David Gillon

The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross

Book 8 of The Laundry Files. Currently stalled half way through this one, as it got a little too horrifying. After the events of The Nightmare Stacks, The Laundry has been disestablished, half its leaders are on the run with arrest warrants on their heads (OTOH they have a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and they're not afraid to use her), and the Sleeper Under the Pyramid, the big bad from The Apocalypse Codex, is back and has suborned most of the Cabinet. We're into deals with Nyarlathotep the devil in pursuit of least worst outcome territory. And then Stross turns the horror level up to 11 and makes Michael G(r)ove the Minister for Supernatural Defence. Aiiiieeeee!!!!

Serpent's Reach, C J Cherryh

I accidentally re-read this when I picked it up off the bookshelf while waiting for a game to load. This is early Cherryn (1980) from when she was writing compact stories, before her post-Downbelow Station doorstop phase. No actual serpents in this, the Serpent's Reach of the title is the Hydri Stars, a self-governing (and quarantined) enclave within Cherryh's Alliance. At its opening Raen a Sul Hant Meth-Maren (Raen of the Sul Sept of House Meth-Maren) is a 15yo, growing into her heritage as one of the immortal Kontrin Hivemasters (though the Meth-Maren prefer Hive-friends). The Hydri Stars are the domain of the Majat,  bipedal insects working in a hive mind, and on capital planet Cerdin the Meth-Marens are the focal point for contact between the hives (peaceful Blue, Green, Gold and warlike Red) and the extended Kontrin family who hold the trade rights for Majat tech that makes the Reach fabulously wealthy. Then one night, Sul sept is betrayed and slaughtered by a conspiracy of Ruil sept, other Kontrin houses, and the Reds.

Raen alone survives, purely through chance, and pleads with the queen of Blue hive for vengeance, a vengeance that obliterates Ruil sept, but is put down by the rest of the conspiracy. An embarrassment to Kontrin society, Raen is exiled from Cerdin, and the human leaders of the conspiracy executed by the 700yo head of the Kontrin family (never assume the doddery 650yo standing up to speak at the dictator's request doesn't have a laser pistol up her sleeve).

Nineteen years later, Raen is a dilettante wanderer, intermittently monitored by the Family and other Houses, survivor of one assassination attempt, but showing no interest in further acts of revenge. Then she turns up, unheard of, on a public spaceliner, one of the craft that support the Betas, the non-immortal humans who provide the infrastructure for the Kontrins to parasitize. The Betas are terrified of her, no Kontrin ever stoops to public transport, no matter how expensive and exclusive it theoretically may be. High-rolling society vanishes into its cabins, leaving Raen to pick someone from the Azi crew (the short-lived, tape-programmed, bred-for-the-purpose humans parasitized by Kontrin, Beta and Majat alike) to join her in a seemingly endless series of games of Sej (rules provided in an appendix). Her bargain with Jim is simple: If he leads in number of games won when they arrive at Istra, the outermost Hydri system, to which only one other Kontrin has traveled in 700 years, then she will buy free his contract and make him independently wealthy. If she leads, she will buy his contract for herself.

Arriving at Istra, Raen's self-appointed mission begins to expose itself. Her trip is no whim, she had made the journey to protect a Majat emissary, a Blue Warrior. Raen, Jim, Warrior and a returning Istran commercial/diplomatic mission descend to the planet, only to be attacked by Reds. The diplomats die, and so does Warrior, but not before passing his message to Istran Blues, and in a hivemind, Warrior is immortal, no matter individual Warriors die. Raen's unlimited Kontrin wealth and power allows her to rapidly establish herself as the new pole in Istran politics, able to unblock critical overbreeding in the Azi at a stroke of a pen, even if the actual resolution of 18 years of Kontrin-directed overbreeding will take years to work through. Meanwhile poor Jim scrambles to keep up with her, his life turned upside down, especially by Raen's habit of putting him charge of things, when he's always been the one others are in charge of before now.

But it's not just the Beta and Azi society that's been critically overstressed, so too has Majat society, with inter-hive hostility spilling into the streets of the human city, and a scratch from a Majat warrior can kill. Raen's mission is to save Blue hive, but the conspiracy has an eighteen year headstart, and the threat extends far wider than even she had appreciated.

This is what Cherryh does best, xeno-sociological SF, where the implications of difference are rigorously pursued. Majat society is immortal, and effectively consists of 4 individuals, Blue, Green, Gold and Red. The implications of individuality are something the Majat grasp poorly, and the implications of individual death not at all, and so they made the Kontrin immortal, in order to remove the thing they could not grasp. (The Kontrin habit of self-promotion by assassination not withstanding). Raen is the last of the Meth-Maren, possibly the last Kontrin to perceive they have a duty to the Majat, and not just themselves. But even Raen's motives are clouded by her history, and the boundary between protecting Blue hive, and using Blue Hive is decidedly fuzzy. One thing I particularly liked about this is that people make mistakes, starting almost from the first page. Raen has unlimited power, but limited ability to apply it, and an incomplete understanding of the threat she faces, while poor Jim is distinctly out of his depth, and does make some serious mistakes when left without guidance.

And something the story brought home to me, that I'd not really appreciated before, is how completely Azi society is a slave-society. It's worse in the Reach than in the Alliance as a whole, because of the universal 'drop dead at 40' mechanic (very Logan's Run), but even the elite Alpha Azi of Cyteen and Regenesis are tools of their society, bred for a role and sent where needed, and even the right to understand they're a slave has been taken from them.

French Battleships, 1922 to 1956, John Jordan and Robert Dumas

French Cruisers, 1922 to 56, John Jordan and Jean Moulin

I bought these to go with the French Destroyers book by Jordan and Moulin I read recently and they're equally good - you know a technical history is detailed when it makes a point of listing who manufactured the anchors.... But what I found most fascinating was the two different accounts of Operation Catapult and the Battle of Mers el Kebir (the British attack on the French fleet post Armistice), which appear to show that Jordan is operating as a true translator for the sections written by his two French co-authors. Moulin's point of view (mostly in French Destroyers) seems to be "I suppose I see the British point, but it was a tragedy", while Dumas rages at the decision. He is convinced it turns on a (deliberate) British mis-reading of the Armistice terms, as translated from French to English, particularly the precise meaning of Article 8, which says the French fleet will assemble in 'ports to be determined' under the 'controle' of the Germans and Italians. Dumas insists that the proper interpretation/translation of 'controle' in this context is 'supervision', not the English 'control', that the ports would be their home ports, and that we should have trusted that Admiral Darlan would stick to his promise to scuttle the fleet before allowing the Germans to take it over (which he actually did when the Germans occupied the Vichy zone in 1942).  However Dumas is ignoring the reality that France had just betrayed its solemn undertaking to Britain not to seek a separate peace, that Darlan, despite his promise, had taken the position of Minister of Marine in the Vichy government, that peacetime home ports would put half the fleet in the Occupied Zone, that the French Fleet in Axis hands was an existential threat to the Empire's dependence on the route to India through Suez, and that Germany and Italy had a history of ignoring inconvenient solemn agreements for immediate advantage. Even if I adopt Dumas interpretation of 'controle', Churchill's decision seems inescapable, no matter how tragic the implications.