Reviews and Comments

Another very standard Reacher novel. Stranded in Bolton South Dakota, Reacher stumbles into a case against a biker gang that's been manufacturing meth in an abandoned military facility west of town. A witness has stepped forward willing to testify to seeing a biker hand over a brick of meth. The town has to keep her safe until the trial.

The complicating factor is that, like many rural towns in the western US, Bolton bid for and won the site of a massive prison complex. And if the prison has a riot or an escape, every single member of the Bolton police department is to drop whatever they are doing and assist the prison. Even if what they are doing is protecting a witness under threat. The cops can't protect her, but Reacher can. Or should be able to. Can he keep her alive the approximately 61 hours until she needs to testify? In the dead of winter when it's 0 degrees outside? He'll do a better job than the local PD at least, because the biker's lawyer turns up dead and then a local cop does too. The cops can't protect everyone, especially if the prison siren goes off.

Child takes a lot of liberties with a fairly shitty but anodyne prison-industrial complex situation. Everything is turned up to 11 and the super-competent Reacher has to deal with obviously absurd situations.

But that's what Reacher does.

In the world of Babel, magic works by inscribing similar words onto bars of silver which manifests the difference between the words as spells. What works really great are words in translation, because few translated words have exactly the same meaning.

Babel is the story of Robin Swift, a Chinese orphan with a talent for languages who is brought to England by an professor of translation. China forbids the teaching of Chinese to foreigners, so the British Empire steals young Chinese boys to provide words in translation. It's incredibly exploitative, and Robin starts to learn just what his purpose is meant to be.

As the subtitle implies, Robin gets caught up in opposition to Oxford's use of translators powering of empire. But he also really likes the creature comforts that come with being one favored by the British Empire and would really like to keep those. Can an empire be reformed from within, but someone who is a member of a colonized people no less? Or does changing empire require violent uprising?

The story starts off very engaging, but at the point the Robin has to choose whether to go in violent opposition, the text becomes quite bogged down with repetitive arguments and discussions between characters over the ethics involved. And as the climactic confrontation approaches, every character becomes merely a vehicle for plot and discourse, devoid of much in the way of personality.

I gave this 4 stars because of some really interesting ideas and a really great start. But I wish the second half of the book lived up to the promise of the first half.

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.