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I was having a discussion with a group of writers about the technological singularity, and several asserted that the rate of increasing processor power was declining. They backed it up with a chart showing that the increase in MIPS per unit of clock speed stalled about ten years ago.

If computer processing speeds fail to increase exponentially, as they have for the last forty years, this will throw off many different predictions for the future, and dramatically decreases the likelihood of human-grade AI arising.

I did a bit of research last night and this morning. Using the chart of historical computer speeds from Wikipedia, and I placed a few key intervals in a spreadsheet and found:

  • From 1972 to 1985: MIPS grew by 19% per year.
  • From 1985 to 1996: MIPS grew by 43% per year.
  • From 1996 to 2003: MIPS grew by 51% per year.
  • From 2003 to 2013: MIPS grew by 29% per year.

By no means is the list of MIPS ratings exhaustive, but it does give us a general idea of what’s going on. The data shows the rate of CPU speed increases has declined in the last ten years.

I split up the last ten years:

  • From 2003 to 2008: MIPS grew by 53% per year.
  • From 2008 to 2013: MIPS grew by 9% per year.

According to that, the decline in processing rate increases is isolated to the last five years.

Five years isn’t much of a long term trend, and there are some processors missing from the end of the matrix. The Intel Xeon X5675, a 12 core processor isn’t shown, and it’s twice as powerful as the Intel Core i7 4770k that’s the bottom row on the MIPS table. If we substitute the Xeon processor, we find the growth rate from 2008 to 2012 was 31% annually, a more respectable improvement.

However, I’ve been tracking technology trends for a while (see my post on How to Predict the Future), and I try to use only those computers and devices I’ve personally owned. There’s always something faster out there, but it’s not what people have in their home, which is what I’m interested in.

I also know that my device landscape has changed over the last five years. In 2008, I had a laptop (Windows Intel Core 2 T7200) and a modest smartphone (a Treo 650). In 2013, I have a laptop (MBP 2.6 GHz Core i7), a powerful smartphone (Nexus 5), and a tablet (iPad Mini). I’m counting only my own devices and excluding those from my day job as a software engineer.

It’s harder to do this comparison, because there’s no one common benchmark among all these processors. I did the best I could to determine DMIPS for each, converting GeekBench cores for the Mac, and using the closest available processor for mobile devices that had a MIPS rating.

When I compared my personal device growth in combined processing power, I found it increased 51% annually from 2008 to 2013, essentially the same rate as for the longer period 1996 through 2011 (47%), which is what I use for my long-term predictions.

What does all this mean? Maybe there is a slight slow-down in the rate at which computing processing is increasing. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe the emphasis on low-power computing for mobile devices and server farms has slowed down progress on top-end speeds, and maybe that emphasis will contribute to higher top-end speeds down the road. Maybe the landscape will move from single-devices to clouds of devices, in the same way that we already moved from single cores to multiple cores.

Either way, I’m not giving up on the singularity yet.

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I’ll be in Seattle on Saturday to be interviewed by Nikola Danaylov of the Singularity Weblog and Singularity 1 on 1 podcast. I’ve listened to quite a few of his podcasts, and he’s a great interviewer, and had interviewed Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, Noam Chomsky, and many other amazing people.

This will be a joint interview with myself, Ramez Naam (of Nexus fame), and Greg Bear, a prolific author of science fiction novels.

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered by any of us, please contact Nikola on twitter: @singularityblog this evening.

p.s. I’m posting this while traveling by Amtrak from Portland to Seattle. Trains rock!

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Anne Bishop

Matt Vancil
Jim Kling
  • Background
    • JK: Quit day job in 1992 to go to grad school. In 1995, decide he didn’t want to complete PhD in chemistry, eventually decided to science writing internship. Then went on to do freelance, and has done it ever since.
    • MV: Screenwriter and filmmaker. Have a day job, but it’s a writing job. Got that as a result of a string of other writing. First time he’s had a consistent gig.
    • AB: Author of multiple series. Pretty much a full-time writer. Working on 18th novel, but still have a day job, two jobs a week. 
  • What is the writing life like?
    • JK: 
      • Currently have home office. Had an outside office, but stop using it. 
      • I don’t get dressed or shower until noon. Doesn’t keep regular hours.
      • Had a regular job briefly, hated the regular hours. Would rather work when he wanted to in order to be happy and healthy.
      • Deadlines dictate when he needs to get certain work done.
    • MV: 
      • Required to have bit of structure because of the company he works for.
      • To work at home, he prefers a place that quiet, cool, and calm.
      • But at work, he’s forced into an environment that loud and chaotic.
        • because of this, he’s abandoned the idea of structure, and just embraced the chaotic nature of the work.
      • On his own work, its about a routine: an outline and a quota. Because at the end of a day of work, the last thing he wants to do is write.
    • AB:
      • I like structure. I treat it as a job I have 5 days a week.
      • I don’t get dressed for the office.
      • I throw on clothes, make coffee, and as soon as my brain is engaged and start working.
      • The less time between waking and getting to the keyboard the better.
      • The less input, less sensory, the better.
      • I set a weekly word count equal to 1,500 words a day. This is what is needed to make the deadlines for the size of the novels I write.
      • I sit down from 8:30 in the morning until about 1:30.
      • At that point, it’s time to meet the day. Get cleaned up, and tend to all the other stuff. Nobody gets time in the writing slot except for the characters.
  • MV: The development is actual work too: sometimes its not just typing characters into a keyboard. It’s deep thinking about motivation before you’re ready to put words on the page.
  • AB: No matter what the process is, you have to be willing to produce the end product.
    • JK: You have to be willing to deal with the self-doubt. As a hobbyist, there’s no external pressure. If you never send off the novel, the editor doesn’t even know. But if you’re self-employed, you have to finish it and send it off, because you need it for the check, even if you’re worried that its a piece of shit.
  • AB: Know your writing style. Are you a sprinter or a marathoner? All of these are valid ways to get to the end-goal. But know what it right for you.
  • How do you deal with writing time vs. all the other things you can do?
    • MV: Ultimately it’s about holding yourself to a quota. And what helps you make that quota is an outline. Problems in Act 3 are almost always due to problems in Act 1 that weren’t resolved because there was no outline. Also, give yourself permission to suck. 
    • AB: There’s a difference between 10 minutes of minesweeper to rest your brain and an hour of minesweeper to avoid writing.
  • Q: If you get blocked somewhere in the first draft, do you ever go back and edit as a way of making some progress?
    • AB: I do what I call musings. I open up another file, and just start typing about what I think the problems might be, what the characters might be thinking about. Sometimes this is like warming up after you’ve had an injury: you have to get the muscle warmed up.
      • Give yourself an ultimatum to do the chore you hate the most or write a 100 words. I guarantee that you’d rather write 100 words than to scrub the kitchen floor.
  • Before you quit your day job, what do you need to get from your writing?
    • AB: I’ve gradually decreased my hours at my day job down to two mornings. This has been very good to be able to gradually decrease.
      • If you hope to quit your day job and pay your mortgage and feed your kids, you should be writing under contract long before you give up your day job.
      • Don’t give up the day until your fiction is earning enough to pay all of your bills for a year.
      • Ideally you need to not only pay bills, but also put aside money for emergencies, savings, etc.
      • Agents will say you should have ten books in print before you consider it…
    • MV: It’s better to have a job and work some minimal hours than to simply quit. Determine how many hours a day you need to write, and then try to find a job that will support it.
      • You have to be prepared that this is a long haul… I went to a film school and they beat into your head that you’d need to do this for at least five years before you’d be able to make money at it.
      • Embrace any job that helps you further your goals: e.g. a tech writing job that gets you access to publishers.
    • JK: It’s hard to do this and it requires some luck. But it also requires being willing to embrace a different lifestyle. If you want to drive a new car, have new clothes, eat your meals out… then don’t quit your day job.
      • There are some, but not very many.
      • Be willing to scale back the lifestyle.
      • AB: Leave lean.
    • MV: If you’re writing you are probably doing it because you love it. Be prepared that at some time it’ll feel like a job, and you’ll hate it. Remember why you started doing it.
  • Q: What’s a likely amount of money to make?
    • AB: First advances are lucky to be $5,000, except for an exceptional few. And that comes in 3 payments over about 3 years, so it’s not a lot of money. 
      • If you have 10 books in print, then royalties will start to add up, but it’s still a live lean lifestyle.
    • JK: I have a second income in the form of my wife who works.
  • How do you force yourself to get dressed and leave the house? How do you avoid feeling isolated?
    • AB: Why do I want to leave the house?
    • JK: It is isolating, and sometimes it bothers me, and sometimes it doesn’t.
      • I go out and meet with other writers every other week.
      • I get sick of being at home and go out.
      • My dogs force me to take them out.
  • Q: You’ve talked about the income, what about the expenses particular to writing?
    • AB: You need a computer, paper, electricity and time. The expense of writing is not great except that it is time.
    • MV: One cost is that you’ll have a scary credit history if you don’t have a steady income. 
    • AB: Self-employment tax: the other 7.5% you need to pay into social security.
    • MV: Keep very clear records of your sources of income. I have 8 sources of income.
    • JK: Deduct everything you can.
  • Q: How does it work between writing and film-making?
    • MV: Over the last two years, I didn’t have a day job. When I had a film, I could film it. Now I have to negotiate the time off work from a job I want to keep.

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My notes from OryCon 35 (2013) are a little shorter than usual this year, so rather than one blog post per panel, I’m consolidating posts.
(One meta-comment: There have been a fair number of panels about the future, including one that I was on. In every case, it feels like panelists consistently under-estimate the amount of change I think we’ll see in the future. In a panel I attended entitled “300 Years from Now” panelists discussed issues facing us today: water shortages, climate change, global economic divide, etc. while assuming that humans remain much like we are today. In 300 years, I think we’ll have gone past those problems, and we’ll be dealing with questions of what it means to be human when we’re 90% machine and 10% biological.)
Notes from The End of All Things at OryCon 35 – 2013 

Kat Kenyon

Karen Azinger
Nancy Kress
Ru Emerson
Richard A. Lovett
  • What makes a bad ending
    • A scene so preordained the reader anticipated it for 100 pages
    • A climax that happens offstage.
      • This happens before the end, but it’s the most important. The very ending is the mopping up.
    • A scene that is obvious.
      • It should seem both inevitable and yet not obvious
  • The book should wrap up on its own terms
    • It should feel satisfying on its own
    • Especially for a first time novelist — there’s no trust that you’ll wrap it up later. No guarantee that the next book will come.
  • The inciting incident suggests what the story problem is. And at the climax it should be resolved.
  • The marrying and the burying: this is what comes after the climax.
  • What is the cost of success for the protagonist?
    • it should cost your character something. An emotional cost to the choices they make. 
  • A writer’s secret weapon is theme.
    • The reader may or may not be able to articulate it. But if a book has no theme, the reader will say it doesn’t work.
    • Both the plot and the ending must involve the theme.
  • An action oriented book will have an action scene for its climax. The reader can see it coming. But there can often be an internal story was well (about the journey of the character, where they are moving to, what their shortcomings are.)
  • Dual arc story:
    • the arc of the situation
    • the arc of the character
    • the situation arc: the events of the story. it must affect the character, or the reader doesn’t care.
  • How to construct an ending both surprising and inevitable?
    • Plan for reversals
      • Even if the main story arc isn’t very surprising, other things will
      • There are betrayals, a surprise, a mystery.
      • Something that the reader didn’t see coming. So some is a surprise, and some seems expected.
    • Plant subtle clues ahead of time.
      • It leads to the sense of “oh, i should have known this was coming.”
  • What can go wrong now?
    • Then make it go wrong.
    • Then the character will be forced to change.
  • The choice ending…
    • As the reader progresses, it becomes obvious that the character is going to be forced to choose between two alternatives. Those alternatives become more obvious as the reader reads. But we don’t know which they’ll choose. The options should be roughly equally weighted.
Notes from One Lump or Two: How much Technology is Too Much?

Richard A. Lovett

Patrick Swenson
Gordon Eklund
Annie Bellet
David W. Goldman
  • How much science in a story for it to be science fiction?
    • RL: None! Science fiction is extrapolation from something. It’s based in reality. But it doesn’t need to be about science.
    • PS: My stories are about what-if… extrapolation about what we know now into the future. not just science, but our culture and society. But… cool science and cool tech goes a long way. My editor asked me to add more technology into the the early chapters to ground the reader. Happy to do that…required research on my part.
    • GE: Heinlein quote: the perfect science fiction story is a story that, at some point in the future, would just be a contemporary fiction story.
    • RL: Explain enough of the science so that people understand how it works. Work out a lot, but put the minimum necessary in the story.
    • PS: Consulting with (editor? scientist?), asked what was necessary: Don’t violate certain principles, and then hand wave the rest.
    • DG: You don’t need to explain what we don’t know (e.g. how a warp drive would work), but you do need to avoid explaining things in a way that violates what we do know (e.g. faster-than-light travel without special conditions).
    • DG: There are some stories that are about science. They’re about a specific scientific idea, and then a story is wrapped around it. But that’s the minority of all stories.
    • RL: Lots of research that doesn’t go into the book. Had to write a spreadsheet tracking oxygen consumption over 24 hours according to exercise levels of the protagonist. That doesn’t go into the book, but its there to make sure the science is right.
  • What makes a story age well or not with respect with technology?
    • The emotional arc of the story.
    • The story has to hold up without the technology.
    • Don’t put dates in story, because that really affects how people perceive it.
    • A lot of science fiction written during the cold war is about the soviet union: now it’s alternate history.
    • Older science fiction is a time capsule to the future of a different time.
    • Now matter how forward looking science fiction is, it’s always a commentary on the time in which it was written.
The Future of Publishing

Mike Shepherd / Moscoe – Traditionally published author

Linn Prentis – Literary Agent in Pacific Northwest
Tod McCoy – 
Liz Gorinsky – Editor at Tor Books
Peter Smalley – Indie published author
Phoebe Kitanidis – Ebook publisher and traditionally published YA author 
  • What are the threats to traditional publishing?
    • LG: The main issue is not ebooks or self-publishing but attention. The number of people buying and finishing books. How do we find and keep and communicate with readers?
      • Reading on screens – notifications pop up, getting an email to watch a youtube video. Many people complain that its harder to finish a novel. People get excited about interactive media on the web.
    • PS: A challenge to traditional publishing is the platform… People have multiple electronic devices and its a chore to move between them. The competition for attention is not just what form of entertainment we want, but the cost of moving to the platform where the books are.
      • MS/M: The counter to that is that if someone recommends a book, I can easily and immediately go buy it. So I’m more likely to buy a book.
  • Is the business changing?
    • LG: Absolutely. The challenge is getting readers in contact with our authors. The main job of editors is not editing. 60-70% of the time in the office is spent figuring out how to get books to readers, anything from managing blurbs to editing meta-data, etc. In the past, getting attention meant getting 12 traditional book reviews. Now it might mean two traditional reviews and fifty blog mentions.

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Amazon is a pretty amazing company. They create a very compelling shopping experience encompassing nearly every category of product, they make the discovery and shopping experience easy, and customer reviews have transformed shopping by helping us find quality products and avoid crappy ones. Shopping online helps save time when shopping and running around town. And of course, as an indie author, 99% of my book sales are through Amazon.

For all that, Amazon is not a panacea. The same scale that allows recommendations, reviews, and low pricing to work also has negative side effects. There are many, but I’ll just mention a few:

  1. As more book buying moves online to Amazon and to ebooks, it becomes harder for local bookstores to survive. Some might say “who cares?” but for the 20% of Americans without Internet access, bookstores and libraries are how they access books. For younger children, bookstores are an exciting place of discovery. My kids love visiting any bookstore. But bookstores can’t survive on childrens books and only a small percentage of adults visiting them. 
  2. As an author, I’m very concerned that 99% of my book sales are through Amazon. What if they change their policies and decide to offer half the royalty rate? Without any other effective distribution outlet, I’d be screwed. I’m delighted to sell as many books as I do there, but I’d be much more comfortable if I was also selling elsewhere.
  3. Local, indie bookstores are owned by people, whereas Amazon is a global corporation. As I’ve mentioned before, every time we make a credit card purchase with a global corporation, we’re sending our money to the 1% of wealthiest people. Yes, we’re supporting them. If you spend your money at a local bookstore, a much greater percentage is actually staying people like you and me. 
Recently I’ve learned about two great ways you can support local bookstores: IndieBound and Kobo.
Kobo is an alternate ebook reading platform. Like Amazon, they have ereader devices and reading apps for all major smartphones and tablets. Like Amazon, they have millions of books, usually at the same price as Amazon. What’s different from Amazon is that they sell their ereading devices through local, indie bookstores. And when you buy a Kobo ereader from a local bookstore, a percentage of revenue of every single book you buy continues to support that bookstore for the life of the device. If you use a Kobo app instead, you can still support a local bookstore by purchasing ebooks through the affiliate website of your local bookstore.
In other words, you can get most of the benefits of shopping with a major online ebook store while still supporting your local bookstore.
IndieBound is an affiliation of local bookstores that are members of the American Booksellers Association. Through the IndieBound website, you can find and order books online, just as you would through Amazon, but instead your purchase benefits your local bookstore. And because the IndieBound website searches the large, commercial databases, nearly everything available on Amazon is also available through IndieBound, even if it’s a specialty, published-on-demand book.

So the next time you reach for the mouse to buy a book, give Kobo or IndieBound a try.

My books are available through both:

To give you a little incentive to try Kobo, you can pick up a copy of A.I. Apocalypse for FREE on Kobo through the end of November, 2013 by entering the code jansbooks. Detailed instructions:

  1. Visit Kobo.
  2. Click on A.I. Apocalypse, then click Buy Now. 
  3. Sign in with your Kobo UserID and Password. If you don’t have one, create an account.
  4. On the “Confirm Your Purchase” page, click on the link for “Have a gift card or promo code?” and enter the PROMO code: jansbooks
  5. A box will pop up saying that you’ve covered your cost so they won’t have to bill your credit card.
  6. Now you will see at the BUY NOW button that $0.00 will be charged. Click the BUY NOW button.
  7. Download the epub to read on your computer, tablet, or Kobo ereader.

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The new Nexus 5 processor (2.3 ghz quad-core) is about 11,000 Dhrystone MIPS, roughly equal to the best dual-core processors of 2005/2006.

This suggests that at this moment in time smartphone processors are roughly 7 years behind general purpose CPUs.

Then I remembered that in 1995, I got an HP 200LX, a handheld PDA. It had an 8mhz 8086-equivalent processor, which was roughly equal to what I had in 1988 when I had an IBM PC clone at 8mhz. So then too, they were 7 years behind desktop processors.

It looks like it’s a fairly constant ratio, over nearly a twenty year period.

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If you’re at OryCon 35 in Portland, I’d love to chat. Either stop me and say hi, or find me at one of these panels:

Social Media and the Modern Writer
Jefferson/Adams      Fri Nov 8 12:00pm-1:00pm
Websites, Facebook fan pages, email lists, contests, twitter, tumblr,
Pinterest, ads, blogs and that annoying thing called a “platform”: what
works, what doesn’t, and why you need to care (spoiler: you do).
Grá Linnaea, William Hertling, (*)Jason Andrew, Aaron Duran, Cat Rambo,
Peter A. Smalley

Revision: Path to better writing or way to never finish?
Lincoln              Fri Nov 8 2:00pm-3:00pm
Endless revisions can kill good writing, but everyone says polish your
work.  Besides, the first draft is usually bad, right?  How to navigate
through the apparent contradictions without going crazy.
Renee Stern, (*)Irene Radford, William Hertling, Amber D. Sistla

Northwest Independent Writers Association (NIWA) Booth
Dealer’s Room     Fri Nov 8 5:00pm-6:00pm

The future of dental floss
Hamilton             Sat Nov 9 10:00am-11:00am
How technology will change everyday life, from taking a shower to reading
the newspaper, from getting to work to the clothes we wear.
(*)David W. Goldman, William Hertling, Mark Niemann-Ross

How near is too near
Broadway             Sun Nov 10 12:00pm-1:00pm
What time frame is too near for near future science fiction longevity and
credibility.
(*)Jason M. Hough, William Hertling, Blake Hutchins, Nancy Kress

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Barge with shipping containers suspected
of being a floating data center owned by Google.
Credit: James Martin/CNET 

By now most of you have heard about the barges suspected to be Google’s floating data centers. CNET reported the first on Friday:

Something big and mysterious is rising from a floating barge at the end of Treasure Island, a former Navy base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And Google’s fingerprints are all over it.

It’s unclear what’s inside the structure, which stands about four stories high and was made with a series of modern cargo containers. The same goes for when it will be unveiled, but the big tease has already begun. Locals refer to it as the secret project.

Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But after going through lease agreements, tracking a contact tied to the project on LinkedIn, talking to locals on Treasure Island, and consulting with experts, it’s all but certain that Google is the entity that is building the massive structure that’s in plain sight, but behind tight security.

Could the structure be a sea-faring data center? One expert who was shown pictures of the structure thinks so, especially because being on a barge provides easy access to a source of cooling, as well as an inexpensive source of power — the sea. And even more tellingly, Google was granted a patent in 2009 for a floating data center, and putting data centers inside shipping containers is already a well-established practice.

Barge seen in Portland, Maine with very similar structure.
Data center? Office space?
Credit: John Ewing/Portland Press Herald

They also reported another, nearly identical barge off the coast of Maine:

Now it seems as though Google may well have built a sister version of the project, and, according to the Portland Press Herald, it recently showed up in the harbor in Portland, Maine.

In both cases, the structures on both barges appear to be made from a number of shipping containers, many of which have small slats for windows, and each has one container that slants down to ground level at a 45-degree angle.

I wouldn’t be surprised that they’d build a floating data center, but I do wonder why the containers would have windows. Maybe it’s to make negotiating the interior easier when there’s no power. As much as I’d love to see it turn out to be a data center, I could also see it being temporary housing, or a proof of concept for a new way to building housing.

If it is a data center, there’s no word yet on whether they’ll be arming them with autonomous fighting robots.

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An Apple //e with 7 modems, one in each expansion slot.
Photo from http://rmac.d-dial.com/

People who have grown up in the age of the Internet usually don’t know how hard it was to chat with other people in the dawn of the connected age.

I found this photo recently. It’s an Apple //e, a 1 Mhz computer with 64KB of RAM. It had seven expansion slots. One was usually taken up by a converter to allow the Apple //e to display 80 columns of text instead of 40, and another slot usually taken up by a disk drive controller board, and a third by a modem.

You’d use that modem to call BBSes or bulletin board systems that usually supported just a single caller at a time. That meant a popular BBS would be busy most of the time. One BBS I ran, a board called The Programmer’s Pitstop, was busy 95% of the time, 24 hours a day, for months on end.

BBSes were asynchronous mediums: one person would post messages, hang up, and then another person would call in.

But people craved more: they wanted real-time, simultaneous chat. And it was made possible by a select, crazy few (including me) in the mid 1980s. We’d tear out the 80-column display card, and the disk drive controller card, and stuff an Apple //e with 7 modems, filling every slot. At that capacity, the Apple //e couldn’t cool itself off, so we’d either have to keep the cover off, or cut holes in. Without a disk drive controller, the only way to get the software loaded was from an audiotape connected to the audio input port. (Even in the mid 1980s this seemed a prehistoric way to load software – a mechanism that dated back to the 1970s.)

Then we’d call the phone company and have to convince them to run seven phone lines to a residence. When I did this in 1986, there were no phone lines left on my block. Three telephone company trucks showed up at my house every day for two weeks while they ran new lines from the nearest junction box, about three blocks away. When all was said and done, we had ten phone lines coming into our home: 7 for the chat system, 1 for outgoing modem calls, 1 voice line for me, and 1 voice line for my parents.

But the feeling of chatting in real-time for the first time with other people, sometimes on the other side of the country or world, was simply amazing. 

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If you’re a fan of science fiction space epics, stop reading now, and go buy Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.

I can’t recall whether I discovered Ancillary Justice because of the front cover blurb by John Scalzi, or this compelling synopsis:

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.

Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren–a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.

An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. And only one purpose–to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.

It’s a really interesting premise with great execution. The story alternates two timelines, both told from the protagonists point of view. In one, the protagonist is the starship’s AI that controls both ship and thousands of human-bodied robot soldiers. In the other, taking place twenty years later, the AI has been reduced to just a single one of those bodies, carrying out her mission over twenty years.

Ann Leckie masterfully describes the underlying culture and politics, tying together both plot and cultural details and values. Although space empires are a common setting in scifi novels, making up an entire subgenre, the storytelling is fresh and wonderful.

Now I just have to go see about getting an advance review copy of the next novel…