Patrick O'Brian, The Thirteen-Gun Salute ** 1/2

My least favorite Aubrey/Maturin books are the ones that spend more plot on Maturin's role as an intelligence agent than on nautical derring-do. Maturin as an intelligence agent is by far the least convincing aspect of these novels, so it's never good when a book dwells on it.

In The Thirteen-Gun Salute, our heroes escort a British envoy to Malay, where he hopes to woo the Sultan away from a treaty with France. Stephen Maturin works behind the scenes to undermine the French position.

The voyage to Malay is entirely routine. The finest set piece is Stephen's visit to the Kumai Crater in Borneo, where he visits a Buddhist monastery and communes with the orangutans. O'Brian ends the book in medias res with the crew stranded on an uncharted island, which perhaps bodes well for the next installment.

Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe *** 1/2

A terrible title for a book whose subtitle is "Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics." Masters of the Universe is a nice companion to George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. Where Nash covers the various strands of conservatism in America, Jones focuses on the libertarian strand in both the US and Britain. ("Neoliberal" is the more common British term for the group.) Jones is also interested in the political movement: how did free-market ideology manage to replace the post-war Keynesian consensus?

Masters of the Universe does a very good job of explaining the neoliberal worldview, including both its economic foundation and the philosophy that earns it the name "liberal." Jones presents the view fairly, even though he is not a neoliberal himself. (His tone becomes more critical in the later chapters.) Turning to the politics, he shows that the shift to market-based approaches came in response to a perceived failure of the Keynesians in the late 1970s, and that it started during the liberal administrations before Reagan and Thatcher.

Jones' prose can be academic and repetitive, but it's an interesting story.

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves ***

The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

Seveneves is a a typically ambitious epic from Neal Stephenson. Scientists determine that the breakup of the moon will make the surface of Earth uninhabitable starting two years hence, and the world comes together to plan for the continuation of the human race in space. Most of the action takes place on the International Space Station, which serves as the seed for an orbiting civilization.

Seveneves is definitely hard sci-fi, with more of its 800+ pages dedicated to technological explanations than to story. All of the world's scientists work together seamlessly to make amazing progress in two years, while politicians are all corrupt.

Half way through Part I, I started wondering why the scientific community hadn't applied their ingenuity to repairing the Moon. They made amazing progress on the much harder problem of building a sustainable civilization. Even I had some ideas about how to "fix" the moon (similar to the asteroid capture caper). Stephenson probably could have explained why it wouldn't work, but he didn't, and the missed option tempered my enjoyment a bit.

I also had issues with Part III, which (spoiler alert) takes place five thousand years later. Human civilization consists of seven races, each descended from one of the eponymous seven Eves. I had a hard time believing that the races would have stayed as distinct as they did given that they've lived (essentially) together for thousands of years. The sociology didn't feel realistic to me. Also, the story in Part III felt rushed by comparison to the previous parts and ends with an incident that felt like the start of something rather than the end. If I'd been Stephenson's editor, I would have recommended publishing Part III as a second book along with a Part IV that continues the story for another hundred pages and several years.