Most of what I read is science fiction and fantasy.
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Nearly a thousand years removed from Earth, the remnants of humanity cling to existence inside giant, space faring creatures known …
"Auben Mutze has more vices than he can deal with--six to be exact--each branded down his arm for all the …
Escaping Exodus is a story of a young woman named Seske Kaleigh, heir to the command of a biological, city-size …
I had hoped for an accessible text exploring the idea of empire as a universal enemy to humankind through the lens of jihad. Instead, I got a dense history of the Bosnian civil war written in stiff and unreadable academese. (I swear, if I never read the word "peregrinations" again it will be too soon.) Maybe the book eventually gets where I thought it was going, but I couldn't justify punishing myself further, and I abandoned the read after getting a third of the way through. Why any person would think it a good idea to write this way is beyond me. Might as well have a disclaimer on the front of this book: "Not for laypersons."
I had hoped for an accessible text exploring the idea of empire as a universal enemy to humankind through the lens of jihad. Instead, I got a dense history of the Bosnian civil war written in stiff and unreadable academese. (I swear, if I never read the word "peregrinations" again it will be too soon.) Maybe the book eventually gets where I thought it was going, but I couldn't justify punishing myself further, and I abandoned the read after getting a third of the way through. Why any person would think it a good idea to write this way is beyond me. Might as well have a disclaimer on the front of this book: "Not for laypersons."
Listened to this twice before, but now sharing it with someone new. Still a fun listen.
Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that …
Forever Peace is a 1997 science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman. It won the Nebula Award, Hugo Award and John …
From the 2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner for Best Writer, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars is the final book …
The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end.
Peace and order are now figments of the …
"It is a world in which near-instantaneous travel from continent to continent is free to all. In which automation now …
From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning …
"The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would …
This "brilliantly conceived" novel imagines a devastating nuclear attack on America and the official government …
Content warning Mild spoilers
Whereas Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War is a primer on nuclear weapons and US nuclear policy with a fictional scenario used to illustrate how those nuclear weapons and policies could lead to the worst-possible outcome, this book is entirely a work of fiction and assumes that readers already have foundational knowledge about nuclear weapons and US nuclear policy. I wouldn't recommend this book to someone hoping to learn more about nuclear weapons and US nuclear policy—I would point those folks to Nuclear War and Command and Control, among other sources—but I would recommend this book to persons who enjoy military/political fiction.
I have just two complaints with this book:
First, it definitely reads like a [somewhat dry] novel rather than a Congressional commission report, as it proports to be.
Second, while the author was very careful to lay out a plausible scenario for the DPRK using nuclear weapons against the US and its allies—so much so that I felt that to be the raison d’être of this book—I felt that the US response to the DPRK's nuclear strikes stretched the very limits of believability. The scene with President Trump being mollified after the Navy officer runs out with the nuclear briefcase, in particular, seems utterly ridiculous to me. Combine Trump's ego with his volatility and the US's launch-on-warning posture, and I simply can't imagine a scenario in which the DPRK launches more than 50 nuclear missiles at US targets—including several on the US mainland—that doesn't result in nuclear retaliation.
I appreciate this book for its fast pace and the "it could happen" warning it relates, but it falls short both as a novel and as an educational resource.
Interesting reading articles about climate change published in 2015. Did people really feel that optimistic about the Paris agreement at the time? I don't remember feeling that way, but some people did, apparently. Some little glimmer of hope, I suppose. Poor bastards.
Interesting reading articles about climate change published in 2015. Did people really feel that optimistic about the Paris agreement at the time? I don't remember feeling that way, but some people did, apparently. Some little glimmer of hope, I suppose. Poor bastards.
