Minor Thoughts from me to you

Cold Days
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 23 January 2014 – 25 January 2014

Harry Dresden discovers that being Queen Mab's Winter Knight is weirder and more confusing than he'd already expected it to be. He also has to fight a continual battle against Winter's gravitational pull towards evil. Not only that, but he's closer than ever to Mab and learning that she has her reasons for what she does and that he sometimes even agrees with her.

Cold Days completes the story arc that began in Changes. Dresden has now completely left behind his old life of Chicago's only professional wizard. He's walking in far more powerful circles, whether he likes it or not. He's assumed broad new responsibilities and he's learned more about the true dangers in the world than he ever wanted to know. At heart, he still wants to protect the ones he loves and use his strength for good. But the line between good and evil, between good motives and evil outcomes, is very blurry.

In some ways, this novel completes a story arc — a character arc — that started with the very first novel in the series. Harry gradually realized that his cases concealed much deeper machinations. He gradually learned more about the forces that were manipulating the events that he kept getting caught up in. This novel is the first time that he really starts to see the big picture and figure out who his real, ultimate, enemies are.

I'm looking forward to reading Skin Game, to see where things go next. I only wish I didn't have to wait until May to find out.

Ghost Story
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★★★
Read From: 21 January 2014 – 23 January 2014

After being assassinated at the end of Changes, Dresden wakes up as a ghost. Which sounds cool. But Ghost Story is here to tell you that it's anything but fun.

Dresden quickly realizes that he's more cut off and isolated than he's ever been. He doesn't know how to "live" as a ghost. He has to be taught by the other ghosts. He can't talk to any of his friends. He can't touch any of his friends. He can't touch anything at all. He can walk around Chicago. He can see what's going on. But he's completely unable to interact with anything or affect circumstances in any way.

Before dying, Dresden had completely wiped out the Red Court vampires. He's been gone for 6 months. Now that he's back, Chicago looks like a city under siege. Dresden learns that there's been some nasty fallout from the destruction of the Red Court. He created a magical power vacuum and nature abhors a vacuum. Now his friends are in even more danger than before and it looks like his apprentice may have gone completely around the bend.

This was a different type of Dresden story. It moved at a slower pace and was a lot more reflective. Dresden had to grow accustomed to being a ghost. He had to think deeply about what it meant to live, what it meant to die, and what it meant to care for people when you were neither fully alive nor fully dead.

The last book had more upheaval than any other Dresden novel. This book had more contemplation and self-reflection than any other Dresden novel. I liked it. I think it may be the strongest book yet in the series.

Changes
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★★★
Read From: 18 January 2014 – 20 January 2014

This may be the most appropriate title of the entire series. Harry goes through more change in this one book than he has in the entire series to date. He discovers that he has a daughter. Friends die. A magical Power disappears forever. Harry changes jobs, makes peace with the Winter Court, loses his car, loses his home, and loses most of his possessions.

I enjoyed this book. That's an odd thing to say when this much pain, suffering, and change is packed into one story, but it's true. Harry faced some very tough choices and some no-win scenarios. He chose in a fashion that felt very true to the character that Butcher has created him to be. It's hard to imagine how the series itself will change after the events of this story but that too feels right, given the potentially apocalyptic scope of the Powers that Harry continually faces.

Every series needs to change to avoid becoming stale, cliched, or repetitive. Butcher has proven that he can change this series and that he can continue to make it feel like a living reality and not just a static universe for telling the same stories over and over.

Turn Coat
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 17 January 2014 – 18 January 2014

The man with a vendetta against Harry Dresden, Donald Morgan, shows up at Harry's front door. He's wounded, on the run, and asking for help. Harry's pathological need to always do the right things means that he offers that help right away. That doesn't change the fact that he and Morgan both hate that Harry's offering the help and that Morgan was forced to ask Harry for help. Morgan's accused of murdering a member of the White Council's Senior Council and Harry is practically the only wizard that doesn't believe that he did it.

For the first time, we get to see the headquarters of the White Council and some of the inner political workings of the council. This is the first time in the series that the White Council has truly felt like a large, global concern rather than just a group of a few powerful wizards. (From this view we also see, quite clearly, why other magical powers keep referring to the White Council as a rotten tree that's about to fall.) By the end of this story, it's clear that the White Council has more than one active traitor and that it would be dangerous for any one to depend on the wizards for help.

This is another solid story that continues to develop both Harry Dresden and the world that he lives in.

Small Favor
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 14 January 2014 – 17 January 2014

The book opens on Harry Dresden enjoying a lighthearted snowball fight with the Carpenters. Out of nowhere, for seemingly no reason, he's attacked by creatures from the Nevernever. He later discovers that they're gruffs (as in "the billy goats gruff"), creatures of the Summer Court. Later, he's attacked by creates of the Winter Court. Then he ends up in face offs with the Denarians and the Fallen.

This book has many great moments. Harry's various battles with the gruffs are fun highlights. His continuing character development is good to see. But the overall plot felt messy. I spent most of the book wondering what was going on. That can be fine—Harry is the narrator and the audience is supposed to be confused if he's confused. (He definitely should be confused, given the powers he goes up against.) In this case, I don't think the overall actions of the various powers made a lot of sense. I felt confused because the plot itself was confusing and not all that coherent.

This story is important as a part of the overall Dresden story line but I don't think it's a great individual book.

White Night
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 12 January 2014 – 14 January 2014

Harry believes that a string of suicides is really a string of murders. He investigates and ends up pitted against the various factions of the White Court vampires. He gradually discovers that they're all being manipulated by an outside force. But when it comes to the White Court, that's more of an expectation than a surprise.

Harry continues to grow and develop. The theme of the novel is personal responsibility. You aren't good or evil. You're who you choose to be. This is developed through several different characters, including both Harry, his apprentice Molly, and his brother Thomas.

We continue to see an extremely dark side to Harry. It's clear that he could very easily cross over the line and start becoming someone evil. All it would take is the decision to make things right, no matter what the cost. He's definitely tempted but he's resisting and he's relying on his friends to challenge him when he steps too close to the line. This push and pull drives the story.

Highlights: Harry suddenly acting as the jilted gay lover. Marcone showing up for an emergency extraction. Harry using lust to power a spell.

Proven Guilty
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 8 January 2014 – 12 January 2014

Harry Dresden, now a Warden of the White Council, gets a cryptic warning to be on the alert for black magic in Chicago. First he has to stop in at a local horror convention (SplatterCon!!!) to stop some phobophages manifesting as horror movie monsters. Then he has to plan and execute a raid deep into Winter's terrority in færie. Then, finally, he can worry about the appearance of dark magic. And, in the process, gain an apprentice of his own.

Once again, Harry is still dealing with the consequences of his past decisions and actions. He's haunted by the people he killed during the necromancer's Halloween party. He still struggles with his own personal Fallen angel. He's avoiding his friends because of his guilt and shame. In short, the series continues to feel like a real story about a real individual. These aren't just paint by numbers fantasy adventures.

Dead Beat
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★★★
Read From: 05 January 2014 – 08 January 2014

This story opens pretty much where the last one left off. Harry Dresden is living with his half-brother, Thomas. He's discovering that the family he always wanted comes with a price — putting up with the family. He's still dealing with the physical, mental, and emotional aftereffects of his last magical battles. Unfortunately for Dresden, Chicago now has to deal with several recently arrived necromancers. And that means that Harry has to deal with them.

Because of the way that the last novel unfolded, I had thought that Butcher was done introducing new magical denizens. I was wrong. The necromancers were definitely new and the story revolved around their not so fun plans. It was a little bit of a different kind of story. Karrin Murphy was absent for this novel and Harry had almost no interaction with the Chicago PD. His principal sidekick, Butters, was a very minor sidekick from a previous story. These changes helped to keep the story fresh and not formulaic.

Throughout the story, Harry constantly has to deal with the effects of the decisions he made during his previous battles. Some were good, some were bad, but all still have to be dealt with and still have lingering consequences. He has his own Fallen angel to deal with, a vampire half-brother, and a puppy.

He also has to deal with his own desire to protect Chicago and has to decide how far he'll go — what powers he'll use — to do that. There's an interesting side effect to having Dresden act as the narrator for these stories. He knows he's changed, but he doesn't think he's changed that much. (Who does?) He's surprised when his friends start acting afraid of him and worrying that he's going insane. He comes to realize that his friends have valid concerns. He's much more magically powerful now than he was at the beginning of the series. And he's far more willing to dabble in grey, or even black, magics than he ever was before. He's more dangerous, but is he a worse person? His inner battle defines the story as much as his outer battles do.

This series keeps getting better and better. I love the way the stories continue to be page turners even as real character development takes place.

Blood Rites
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 03 January 2014 – 05 January 2014

In my last review, I said "once you’ve hit upon a successful method, it’d be a crime to change it". With Blood Rites, I consider myself corrected. Butcher changed up his formula and the result is an even better story. The previous five novels have each introduced a new big bad, fleshing out the magical world that Dresden lives in. This one takes that foundation and builds off of it.

Thomas, a White vampire, asks Harry to take a case, to help one of Thomas's "normal" friends. Harry, needing the money, agrees to do so. He finds himself acting as a gofer for a movie producer, as he tries to figure out who is sending killing curses against the leading ladies. For good measure, he also has to defend himself against a scourge of Black vampires looking for revenge.

This story was much more of a mystery story than the previous books were. Harry and the reader spent the majority of the story completely out to sea regarding the identity or motives of the magical attacker. The result was a very compelling read. To make things better, Harry grew over the course of the book, learning more about himself and his family. He learned some painful truths about people he thought he knew well and came out of everything with a much closer connection to the people around him. I'm eager to see where things go from here.

Death Masks
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 1 January 2014 – 2 January 2014

Butcher continues his successful series. Once again, Harry Dresden is fighting to save Chicago from something terrible. Once again, Butcher gives him a different type of big bad to fight against. He's faced wizards, werewolves, vampires, and færies. Now, he confronts the Fallen (angels), as he works to recover the stolen Shroud of Turin.

The Dresden books may be somewhat formulaic but that doesn't make them bad. Once you've hit upon a successful method, it'd be a crime to change it. The magic is still fascinating. The mythological details are vividly described. Nothing comes easy for Dresden and the result is another compelling page turner.

Brain Rules
by John Medina

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 07 December 2013 — 25 December 2013

I majored in Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh. While there, I took a course called Human Information Processing. We studied how the brain works, how people perceive information, how they store information, how they remember, etc. It was fascinating and gave me many good insights into how I could help myself — and others — learn.

Brain Rules is a layman's version of my college course. Medina concisely and entertainingly walks us through things that we know — or think we know — about how the brain works. He's careful to only relay information that's been confirmed by multiple independent experiments. He clearly distinguishes between what we're pretty sure we know and what we only suspect or guess at.

He starts out by emphasizing the importance of exercising to brain function. It persuaded me to start walking more and to look for more ways to become more active. He included a startling statistic: doing aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of general dementia. It cuts your risk of Alzheimer's by 60 percent.

He also focuses on education and learning. For instance, the brain's attentional "spotlight" can only focus on one thing at a time (rule #4). We're incapable of multitasking. And we are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording detail. These facts suggest new ways for teachers to educate students.

Teachers need to make classes interesting, so that students' minds don't wander to other things, tuning out the class. And teachers need to put content into patterns that students can see, rather than just giving students a hodgepodge of facts.

I found each chapter to be interesting and thought provoking. I can definitely recommend it as a way to learn more about yourself and how to optimize your life.

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.