perfidy

Is on his way to Festung Buckethead and when he gets here, he'll be bringing in his purple velvet bag:

• The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began, by Stuart Clark
• The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, by Edward Luttwak
• Governing for Prosperity, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley
• The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando de Soto
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

And while I was at it, I also pre-ordered:

• A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril An Alternate History, by Peter G. Tsouras
• The Fuller Memorandum (A Laundry Files Novel), by Charles Stross

Rainbow of Blood is a sequel to Britannia's Fist, an alternate history novel where the United States and Britain go to war in the middle of the Civil War - over the British connivance with the Confederates in building armored commerce raiders.  It's somewhat like Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes series, which also had the US and Britain at war, but over the earlier Trent Affair.  Solid historical speculation, and not bad fiction.  Tsouras has edited numerous volumes of alt-history essays, most of which are pretty good.

Charles Stross is one of my favorite sf authors right now.  I just order anything he publishes.  In this case, this is volume three of a really fun series where Cthulhoid monsters meet bureaucracy in the person of a UNIX geek.

Oh, and I got this, in honor of GeekLethal:

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, and thanks Dad for being an enabler for my addiction.