Reviews and Comments

The author's goal was to write something like John le Carré but with more female spies. I haven't read enough le Carré to judge the resemblance. Amanda Cole is a CIA agent, the daughter of CIA agent Charlie Cole. Posted in Rome, she interviews a Russian walk-in who claims that Senator Bob Vogel is about to be assassinated on a trip to Egypt. The station chief tells her that everything is too fantastic to believe, suggests Russia is testing them with fake info, and orders her to do nothing. Of course, Bob Vogel is killed in Egypt in exactly the way the walk-in predicts. Amanda starts on operations to make use of the source.

When Vogel's chief of staff goes through the papers on his desk, he has extensive notes on meetings with a Russian oligarch. Meetings that she knows nothing about, and she knows everything about the Senator's business. Notes that indicate he's getting information on Russian shenanigans that he hasn't shared with the CIA. She brings them to Amanda Cole's attention when Cole informs her that Vogel didn't die of natural causes.

And the last page of those notes has the Russian oligarch passing on Charlie Cole's name, to what end is unclear. So Amanda Cole is both trying to beat the Russians at their spy game as well as figure out what involvement her father had in it.

The spycraft contained is mostly psychological and small pieces of leverage, but there's also the occasional more active skulduggery.

Very very enjoyable.

The premise is that faster than light travel is only possible for space ships if they enter "the Flow" at specific points and exit at specific points, like getting on and off one way buses at specific stops. The ruling house of the Interdependency maintains control by granting monopolies to specific guild houses who must produce their goods on specific planets. Thus, one planet is dependent on the monopoly goods of another planet and vice versa. And the ruling house of the Emperox collects tribute from all the other houses/planets because they control the hub of the Flow, the "central" location where most trade has to transit.

OK, so that's the setup. However, a Flow physicist on an outlying planet has figured out that the Flow is collapsing, which means that every planet has to become self sufficient beforehand. Or die.

Can the physicist get word back to the Emperox before someone else takes advantage? What if the Emperox is a bad person? What if the local duke on his backwater planet kills him first? What if the bad guys all have extremely mustache-twirly plans that the author takes great pains to make obvious to you the reader so that who is doing what is never in question and instead the only thing you have to wonder about is will the good guys execute their scheme in time?

Also, what if everyone talks the same way? What if they all start off every conversation with some diplomatic language and then a minute in everyone says "let's cut the shit and talk without pretense" and then they do.

Anyway, for once, I enjoyed a Scalzi book. It's interesting even if it's pretty shallow.

If you've looked askance at Elon Musk's claim/plan to settle Mars this century, this book will validate your priors in a most entertaining way. The first 3 parts cover the physical & mental aspects of space settlement. As someone who works on satellites, none of this is surprising to me. At least a couple times a week, someone in the office will exclaim "space is hard!" as we try to solve a problem. Additionally, the book spends 2 parts of the legal and geopolitical environment of settling space. The authors' position is that space settlement nerds don't really spend enough time thinking through the ramifications. In particular, while there are better frameworks for space settlement than what we have, there's not a clean path to get there and space settlement nerds aren't really moving society in a real way to get there. There's an extended discussion of an attempt to establish a new state in space by dint of a small cubesat launched by a space society. (As a side note, I'm quite surprised that the book doesn't go into the attempts to create micro-states such as Sealand. Those would be a lot easier to attain statehood with that space environments, and yet none of those has even come close to succeeding.)

What really makes the book though is that the authors are both funny and pay attention to the weird facts of space. Steve Bannon once ran Biosphere 2! The humor won't be a surprise to regular readers of Zach Weinersmith's web strip, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The earlier parts of the book cover the progress of the war, focusing on the situations that would be the subject of the Tokyo trial. Then the book moves to the machinations behind the scenes that set up the trial, decided how it would be run, and who would judge. Particularly interesting was the thinking and politicking behind the decision not to prosecute Emperor Hirohito. However, as the trial progresses it is explained that prosecutors, defendants, and judges alike also wanted to avoid blaming Hirohito for the war, which led to some very awkward exchanges throughout the trial. What was never explained is why the prosecution wanted to maintain the fiction that Hirohito was tricked into the war by war-loving generals, rather than simply acknowledging that it was a political decision or in the alternative, simply noting that prosecuting him would be difficult. I'm sure the powers that be had reasons that made sense to themselves, but I came away from the book not understanding that choice. After an exhaustive recounting of the trial from the perspectives of nearly everyone involved, the book gives a few chapters to the aftermath, including a long epilogue on the legacy of the trial in some of the major countries that were involved (the US, China, Japan, and Russia).

Crucially, throughout the book, the author does not spare anyone from criticism. Every country involved comes under the microscope, and none escapes blemish. Everyone from Truman to MacArthur has their faults exposed. Perhaps the only person involved to escape with his honor intact is Mei Ruao, the American educated Chinese judge. During the war, he experienced the Japanese bombing his city firsthand. After the war, he threw in with the Communists rather than accept exile in Taiwan. At first lauded, he was denounced during the Cultural Revolution, and then had his reputation posthumously restored by the Chinese Communist Party.

Be forewarned though, that not only is the book long, but many parts are repetitive. The book repeats descriptions of many episodes with the same wording and even the same quotes. A minor quibble, however.

A police procedural set in Cambridgeshire England, with DI Manon Bradshaw. The character still grates on me because she is so unhappy in her own life. She alternately wants to be free of her relationships and family and desperately wants them to never go away. I found myself frequently thinking "stop waffling and commit" because of how much time the text spends inside her head.

However, I love her as a police detective, and I loved this particular crime-solving tale. Lukas and Matis are undocumented Lithuanian immigrants to England, living in squalor in effective slavery. The townsfolk hate them because they think the Lithuanians are taking their jobs and women. The neighbor particularly hates Lukas because he has been sleeping with his wife, and another hates Matis because he's spent time with his impressionable daughter. The Lithuanian bosses use them ruthlessly and are apt to disappear them if trouble arises. One fellow resident of the house gets sick. Rather than get medical care for him, they let him die and disappear his body.

All of these people are viable suspects when Lukas body is found hanging from a tree with a note reading "Mirusieji negali kalbėti" attached.

What I loved most about this is that the crime & investigation doesn't involve a bunch of improbable coincidences, and that the investigation is basic police legwork: interviews, reviewing surveillance video, reviewing logs of phone calls & license plate readers, etc. It's a mark of a good writer that Susie Steiner was able to craft a compelling story with twists & turns and do it without the improbable crutches so prevalent in the genre. It's a shame she died, as this book was the best of the series and I would have eagerly snapped up new entries.