Kavinay
A clever exploration of quite possibly the most fantastical aspect of Trek: post-scarcity.
There are two big takeaways for me:
1. A future without poverty necessarily transforms the mindset of Federation citizens. It's the reason why Starfleet officers are unbelievably perfect: growing up without the toxic stress of material instability leads to even humans who are so alien to contemporary norms. The profit motive, price signal and so on are just irrelevant.
2. The Ferengi are us. They're 20-21st century humanity struggling to understand how any society could function without a reliance on capitalism.
My only minor quibble is that I think the back-half of the book is a bit more crunchy than the first. Saadia does a great job when addressing the economic concepts within the TNG/DS9 frameworks. Given the target audience, I wish he did more of that and less background work on explaining Trek conventions to the reader. How many normies are really going to bother picking up what's essentially a love-letter to policy oriented Trek fans?
Maybe it's just been a long time since Xenos, but this book seemed a bit flat for me. Abnett's writing is great, but the Inquisitor-hijinks plot just didn't grab me.
On one hand, there's no sweep of narrative history like the first book. Essun basically doesn't do a whole lot for most of the book. But Nassun, my god, you're both cringing and eagerly reading in the hopes she'll survive her father and what's to come.
Outstanding. You don't really know you needed a mix of Ultraman + Kaiju + Oz (the prison show), but once you do get into it, Cannon's storytelling is just captivating. Case in point, Zonn's quiet psychopathic prison stare genuinely freaks me out more than any Kaiju rampaging through a city.
Segregation and Anti-Rascism are relatively straightforward, but what Kendi does for the majority of this book is demonstrate how a third narrative in racism, Assimilation, has been interwoven into the fabric of the discourse. It's his handling of calls for assimilation and how they've historically been used to deepen racist agendas that is profound.
On reflection, there really isn't a lot of action in Invisible Republic. There's a mystery of sorts but really the hook into this story is just how thoughtful the details are. It makes for a delightful bit of SciFi.
As a father, this book hits home.
Beautiful black bodies.
People who want to be white.
Coates touches on so many aspects of the lived experience of racialized person that you catch yourself nodding at the familiarity of his text.
Grant Morrison's chaos is sometimes magic. Sometimes it's just a mess. This is unfortunately the latter.
Here's a spoiler: the takeaway from Wainwright is that prohibition doesn't work. But unlike the resident pothead, his thesis is based on analysis that exposes drug war policy as often wasteful or even counterproductive.
Drug lords adapt is probably a better subtitle. There's nothing particularly novel revealed by Wainright's research if you have a passing understanding of the politics of drug enforcement. But what he does well is tie the operating norms of violent cartels with the incentives created by the very institutions that seek to control them. Violence is the the criminal enterprise's recourse in the absence of enforceable contracts. When you combine that operating reality with a demand curve that's only growing and a hydra-like supply line, is it any wonder why cartels thrive against policies that only escalate the drug war?
Shockingly good. Wendig does such a good job of establishing the first post-Endor moments of the Galaxy that you're glad the old Expanded Universe is toast.
Oh, and huge spoiler: LOBOT LIVES!!!!!
You go into the book thinking Erik Prince is Darth Vader.
He's not. He's more akin to Director Krennic: a manipulator of corrupt institutions that simply don't value life.
The real shock of Scahill's excellent coverage is just how banal the evil of the mercenary business is. Much like imperialist and colonial military dogma, the expansion of the private security contractors–mercenaries–boils down to exploitation and indifference. Exploitation of government policy to procure highly suspect security contracts and indifference towards the lives of the foreign populations affected by private militaries that are not beholden to account for war crimes.
Outstanding. Fatsis' embedding of himself in the culture of competitive play is engaging even if you're not a Scrabble fan. The mental game he so carefully examines of both aspiring and top players reveals how many layers of emotion and calculation go into playing at higher levels. How can you do well at such a specialized pursuit without flirting with mania?
There's something really clever going on in Appiah's take on ethics in a global world. He goes out of his way to point out that while the main thrust of his positive argument is “you care about X because your neighbour does” is easy to articulate, it's damn hard to get there in most ethical systems.
I don't think this will appeal or even make sense to anyone interested in defining their identity with nations and states. In many ways, Appiah's moral compass only makes sense in a post-colonial context. If you think some accident of your birth entitles you to a special or nobler moral value then he has nothing to offer you. The very point of Appiah's approach to ethics is to first realize that most of the historical precedents that are pointed to for defining moral identities are themeselves mutable. Judgements aren't static. They change over time and they change dramatically when in contact with the wider world.
Why bother reading this? In a political era where nationalism and populism is surprisingly effective, Appiah points out that the purity of moral identities is fiction. This isn't ivory tower philosophy. It's applied ethics that gets the experience of the world from a non-majority point of view–something that's really hard to find articulated so well in any work on ethics.
The first 2/3rds of the book are a Captain Kirk style power fantasy but the finale is surprisingly good.
Every once in a while, someone will venture forth with a pseudo-academic diatribe about how colonialism and imperialism were ultimately valuable for nations captured by European mercantile and military might.
They also tend to be the people who will tell you how clever Churchill was, how The British Raj created modern India and how the British Empire should be a source of pride.
In such cases, I recommend you point such committed imperialists to the staggering body of documentation and evidence that Madhusree Mukerjee has collected in Churchill's Secret War.
The picture that emerges of British efforts to starve India for political gain is monstrous.
Mukerjee doesn't even have to take a side. She lets British officials both close to Churchhill's administration and The Raj flay the PM and the empire in their honest assessment of the quiet genocide perpetrated during World War II.
An empire of famine, condescension and pride: Churchill and Britain are impossible to apologize for after you've read this book.
Banks' specialities: it gets weird, you can't predict the end and yet it all makes sense eventually.
The best thing about Macbeth is that it would eventually lead to Kurosawa's adaption: Throne of Blood.
So much better than Bill's version.
