As it turns out, Mary Robinette Kowal can write. This is a good book, easily 5 stars. I’m given to understand that Brandon Sanderson came up with the story seed for this novella, and passed the actual writing of the novella to Kowal, who did the hard work of actually making this book.
I really enjoyed the worldbuilding in this. Basically, this is a dystopia where people have achieved technological immortality by nanites and body replication after death. However, some luddites people don’t like this immortality, so there are terrorists fighting against the immortal 99%. This is the main plot of the story. The protagonist is a body replication clone of a terrorist murderer, and it is the clone’s job to track down the terrorist murderer she is the clone of.
Adding further to this, VR and augmented reality technology has advanced to the point where your perception of the world changes around you. One person might see the world as inspired by Loony Toons, while another would see the the same world inspired by Renaissance Art. This is by FAR what makes this setting the most dystopian. At the beginning, the protagonist is forced to confront the fact that the whole world is a lie. She spent her life in a beautiful world, but has that beautiful illusion stripped away to leave a bland and boring world.
This is a Great Courses lecture series about the Vietnam War. I really enjoyed it. It focused on the big picture, beginning with WW2 and the collapse of the world’s great empires, and the leadup to the Cold War. It also focused on the little picture, with the individual lives of soldiers stuck in the mud and the suck. In particular, I enjoyed how the lecturer took time to discuss the major players in the events in question, from Lindon Johnson to Nixon to Kissinger on the US side, to Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan… and a LOT more on the Vietnamese side. But it goes even broader than that, to as far afield as Moscow and Beijing. This war had a lot of actors, and pretty much all of them had moments of brilliance as well as incompetence.
This discusses both the political and military aspects of the war, but also the civilian/religious/civic fallout as well. From the Catholic/Buddhist tension of South Vietnam, to the guerilla warfare upsetting civil life with the Tet offensive(s), to the use of Agent Orange (Blue and Green) disrupting the growth of rice and food for normal people. It discusses war crimes on both sides of the battlefield, including Communist treatment of POWs, as well as US soldiers massacres.
It even went into the life after the war for soldiers on both side of the Pacific: how US soldiers became despised upon return to the states, while how South Vietnamese soldiers were either killed or ‘reeducated’ by the victorious Communists. Even the North Vietnamese didn’t actually get what they bargained for: no ideal socialist/Communist society took root after the war; instead the economy stagnated, and the politiburo turned in upon its own people and launched wars against neighboring Cambodia and China.
The lecturer pointed out that the US lost the battle, but won the war; today, Vietnam is a capitalist country, and a host to US tourists. It discussed a bunch of myths which popped up after the war (such as the ‘stab in the back’ myth about how US soldiers didn’t lose the war, but US civilians did; and the ‘still POWs held in Vietnam’ myth). Overall, this felt like a good introduction to the topic.
John Mendez- Book Reviews and More 