Kavinay
There's something psychotically absurd about Clan society and Blaine Pardoe does a great job seeding this not just in the tale of the Wolverines but also in our understanding of Nicholas Kerensky and his direction of the clans.
My only complaint is that there's so much in this story that could have justified a longer series. Pre-Operation Revival Clan stories are just so intriguing because the authors need to lay groundwork for how fascist, warrior dictatorship doesn't collapse under it's own craziness. In a way, I wish this book had been fleshed out even more and was the foil for an excellent sourcebook like Wars of Reaving.
A refreshing contrast to the rest of the Dark Age novels. Much like Stackpole's earlier novels, this book moves great chunks of the timeline forward.
Alaric is just as annoying as Victor though... Obviously he's going to end up IlKhan and that's just repeating the sins of BT past with Victor simply being the greatest and most privileged product of divine right in the galaxy. Blergh.
It's a shame the fiction and timeline died or went fallow shortly after this book.
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?
The bad guys in Battletech are just always more fascinating than the factions the developers actually encouraged us to empathize with.
Charrette and Thurston are basically the best writers of BT fiction. My only knock on this book that Book 2 and on starts to get really fragmented with a vast array of other Inner Sphere plot threads being touched upon.
A good book. I feel it's weighed down a bit with having resolve a lot of connective tissue before getting on with the Black Legion proper. For example, the first four chapters might have been better as a short story, or maybe the entire series could have been a true anthology from more than just Khayon's perspective.
Still, the payoff is there with Sigismund. Dembski-Bowden seems to have a knack for really exposing the loyalist Astartes as twits.
There's the really weird sense of banal nihilism that pervades most of Millar's work. It's just always there, even in this precursor to the Kingsman movie. In fact, the entire evil plan of the book's villain is so straightforward that it succeeds in horrifying where a spandex villain couldn't. It's a very clever narrative trick that would otherwise have made The Secret Service just another Bond wannabe.
BTW, if anything this book points out how impressive the Kingsman adaption was. It somehow keeps Millar's basic feel but also adds a human element (particularly Colin Firth's analogue to Uncle Jack) that helps the story from coming across as bleak as this original.
It's not often that the new Marvel canon novels or comics have completely swung and missed. This book is unfortunately one of those cases.
Frankly, the epilogue and a short flashback to Windu's apprenticeship are far more interesting than 90% of the comic. It just leads to a story that pales in comparison to the standards set by Soule or Gillon. What makes it worse is that Windu and a Clone Wars era story are ripe for the picking. Instead, we get a straight-up Clone Wars episode that ultimately conveys very little.
Kieron Gillen gets it.
Somehow, he can make characters that fit in the OT canon but also completely reinvigorate all the tropes that 40 years of Star Wars has mined to death.
Dr. Aphra is quite possibly the best thing to come from the new Disney canon and I say this even after absolutely loving the Gillen's Darth Vader run and Soule's brilliant Lando series.
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.
“Astronomers have stars, geologists have rocks, but what do moral theorists have to work with?”
In a field that is full of abstraction, Appiah brings you what you rarely get in a philosophy classroom: a collision with real world research on applied ethics. The thrust of this book is not so much the Appiah is championing contemporary experiments so much as he's exploring how such works complicate the ivory tower normative systems that we've used from Aristotle, to Kant to Rawls.
This is not the sort of book you read to tie up your moral theories in a bow, which not by accident, is also why it's such an interesting work no matter where you fall in between deontological, consequentialist or virtue approaches to moral reasoning.
This is not a bad story. Scott Snyder write Batman with a combo of fun and grimness that most can't match. That being said, there's something familiar about the conclusion and that's the convenience of everything wrapping up in a manner similar to his previous Batman run. It's as if he does such a great job laying out the experience of Batman that he can't quite figure out a way to make sense of the story. Case in point: Harvey/Two-Face's conclusion just rings hollow.
KGBeast though! Man, I'd love to see more of Snyder's take on this old favourite.
The upshot of this book is not that big data is the holy grail. Rather, the recurring theme in all of Stephens-Davidowitz's interesting examples is just that most self-reporting is awful.
I'm still skeptical about the big data revolution–and this book doesn't really focus on implicit bias in analysis of large data sets–but the conventional research methods of social sciences are amusingly torn to pieces (much like advertising ROI was absolutely shredded in the digital age where measurement was no longer entirely by gut).