The Operators is a book-length version of the Rolling Stone article, covering the first few years of the Obama administration’s efforts in Afghanistan. And those looking for a hero in the story are going to have a hard time finding one. Even Hastings, the narrator and ostensible protagonist, isn’t particularly likable.

The war Hastings describes is one dominated by political infighting, with various factions hidden away inside their own insulated bubbles, incapable of recognizing the truth, or refusing to admit the truth when it conflicts with ideology. The Obama administration comes off as weak and ineffective, the Afghan government as corrupt and impossibly incompetent, and the American military as an isolated culture more concerned by its own inner workings and politics than whether or not it can achieve actual “success” in a country as thoroughly broken as Afghanistan (or even what “success” might mean). The media gets the worst of the criticism though, compromising its professional integrity in exchange for access to the people in power. The only people presented at all sympathetically are the individual American soldiers and infantry units who face the true reality on the ground every day.

It’s hard to come away from The Operators feeling like there’s any hope — not just for America in Afghanistan, but for our ability to accomplish anything substantial on a large scale. The dysfunction in America seems baked into our DNA, with political polarization and personal ambition overriding any sense of the greater good. Granted, this is just one person’s view of the situation in Afghanistan, but given that no one is treated terribly well, it’s hard not to believe that The Operators may be close to the truth.

Given my history with the genre, one would expect that Hannu Rajaniemi’s debut novel, The Quantum Thief, would leave me feeling much the same way, but this is not the case. The Quantum Thief, while presenting a radically alien post-human future described in an obtuse new vocabulary, has the one quality his peers lack — humanity. Yes, his characters are post-human, yes they exist as software iterations of themselves, and yes they are far removed from us, but despite their change in form, they are still driven by desires and ambitions and fear and love and all the things that make us human. In effect, by turning themselves into gods, the inhabitants of Rajaniemi’s novel have become like classic mythical gods — omnipotence crippled by human weakness and emotional frailties, their human foibles ever more present the less human they become.

And no character is more flawed than the novel’s protagonist, master thief Jean le Flambeur, broken out of a software prison by a female warrior named Mieli and set on a mission by a distant higher power to steal something of great value in the Oubilette, one of Mars’ moving cities. Le Flambeur has lived so many lives that he’s intentionally forgotten most of them, but reclaiming his Martian memories is one of the key points the novel hinges on. There are so many genres at work here, and so many excellent characters and co-protagonists (such as amateur detective and student art historian, Isidore, and his MMORPG-derived girlfriend, Pixil), that it’s difficult to keep track of them all.

And as dense and challenging as the material is, the climax of the book and the amazing ride and fractal puzzle that unfolds is worth all the heavy lifting. The book is surprising, clever and deeply felt — easily the best science fiction novel of 2011, and the final pages only point to more to come.

Axis is the sequel to Spin, and although it continues the story Wilson started in the original, it lacks its predecessor’s scope and does very little to answer the questions it posed. The cast is largely new, and we only get to know them superficially compared to the well-rendered cast from Spin.

Set on the alien world Equatoria introduced at the end of Spin, Axis opens with a woman named Lise who is trying to solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance some years earlier. Sadly, this thread more or less gets dropped as a group of radical Fourths comes into play. Their plan, as well as a new development in the exobiology of the Hypotheticals, serve as the lynch pin of the plot and is only tangentially related to Lise’s long quest.

Despite a strong opening, the book gradually loses focus and plot momentum — even Wilson’s excellent use of language doesn’t do much to offset the narrative inertia of the later chapters. The revelations at the end are neither surprising or game-changing, and we’re left with an unsatisfying ending that leads into the final volume of the series.

I’m still on board to see where things go, but I have to admit that I was very disappointed with Axis. Here’s hoping that Vortex takes the series out properly.

The book opens on Sasha, a woman working in the New York City music industry who goes on a date with a man she met on an online dating site. From there, the novel spins out, bouncing from character to character as it spreads through a web of associations that begins and ends with Sasha. It crosses space and time, and loops back to that date and in the end you get an incredible sense of lives lived and lost, and the little things that connect us all together. Goon Squad celebrates a generation of young people coming of age in the latter half of the twentieth century — myself included, back when I was young — to whom music was everything, the very definition of cool and identity. It puts in perspective the fleeting moments of our lives when we went to shows, did drugs, drank and saw the future as limitless and full of possibility, only to wake up and realize our time as parents of small children greatly eclipsed our oh-so-brief time as punks.

In addition, the book is a scathing literary and cultural satire — at once hilarious and tragic, and un-ironically postmodern, ultimately terminating somewhere in the suburbs of a post-science fiction city built by William Gibson. You’ve no doubt read about the chapter written as Powerpoint slides — and as much of a gimmick as it might seem, it works brilliantly in presenting the anxieties of a young girl and her family. Egan closes on  a future where social media alone can create a star, where the connections between people aren’t inherent and subtle, but are open and clearly graphed out on the Internet for everyone to see.

A variety of editions, including an iOS version, have been released, but don’t let the hype fool you — this is a really great book enhanced, not hindered by the marketing and well-deserving of winning the Pulitzer Prize. Of all the novels I’ve reviewed in the past two years, this is undoubtedly my favorite.  I am so sad that I’ve finished it, but can’t wait to plunge back in to re-examine the associations I’ve missed.

Delivering a great number of twists and payoffs on elements spun out of the first two books, A Storm of Swords is arguably the most satisfying volume in the series. The ending chapters are breathless page turners, as principle characters are brought again and again to the edge of peril. As angry as many fans of the HBO show were regarding Ned’s scenes on the steps of the Sept of Baelor in A Game of Thrones, there are moments in this book even more shocking and horrendous — I can’t wait to see how the television audience reacts to them.

In the end, the only disappointment I have in A Storm of Swords is that it was originally setting up a five year gap between major story movements in the series. I know what a stumble it was when Martin entered a decade-long culdesac struggling to finish A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons and fill in that gap within the story. Filling that gap may be important, but I fear it will be many years yet before the story promise offered by A Storm of Swords is fulfilled.  New readers should understand that Swords is the climax of an act and that the great twists and turns of the book may not return to the series until the pieces are properly arranged on the board once more.

In many ways, A Game of Thrones represents a tremendous paradigm shift in fantasy.  Characters are flawed, and central figures — even protagonists — can die horribly. We may take this for granted now, but in the late 1990′s, fantasy was still largely wed to the Tolkien model. Not so after A Game of Thrones. Robert Jordan, David Eddings, Terry Brooks, et al, all seemed adolescent in comparison to Martin.

I have since gone back and read it six times over the past 14 years — whenever a firm date is announced for a new volume of a Song of Ice and Fire, I go back and re-read all the books in the series. The recent announcement of A Dance With Dragons for July 2011 is no different — except this time, I’m reading the series on my Kindle and not in print. Fortunately, the typography and art translates well on the platform, and reading it on Kindle is very similar to reading it in print. Even knowing the story as well as I do, including through a recent screening of the first six episodes of the HBO television adaptation, I find there’s still much to enjoy. The tragedy that befalls Ned Stark and his children is still as great as it was on first reading — and the hindsight of the later books only helps to underline this.

For many years, I have tried to find fantasy series that can compare, and though some come close, none have been able to match A Game of Thrones. And as good as the television series is, the source material is still better.  If you’re still on the fence, you really have no excuse.  Read it. And don’t complain about the Kindle price — it’s worth the $9.

Anathem

Summing up the book isn’t easy — it centers around a monastic order of scholars called avout, who are effectively cut off from the rest of the world. But a crisis occurs that only they can fix, and soon Fraa Erasmus, the book’s narrator, and his fellow scholars are thrust into a high-stakes global adventure, where much of the action is resolved through philosophical dialog. Like the best classic science fiction novels, Anathem weaves real science and philosophy into its narrative, underpinning nearly everything with a sturdy skeleton. This is quite unlike what often passes as “hard” science fiction these days, when technology is often indistinguishable from magic.

I feel like if I say anything more, I will spoil the book. If you love science fiction that centers around big ideas, philosophy, or even social satire, this may just be the book for you. Fans of Stephenson’s other books should be very happy with this addition to his canon.

Matterhorn follows Lieutenant Waino Wellas and the men of Bravo Company as they hold and fortify, then abandon, then retake a strategically located hill near the Laotian border. The novel traces the military decisions from their genesis at battalion headquarters, through the junior officers leading the company all the way down to the grunts in the field as those decisions are executed. Showing each layer as he does, Marlantes reveals the game of telephone that is warfare in Vietnam, with the orders distorting through the filter of incompetence, personal initiative, heroism, terror and bad weather.

Matterhorn is also a kind of bildungsroman for Mellas, introducing him as a green officer with political ambitions and watching him change into a cynical veteran who has lost his faith in both the Marine corps leadership and humanity, even the meaning of life itself. His journey, as well as the journey of various supporting characters, is as riveting and compelling as anything I’ve ever read. There is a sincerity and integrity to these characters as Marlantes has molded them, taking what could have been flat cliches and turning them into characters who pop off the page and live inside your head.

This is going to seem a bit strange, but Matterhorn is the best war novel I’ve read since Joe Haldeman’s science fiction classic, The Forever War. He makes the action exciting, but never gives the pathos of death the short shift. As we get to know these characters and how they live, we also see them in their last moments as they face death. Though there’s an impressive cast of characters and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all, one really feels the loss as each man falls in combat.

Much time is spent focused on military politics, as well as the racial and class divisions of the Vietnam era. And although some of the racial monologues can seem forced, Marlantes handles the issue of racism in the Marine corps with deft precision, providing a balanced look at the black soldiers caught up in the struggle for civil rights, the white non-commissioned officers who have seen their corps transformed since they were enlisted men in the Second World War and Korea, and the soldiers caught in the middle. Mellas himself wrestles with race, just as the country did, never quite finding the right answer to the issue.

In the end, though, it’s the futility of war that drives the central message of Matterhorn. Human lives are discarded casually by ambitious officers looking to pad body counts, and positions that were fought for on one day are abandoned the next, only to be fought for again. The question Marlantes asks is: “Was this war worth the loss of so many lives?” And the answer — that it wasn’t — is at the heart of what still divides the country on Vietnam. It’s a hard thing to accept that so many people died for nothing, so it’s easier to attack those who say it than to accept the truth. The same question is being asked of Iraq and Afghanistan, and sadly, I think the answer might still be the same. Wars based on political ideology, rather than a clear and concrete territorial objective, can never be successful.

Great social fiction works by having the characters carry the author’s message in an elegant and subtle way. Bad social fiction takes two-dimensional characters and has them act out the message, hammering the social problems into the reader’s head. American Rust falls in to the second camp.

From the title, it’s clear that Meyer wants his novel to tell not just its characters story, but the story of the American working class living in the rust belt. He does this by taking two unlikely friends — ex-high school football star, Billy Poe, and ex-high school nerd, Issac English — and places them in a terrible situation. After the situation goes down, the book acts as a travelogue, using the disjointed and often bafflingly irrational situations as a means to show the reader different facets of American decline. Through a series of stream-of-consciousness internal monologues and actual speeches made by various characters, we get the history of the U.S. steel industry, its decline and death, and the impact it has on Western Pennsylvania. The other  point-of-view characters, including the local police chief, Poe’s mother, Issac’s Yale-educated sister and Issac’s father are thinly painted and exist to show different aspects of the issue (strain on law enforcement, the working poor, the guilt of working class kids who go to college, the plight of the elderly, etc.).

Meyer’s heart is definitely in the right place, but that’s not enough to make a great book, or even a competent one. Language, description and conviction are only part of the equation — a novel needs compelling characters and story to be truly great. Sadly, American Rust fails in this regard.

Benioff, best known for the novel, The 25th Hour, and as showrunner of the upcoming HBO series, Game of Thrones, melds the comic with the macabre, neither trivializing the siege nor crushing the reader with despair. Lev, a pessimist, narrates the story in the company of the blonde and upbeat, Kolya, who is a self-styled ladies man and rogue. Though disparate in personality, the two become comrades and later friends through the course of their quest, and the dynamic between the two is one of the book’s many appealing qualities. The eastern front of World War II is often forgotten in U.S. accounts of the war, and rarely finds attention in American literature. But Benioff brings the scale and savagery home to the reader in the form of an entertaining adventure yarn.

As is often the case with my favorite books, I finished the last page sad to be losing touch with characters to whom I had grown incredibly attached. I didn’t want City of Thieves to end, and that’s high praise, indeed.