Review: A future expedition into newly uninhabitable regions of Earth due to global warming goes terribly wrong. Of course it does. It's an interesting part of the plot: It's understood that some areas of Earth will become so warm and humid (look up "wet bulb temperature,) that humans won't survive on the surface as global warming progresses. What would that really mean for life on Earth? There's a lot more to this book, principally the unreliable first-person narrator. A perfect novella length.

Review: Follows the near future development of faster than light travel. But it's not the first time humans have invented it ... Set in future Scotland and near Earth space. There are some really ingenious settings and characters: The android who you're never sure is actually self aware. Oh he says he was very disturbed to learn he wasn't human but we're left in doubt. MacLeod very cleverly narrates his sections in such a way you can't figure him out, but it takes a while to catch on to what the author is up to. I feel like this book and its sequels in the Light-speed trilogy belong in one of MacLeod's established universes and it might help to enjoy the book if you've read some of those.

Review: A sequenced set of stories about videographer Amber and a conspiracy theory radio show and pod-caster host Jack Owens. He's trying to make the jump to video. On the radio you can stick to talking about Big Foot. On video things get a lot more real. This is a pretty funny book. Every one of the loosely connected stories presents a different mystery: Is what they just saw really paranormal or is there a rational explanation?

Review: Alternate world military with a bit of magic, something like 18th Century France. Starts out slow, but picks up about a third of the way through and just gets better and better. This is the first book in the "Shadow Campaigns" series.

Review: The book begins with a guy starting his day at the office in Hell. Yes, literal Hell. It's amusing and promises some adventures as the workers attempt to convince mortals to sign away their souls. Some hellish office politics take place. Then the story broadens to follow one family in danger of losing their last members to a Devil's bargain. Not the light comedy / supernatural thriller I expected, but still funny in parts and well written. Opinion on this one is quite mixed and I can see why. To really get the most out of it you need to read it like a mystery, not comedy or thriller or fantasy.

Review: On Anjiin, humans have developed a civilization somewhat less advanced than ours, but with some strange technology based on the very different life native to Anjiin -- biochemically incompatible with Earth-based life, giving their scientists some unusual advantages over most from other worlds. This becomes important when an alien force swiftly conquers all of Anjiin and abducts the biochemists to carry out special research for the invaders. Working under extremely difficult conditions, the scientists make some discoveries and begin to plan their escape. I never got into the Expanse series past the first book, but I think this will be a better series. The first installment is excellent.

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Review: There's a piece of advice for crafting a good science fiction novel: Don't use just one big idea, but instead three, in layers. I think this came from Octavia Butler, but it could be Damon Knight. Anyhow, Beggars in Spain, while throwing all sorts of future developments into the plot, really brings only one new, arguably small, idea. What if certain people in the near future don't need to sleep? Sometime in the 21st Century the full mechanism behind sleep is discovered, and a genetic therapy develops to greatly reduce or eliminate the need for sleep -- but it's rather difficult and expensive to perform. Not much more powerful genetic engineering than that is developed (at first anyway,) but it's enough to cleave society into the "Sleepless" and everyone else. What could you get done if you never needed to sleep? Over a couple of generations the Sleepless leave everyone else in the dust economically. It's not so much that the rich and powerful get the best genetic treatment for themselves, as it's that this treatment creates a new class of the rich and powerful, and everything comes apart. The ideas in this book stayed with me like few others. There's a kind of law of parsimony at work: Don't throw all the biggest outlandish biomedical and cybernetic developments at us at once. Just add one, and the rest will follow. Eventually we get post-scarcity, more superhuman intelligence, and eventually, near total anarchy.

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