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Like most recent books that create a counterfactual history of a U.S. President, injecting supernatural conspiracy elements, this one starts stronger than it ends. The voice matches Nixon's perfectly, and sucks you in nicely. The ending fizzles a bit, sort of like Nixon himself, I suppose. This doesn't make my recommended list for everyone, but people into Lovecraft (or Nixon) could do a lot worse.

I made the mistake of reading the first half in 15 minute increments, then leaving it for a couple of months before reading the rest. Given that the story involves dozens (human and AI) characters, many of whom have secret agendas, this sporadic reading meant that I'm sure some reveals at the end went by totally unnoticed. Still, this seems like what I expected a novel in the Culture series to be like, particularly the ship Minds being protagonists. Not entirely satisfied with the ending, but totally worth the time.

Though I'm not an avid reader of Clancy-style fiction, this story of a near-future war between the US and China (told largely from the US point of veiw) totally sucked me in. It starts much stronger than it finishes and some of the hacking bits are a little too magical, but I've been finding myself thinking about parts of it even weeks after finishing it. Also, the rationale portrayed by Chinese leadership for starting the war, while not entirely convincing, is a definite step up from the sort of hand-rubbing, cackling, Yellow Menace crap we might have been subjected to a couple of decades ago. Space dedicated to the Black Widow story line might have been better used on something else. (Also, they probably didn't need to resort to hardware hacks to bring down a bunch of F-35s. Just sayin'.)

For a novel in the Culture series, the events in the book don't particularly rely on happening of and within the Culture; most of the story really could have been set in any generic future (or even present) setting. (Turns out that most of it was written before the author had even fully conceived the Culture, and it shows.) The book's construction, a Tarantino-style disjunct chronology, serves it well enough (even though I'm not fond of the technique), but by the time the big reveal came around, I just didn't care all that much for the main characters.

Though generally superior to the first Culture book, the climax took me totally out of the story, wrecking it a bit. Still an interesting angle from which to explore a post-scarcity society, and well defined, interesting characters (particularly the AIs).

This odd little book about analyzing the "beats" of three dramatic works of stage and screen (Hamlet, Dr. No, Casablanca) as if they were sessions of a role-playing game serves pretty well at rewiring how your brain looks at scenes. The visual nature of the result of the technique also works pretty well, but a larger body of examples would make it patterns more evident. There is a bit more disagreement between the visual icons used and the text of the page (that is, editing mistakes) than you might expect, but they are easy to spot. If you like deconstructing stuff, this may be a book for you, even if you aren't a roleplayer.