not as compelling as the second book, mainly because a lot of the plot reveals were telegraphed so clearly in the first two books, it felt like I already knew how most of the character arcs would resolve. I’ll probably keep going with the series, but it’s not near the top of the list.

54th book of 2019 – I enjoyed it. It felt like a sci-fi version of bureaucratic fiction (i.e. 驻京办主任) where the grinding gears of tradition and succession are as much an element of the plot as the living characters. Moreover, it captures the feeling of being a foreigner, and to quote another review: “This is for all those who have ever fallen in love with a culture that was not their own.” ...

The plot is completely unrelated to its predecessor, ‘A fire upon the deep’. However, the themes of the book are similar about first contact between different cultures and accelerated technological development. Things I liked: Interesting setting in the on/off system. A plot revolving around the start of the information age, set from the perspective of decades and from afar. Things I’m not sure I liked: Extreme anthropormorphization of the spiders. I get that this makes it easier for the readers, and I enjoy that it’s explained in the books via translation, but you could have replaced the characters with humans and not noticed the difference. ...