Momo is a charming little fairytale that conceals some deep teeth. Somewhere in Italy, a young girl with no other connections takes up residence in an abandoned amphitheater. The neighborhood decides to take care of her, fixing up some of the ruins into a cozy little nook, bringing food, and otherwise letting Momo live her life. She plays with the local children, listens intently and draws out people's fears and problems, and has special friends Guido Guide, a local historian/fantabulist, and Beppo Streetsweeper, a slightly dotty old man who takes care with even the simplest jobs.

Momo's nice little community is interrupted by the Men in Gray from the Timesavers Bank. These figures appear to various adults, preaching a doctrine that a second saved is a second for the future, and that everyone must hurry and squeeze every moment, taking no time to appreciate life. Of course these are not time savers, but occult time thieves parasitically feeding off of human time. They make their Faustian bargains and then fade from memory.

Momo is the only one who can see them, and while she convinces her friends, she's powerless to convince the wider world. A magical tortoise arrives and leads her to Dr Secundus Minutus Hora, a godlike being who bestows time to the world and is the ultimate target of the Gray Men. He gives Momo a gift and a mission, but when she returns to Earth after a year away by other's perspectives, the world has become modern, speedy, and too Momo's friends have all been captured by the Gray Men. She embarks on a desperate gambit to defeat them and liberate time.

Momo has many individually charming scenes (my favorite is how she resolves a broken friendship, uncovering the bad root cause where both men thought they were taking advantage of the other), loosely linked by a trenchant critique of modernity and false efficiency as opposed to la vida dulce. For me, the most interesting part is how it may have inspired subsequent works. Creepy inhuman bureaucrats stealing time and fearful/jealous of people are a not super-exotic idea, but it's interesting to compare the Auditors in Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, or The Strangers in Dark City.

Most serious Americans should be thinking about China. Whether you're a human rights type, an imperialist, or just concerned about where all the stuff of our lives comes from and where all the jobs went, China is the focus. The flip side of that is that most Americans know something between nothing and weird racist lies about China. Dan Wang knows better. A Chinese-Canadian-American tech analyst, Wang spent several years in China working for Gavekal Dragonomics, an economic market intelligence firm, before returning to America in 2022.

Wang's thesis is that China is an engineering nation, which means they can combine ambitious effort with immense arrogance. It's hard to discount that. General Secretary Xi Jinping was educated as a chemical engineer. The current 20th Politburo is heavy with technical backgrounds (and lacks a single woman or non-Han Chinese member). China is also the center of the world's industry, with roughly as much production capacity as the rest of the G8 combined.

On the positive side, the engineering culture has created immense material prosperity, with multiple decades of GDP growth approaching 10%. Even relatively poor provinces and cities have robust transit infrastructure. Mass transit and high speed rail sit comfortably next to millions of new electric cars. Solar panels cover hills, with nuclear plants and coal providing baseline backup. Whole cities housing millions of people spring up like mushrooms. The only industrials in which China is not the world's leader are aerospace and computer chips, and they are making robust progress in both. Since 2010, China has gone from just a factory to a key partner in precision mass-production. If you need anything built, from guitars to drones, you can set up a local production system at immense complexity (which will rely on Chinese components anyways) or go to Shenzhen and just do it.

The flip side is that when the engineering state errs, it errs big. The One Child policy was a barbaric campaign of mass sterilization and forced abortion which left wrenching psychological and social wounds and did massive demographic damage. While China did have a high birthrate in 1970, by 1980 the reproduction rate was down to 2.7 per woman and falling, along the same lines as neighboring countries. In Wang's read, the CCP did a bunch of horrific crimes to individual women on a population scale to achieve nothing (certainly, The Population Bomb/Limits to Growth types were wrong) and has never admitted an error, even as it removed all restrictions and encouraged children in the 2020s.

One Child has a modern counterpart in zero-COVID. While COVID-19 originated in China, strict quarantine measures managed to keep the disease at bay as it spread through the rest of the world, killing millions. By 2022, life in China was basically pack to normal (plus regular testing and contact tracing apps). But as the omicron strain emerged in 2022, the zero-COVID policy collapsed, particularly in Shanghai. The entire city went into an 8-week lockdown. There was no backup plan, and food distribution basically fell apart as quarantine shut down logistics at scales from trucking to delivery drivers. Every civilization is three meals away from Chaos, and the Shanghai lockdown brought China very close. While other countries had used the years to implement a new normal, better respiratory care, and vaccines, China coasted on its satisfaction.

Wang and his wife fled to Dali and then Cheng Mai, where they encountered dispossessed young elites, from crypocurrency entrepreneurs to artists. These 20 and 30 something saw little future for themselves in China, with its arbitrary political repression. While the CCP's ability to marshal physical resources is its greatest strength, its inability to persuade and utter fear of mass revolt is its greatest weakness.

I think Wang knows what he's talking about, and his personal experiences liven up what could be a rather dry and technical book, but ultimately he's an amateur and not an academic, and his framing lacks rigor. While he's right to contrast America as a lawyerly society, with an obsession about process and a respect for individual rights that factually shades to favoring the wealthy, the missing link is finance.

Wang mentions this in an aside, that the Shanghai index has been the worst performing stock market index. There are two reasons for this. First, arbitrary government regulation has wiped out billions in value in Chinese stocks. But more importantly, the Chinese market is brutally competitive, and Chinese firms are forced to reinvest in productive capital rather than stock-buybacks if they don't want to be undercut next year. Conversely, American companies are valued on vibes and quarterly returns rather than actual capacity, and grotesque monopolies are protected by regulators rather than forced to divest and compete. America didn't lose the ability to build, rather "the market" (an abstraction of analysts and speculators) decided it was more profitable to offshore than get American hands dirty.

This is a major blindspot for a prior analyst.

Three stories by Claire Keegan ("So Late in the Day", "The Long Painful Death", "Antarctica") came up in my short story reading group and absolutely blew everyone away. Keegan has an incredible gift with words, writing spare psychological stories with utter realism and an architectural sense of symbolic and structural unity. Small Things Like These keeps these talents moving for novella length.

Bill Furlong is a coal merchant in New Ross, Ireland, in 1985. A bastard, he never knew his father and his mother passed away when he was twelve. He was raised by the kindly Mrs. Wilson and has become a successful businessman and father, with five daughters. Times are bad and yet by dint of effort and discipline, the Furlongs cling to the middle-classes, respectable, and even somehow kind.

As Furlong ponders the upcoming Christmas season, his mind wanders across the past and his family. On a delivery to the local convent, he finds a freezing girl locked in an outbuilding. He begins to suspect the convent harbors a terrible truth, and that rather than helping unfortunate girls, it is a prison that exploits their labor. The entire town is complicit, looking aside because respectability is more important than kindness, and the barrier between their own lives and the abyss is so very very thin.

Furlong makes a brave choice, the right choice, and walks through snow into a cold and blinding future, left undefined. Simply a gorgeous novel.

The thing about the Alien franchise is that it is two incredible movies holding up a sea of spinoffs between great pastiche (idk, the Alien vs Predator video games) and outright crap (hello Prometheus!). Alien: Bishop is on the great pastiche end of the spectrum, with a natural match between the franchise and T.R. Napper's gritty and kinetic style.

The best parts of this book center on the Colonial Marines. Kari Lee is an Australian refugee looking to trade dangerous service for her family's safety and unsure if she has what it takes to make in the Corps. Captain Apone is a Sun Tzu quoting warrior-intellectual, the younger brother of the tough sergeant from Aliens. Their platoon is chasing after the synthetic Bishop, both because the Marines never leave a man behind, even if he bleeds white, and because he's a priceless trove of knowledge about the xenomorph. Everything connected with the Marines is top tier military science-fiction, with chaos, fear, and pulse rifles blaring.

A second storyline is more like Alien, following the Vietnamese crew of a smuggling vessel captured by the Chinese space navy and used as hosts for the xenomorphs. Sun, the young medic of the crew, survives through luck and endurance in the face of unimaginable horror. The Chinese Marines get a secondary point of view of this, more arrogant humans believing they can harness the xenomorph.

The weakness in the story is the core line between Bishop and his creator, the arrogant scientist Michael Bishop. Bishop's growing friendship with Ripley is one of the better secondary storylines in Aliens, and the arrival of the synth's creator one of the better parts of the otherwise mediocre Alien 3. But the game between synth and creator never really hits home in a satisfactory way. Michael is so obviously malevolent that suspension of disbelief is impossible.

Napper pays homage to the best parts of the franchise, while adding his own Aussie/Vietnamese twist. Embrace it for what it is and enjoy.

A decent little coffee table book, mostly of unit patches and challenge coins associated with various secret USAF projects. There's a little discussion of the iconography: lightning bolts, B-2 silhouettes, the sigma for radar return, aliens, bad Latin mottos.

There's also a little bit of Merlin's field work, trekking out into the desert to find fragments of crashed Cold War test projects, including a U-2 and the XB-70 Valkyrie. There twisted scraps of metal are more significant than the weird morale boosting iconography of secret aerospace, but they're also ultimately twisted scraps of metal.

In Ascension is beautiful, fascinating, frustrating literary science-fiction. Our narrator, Leigh, describes growing up in Rotterdam with an abusive father and distant mother. Rotterdam and the Netherlands are an immense artifice, land torn from the bosom of the sea and kept dry only by immense human effort. She becomes fascinating by water and aquatic microbiology, an obsession which takes her through a PhD program.

Several ruptures occur in succession. Leigh's father dies. She joins an expedition to a mysterious rift in the Atlantic Ocean, where what was ordinary seafloor appears to have fallen away into a void deeper than the Mariana Trench. Leigh experiences a rapturous hallucinatory fever after a dive above the rift. The expedition's experimental submersible is destroyed, sending back scanty data, and a handful of samples of archaea prokaryots.

The expedition is associated with a shadowy multinational space agency called ICORS, founded to exploit a novel and unexplained new space drive technology. Leigh's research into agricultural algae is of interest to ICORS, and she leaves her mother, who is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's, to join the project at China Lake Naval Air Station. Leigh befriends the program administrator, an older woman named Uria, and forms a surrogate mother-daughter bond. The program opens doors: The plan is to make an expedition to an immense alien object called Datura, which is connected to the rift and the drive in unexplained ways. Leigh trains as an astronaut and becomes part of a crew with Tyler and Karius, two more conventional Right Stuff types.

Her crew is the backup of a backup, but after a terrorist attack disables the primary crew, she is sent out into space. Datura has vanished somewhere in the Oort cloud and a mysterious message was sent from the derelict Voyager probe. The journey is one of psychological estrangement, sealed in an automated ship drawing further and further away from Earth. Lightspeed lag makes an idea of relevant information from Earth a joke. Each step into the void seems to create psychological and physical lapses, as if Earth exerts a mysterious pull on its descendants (I'm reminded of a moment in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where Ford Prefect hits a human with the telepathic distance from his birthplace. Every creature can do this, but since no human has been further away than the far side of the moon, no one has ever noticed it). Crossing the heliopause the ship is disabled by an unknown and unexplained force. The constellations show that time has moved, backwards by 2 billion years. Leigh and the crew expect to die in space, their bodies drifting into the void for eternity.

The final section shifts to Leigh's sister Helena, as she tries to uncover what happened to her sister. ICORS has locked everything about the mission behind a veil of corporate secrecy and than bankruptcy. Helena's quest carries her to the South Atlantic island of Ascension, where the mission was supposed to be quarantined, and the hallucinatory strangeness of this cinder in the ocean. And then in the epilogue, we see that it was all connected, all looped. Leigh and her comrades are re-entering to a watery Earth, the algae in their bodies carrying

I'll admit, I don't know how to feel about this novel. The conventional parts are gorgeous, the psychological portrait of a very strange family and how it expresses love. There's elements of fiction about scientists, about the mindset it takes to uncover and prove a novel truth. There's ultimate questions about where life comes from, where it ends, what else is out there in the universe. But just when this novel should touch down, the bottom falls away in a void of darkness and sparkles of light. A braver novel would conclude.