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There’s nothing like a good redemption story. And if that redemption story also happens to feature space pirates and interstellar battles, so much the better!

Sol Linocass is a divorced dad down on his luck. His attempts to win back the favor of his ex-wife invariably seem to go sideways. He can’t hold a job, and he’s an alcoholic. His life, in short, is going down the tubes, and his dream of a better future thanks to his skill as a pilot from hours in simulators doesn’t seem likely to materialize any time soon.

But one day he stumbles across top secret information hidden in some scrap he hauled in from the junkyard. Sol may not be the best decision-maker in the world, but he is wise enough to know just what the government would do to get their hands on such data. So, he decides to flee as fast as he can, by joining up with his sister Trudy and her rag-tag crew of space pirates.

Trudy is the opposite of Sol in many ways; competent, organized, and in command of her life. She makes it very clear to Sol that once they leave port, he’s not her little brother, he’s just a member of her crew. She stops just short of making a “row well, and live” speech, but it’s very clear who’s in charge here.

I’m not usually one to want prequels or retellings or things like that, but I would love to read the story of this book told from Trudy’s perspective. She’s a fantastic character, especially once you know the whole story, and can appreciate all the different concerns she’s required to balance.

What follows once Sol joins the crew is a spacefaring adventure full of danger, intrigue, political-machinations, and double-crossing. It reminded me a little of Frank Herbert’s sadly neglected novel The Dragon in the Sea, about a submarine crew where everyone suspects everyone else of being a double agent. With everything that’s at stake, Sol never knows who can be trusted. (In the sage advice of Natalie Portman in My Blueberry Nights: “You can’t even trust yourself.”)

But in the end, everybody has to put their faith in something; and ultimately that’s the decision Sol is forced to make under the highest pressure imaginable.

There are so many things I could praise in this book: the obvious points are the compelling and twist-filled plot, and the vivid, memorable characters. It reminded me of a Carrie Rubin novel in that regard. (And yes, there is even a bit of a medical subplot to it.)

A less obvious, but equally important quality is how Holtschulte handles the world-building. World-building is key in a science fiction story since, you know, it’s set in a different world.

Tall Boy Sun contains a bare minimum of world-building. It conveys just enough information about the setting that we can follow what’s happening, and not a bit more. There are no info-dumps or long-winded expositions here, which is perfect.

When you read an exposition-heavy section in a character-driven novel, it has the effect of taking you out of the moment, and reminding you that you are just reading a story. For comparison, imagine reading a novel set in the present day: if it weighed you down with a bunch of needless backstory about politics and history of our own world that wasn’t relevant to the story, it would be distracting and even a little confusing. You would be asking, “why would the author need to tell me this?”

We accept more explaining about the world and setting in sci-fi or fantasy novels, but how refreshing it is to read one that feels like it really is of a piece with its setting! Tall Boy Sun‘s world is so well-built that it ceases to feel like it was built at all, and feels as if the writer truly inhabits the world being described, and simply penned a novel set in it.

There are many more praiseworthy things in this book, such as Trudy’s colorful crew, and the sinister antagonist Gilbert Bane, who is a mixture of Boba Fett, the Red Baron, and the Dread Pirate Roberts. But, it’s more fun if you can just discover the world and denizens of Tall Boy Sun for yourself. I highly recommend this book, even if sci-fi isn’t one of your typical genres. It is first and foremost a book driven by its characters, who are as well-crafted and memorable as any you’ll ever meet.

Now if we can only get a spin-off about the adventures of Captain Trudy…

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Andrew Crowther posted about this book the other week. I shared his reservations, but as a longtime Marxist of the Groucho School, as well as a fan of offbeat books generally, I had to give it a try.

The book is narrated by… some guy. Frank Denby, I think, or something like that. And he’s a reporter in 1930s Hollywood. But he’s just filling the role of the Poor Nut, to use Stephen Leacock’s phrase. Nobody’s reading this book for him. No, they’re reading to see how the author manages to turn Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx into a detective.

Well, all told… it’s a mixed bag. Groucho, as depicted here, is certainly witty and gets off plenty of good lines. Moreover, I don’t think they’re just recycled gags from the movies; at least I didn’t remember most of them. The author appears to have gone to some effort to mimic Groucho’s style while furnishing him with original material.

Less impressive is the mystery itself: a starlet is found dead, and the authorities rule it a suicide, but Groucho knows better. He suspects foul play by shady characters in show business.

And, lo and behold, it turns out that it is indeed foul play by shady characters in show business. Granted, there are enough of them that figuring out exactly which ones did it is something of a mystery. But not really enough of one.

Again, though, is anyone reading this because they expected a mystery to rival one by Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie? Or are they reading it because it’s an amusing novelty? Exactly. It is the literary equivalent of a gadget play. And for what it is, it succeeds well enough. My favorite scene is the one where Groucho, disguised as his brother Harpo, narrowly avoids assassins sent by some of the villains. Groucho’s press conference afterwards is particularly amusing.

Fans of the Marx Bros. will probably enjoy it. Fans of mysteries will find it fairly predictable. But to me, the acid test of a book like this can only be: what would Groucho himself think of it?

My guess is he would say something complimentary, and then immediately add something else that would reframe his initial comment as an insult. Then he’d waggle his eyebrows, take a puff on his cigar, and walk comically away to his waiting vehicle, which Harpo would drive away without him.

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You remember the other week when I reviewed that “biography” of Baron Ungern-Sternberg and talked about how it was cool to read a book that didn’t over-explain things to the reader? Well, this book is like that too, only it’s an alternate history story rather than a biography.

You can tell things are different in this world. The story is about the Energy Wars of 1994, when terrorists of unclear affiliation attacked the Johnson Space Flight Center.

General Gus Grissom, who apparently did not die (I think–see below) in the Apollo 1 program in this timeline, is heading the response to the attack. Under his command is the narrator of our story, Peter Caudell, with the framing device of Caudell telling the story many years later to his daughter.

It’s a very short book, taking only about ten minutes to read, but it packs a lot into those ten minutes. Mostly raising more questions than answers. Which is good if you’re like me. My motto is that the best books are the ones that leave you questioning what’s even real.

Still… it would have been nice to have things a bit more fleshed out. The author does include an Afterword which explains some things, but even the explanations raise questions. For example, there’s a note about where the clones of Stalin are located in this alternate world.

This is why I included the parenthetical note about Grissom above. There are multiple references to clones throughout the story, in a way that suggests they’re important, but I could never figure out exactly what the deal was with them.

But in a way, this makes the story feel more authentic. I feel like clones were all the rage as the sci-fi trope of the 1990s. I know I was a big fan of clone-related stories when I was a kid. AI and robots and simulation theory are all right for these young people with their short pants and their comically oversized lollipops, but me, I’m from the Old School. Give me that old-time warehouse with rows of clones in test tubes. If it’s good enough for the Galaxy of Fear, it’s good enough for me.

Anyway, back to the story: it’s well-written but kind of incoherent. But I’m strangely okay with that, because it really does feel like reading a fragment of a dispatch from some other reality.

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Well, right off the bat, you’ve got to love the title.

I’ve been a fan of Andrew Crowther since I was a teenager. He was the world’s leading expert on W.S. Gilbert, and I was a kid who used a dial-up internet connection and an iMac G3 to read archived Savoynet discussions on the G&S Archive.

Well, times have changed, but Crowther is still the leading expert on W.S.G. Now I have faster internet and a MacBook Air, but I have never lost my appreciation for Gilbertian humor, which is to say, sharp wit and clever satire. Crowther’s book contains plenty of both.

Which is not to say he’s just imitating Gilbert. Far from it. His style is different; darker and starker, with a harsh edge not found in most of Gilbert’s works. (With important exceptions.) Crowther tackles the absurdity of the modern world by heightening it just enough, until the contradictions and hypocrisies become impossible to ignore.

Some of the stories verge on horror, most notably “Jasper” (which animal lovers may wish to skip), others, including my favorite, “The King’s Juggler”, are more in the Victorian satire vein, wherein we are invited to shake our heads and chuckle sardonically along with the author. And some are downright uncanny given current events.

You don’t see a lot of books like this any more. Short stories have been said to be dying for decades. Now, novels are said to be dying too, and indeed literacy itself may be on the way out. Therefore, I encourage you to rage, rage against the dying of the light by reading this collection. It’s just the right blend of Victorian and modern cynicism.

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Only Adam Bertocci could tell a story about a small high school chess club rivalry and turn it into a grand drama about life, art, the nature of genius, and the meaning of greatness.

Parker Sabatini is an accomplished chess player in her school’s casual chess club. One day, Ali Wolfhart, on leave from the cheerleading squad due to injury, stops by the club. At first, she seems like just a novelty. Until she starts winning. And winning. And winning. To the point that Parker begins to become obsessed with Ali’s uncanny gift for the game.

Like Salieri vs. Mozart in Amadeus, Parker struggles to comprehend why this divine fire of genius should have been bestowed upon a cheerleader, of all people. Her obsession turns to jealousy, culminating in a violent outburst at a chess tournament.

The book is told as a series of interviews with students and faculty at the school, narrating how the relationship between Ali and Parker evolved. Or, perhaps, devolved. (This style of narration foreshadows that used in Bertocci’s recent novel, The Sorcery of White Rats, which is also excellent.) In the course of these ruminations, the interviewees muse on all sorts of topics, ranging from educational philosophy to the meaning of life.

There’s been many a novel written that doesn’t tackle themes as heavy as these, but as always, Bertocci addresses these big questions with a light touch and economy of words. The book takes only about 30 minutes to read, and it leverages each word for maximum impact.

In the end, Ali’s genius remains enigmatic; as genius always must. Perhaps the best attitude to take towards genius is simply to be grateful that one is fortunate enough to have the opportunity of witnessing it. That’s certainly the attitude I take when I read one of Bertocci’s books.

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Imagine a biography. But not a normal biography. This biography starts out with the narrator—presumably the author, although we can’t be sure—describing how he doesn’t know anything about his subject. He wanders around for a couple chapters, talking to random people, including his girlfriend, about how he doesn’t know anything about this guy.

Some of the people he meets give him advice. Some of them tell him conflicting stories. Then he decides that since nobody has a really firm grasp on the facts, he will use literary license to fill in the details of his subject’s life. That is, he will just make stuff up.

Having told us he is going to do this, the second part of the book begins, chronicling the life of the subject as imagined by our author. You might think that, while what we are reading is not true, it will at least be clear.

But you would be wrong, because the author assumes you will be familiar with most of the details surrounding the main character’s life. Even though, again, he is making it up.

People appear and start talking with no introduction. Who they are and why they are there is not explained. The focus and perspective shifts abruptly without warning.

Also, it is translated from French.

You might say this sounds like it would be absolutely baffling.  Completely incomprehensible and impossible to follow. But wait! I haven’t told you the very best part yet.

The subject of our story, Baron Nikolai Robert Maximilian Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg, sometimes known as Roman, is totally insane. Thus, everything he does, he does with no apparent reason or motivation. The main through line in his life is violence. Some kids dream about being doctors or firefighters; young Ungern-Sternberg dreamed about committing war crimes. Well, he achieved his dream.

What history does confirm about Ungern-Sternberg is that he was an anti-communist (“White”) general in the Russian Civil War. He committed many atrocities fighting in southern Russia and Mongolia. At some point, he decided he was the reincarnation of Genghis Khan and attempted to reestablish the ancient empire of the great warlord of the Asian steppes.

Even Pozner’s account, as fantasy-based as it is, agrees with later historical research on this point, although Pozner almost certainly took it upon himself to embellish Ungern’s rampage with extra horror. Because, you see, Pozner was a communist, and deliberately chose the Mad Baron as his subject to make the anti-communist side look as bad as he possibly could.

In that respect, he made a good choice, because the Baron’s reign of terror definitely does not make him a sympathetic  figure. Of course, Pozner left out many of the atrocities carried out by his own side. He’s far from the only chronicler of history to do that.

Now, here’s the odd thing: for as bizarre as this book is—and it certainly is way more bizarre than what I was expecting when I went looking for a simple biography of an obscure historical figure—it is nonetheless interesting, and held my attention in a way that a conventional history probably wouldn’t have. In the words of Benoit Blanc: “It makes no damn sense. Compels me, though.”

Books like this don’t get written anymore. Nowadays, books hold your hand, explain everything, often multiple times. In a weird way, it was refreshing to read a book that was like, “Here’s a baffling account of a little-known period in history, as seen through the eyes of a violent lunatic and described by a lying communist. You’re on your own, kid; have fun storming the castle!”

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What’s more important: having a good system, or having good personnel? Broadly speaking, this distinction can be used across many fields of endeavor, whether it’s debating what makes a superior NFL team or evaluating how to run a company. It can be applied to the study of history—think Carlyle’s “Great Man” theory vs. Marxist interpretations where economic and sociological factors are primary causes. It’s a major division across academic disciplines, i.e. “the Humanities” as opposed to “the Sciences.”

All Tomorrows is a work of speculative science fiction that seems to lean heavily on a systematic analysis of life itself; that is, evolutionary biology. It is framed as the work of a future alien xeno-biologist recording the history of humanity as it evolved and journeyed into space. Like Gibbon standing among the ruins of ancient Rome, the narrator is reflecting on all the trials and challenges faced by the many species that originally came from Earth.

The initial “next steps” for humanity as described in this book include journeying to Mars, and of course, the inevitable Earth vs. Mars war that follows. From there, humans begin breeding to become better adapted to space travel, and over the millennia turn into a variety of strange creatures.

Speaking of strange creatures, they eventually encounter a species referred to as “the Qu”, beings with a God-complex who remake other lifeforms they encounter in experimental ways, leading to some true abominations. The Qu have seeded other worlds with lifeforms based on dinosaurs from Earth’s past, and once they meet “the Star People”, they are disgusted with this upstart species, and remake them into a variety of abominations as punishment.

Eventually, the Qu depart, and evolution continues to take its course, eventually leading to the rise of a machine-intelligence based empire with no regard for biological life. This empire also eventually experiences its downfall, and over hundreds of millions of years, new species of intelligent life arise to take their place.

As the timescale implies, the scope and span of this book is huge and sweeping. There are no “characters” as such, unless we consider whole species as characters. Many of the creatures described seem disturbing and abominable, although perhaps if given the chance, they would say the same about us. Evolution produces many strange things.

Although the book appears to be heavily steeped in systematic thinking, at the very end, the limits of such thinking are revealed. I won’t spoil it, but the title has a significance that becomes apparent only in the last line. This is where the comparison to Gibbon feels most apt; even when discussing the evolution of life on a massive scale, the author somehow never loses sight of the particular, of those little details that we categorize as “human.”

The book is illustrated by the author with images depicting all the different creatures described, which offers us a glimpse of how deeply unsettling and bizarre they are. H.R. Giger would be proud.

All in all, the book is a great way to stretch your imagination and think in cosmological scales. I’d even go so far as to say it’s inspiring, because all the vast cycles of rise and fall imply many untold stories within them. Highly recommended to fans of science-fiction.

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I apologize for not making my usual post last week. To make it up to you, this week I have prepared a very special double book review. Both are non-fiction books, and both have a similar topic. The full titles were too long to put in full in the blog heading. They are A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America and Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. I like when a book is up front with its title. Short of emulating Albert Jay Nock and titling the book “Our Enemy, The Boomers”, neither author could have been more direct.

The two books take different angles of attack on their shared target: Gibney’s Generation of Sociopaths is a sweeping odyssey across many different levels of alleged Boomer selfishness, complete with numerical summaries quantifying their malfeasance. Andrews meanwhile takes a more literary approach, modeling her book after Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and attacking Boomer vices using six prominent members of their generation as the foci of her assault.

Curiously, the two books present slightly different definitions of what qualifies someone as a Boomer. Andrews uses the standard birth years of 1945 to 1964, whereas Gibney includes those born from 1940 on. Either way, the generation (which presumably could also be called Gen W, although I’ve never seen it referred to as such) has many members, and, according to these two, not many of them are good.

Gibney is more vindictive in his attacks. He diagnoses the Boomers as clinically sociopathic, behaving with a total lack of concern for others and a single-minded focus on their own welfare. Much of his book is devoted to detailed examinations of American tax law, dedicated to the thesis that Boomers voted for policies to benefit themselves at the expense of both older and younger cohorts.

Here, the alert reader might raise an objection: isn’t America theoretically a representative government? And might not a representative government be reasonably expected to respond to what a large percentage of its population wants? And since the Boomers are by definition a large percentage of the population, shouldn’t we expect them to vote in their own interest? Isn’t that, like, democracy in action? But this is not good enough for Gibney. The Boomers display, in his view, a lack of the prudence and foresight that was characteristic of previous generations.

Andrews does without the graphs and figures. Her book is much more personal, targeting specific foibles of specific people: Aaron Sorkin is an out-of-touch writer of TV dramas who mistakes his characters for real life. Camille Paglia is a decadent artist who is shocked when the values of her salons translate into reality. Al Sharpton was the last corrupt boss of Tammany Hall-style machine politics. Even Steve Jobs, to whom Andrews is clearly more sympathetic than the others, was at best a flawed hero, insofar as his phones and music players ultimately fueled Boomer-ish conspicuous consumption.

Gibney’s book concludes with an appeal to Carl Schmitt’s Friend/Enemy distinction, exhorting his readers to view the Boomers as a kind of scapegoat on to whom the sins of our nation must be cast, and of whom a ritual sacrifice must be made before there can be absolution. Andrews ends her book with a more meditative note on how millennials can avoid following in the footsteps of their parents. (Interestingly, both books also make approving references to Lord Kenneth Clark’s 1969 television series Civilisation. It is almost as if there is some anti-Boomer Q source from which they are both working.)

What is perhaps most interesting about the books is the different perspectives of the authors. Andrews is a reactionary conservative, Gibney seems to lean progressive with maybe some libertarian influence thrown in. As a result, their analysis of what exactly the Boomers did wrong differs, with Andrews believing they destroyed the fabric of society with their libertine disregard of cultural norms, while Gibney views the social issues that alarm Andrews—feminism, gay marriage, etc.—as mere footnotes. In his view, the overall culture is far more right-wing now than it was when the Boomers were coming up. As he frequently reminds us, Nixon was more left-wing than Obama when it came to expanding the scope of government.

In the end, their diagnosis seems to converge on the idea that the Boomers, growing up in a time of peace and plenty, were spoiled by their material wealth, and selfishly squandered it all, leaving their progeny in a far worse situation economically, politically, and—in Andrews’s case anyway—spiritually.

And here we come to the central point, the specter that haunts both books: the Boomers’ progeny, most of whom are the generation we know as Gen Y, the Millennials, or, if you’re of a mind to use a slur for us as Gibney does for the Boomers, “the Participation Trophy Generation.”

I am one of these Millennials, born in 1990 to Boomer parents. As a member of that generation of supposedly disinherited knights that the Washington Post once dubbed “the unluckiest generation in U.S. history”, I am, if Andrews and Gibney are to be believed, a victim who is entitled to redress of his grievances.

And this is the great irony of both books: in each case the authors accuse the Boomers of being rebels without causes, of not respecting the traditions of their ancestors, but instead deriding them, overthrowing them, and stealing their wealth, all while acting as if they are aggrieved and entitled to compensation… and then they each proceed to do exactly the same with the Boomers themselves!

Gibney’s hypocrisy is particularly irritating. He proposes levying large taxes on the Boomers, the proceeds of which should be redirected to California venture capitalists such as himself. His whole book indicts the Boomers for stealing the wealth of others to benefit themselves, and then he ends by proposing to do the very same thing. He justifies this by saying that “a Schmittian menace does motivate society, sometimes to good ends, if the Us is genuinely commendable and the Other, not so much.”

In other words, “we are the good guys, and anything we do is therefore also good.” Does it ever occur to Gibney that this is also what the original students of Carl Schmitt were thinking?

Anyway, before Gibney starts building wicker men for Boomers in the hopes that next year’s crop will be better, I would point out that failure to show respect for the ancestors is one of the major sins across virtually all cultures in history. That the Boomers may have been guilty of it is no excuse for their successors to do the same.

Back to that Washington Post article, and specifically this chart, which demonstrates that Millennials enjoyed the least growth in GDP per capita of any generation. Very unlucky! Not nearly as “lucky” as the G.I. Generation (b.1900-1924) or the Silent Generation (b. 1925-1945). Look at the economic growth they enjoyed during their first years in the workforce. What luck! I’m sure, as they were about to storm the beaches at Normandy, they were all thinking how incredibly lucky they were to have been born at this time!

To my fellow Millennials (and Gen Zers–those who can read), I say this: yes, we inherited a mess from previous generations. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see what they might have done differently. But every generation in history could say the same. No one was ever gifted a perfect world, and if they were, mythology suggests they would lose it almost immediately. If we are going to at least set our lands in order, we cannot do it by heaping scorn upon those who went before us. We can only study what they did right, what they did wrong, and use that knowledge to make ourselves better. We can still be, as that wonderful work of Millennial fiction Samantha, 25, on October 31 says, “the generation that changes it all.” But

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

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Remember that book, CCRU Writings: 1997 – 2003 that I reviewed last Fall? The one full of weird occult philosophical ramblings about AI, techno-demons, and inhuman pseudo-mythology?

If you read that review, or the book itself, and thought, “that was good, but it’s just not bizarre enough”, well, my friend, have I got good news for you!

Cyclonopedia is written in an academic style. Or rather, it’s what would happen if H.P. Lovecraft wrote in an academic style while on acid.

The book is framed as a found manuscript discovered by an American tourist on a trip to the Middle East. What she finds is a disordered collection of notes loosely centered on the works of a Dr. Hamid Parsani, who has developed an esoteric theory of the world, particularly the Muslim world, and the Global War on Terror.

Dr. Parsani’s thesis, insofar as it can be discerned from the many cryptic documents and references, is that the Middle East is actually a conscious organism, powered by a dark god that lives beneath its surface. This viscous Lovecraftian xeno-intelligence is the substance we know as “oil”, and it subtly shapes humanity to suit its purposes. It runs our machines, drives our economies, and provides the impetus for massive wars, all in an effort to increase its control over the Earth as it seeks to burn as bright as its nemesis, the Sun.

Scattered throughout the writing by and about Parsani are references to other characters, including an American soldier called “Colonel West”, a Kurtz-like figure who has begun to understand the bizarre and occult nature of the battlefield and gone rogue, leading a renegade Delta Force unit on brutal sorties informed by his and Dr. Parsani’s research into the esoteric nature of the desert and the demonic forces that rule it.

This West character is especially interesting to me because in certain respects he parallels the real-life Lt. Col. Allen West, who was tried for the use of unnecessary force during the Iraq War, even down to such minor details as the fictional West’s fascination with oil and the real-life West’s line that “if it’s about the lives of my soldiers at stake, I’d go through hell with a gasoline can,” which he said by way of defending his actions. Is this literary license, satire, hyperstition, or mere coincidence?

I’m probably making this sound more compelling than it is. Parts of it read like a really dry and incredibly confusing dissertation, punctuated by moments of bizarre horror that aren’t as shocking as they might be simply because they feel so out-of-left-field. Still, like CCRU, the book does manage to gradually instill a sense of gnawing unease in the reader.

And also like CCRU, most of this unease comes from the fact that its central insane thesis seems to align with observable facts. If the Middle East really is a sentient force that compels humanity to wage eternal war over the black gold beneath it, we would expect to see exactly what we do see in the real world.

More curious still are some of the things that the philosophy of Cyclonopedia implies rather than stating outright. For instance, the curious fact that the monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all originated in the Middle East, and slowly but surely defeated and subjugated the sun-worshipping religions—a fact which dovetails with the supposed envy the dark god oil harbors against the sun. (“Since the beginning of time, Man has yearned to destroy the sun!“)

It’s worth noting that the basic concept here isn’t all that different from Dune: a mysterious desert populated by a adherents of an esoteric religion, and a vital resource that is key to control of the universe. Frank Herbert based his story on the Muslim world to begin with; Cyclonopedia is like what would happen if you removed the sci-fi setting, and restored Dune‘s weird, psychedelic vibe to Mesopotamia proper. Truth is stranger than fiction, and Cyclonopedia is stranger than both.

Now, this is where I need to step back and acknowledge that most people are not like me. Most people like a story with a coherent beginning, middle, and end, and do not like to feel like their understanding of reality is slowly unraveling when they read a book. So I probably have a higher tolerance for this sort of mind-bending madness than most. And even I was getting impatient after a while. In a lot of ways, the book felt like it was building up to a payoff that it never delivered.

So, should you read it? If you love bizarre esoteric theory-fiction that requires a huge amount of close reading to even begin to understand. Since I think that only describes about nine people in the entire world, it’s likely not for you. But if you’re one of the nine, you’ll probably love it.

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There’s an old line which I’ve seen attributed to Pericles: “just because you don’t take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” I am very skeptical as to whether Pericles said this, but the sentiment is fundamentally sound. Politics exists in all nations at all times, and can be defined simply as the endless competition for the power of governing. In democracies, people compete for votes. In oligarchies, for the support of the strongest factions. In monarchies, for the favor of the crown.

Thus, there will always be politics. In the latest Brad and Karen thriller, the pair are both caught up in developments stemming directly from government policy changes. Brad in that much of his research funding has been terminated and Karen in that she is having to work with a much more aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Both are affected when one of Brad’s colleagues is taken into ICE custody and then mysteriously murdered. As usual, the duo works to solve the murder, though this time getting information through Karen’s usual channels is more difficult, as the federal authorities are very secretive about their operations.

If you’re a fan of Brad and Karen thrillers, I probably don’t have to tell you to read this. Unless, perhaps, you are also so horrified by current events that you don’t want anything that reminds you of them. There were a few, I think, who declined to read Mark Paxson’s wonderful novella The Jump for that very reason. And that’s a pity, because it really was a phenomenal book that explains current events far better than most mainstream news outlets.

So, my advice to prospective readers of this book is to be undeterred by the political themes. Even if you don’t agree with them! As you might guess, the distribution of ratings for this book is bimodal, with some long-time readers of the series being alienated due to the beliefs held by the main characters.

This may be a controversial opinion in itself, but this review just makes me sad. When did people lose the ability to read a story even if they disagree with some of its ideas? Are some people unable to read Kidnapped just because they are not Jacobites? Political disputes, up to and including wars, get forgotten with time. (“Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor…”) What doesn’t get forgotten are good stories.

Well, anyway, back to the book itself: in the end it practically turns into a spy-thriller tale, complete with secret agents leading double lives and a dramatic cycle of betrayal and revenge. And I love a good spy story.

Pick up The ICE Murders. Yes, it might force you to think about things outside of your normal perspective. But isn’t that what books are for?