Thomas E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: How the Civil Rights Movement Won its Battles, 1954-1968.

Ricks is a U.S. military historian. If you're used to thinking about nonviolence as a set of lofty ideals, this project raises immediate questions: why would a military historian be interested? And why would someone who is morally committed to nonviolence--someone like me--care what he thinks?

But there's an intensely practical case for nonviolence as well. I learned this partly from reading Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's work on nonviolent regime change, and partly by turning the counterinsurgency writing of David Kilcullen upside-down.

Here's the thing. Most people, regular people living under whatever government, just want to live their lives. To do that, they need to feel safe--not perfectly safe, but convinced that lightning or roving bands of leopards or the other generalized dangers of existence are unlikely to strike them personally. The task of a counterinsurgency operation is to convince people that their government can keep them safe. A group that wants to change government, for instance by overthrowing the incredibly repressive system of Jim Crow, needs to convince regular people that their government does not protect them.

One way to do this is to make the government's violence visible.

When you think of the civil rights movement this way, as a deliberate and ultimately successful campaign to confront a violent enemy, it's easier to see why a military historian would be interested.

Specifically, Waging a Good War is about the campaigns waged by the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr.'s group) and the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group that organized the Freedom Summer). It describes the Movement's strategy (how people chose, or failed to choose, their overarching goals) and tactics (how they pursued them), with regular comparisons to U.S. military campaigns. Most of the comparisons reference World War II; it's clear that Ricks prefers writing about people whom he thinks are the good guys, though he doesn't try to beatify any of the leaders whose decisions he examines.

If you're looking for an overview of the civil rights movement with an emphasis on techniques that other protest groups might try to emulate, this is a very solid place to start. I found, as I hoped, lots of practical information about planning and training. I learned about many civil rights leaders whose names I had not known, and learned more about people of whom I had only heard in passing. In particular, this book is full of praise for the leadership and insight of Diane Nash. As a mathematician, I was aware of the Algebra Project founded by Bob Moses (a very different person from the city planner by the same name!), but had no idea about his foundational role in Freedom Summer. That portion of my ignorance has now been rectified.

One theme that I did not anticipate is PTSD, or, as Ricks often terms it, combat stress. He devotes a substantial portion of the book to the question of what happens after a major operation, how survivors recover or fail to recover. I've seen echoes of the struggles Ricks describes among friends who were heavily involved in the Black Lives Matter protests. The questions he raises about how an organization might try to plan for the aftermath of a huge effort are important. Even in activist circles, I've generally heard this discussed in terms of individual burnout, rather than as a problem of collective support.

Waging a Good War is clear about its own scope. Some elements of the civil rights movement fall outside that scope; in particular, this is not the right place to find a detailed account of the NAACP's legal strategy. A more serious and less intentional limitation is that this book does not contemplate the U.S. as a colonialist power. Occasionally, this flavor of patriotism impedes Ricks' efforts to find an appropriate military simile. Here he is talking about J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, for example:

There are few analogies for this situation in conventional modern Western military history. Rather, Hoover operated like a medieval warlord, both an ally of the sovereign and a danger to him...

I am not a military expert, but I don't think it's difficult to find twentieth- and twenty-first century examples of the U.S. cooperating with people it termed warlords!

But this isn't the kind of book you read to stoke your cynicism; it's the kind of book you read to gear up for a long march. If you think a book like Waging a Good War could be useful to you, it almost certainly will.

Nghi Vo, The City in Glass.

The demon Vitrine loved the city of Azril until it was destroyed by angels. Her fury wounded one of the destroyers; no longer pure enough for his kindred, he is cursed to stay on Earth, wandering the ruins that were once Azril in pain and confusion.

I have a theory that some novellas are constructed like short stories and some are constructed like novels. The City in Glass is a novel that feels like a short story. The narrative arc is simple--the plot is essentially a love triangle, where Vitrine loves her city and the angel loves Vitrine--and the ending strikes with the force of a well-built short story. The complexities are in the streets and people of Azril itself: the tales that the angels cut off and the new tales that accumulate as different people arrive and begin to rebuild.

The City in Glass is in the same continuity as Vo's Singing Hills novellas. There's a passing reference to mastodons, and another to a cleric with a talking shrike. The angels and demons clearly draw on Christian mythology, but Christian mythology isn't privileged here above other mythologies: you won't find the attention to the hierarchies of Heaven and Hell that prevails in other stories about angels falling in love. Vitrine comes from a far-flung family of demons, each with its own talents and obsessions; they seem to be powers arising (super)naturally from the earth itself, rather than exiled angels. The angels, meanwhile, are terrifyingly destructive and terrifyingly good. We never learn why Azril was destroyed, or whether the angels serve a God. The focus is instead on grief, rebuilding, and the inevitability of change. Even immortality is not altogether constant.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. In the US, it comes out October 1.)

Lady Eve's Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow.

Ruthi Johnson (currently going by Evelyn Ojukwu) is running a con on the awkward heir of a major intergalactic insurance concern to get back at him for jilting her baby sister. But it's hard to focus on breaking Esteban's heart when his wildly dashing half-sister is standing right next to him.

This--like the ostensible Miss Ojukwu's game--is the kind of project that takes a massive amount of craftsmanship to pull off while seeming light-hearted and casual the entire time. There's an immense satisfaction in watching the various gears line up. If you're thinking of Ruthi's universe as a hand-crafted mechanism, it's one with a surprising heft: early twentieth-century musical comedy IN SPACE needs no extra justification, but I appreciated the depth in Fraimow's imagined cultures. Even the seemingly frothiest fashions are based on assumptions about where money comes from and how it is used, and there are layers and layers beneath questions such as why debutantes wear bubble-dresses (the better to dance in half-gravity!) or when it's gauche to take a radiation pill before eating, to say nothing of the best methods for interstellar transport of kosher duck.

(I read this book as a NetGalley ARC; in the US, it comes out on June 4.)

The heroine of P. Djèlí Clark's The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is the undead assassin Eveen, nicknamed "The Eviscerator." Perhaps I should have recognized this was inevitable, but I was startled to find that the end of the book

involves Eveen...

involves Eveen and a newfound comrade torturing the antagonist to death.

The antagonist is a villain of the grandest sort, so if you're someone who finds the notion of retribution emotionally satisfying, maybe this will work for you. I'm not. I'm willing to read about torture, and even willing to read about protagonists who engage in torture, but an authorial stance that frames it as just is a hard no for me, even in stylized adventure stories. I would have set the book down unfinished if I hadn't already been on the last page.

Until that bloodthirsty denouement, Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a fun, snappy, fantasy adventure with a mix of wizardly and divine double-crossing. In some ways, the reading experience feels the way I imagine it must have felt to discover Steven Brust's Jhereg in the '80s: the braided timelines, the banter, the novelty of a fantasy setting that has no investment in mythologizing England. I missed some of the richness of the contrast between history and fantasy in Clark's Cairo stories, but I loved the late-book faceoff between divine powers and the booklong tug-of-war between Eveen and her intended target, who looks oddly like a younger version of herself.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates.

Chih is a cleric who travels the world collecting stories with a startlingly intelligent bird for a companion. At the beginning of this novella, Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey--but the abbey is strangely empty, and there are, as you might have guessed, war-mammoths at the gates.

All of Vo's books about Chih are built around the ways the same story can be told. They're always fascinating on an intellectual level, but some stories will inevitably lie closer to the heart than others. This one lies close to mine.

Returning to a place you used to call home and finding both you and it has changed is a theme that has obvious autobiographical resonance for me. But I'm also interested in the facets of this specific story, which involves memories of a person who was a beloved leader to the clerics and an honored grandfather to a pair of warriors, and the way Vo refuses to let the messages resolve into anything as simple as "This person was good" or "This person was bad" (OK, maybe there's some autobiographically resonant grief there, too). I also enjoyed learning more about those long-remembering birds, the neixin, who have been a matter-of-fact background element in many of the Chih stories, but now come to the fore.

Though many of the novellas in this series could be read in whatever order you joyfully stumbled upon them, this one does assume some existing curiosity about Chih and their world, so it might not be the right place to start. It's definitely one to look forward to, though!

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. In the US, it comes out in September.)

Rebecca Fraimow, The Iron Children.

In this forthcoming novella, a young woman named Asher finds herself in command of a group of Dedicates--soldiers given iron bodies to fight a desperate, defensive war--on the edge of a mountain in winter. But one of her Dedicates is a spy.

I have a soft spot for the military-fiction trope of the sergeant who knows way more about what's going on than their commanding officer, and the sergeant in Iron Children is pretty great. But this isn't, fundamentally, a story about who's going to win the war. It's about what it means to be an ordinary person living through one piece of it.

I know Fraimow's writing from her historical fiction about being queer and Jewish. Though Iron Children's Dedicates are commanded by a military order of nuns, this feels like a story with a Jewish ethos: the characters belong to (multiple, distinct) religious minorities, and each individual has to figure out what being ethical means on their own, and then live up to it. There are gripping snow-survival moments and knotty questions about agency. Sometimes these are literalized questions about who controls a Dedicate's iron body, presented with the kind of intensity and specificity that fantasy does best.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. Fun fact: it's a novella that's coming out from Solaris! It's nice to see more imprints publishing fiction at this length.)

Arkady Martine's Rose/ House takes preoccupations that readers of her novel A Memory Called Empire will be familiar with--a living place, the impression that a dead man leaves behind him, the seductions of intellectual fascination, the way an idea you love can cut you open--and refracts them through a different genre. Memory Called Empire and its sequel A Desolation Called Peace were adventure stories: there's a protagonist setting forth to learn more about the world, a beautiful woman, nobility engaged in elaborate plots, startling self-sacrifice, and a stack of similar motifs you might have met anywhere between Cherryh's Foreigner series and The Three Musketeers. Meanwhile, Rose/ House is a ghost story--a science fiction ghost story, with climate change and artificial intelligence and an architectural marvel in the Mojave desert all held up to the prism.

Rose/ House isn't coy about its genre. We're told early on that, "Yeah, Maritza grew up here, she knows like anyone else that Rose House is a haunt, and was glad when it was shut up inside with itself for good." The word "haunt" persists and multiplies, occasionally as the adjective commonly applied to houses, more often as that stark noun. But there are references to other genres too--casual references to carjackings for water rations, a detective who stubbornly investigates an inexplicable corpse--and I was inclined at first to read the book as a mystery. That's not the core. The core is the house itself: intelligent, inhuman, and beautifully, terrifyingly interested.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

As a teenager, I vowed never to read another book that said "epic" on the cover. I was tired of stories that stacked cliffhanger on cliffhanger, accumulating points of view without resolution. I read Kate Elliott's Furious Heaven, the sequel to Unconquerable Sun, without knowing the final cover design, so I don't know whether reading it violated my vow. But I can report that Furious Heaven is a rare thing: a sprawling, multistranded story about galactic conquest that reaches a satisfying resolution in two volumes. There could be a sequel--and indeed, it seems that Elliott is planning one--but there doesn't have to be. That's a difficult balance to strike!

Furious Heaven begins with a hefty dose of dynastic plotting. Princess Sun, the story's Alexander the Great equivalent, is her mother's most likely heir, but her succession is not inevitable, and plenty of people both within and outside the Republic of Chaonia would love to introduce some chaos. Sun's new Companion, the brash Persephone, is impatient with politics, but she's more embedded in systems of privilege than she recognizes. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Apama at Sabao, who wanted to be an ordinary fighter pilot, is stuck dancing attendance on her father, one of the cabal of people with two literal faces that rules her empire. Apama's father wields power in a way that's most terrifying for its boringness--he doesn't need to posture villainously when he can simply command.

There's a point in Furious Heaven where Sun concludes that sustained aggression is safer than standing still. I tore through the book's second half in a rush, caught up in Sun's momentum. Elliott does a phenomenal job of conveying both the strategic logic and its contingency on tiny circumstance. Sun is successful despite and because of the risks she takes.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

Tasha Suri's novel The Oleander Sword is the middle book in a planned trilogy that began with The Jasmine Throne. It's the kind of book that comes with maps and lists of characters from different countries, and it opens with a war, as Malini, who has just crowned herself Empress, seeks to defeat her fanatical, princely brother. But Oleander Sword doesn't sprawl across new viewpoint characters and their disconnected subplots, the way one might expect from a book in this sort of package. It's fundamentally a very focused story. Half is how Malini will balance her drive to consolidate power with her love for Priya, once a servant girl. The other half is how Priya, newly filled with magical force from the treelike yaksa she worshipped as a child, will square the demands of her own power with her love for Malini. There are sudden betrayals and the fulfillments of mysterious prophecies--the book's title, in particular, cuts in an unexpected way--but if you've read Jasmine Throne, the confrontation that Oleander Sword sets up for the final volume will not astonish you. The satisfaction is not in authorial sleight of hand, but rather in game pieces clicking into place.

Suri's fantasy novels are inspired by medieval India, rather than vague impressions of England or France, and I particularly enjoy the way that this upends fantasy conventions. Inheritance isn't driven by birth order, for instance, and the trope of the ambitious priest carries different weight.

Max Gladstone's forthcoming novel Last Exit is aimed straight at me.

Why me, specifically? When I turned forty last year, I had the following conversation with redshiftnova:

Me: I hadn't planned on having a midlife crisis, but instead I got a worldwide pandemic.
Red: YOU OVERACHIEVER!!!

This was hilarious--and it's the precise set of baggage that the characters of Last Exit carry. The age; the scholarship to an elite East Coast college (Last Exit is about Yale, and I went to a small liberal-arts college whose students prided themselves on being smarter and working harder than the Ivy League trust fund kids, but that just means the sweatshirts came in garnet instead of navy); the math degree driven by the lure of impossible things; the exhortations to save the world; the knowledge that the world is falling apart.

The world is ending; but the world has always been ending. The question is whose world, and whose world you think matters. Last Exit is an American novel, a big sprawling ensemble-cast American road trip novel, and the question of who exactly has been fucked how badly by the continuation of America is never far from the surface.

Flip things around, try the active voice: will a terrified person fuck things over, to keep America the same? Last Exit asks the question that way, too.

This is what the novel is about, in a grand thematic sense. But what happens? The story begins in New York City, as Zelda, a grown-up gay kid from small-town South Carolina, is preparing to apologize for losing her lover Sal. Instead of Sal's mother, she meets Sal's teenage cousin June. June is a veteran of the BLM protests; she has watched cops on horses try to kill her friends. She doesn't want Zelda's apology for failure. She wants to try again.

New York City has a solid weight; it knows what it is. But Zelda has a knack for going other places, and in less populated spots, or when people are looking away, she can walk (or ride or drive) to other possible worlds. Turn The City We Became inside out, and send it on the road to Amber.

Send it back to Montana, where Zelda fucked things up the first time.

Bring the team back together: Sarah (a doctor, married, a mom, an Army brat, Sarah whose sister has gone home to the reservation), Ramón (who tried to go into finance but found his soul again fixing cars), Ish (whose Silicon Valley surveillance company watches for the serpent eating the heart of the world), Zelda, and June (who looks like Sal, and isn't). Retrace the steps of the last adventure, to the Green Glass City, and the tower where they met the princess.

Meanwhile, something is following our friends: the reason that the world is ending, growing tangible. Last Exit has a lot of horror in its DNA. Things are twisted. Bodies are twisted into non-Euclidean geometries. People die.

But the scariest thing isn't non-Euclidean geometry, is it? It's other people.

Bring the team back together. It's time to save a world.

(I read Last Exit as a Netgalley ARC.)