Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography by David B Williams (4 stars)

This book captures a lot of excellent geographic history that Seattle residents will find interesting. I'm not a big fan of reading history and this kept my interest for essentially the whole book. If you've ever wondered why a large part of Seattle is listed as "high liquefaction" risk in the event of an earthquake, this book explains why.

The drastic geographic modifications made by white settlers were quite shocking to this modern reader, long-used to complex and lengthy planning approvals for even small changes:

Changing the shape of the land and bodies of water was as natural to settlers, developers, and urban boosters as building houses, cutting trees, or ignoring the rights of Native peoples.

Between 1898 and 1930, Seattleites washed and scraped away more than 11 million cubic yards of Denny, reducing a double-peaked, 240-foot-high mound to a pancake-flat tabula rasa.

Linking freshwater with salt water lowered Lake Washington by nine feet and reduced the total amount of shoreline in the city by more than thirteen miles. 

Those geographic modifications are impressive both from their sheer audacity as well as the technological innovation they drove, such as self-dumping scows that dumped most of Denny hill into Elliott Bay automatically.

The book also considers the geological timescale, explaining the effect of lahar flows from Mt. Rainier and delivering some chilling warnings:

We will do our best to counter those forces with good engineering and planning, but ultimately our lives will be changed the next time Mount Rainier sends a lahar our way or the Seattle Fault shifts the ground by twenty feet.

 4 stars.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky (4.5 stars)

This is a fascinating first-contact story as seen through the perspective of a Russian smuggler. The contact itself is entirely unusual: aliens have come and gone, and left humanity a bunch of alien artifacts in a series of 'Zones'.

“A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras . . . A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about . . . Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp . . . and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow . . .” “I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.”

The artifacts are both incredibly useful and, more often than not, inexplicably deadly.

These suits are completely safe from the burning fuzz, for example. And from Satan’s blossom and its spit...

The government and smugglers (stalkers) are all intent on finding and extracting these artifacts for their own gain. The story follows a stalker, Red Schuhart, initially in the first person, then somewhat surprisingly in the third-person with more POVs added. Red's character feels very Russian, he has a fairly bleak world outlook, a very dry sense of humour, and there's a LOT of drinking involved. His monologue was one strengths of the novel:

I take out the flask, unscrew it, and attach myself to it like a leech

I'll walk on my teeth, never mind my hands. I'm no novice. 

This is an amazing thing, by the way: anytime you come in, these barmen are always wiping glasses, as if their salvation depended on it.

At times it heads into fairly dense philosophy, and I felt my attention straying somewhat.

It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from his dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.”

I appreciated the complexity, and getting a taste for the Russian-ness, of the characters.  But what I really wanted was people to go back into the Zone and do more exploring. What calamity would befall the next adventurer! Instead we are left with only a couple of very small tastes of such a fascinating concept.

4.5 stars.

One Second After by William R. Forstchen (2.5 stars)

One Second After has already been cited on the floor of Congress as a book all Americans should read, a book already being discussed in the corridors of the Pentagon

My initial reaction was....OK I'll bite.

After reading it I think there is definitely a real threat from an EMP attack but my trust level in the "science" behind this book is extremely low. I can see why Newt Gingrich endorsed this: it's very light on the actual science behind EMP, heavy on the need for guns, and with some climate change denial thrown in for good measure:

“Global warming, sure, spend hundreds of billions on what might have been a threat, though a lot say it wasn’t.

I guess writing a fictional book is the best way to get things done these days in congress. Presumably this will win over the same people that don't want Mars research funded because they believe Mark Watney already went there and look how that turned out.

If you're a me-and-mine-first gun-owning prepper climate change denier, and wish all those hippies would stop helping the homeless and go buy some AR-15s, this is the book for you:

“Once they run out of food, then the reality will set in, but by that point, anyone with a gun will tell them to kiss off if they come begging. And those poor kids, if they have food, the ones with guns will take it. They’re used to free clinics, homeless shelters when they need ’em, former hippie types smiling and giving them a few bucks. That’s all finished. They’ll die like flies...

If you're a congressperson looking for ways to send more money to the defense industrial base, this is also the book for you:

We were so damn vulnerable, so damn vulnerable, and no one did the right things to prepare, or prevent it. 

If, like me, you just like post-apocalyptic fiction, there's some entertainment and an interesting thought experiment here, but as a novel it is very weak. The Road or The Stand this is not.

It's hard to know whether to give Forstchen credit for creating a main character that is incredibly flawed: he essentially robs a pharmacy for insulin for his daughter but then holds others to a much higher moral standard and even executes some thieves, or if that was deliberately endorsed as sensible "looking out for your own".

The progression from "everything is normal" to "extrajudicial killings in the streets for stealing" was three days without electronics.  I'd say that's completely ridiculous, but a sad part of me thinks it may not be. Plenty of people will read this as an instruction manual where the only solution to a crisis is selfishness and violence.

2.5 stars.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (5 stars)

This is a spectacular book, mostly just because the approach is fascinating: it's a political/economic fantasy novel with a female accountant as the protagonist?! I've never read a book like this: imagine A Song of Ice and Fire but replace magic, dragons, and some of the violent battles with economics and trade. Dickinson moves quite quickly but with substance: if GRRM covered the same content it probably would have taken three books.

When conquering an enemy or building an alliance Baru studies the patterns of trade, money lending, and at times uses her position in control of the central bank to change the balance of power. It's a great demonstration of how trade, currency, and debt can be used as tools of political and social control. Sure the Masquerade has an army and a navy, a Nazi-like system of eugenics and secret police, but much of their power comes through the economics of trade.

and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.

Baru becomes a cog in this giant wheel, initially hoping to change it from within, but she knows it will require her to be ruthless in the pursuit of power.

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast.

From day one in Aurdwynn she had to be the Masquerade:

You are a word, Baru Cormorant, a mark, and the mark says: you, Aurdwynn, you are ours.”

Where the novel is weak is in Baru herself. I had a hard time believing that this teenager was a) a mathematical savant, b) an applied economics genius c) a skilled negotiator and d) the most politically skilled operative of all time. Of those I think only a) and maybe b) are actually plausible, the rest are very people-oriented skills that typically don't exist in mathematical savants, and even if they do, they are the type of skills that are built through decades of experience and many failures. She basically only has a few years of formal learning from a frontier school.

So she is somewhat of a Mary Sue, but she isn't without weakness: she isn't a strong fighter, and she makes a number of real mistakes with grave consequences for the war. A bit of Deus Ex Machina does creep in since she never needs to struggle with a problem for more than a day before hitting upon an amazing solution.

Also we don't actually get to know Baru very personally, but Dickinson has good reason to hold this back. A lot of the intrigue for the reader is in trying to decipher where her loyalties truly lie, but this doesn't keep me from being disappointed that we didn't get below the surface of her next strategic actions or her attempts to decipher the web of loyalties surrounding her.

There is a very strong feminist (so refreshing to see so many women in positions of real power) and pro-gay thread through the entire novel. Homosexuality is one of the core social dynamics the Masquerade wants to stamp out, and Dickinson has many characters fighting against that as a core part of their resistance, many seeing it as a fundamental fact of human existence:

“Men used to marry men,” Tain Hu told her, as they crouched together over a fire pit to cook their venison. “And women once took wives. It was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly it was done by those without needs or troubles—done for love. The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people.”

 A fascinating novel, couldn't put it down.

5 stars.