Book roundup, part 38

Non-fiction

Dark Wire, by Joseph Cox ★★★★☆

A fascinating, fast-paced real-life techno thriller about how the FBI gained access to a global network of encrypted devices used by criminals and the global law-enforcement operation that resulted from police having access to plans for drug smuggling, assassination and various sundry other crimes.

Law enforcement was reading the communications of most of global crime for a period of time. I hadn’t realized that.

Dark Wire is a great look into the social dynamics of how criminals communicate and how purchasing technology from criminals for criminals leads to some criminal behavior. Not very surprisingly.

It all goes back to the Blackberry Messenger, which was the first handheld device to offer encrypted communications. And which as evidenced by the amount of “Crackberry” users during the company’s heyday was extremely simple to use. But the Blackberry had one global key for its encryption, which meant law enforcement could get warrants. So third-party vendors started selling Blackberries with their own keys. Which then through an incredibly cyberpunk evolution lead to companies creating their own secure networks and devices explicitly to sell to criminals. It all reads so incredibly Mirrorshades except it actually happened.

It even became fashion among the criminal set to use the current hip encrypted phone. Because of course it did.

But then the FBI through a series of events ended up creating their own encrypted network, which is a fascinating story all in itself and well-covered in the book, and all bets were off.

The saddest thing though is that after all that work, law enforcement across the world raided suspects in a massive operation, one that followed the sun across the world. The operation netted 12 tons of cocaine and several tons of meth and 22 tons of hash and marijuana. But a short time later the shipments globally resumed at their previous levels. The suspects arrested around the world had quickly been replaced, as had their devices.

Crusaders, by Dan Jones ★★★★☆

The crusades were a fascinating era, an era that married intense faith and industrial-scale violence and brutality. For me personally I’ve always had a hard time reconciling the teachings of Christ with the brutality of some of his followers and the vast, powerful and wealthy organizations that existed to commit murder and torture at scale.

Several hundred years after Paul and John’s deaths, the problem of marrying Christian faith with worldly violence had not gone away. Rather, it had been crystallized by the fact that Christianity was taken up in AD 380 as the official religion of the Roman empire. Now urgent triangulation was required between the amiable character of Christ’s teaching and the realities of statecraft in an empire that existed by virtue of military conquest, subjugation and war. Plenty of serious minds applied themselves to this task, drawing upon a history of political thought going back at least to Aristotle (d. 322 BC), from which had emerged the concept of the ‘just war’: violence that was regrettable but legitimate and even moral, so long as it was undertaken to protect the state and would ultimately serve to produce or restore peace.

Dan Jones does a great job tying the story of the various crusades together, since they were not just crusades for the Holy Land, but also Spain and the Baltic states, but it is a bit of a slog to get through as it gets repetitious with the same kinds of people committing the same kinds of acts over time, not learning anything. Which I suppose is very much a lesson all its own.

And the brutality! The sheer, mind-numbing brutality of it all, and the unfathomable suffering.

Of course, that’s history’s fault, not the author’s.

Dominion, by Tom Holland ★★★★☆

Holland is co-host of the excellent The Rest Is History podcast and writes deftly about how the Christian intellectual tradition has affected most of especially Western culture, making the argument that concepts like secularity, human rights, and even atheism would not be possible without the influence of Christianity on the culture.

Dominion steps through the beginnings of the faith and the enormous amount of intellectual labor that went into refining and adjusting it for new eras and mores. It’s frankly a bit exhausting in its complexity, but at least for me was really enlightening.

The evolution of the concept of human rights, mediated as it had been since the Reformation by Protestant jurists and philosophes, had come to obscure its original authors. It derived, not from ancient Greece or Rome, but from the period of history condemned by all right-thinking revolutionaries as a lost millennium, in which any hint of enlightenment had at once been snuffed out by monkish, book-burning fanatics. It was an inheritance from the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages.

Whether you’re a Christian, atheist, or of another faith, the process of adjusting and refining the teachings of Christ and Paul the Apostle and how those theories have affected the broader culture is very interesting indeed.

Fiction

Note: Less fiction than usual in this post, as I’ve been re-reading Neal Asher’s Polity series to, you know, take my mind off things. I love this series, and I especially love how it evolves from the first novel Gridlinked with its James Bond in space conceit into something sprawling, gritty, and very smart. And the Prador are truly horrific monsters in such a monstrous way. I love how Asher comes up with an evolutionary reason they are so awful.

The Mercy of Gods, by James S A Corey ★★★☆☆

The beginning of a new series, The Captives, from the creators of the brilliant The Expanse, The Mercy of Gods is wildly inventive and fascinating. Set in a far future where humanity has spread around the galaxy, humanity is brutally attacked the Carryx, an alien empire bent on the conquest and subjugation of all. Kind of turbo fascists in space.

The novel has to do a lot of world building, so it’s a bit slow even as it describes horrific events, but it sets the stage for what has the potential to be a brilliant new series. The Carryx are extremely not nice. I’m waiting impatiently for the next installment.

Livesuit, by James S. A. Corey ★★★★☆

And speaking of the next installment, Livesuit is a novella that takes place in The Captives universe from The Mercy of Gods but follows different humans in a different part of the universe as they encounter and fight the Carryx. James S. A. Corey loves to play around with genres, and Livesuit is more than a nod to classic military sci-fi and the use of armored suits to fight aliens.

There’s also a very nice twist at the end.

It can be read as a standalone, but a lot of things make more sense if you’ve read The Mercy of Gods.

Weaponized, by Neal Asher ★★★☆☆

NOTE: For some reason Bookshop.org doesn’t carry this title, so the link goes to the publisher.

Set in the Polity universe, Weaponized moves back in time to the beginning of the Prador War and goes very hard, as Asher sometimes is wont to do, on the body horror of colonists working on turning a planet habitable and finding themselves non-consensually altered to fight seemingly invincible enemies.

Weaponized also sheds more light on the AIs that run the Polity and how those AIs see their subjects and their subjects’ worth.

This is not one of Asher’s best, but well worth reading if you’re a Polity fan and have already gone through the previous novels.

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