Book of the Week: Pirate Utopia.

Bruce Sterling’s Italian Futurist alternate-history Pirate Utopia is, indeed, more of a novella than a novel, so pick it up in Kindle. If you like Italian-themed dieselpunk that is very, very strange and not at all concerned as to your expectations from books. I will warn you; this is an odd-tasting tome. Many people who have reviewed it seem to scratch their heads as to whether or not they actually liked it, although almost nobody seems to be upset that they read it. I’m not even sure whether I really liked it, either. But I’m not upset that I read it.

Bleg for good texts on immediate post-WWI Germany and Russia.

Specifically, I need books that are readable, and not barking mad insane, on both 1920s German radical groups and the Russian communist factional rivals to the Bolsheviks.  I’m not one for obsessive historical research – I think that doing that often gets people stuck in neutral when they should be writing – but it wouldn’t hurt this one time to know just who all the players were.  And, yeah, I read Pirate Utopia, but that’s pretty much Italian-themed and I’m going to be leaving Mussolini right where I found him.