Finally, you get to read Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard, by Lawrence Schoen.

I got to read it early this year, and I loved it. I wanted to tell you about it, but I was told in no uncertain terms that I needed to wait, because you would not be able to have it until the very endmost days of the year, and we would all be happier (you, me, Lawrence, and the publisher) if I held off.

This is science fiction that gets the aliens right. With no human POV characters, our only eyes into the story are alien ones, and Lawrence does this so well I felt like I was a wrinkled, hairless historian with a prehensile snout and oversized ears.

I say “aliens,” but that term will get quibbled over. Barsk is a wet, cloudy world settled by the Fant, creatures who, as the full title of the story suggests, bear a non-coincidental resemblance to Earth’s elephants. The setting is, technically, an anthropomorphic one, but saying “oh, it’s an anthro story” does the book an enormous disservice. Barsk is to anthropomorphic, “furry” fiction as Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is to Lucas’s stormtroopers.

The story is part detective story, part adventure, and part “idea” story whose central conceits do a delightful job of blurring that line between sufficiently advanced technology and magic. It hits familiar notes in ways that tell me “this is like other books I love,” and then delivers new notes in ways that remind me why I like reading stuff that is actually new.

I’ve raved over Lawrence’s “Amazing Conroy” stories before. As delightful as those were, Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard is better, and for all the right reasons.

Myke Cole burst into my reading queue when I met him at Lunacon in 2012. I devoured his debut novel, then waited patiently for the follow-ups, which I consumed with aplomb.

Gemini Cell is Myke’s fourth foray into the 21st century’s “Great Reawakening,” a setting in which magic has come back into our world, and the military’s best and brightest have blended it with modern warfare to create squads, platoons, companies, and entire battalions of trained, disciplined, and sorcerous soldiers. Which is good, because their enemies are every bit as well equipped. It’s a compelling setting, but this time around we’re seeing it differently.

In Gemini Cell we get to see the beginning of it all. Our protagonist is a SEAL at the top of his game, but it’s a completely non-magical game, and he has no idea that his current operation will cross paths with a magical supply line.

The story is a powerful one, and to my eye it takes some oft-maligned tropes of military adventure fiction and shows us how those things are supposed to be done, especially the “prequel” trope. That might technically be what Gemini Cell is, but it stands quite well on its own, inviting an immediate sequel or two while leaving plenty of room for the extant Shadow Ops series.

Gemini Cell releases on Tuesday, January 27th, 2015.

On the final evening of the 2014 Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat, Mary Robinette Kowal and I sat with students and talk about historical stuff, and Mary brought up some fun 18th- and 19th- century spy techniques.

I realized that the 1980’s are far enough back that the spy tech from that era seems weird and outdated. And that reminded me of a book I skimmed while working at Novell in the ’90s. I spouted a quick synopsis at the students, and realized that it might be fun for me to re-read.

So I bought a copy online and re-read it on my iPad, and as I did so I realized that the reason I was able to do this is because guys like Clifford Stoll took it upon themselves to build “trustworthiness” into the digital and social structures of the Internet 25 years ago.

The Cuckoo’s Egg, by Cliff Stoll, is a non-fiction account of the author’s discovery of a far-reaching, insidious hack, uncovered because of what looked like an accounting error. The technology he describes is antiquated, but the logic behind the hacker’s exploits remains valid today, and Stoll’s attempts to rally the authorities demonstrate how very unprepared we were back in 1987 for the big disruptions of next 20 years.

It’s dry in spots, and didactic in others, but I plowed through it voraciously. Stoll’s descriptions of the Internet of 1987 seem kind of quaint, but they’re also spot-on for his time.  His political views were very refreshing–he writes as a self-proclaimed liberal hippie, and yet he had to work with the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Army, and the Air Force for an entire year. This was pretty conflicting for him, and for his friends, and was every bit as interesting to me as the computer stuff.

I met Cliff Stoll in 2006 at an Apache conference where he and I were keynote speakers. It was kind of cool to realize that he was one of the giants upon whose shoulders my entire business model was standing, and yet we had lots of common ground. In re-reading The Cuckoo’s Egg I found a chapter in which young Clifford Stohl sat down and talked to a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, asking for advice, and yes, there seemed to be some symmetry there for me.