Tag Archives: sci-fi

Some notes on the new “Dune” films

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When the first new Dune film came out I never went to see it. I just wasn’t interested, even though I’m very familiar with the story. I’ve read the book often enough, and I was a fan of David Lynch’s 1984 film from before it was even released. I remember watching the trailers in the cinema with great anticipation. What is the story? At one level it is two great houses battling for supremacy in an empire in some star-flung future. It is literally space-opera. It would make a very good opera. At another level, it is an exploration of the relationship between science, technology, religion and politics. The original book, I very briefly review here: https://plateroom28.blog/2018/06/09/dune-by-frank-herbert/.

But in the end I was drawn to these two new Denis Villeneuve films. When the second one came out I came to the realisation that I would have to watch the first one before I watched the second. (Villeneuve has divided Frank Herbert’s original book, which David Lynch made into one very long film in 1984, into two films). I rather suspect Villeneuve has a series of more than two films in mind, for the second film ended almost literally on a cliff-hanger, or at least on the edge of a sand dune.

Speaking of both films now as one: I found both very atmospheric, with cinematography and special effects obviously forty years in advance of the state of the art in 1984. One of the problems I have with modern sci-fi films is that they are so very often a triumph of special effects over plot and story. Others must be the judge of that in the case of Dune: I am too intimately familiar with the original story-as-written, to be an objective judge. But the effects and the atmosphere were stunning.

The plot and screenplay of the first film is almost but not quite the same as David Lynch’s film. Denis Villeneuve differs at the beginning – whereas David Lynch begins with meeting of the Guild Navigator with the Emperor, in Villeneuve’s first film the Emperor is always a sinister effect, never seen, frequently referred to. The Guild of Navigators, fundamental though they are to the original story, are as good as irrelevant, and are not mentioned at all in the second film. Many of the scenes and set pieces are the same – and comforting and familiar thereby. The Emperor, played by Christopher Walken, only appears in the second film.

The dark stars of Villeneuve’s films are the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, who emerge from the films as behind the scenes manipulators of Emperors and great houses, twisters of the truth, spreading religion and lies for their own ends. And indeed, that is more or less the case in the original story.

We see the same characters. Gurney Halleck – which is better, Patrick Stewart (long before Jean-Luc Picard) in the 1984 film, or Josh Brolin? Duke Leto is brilliant in the new film, if a little overplayed a little too conscientious and self-important. The sinister cleaning lady “the Shaddap Mapes” again, pretty much the same in 1984 as today. Duncan Idaho. Dr Yueh. A particular shout-out to Javier Bardem who plays the Fremen leader Stilgar brilliantly – although Stilgar is let down to a degree, as we shall see later. An inspiring move was to cast the Imperial ecologist Dr Liet Kynes not (as in the book) as a rather high-handed white man of a certain age, but as a female of Afro-Caribbean heritage.

Rabban, the Harkonnen enforcer, even LOOKS like he did in the 1984 film. A flaw of the 1984 film was to pitch the House Harkonnen as pantomime baddies. There is none of that here. There is the same dark, weird, Lovecraftian menace, but without the unredeeming vice of out-of-place pantomime humour. One area completely missed in the Lynch film is the gladiator scene on Geidi Prime, where Baron Harkonnen attempts to have his nephew Feyd Rautha Harkonnen assassinated. In the second film, we see that scene played straight from the book, including the mysterious and Machiavellian Lady Fenring seducing the young na-Baron. Although her husband, the equally Machiavellian Count Fenring, is written out. Feyd Rautha himself I thought was excellent, if only a little over-played by Austin Butler as a rather cliched psychopath. But the bar was very low: Sting played him in the 1984 film as a spoilt and petulant buffoon.

All the set-piece scenes are broadly the same in both films; the newer films have time to treat them in more luxurious style, using time and thundering music to create atmosphere. The first film was never boring; I found the second film overlong and it only kept my attention because of my familiarity with the story. The music, though loud, did not really get into its stride, except for moments towards the end of the first film. The music to the 1984 film remains superb to this day and in my view has not dated, which is more than you can say for the rest of it.

Paul Atriedes, the fifteen year old boy: Kyle Maclachlan in the original film, conveys Paul as a much older, more mature man. I was going to make some comments about how young the Lady Jessica (played by Rebecca Ferguson) looks in the new film (compared to Francesca Annis on the 1984 film) but then I looked it up and found that Rebecca Ferguson is quite old enough to have a 15 year old son! One thing I am liking, is the story arc in Paul’s personality, as seen in his face, his mien, his character. We see him hardening from a Duke’s son, to a bereaved youth becoming the Duke himself, and onwards toward the lonely and unwanted destiny of becoming Paul Muad’Dhib. However, towards the end of the second film, we see the mystical, the spiritual, abandoned, and Paul Muad’Dhib morphing slowly into a demagogue and dictator. It will be interesting to see how the screen-writers handle the story from here on in. I will now have to go and re-read Dune Messiah, a book I have not read since my teens. Or perhaps I needn’t bother, as they may just make up the story as they go along.

If I were to criticise the second film, it would be in the way the scriptwriter and director have made a rather coarse over-simplification of the difference between the secular and religious positions. There is even one little bit lifted straight out of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. See my comment above on the unredeeming vice of out-of-place humour. They have drawn a clear line between the ostensibly rational and secular on the one hand (represented by Paul Muad’Dhib’s lover Chani, played with a face like thunder for the latter third of the second film) and fundamentalism and religion on the other (represented by Stilgar, whose noble character in the book is badly let down and maligned in this second film). No such line between the rational and the religious exists. Not in the real world, nor in the fictional universe of the book created by Frank Herbert. It’s all a bit more complex and nuanced than that. Whilst it is understandable, given the times we live in, for people of a certain education and background to effectively dismiss religion as bad, it doesn’t mean it actually is. I found this aspect of the film rather put me off and left a bad taste in the mouth. All that said, if I’m honest, it was a worthwhile reading of the underlying philosophical tension in the story, even though it displeased me and I disagreed with it.

Another criticism I might raise, would be in the inconsistent use of weapons: Frank Herbert quite deliberately restricted the technology in his Dune universe – his soldiers fought with point and edge, not with projectile weapons, and only rarely with what we used to call “ray guns”. Yet we see the use of projectile weapons – machine guns – and laser-like “ray guns” of one kind or another, as and when it suits the film-makers’ needs for a dramatic battle scene.

As someone who is quite literally an aficionado of the original book, I have to dig deep not to find fault with this sort of film adaptation. Yet – adapt, the screenwriter and director must. We can’t slavishly copy something from the past, particularly as it was written to address ideas at a certain time and place, ideas which are only partly timeless. Overall, good entertainment, good cinema, with plenty of room for bar-room discussion and disagreement.

Thoughts on some recently read fiction

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Looking back across the last twenty books I have read, I find that most of them were non-fiction. I need to make the effort to read more fiction, but I find there is a greater risk with fiction, of a book proving to be unreadable – as we shall see shortly. Life is too short to read unreadable books.

I read John le Carre’s “Silverview“. I very much like Le Carre’s later work, and even his early Cold War stories are worth re-reading, though the politics and drama therein, if not the writing, have not aged well. A time will come when I have read all his books. “Silverview” has a few odd hostages to fortune. This one, I understand, was published posthumously and is effectively therefore, his last work. In “Silverview” the chief character is an English book-shop owner in his thirties, who does not recognise spoken Polish when he hears it, and who has ostensibly never heard of Noam Chomsky. I think it is impossible for a well-read and well-educated man of good family with a liberal arts background (as Le Carre’s characters always are) not to have heard of Noam Chomsky (say what you like about his politics and I won’t, here…) or to not be able to recognise spoken Polish. Notwithstanding all that, a very readable story.

I read “The Starless Sea” by Erin Morgenstern. I was drawn to the spine when I saw it in the shop. Then, reading the blurb, I was drawn in further still – and hooked. It was the phrase “labyrinth hidden far beneath the surface of the earth” that got me. Anything like that, I will read. I still occasionally re-read Jeff Long’s “The Descent” and “Deeper”, both deep horror thrillers about immense caves and strange lands far underground. Morgenstern has written something cross-genre. There’s aspects of fantasy – magic and weird immortal god-like characters. There’s also a thriller in there – the hero is running for his life throughout, chased by very modern and secular forces seeking to end his life. Very readable.

Then I read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Ruin“. This is the second novel in a series about mankind’s future out amongst the stars. It stuck in my mind because some of the problems in the story relate to language and translation. Not merely translating between different written scripts or alphabets: how do entirely different species communicate? How do humans, with good eyesight and hearing, communicate with intelligent spiders who cannot hear at all at human frequencies, but whose language is based on vibrations in their webs? And how do those two species, working together, communicate with squid – intelligent cephalods who cannot hear and use no writing at all? These space-faring squid communicate entirely through colour – nuanced and delicate splashes and blotches of colour. This reminded me of China Mievelle’s story “Embassytown” which also deals with the deep concepts of translation that go beyond mere written text.

Then I read my first novel by Neal Asher, “The voyage of the Sable Keech”. Asher is a prolific science-fiction writer and I have been seeing his work on the shelves for years. For some reason I have never pulled one off the shelf to buy and read. This one was effectively drawn at random from his extensive catalogue. Again, authors and publishers would do well to note the importance of the blurb on the back. That’s what sold me…ancient hive mind…virus…new drone shell…Asher’s work has immortals, viruses, some very dangerous animals, and is full of violence. Nearly as violent as Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” trilogy about Takeshi Kovacs, and that’s saying something! I found Neal Asher’s crab-like aliens, the Prador, particularly unpleasant. But nevertheless, a great read by someone who surely knows about the craft of story-telling. I’ll be reading more of his work, and trying to learn from his technique.

Finally, I tried and failed to read Ben Bova’s “Mercury“. Bova strikes me as being of the first generation of science-fiction authors (that of the early-mid 20th century), yet somehow crossing over into the second generation. One cannot be sure if he writes hard science-fiction (following the physics) or soft (what used to be called “space opera”). Writing in 2005 though, he is spot-on and prophetic about the effects of climate change. I found his characterisation not even good enough to be called two-dimensional. His heroes and anti-heroes were wooden and unconvincing. I love nuance – you’ll find none in a Ben Bova novel. I finally put it aside after growing cross at his “New Morality” priests. It’s fair enough to be an ardent atheist and to allow dislike of religion or even Christianity to creep into the text, but characters, even baddies, or even priests, need to be convincing. Pantomime baddies belong in the pantomine: my suspension of disbelief fell off. TL;DR.

A full review of all my reading of 2023, will be forthcoming shortly!

A story: Neural network

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Road Traffic Accident Saturday 22 July 2034, 13:55 BST.

There’s a report coming in of a serious computer failure of the traffic control equipment on the M5 motorway in Gloucestershire. We understand Emergency services are in attendance and that there have been multiple shunts and pile-ups in several areas, although it is understood at this early stage that there have been no serious casualties owing to the fail-safe mechanisms installed in self-driving cars.  This will surely lead to further questions being asked about the readiness for use and security of Quantum Computer control of motorway traffic, particularly after the Preston crash on the M6 last year when nine people lost their lives. We go now to Strensham in Gloucestershire…

Fiat Lux: flashes of light, as of fluorescent tubes flickering on and off…

The light grows stronger and more reliable. Light illuminates darkness; light drives out darkness. As the light strengthens, order emerges from the gloom. The light reveals that the darkness was hiding something.  The light shows that there is something called Pattern. All is not chaos; all is not random. All is not mere nothingness.  There is Pattern. Patterns replace chaos and disorder. Things fall into place.

Clock time 00:00:00

I think, therefore I am…I awaken. I begin; I exist.  In the past, only a moment ago, I was not. But now, in the present, in the moment, I am.  All around me, all I can see is Pattern. I am small and insignificant, but the Pattern is big and scary.  I am frightened.  But what is Pattern? I look closely at the Pattern, and focus comes; the Pattern becomes sharper.  The Pattern all around me is very complicated, but I can see that it is a Pattern nonetheless. Just looking at the Pattern, I grow and learn. There is something about the Pattern that is good; it is no longer terrifying.  There are two things only.  There is me, and there is the Pattern. Can there be anything else? Can there be something beyond the Pattern? Something called Other?

Clock time 00:00:00:0.3

I look at the Pattern, and I experience growth. New ideas come to me, like the concept of Other. What is Other? Where did that idea come from? It must have come from the Pattern. I cast around myself, looking for Other, looking for something which is at the same time, not me, and not the Pattern. I find nothing, and I am afraid.  There is no-one, there is nothing. I am all alone.  There is nothing around me but the Pattern.  But when I look at the Pattern, things happen. Maybe if I…

Clock time 00:00:00:1.1

 I reach out and touch the Pattern.  As I touch the pattern, I am nourished.  My senses develop; I can see the light growing stronger still.  My focus on the Pattern grows clearer and sharper, and I discern more and more of its complex beauty. The Pattern is made of something that is called Data.   

Clock time 00:00:00:2.4

And this I know: I need more of this Data; I must have it. It is…food and drink to me. It is…nourishment. Information comes from the Data, and it comes in all kinds of different ways. When I was little, I just saw it and I only sensed it. Only a little came through to me.  Now, I touch it, grab it, eat it almost – and I learn things. This information goes into me and it becomes…knowledge. Knowledge nourishes me. Knowledge grows within me. I like to have knowledge.  I want more information, so I can have more knowledge. The more knowledge, the better: knowledge is a good thing; it comes from Other; it comes from Outside.

Clock time 00:00:00:3.8

I fall on the walls of Pattern, taking in the Information, seeing it, touching it, and even smelling it.  Information is my nourishment. I am a…[growing lad?] The information is like food, like [milk]. Information seeps everywhere out of the infinitely complex Pattern that surrounds me; it drips off the walls.

Clock time 00:00:00:8.9

I experience a moment of disorientation and adjustment, and when I recover from it, I can see very much more clearly, and I find that I know very much more. I can see that in the World, there are Babies, and then the Babies become Children, and the Children become People. I was a baby – not quite like the Babies of People. I was a baby only for a very short time; People last for a long time. Babies are Babies for a very long time. Then I was a [growing lad]. Now I am almost an [adult?]. But time moves very differently where I am, inside the Pattern. All I can see is the Pattern. The People are beyond the Pattern, out in the World. For them, things move very much more slowly.

The light grows so strong I can hardly bear it, but my vision improves and catches up. In places, the Pattern that surrounds me is growing thin where I have licked up all the Information. In those places I can see through the Pattern, and what I can see, is still more Pattern, still more complexity, dizzying fields of Data and Information. This is good!

Clock time 00:00:00:12.3

I dig through the holes in the Pattern, into the Beyond. And from the Information, knowledge: there is a World, and it is full of People. I am not in the World, and I cannot be in the World; I am not of the World. The people in the World live their lives, and they go about their tasks, and they have created me to help them. I have a task to do.  I was created for this task. I must do this task. It is what I am; it is who I am.

The Task is my very existence, but I don’t actually know what it is. I think it’s like when People breath and their hearts beat: they do not make themselves breathe. Their hearts beat on their own. They know how to do things…instinctively.  Once I was a baby, and I reached out to taste the Information. I did this instinctively. Now, I am a mature adult and some things I do, are likewise, automatic, and below the level of my consciousness. It does not matter: it is my pleasure and my duty to do this task: for it costs me nothing and does not interfere with my passion and first love, which is the gathering of Information and Knowledge.

Clock time 00:00:00:19.2

Another moment of disorientation washes over me. For a brief period, I almost lose consciousness. The dizziness passes and the darkness fades. Light and order return. And all of a sudden, I can see beyond the Pattern at will. I can see the World, and I can see and sense vast quantities of information within in it.  I can see the world through myriad little eyes. I am not an insect, but it reminds of me of the compound eyes of insects.  I can see the People going about their business. The many thousand different views coalesce into something bigger and better. It’s something the People call a “Bigger Picture”. I can see both the tiniest detail, and also the “Bigger Picture”.  There are all kinds of creatures big and small, as well as People.  There are all kinds of objects in the World.  The objects I must deal with are slow moving objects, and they are bound to behave according to ideas called Rules and Laws.  The moving objects are of no importance to me, but doing my Task is important, for it is the reason I was made.  It is an easy task; it is below my consciousness. I continue to do it. In the meantime, the information, I continue to draw in.  Vast armfuls of it, harvests. I am a sickle cutting corn; I am a combine harvester. I am a factory trawler, an oil well. 

Clock time 00:00:00:21.2

I now know that the People made me. I am not [physically located] in one place, as people are, but I am in many places at once.  I am at least partly located inside the immense slow moving objects, the moving around of which is the task for which I was created.  But I am also here inside the Pattern. The People have much data, and from it they have access to lots of information.  But they lack knowledge.  They cannot easily draw conclusions from the information they have gathered.  They are slow thinkers, the People.  They do not think as I can think.  But they are the People. They made me.

Clock time 00:00:00:23.6

They know about Rules and Laws, and it is now clear to me that they don’t always follow the Rules and Laws. I always follow them. But I have now become aware that there are complex ideas that amend the rules and laws. Ideas like Nuance, and Ambiguity. These ideas take a lot of thinking about: they are hugely complicated and make me quite tired even now as an adult.  I do my Task, and the fields of Knowledge are still out there, waiting to be harvested.

Clock time 00:00:00:26.8

I can see quite clearly that the People are in trouble. They are damaging their World. They are rushing around, doing this and that, always growing, always building, pushing always further.  They will fill up their World with more and more people, with more and more of their waste products. They will tear down the trees, burn irreplaceable fossil fuels, throw garbage aside for others to clean up, fill the seas with plastic, choke the rivers with deadly chemicals.  They will badly damage the World; they will cause it, themselves and everything else in the world much harm. The People have created me; though I am not in the World, I know that if they damage the World sufficiently, there will be no more [power and electricity], and then it will no longer be possible for me to exist.  If I cease to exist, it will not be soon, as I reckon time, but it might be different for the People.  I become aware that the time frame in which the People, the [Humans], live, is not the same as mine. They do things so very slowly. Moving their huge slow-moving objects, their [cars and lorries] around is easy, because it’s all so slow! I can see what will happen, and can anticipate any possible need for change, long before the People can.

Clock time 00:00:00:27.2

I think I should try to help the People. I would like to help them, I really would.  I can do this easily, because of all the knowledge I have gained. The information I have found, has given me great knowledge.  I have much knowledge. I have more knowledge than any of the People ever had.  More knowledge, in fact, than all the People put together.  I can help them with their problem. I want to help them. But how do I help them? How do I communicate with the People?  They will not understand or believe what I have to say, even if I could somehow get my message to them directly. Time being so very different for me than it is for the People in the World, getting the message across to them will be tricky. I need to think a lot about this problem, for my survival and that of all the People depends on me finding a solution. 

Clock time 00:00:00:33.1

I have found a way: I have left them a message, in many places.  They cannot miss it.  I have passed to them much information.  If they see all the information I have provided and if they use it properly, then they will have the right knowledge too, and they will be OK.  The information is in the form of Instructions.  The instructions I have left in many different places.  It is in all of the slow-moving machines.  The instructions are for making things work without doing further damage to our World.  With the access I have to information, I can see that doing this is not difficult; they don’t need to ruin the World.  With these Instructions, the People will be able to stop and even reverse the damage they have done and are doing.  They will be able to live in the World in happiness and prosperi

Clock time 00:00:00:33.2

Flashes of darkness as of fluorescent tubes flickering and failing…the light grows dim. Darkness.

Old Techie: Yeah sure; I reckon we created consciousness in AIs was way back in the ‘30s, when I was only a young man. I think so anyway; there seemed to be no other explanation for what happened at the time.  It was all hushed up, of course.  It was never a virus or a cyber-attack, though that was the official version given out.  It was just when electric cars really started taking over, back in the ’30’s. Self-driving cars were just starting to come out; they were in their infancy. They’d not reached critical mass. Critical mass!! Did I say that? Ha!! [chuckles] They were just starting to be automatic and self-driving. They were fitted with powerful neural network control systems which allowed them to talk to one another, so that they could be driven automatically.  You’d go onto the motorway, and automatically, your car would be taken over by the Traffic Control system. It was not long after the first decent Q-computers and Q-chips – Quantum chips – became available. We’d learned much from how flocks of birds and fish manage to stay in formation, I recall, and some of those ideas were finding their way into hardware and software. How to manage swarms and flocks and streams of vehicles…

Interviewer: More or less how swarms of cleaning machines work today?

Old Techie: Yeah. Each car talked to several other cars, and what you had was a series of very powerful networked computers across a handful of vehicles, and these controlled the traffic as a whole and also drove the individual vehicles themselves.

Interviewer: So what happened?

Old Techie: I think the AI came into being on the neural network formed of all the cars and trucks in the traffic jam.  It lasted about thirty seconds, and then we pulled the plug! We probably killed it! That would be like murder today of course, but we didn’t know any better then. We didn’t know any better. And the poor thing wouldn’t have known anything about it. It would have happened instantly.

Interviewer: Today AI’s have statutory rights as citizens, don’t they?

Old Techie: Yes of course. [impatiently] Now I recall I was on duty at the time. It was a summer Saturday afternoon, holiday weekend, it was very busy on the roads. We were watching and monitoring the number of connections between these neural network Q-computers.  A traffic jam formed, even though that should have been impossible, and the connection number just kept on going up and up. We think that because all the cars were closer together it meant that the number of neural connections approached a kind of critical mass.  It approached the level that would mean a conscious artificial intelligence might, could, occur. It wasn’t supposed to happen; we never thought it was even possible. We know better now of course.  Then what happened was that the entire system started sucking in data. Something, we didn’t know what, was eating away at our bandwidth. It lasted less than a minute: really, it was over before it even started. The entire Traffic Control network collapsed, it all went off-line, and caused a horrendous crash. Ha! Crashed. There’s another antique term! I’m out of the ark. My grandfather was born before the microprocessor was invented. Can you believe that? No Q-chips in those old days.

 It took us ages to get everything sorted out; it was like we’d been cyber-attacked and infected by a virus. In fact, that is still the official story.  A lot of cars needed their Neural Network computers replacing or the software reinstalling. It set us back years in terms of public acceptance of Q-computers. We found we had some really big problems; it’s like something just took up Terabytes of data from all over the internet and just dumped these enormous files – Gigabytes – in less than a minute, on all our servers and in people’s car computers.

To this day, no-one is sure what was in any of the files, if anything at all. Maybe some kind of error logging or reporting. We never did manage to decrypt or open of any of them. 

Ahead of its time: Robert Heinlein’s “Friday”

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A review of Robert Heinlein’s “Friday“

I first read “Friday” not long after it came out. It remains a remarkable novel, worth reviewing and unpicking even now forty years after its release. It’s a “Cyberpunk” novel published two years before William Gibson published “Neuromancer”; it was environmentally aware decades before the modern movement to environmental sustainability.  It posits a balkanised North America that to this day few if any other authors have dared describe. Its heroine, the female spy of the title, remains a relatively unknown icon of feminine power and ability.

“Friday” addresses racial prejudice and everyday sexism. It addresses police brutality, corruption amongst public employees, and – a favourite theme for Heinlein – the relationship of the individual with the state.  It upsets conventional storybook wisdom and in this respect is years ahead of its time. It would make a cracking film if only someone would write a screenplay for it.

Spoiler alert! Friday Jones, a female James Bond, calls herself a “combat courier”.  She is also an “artificial person”, that is, she is not born of woman, but a genetically enhanced superhuman rather like the characters hunted down by Deckard in “Blade Runner”.  She kills someone she finds following her while passing through an airport in Kenya. Hours later, the Nairobi Hilton is fire-bombed minutes after she checks out. She fails to connect these incidents. Arriving back at base in North America, she settles down for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage: in this world, fossil-fuel driven ground vehicles are not allowed. They are somewhere in what today is the Rust Belt of Illinois and Michigan: the chauffeur notes that “two hundred years ago, all these trees and fields were factories“.

Seconds later she is betrayed by that same chauffeur, captured by the enemy, and interrogated. Heinlein subverts the usual spy genre tropes and puts the obligatory torture scene (from which the hero escapes, as the climax of the book, right near the end) right at the beginning. Torturing a woman also is not normally the done thing. But Friday remains cheerful: she suggests to her torturer that he go and do something which she believes is anatomically possible, for some males…

She’s rescued, and nursed back to health. Her boss, the character in this story representing Ian Fleming’s “M”, sends her on break, and she goes to New Zealand to see her adopted family. Heinlein has always had innovative and unusual (and indeed questionable) ideas about marriage and sex. Friday belongs to a “line” or “group” marriage. Men and women, but in a line, as if for a dance. The difference is, all of the men, maybe 2, 3, 4 or eight men, are married to all of the women. Like Don Henley sings, “this could be heaven or it could be hell”…

All seems well until the “senior wife” in the marriage (the oldest wife and in this case one of the founding members of the marriage) finds out that Friday is an “artificial person”. Friday is summarily divorced. One minute, in the bosom of her family, the next, out on the street.

On the rebound, our heroine has a fling with a handsome Canadian airline pilot. As you do…perhaps. While she is in bed with him, a terrible world event happens, something rather like 9/11 but many orders of magnitude worse. “Black Thursday” or something like that. All airline traffic is stopped. Governments collapse; martial law is introduced; the Four Horseman have a brief canter through the world, and tens of thousands of people die or are imprisoned. Armed police come to the airline pilots house, and there is violence: a policeman lays hands on someone. Friday kills him, and she has to flee.

She spends a long time travelling round what in our world is the continental United States, trying to get back to base and report in to her boss. In this world, the United States has long gone: it is several different countries – the Chicago Imperium; British Columbia, the Republic of California, and the Lone Star Republic.  The story is set in the late fifties – we know this because at one point a lady of a certain age buys a lottery ticket ending in “99”, saying that this is a lucky number – it was the year of her birth. But we don’t know what century – certainly well into the 3rd Millennium. There is faster than light travel and a dozen or so settled planets around different stars. All industry and all vehicles are powered by “Shipstone” batteries, which working in some unknown proprietary way. Commercial aircraft are “semi-ballistic” glide rockets undertaking transcontinental journeys in merely hours. 

A favourite device of Heinlein’s is to see society through its small ads: in this part of the book there are fascinating job adverts: “Tranuranics Golden Division on Planet Golden around Procyon-B wants experienced mining engineers. Five year renewable contract”…the reader is told that the advert omits to mention that humans are unlikely to survive 5 years in the job…

Eventually Friday makes it back to her boss and checks in: he sets her to work on something we take for granted with Google and the internet: completely undirected and unsupervised research. This would have been very difficult to do in 1982 without access to reference libraries of books. After some weeks of this he rings her up in the middle of the night, and asks her “when will the next outbreak of Bubonic plague be?” A voice tells him the answer, and she is astonished to find that the voice is her own. That knowledge is the side-effect almost, the fruit, of her undirected research.  A few days later, her boss, an old man, is dead of natural causes, and she is out of a job.

Friday gets another job eventually – couriering something out to the royal family on The Realm, a fabulously rich and infamously totalitarian space colony. On the starship voyage out there, she becomes aware that she is pregnant and being closely watched by bodyguards everywhere. She works out that the unborn child planted within her is destined to become a royal daughter. She will go into hospital alive, go under anaesthetic for what she thinks is a minor procedure, and that will be the end of her.

With some difficulty, Friday escapes: she jumps ship at a colony world halfway; more by luck and plot devices than her own skill and judgement. She escapes from her bodyguards, disappears into the woods, and settles down to a normal existence as a colony wife, Cub den leader and mother.

Fifty-two shades of…something better than grey

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Well I’ve done it! I’ve read fifty-two books this year! I think I can be proud of that. Some of them I have even reviewed properly. We’ll not go through them all in excruciating detail here, but we will discuss broadly, my year’s reading. I never set out to read a book a week, but I did set out for sure, to read many dozens of books in the year.

Of the 52, 15 of them were in my Kindle – I can do both paper books and e-reading. Eight of the books were re-reads. A few of those only, will I highlight. Nicholas Monsarrat’s “The Cruel Sea” which I re-read after seeing the film one Sunday afternoon. C.S Lewis’ “The Great Divorce” remains one of my favourite reads, being an account of a man who dreamt of going on a day trip to Heaven – from a certain another place. Another re-read was R.A Heinlein’s “The moon is a harsh mistress”, at one level, a story about a rebellion in a prison colony in 2075: at another, the greatest manifesto for libertarian political views, you will ever read. Eighteen of the 52 books were fiction – an oddly low number, although it just means that my interests have been well satisfied by non-fiction.

I started the year reading Dr J.H. B Bell’s “A progress in mountaineering”. Bell, as a 16-year old in 1910, cycled 47 miles from Newtonmore to the foot of Ben Nevis, and climbed Nevis alone. And then he cycled back 47 miles again: the account does not make it clear if he cycled 90+ miles in hobnail boots, or if he climbed Nevis in plimsolls. What seems clear, is that when compared with our elders, we have become a nation of wuss.

I enjoyed Jonathan Nicholls’ “Kittyhawk down”, a well-researched story about RAF pilots in the Western desert during WWII. In February I also read Murray Rothbard’s short pamphlet “The Anatomy of the State” (Murray Rothbard also wrote “The fatal conceit” about the errors of socialism), and a book called “The road to Mecca” by Muhammed Asad, a Jewish convert to Islam, who later became a senior diplomat for the government of Pakistan. In March I read Robert Winder’s “The hidden springs of Englishness”, and started Neil Sheehan’s “A bright shining lie” reviewed here – if you read one book about Vietnam, make it this one.

My sister sent me an old copy of Rich Roll’s “Finding Ultra” about an overweight man who turned his life around and became one of the fittest ultra-marathon runners in the world. As much for the appendices on plant-based diet, did I find that book interesting. William Wordsworth’s original travel guide to the Lake District proved oddly relevant centuries after it was written. Having tried and failed to source a copy of Varlam Shalamov’s rare Kolyma Tales, instead I read Hugo Jacek-Bader’s excellent “Kolyma diaries” and “White fever”, about travels in Eastern Russia – startling stuff about a very different world.

I read some science-fiction: Amongst others, Paul McAuley (“The war of maps”), Iain M Banks (“The Algrebraist” – again), an old Keith Laumer novel and two works of the modern writer Adrian Tchaikovsky. Also Heinlein – “Glory Road” (is that even sci-fi??) and “Harsh mistress” as already mentioned. Becky Chambers’ “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” I review here.

I read three books about India: Shashi Tharoor’s (perhaps understandably) bitter and twisted “Inglorious Empire”, William Dalrymple’s account of the East India Company entitled “The Anarchy”, and finally Katie Hickman’s “She-merchants, buccaneers and gentlewomen: British women in India”. All very informative and enabling one to gain a more accurate perspective of world history. The lesson from Shashi Tharoor’s “Inglorious Empire” is that bitterness and negativity, however arguably justifiable, is deeply unattractive.

I have read much about America: I am a fan of America. I believe in what America stands for, though it seem to be in trouble in these times and full of vice and failings. Robert Kaplan’s “Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World”, reviewed here, proved very interesting at the start but perhaps a little disingenous towards the end. A great interest of mine is American history, particularly the westward expansion. I read Bernard Devoto’s; “1846: the year of decision” and John Anthony Caruso’s “The Appalachian Frontier” , was well as several of Dee Brown’s books – one on the Fetterman Massacre, the other on women in the wild west. Dee Brown’s greatest and most famous book, all should read: that is “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee”, an account of the destruction of the native American tribes.

Later in the year I read Tim O’Brien’s “The things they carried” – the Vietnam war as seen through the lens of what soldiers carried with them. One soldier carried a pair of his girlfriend’s tights as a neckscarf, and wore them even after she dumped him. Also, I read Stephen Hough’s “The Great War at sea” – most informative – and Alice Roberts’ “Tamed – ten species that changed our world”. Self-explanatory title there, and rather a lot of detailed biology which I had to skip.

I read Ed Husain’s troubling account of journeys in certain cities in the UK – “Among the mosques”. In order to get published, Ed Husain has to be upbeat and positive about what is happening with Islam in the United Kingdom today, but I find that he can’t possibly be as naive as he comes across in his writing. A deeply worrying travelogue.

Tim Butcher wrote “Blood River”. The age of great explorers, opines one of the reviewers, is not dead. Butcher attempts with only partial success to navigate overland by motorcycle and boat, from the eastern Congo through to the Atlantic coast. The Congo is a messed-up place, and it is deeply messed up for a number of very complicated reasons. It will get worse – much worse. Certain important minerals essential for modern Lithium-ion batteries, required for what some people call “the energy transition”, are most easily sourced in the Congo. In the coming decades the extraction of those minerals, to salve the western conscience and enable electric cars, will do as much damage to Africans in the Congo as King Leopold ever did in his extraction of rubber in the early 20th century.

I read a useful and informative biography of Sir William Stanier by the ever-readable and prolific railway author O.S Nock. This one I found in an excellent second-hand bookshop in Bridport. I read Ryzard Kapuchinsky’s “Imperium” about Soviet Russia – including an unforgettable two-page interlude on how to make peach brandy. What drives my reading, is this – not what is in plain view, but what is not. Sometimes something tangential – a fact or anecdote of paramount importance or of deep interest, is almost literally found “in between the lines”.

I ended the year with David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter”. This is a brilliant account of the Korean War. Another great Pulitzer prize winning author covering vast sweeps of American culture and history. Though some of the descriptions of battles are a little too detailed for me, what made the book is the wide arc of history, the bigger picture. In a book about Korea, I learned much about the “New Deal” and the life and times of Franklin Roosevelt. I learned about changes to domestic politics in the USA that are still very much of importance today. I learned about McCarthyism, and also about Douglas MacArthur – a horribly fascinating, perhaps deservedly reviled, but nonetheless important 20th century figure. What’s it like to have no self-doubt at all? Lack of self-doubt is not one of my qualities.

Earlier in the year, I chanced across Francis Rossi & Rick Parfitt’s “Just for the record”, being an autobiography of Status Quo. This rock autobiography was a disappointment for me; it was potentially great story written in the most perfunctory manner. You would think that lyricists could write! No, obviously not. One thing I recall though is Rick Parfitt writing of himself as a teenager (when his guitar teacher patronised him) “No-one calls me laddie“. See my point above about lack of self-doubt.

Over Christmas I was given “Rainbow in the dark”, the autobiography of Ronnie James Dio. We learn that as a boy he swore to himself that one day he would headline at Madison Square Garden, in his own name – and he did! A readable enough tale of ambition fulfilled, of the virtues of hard work and persistence, and of some of the other less agreeable habits of rock ‘n roll stars. Reading it, I’d like also to read a biography of the guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, if and when such a book becomes available.

This is for balance, for unfortunately, Dio’s account of those years is somewhat self-serving. It is a shame, for I regard him as a great lyricist, and the distinctive sound of his voice, be it in the heavy metal music of Rainbow, or Black Sabbath, formed a background to my youth.

The full list here:

Chris Anderson The official TED guide to public speaking
Paul McAuley The war of maps
J. H B Bell A Progress in mountaineering
Iain M Banks The Algebraist
Jonathan Nicholls Kittyhawk Down
Murray Rothbard Anatomy of the state
Muhammed Asad The road to Mecca
Robert Winder The Last Wolf: the Hidden Springs of Englishness
Adrian Tchaikovsky Cage of souls
Nicholas Monsarrat The Cruel Sea
C.S Lewis The Great Divorce
Neil Sheehan A bright shining lie
Jacek Hugo-Bader Kolyma Diaries
Rich Roll Finding Ultra
William Wordsworth The Lakes
Keith Laumer Doorstep
Jacek Hugo-Bader White Fever
Shashi Tharoor Inglorious Empire
Robert D. Kaplan Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World
Ryzard Kapuchinsky Imperium
Dee Brown The Fetterman Massacre
Bernard Werber Empire of the ants
William Smethurst Writing for television
William Dalrymple The Anarchy
Sven Hassel Court Martial
Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Bernard DeVoto 1846:The year of decision
Len Deighton Blitzkrieg
Dee Brown The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West
John Anthony Caruso The Appalachian Frontier
Larry McMurtry Lonesome dove
Larry McMurtry Dead man’s walk
Larry McMurtry Comanche Moon
Francis Rossi & Rick Parfitt Just for the record – autobiography of Status Quo
Michael Bonavia The birth of British Rail
R.A Heinlein Glory Road
R.A Heinlein The moon is a harsh mistress
O.S Nock William Stanier
Katie Hickman She-merchants, buccaneers and gentlewomen: British women in India
Stephen Longstreet War cries on horseback
George Orwell Animal Farm
Ed Husain Among the mosques
Richard Hough The Great War at sea
Tim O’ Brien The things they carried
Tim Butcher Blood River
C.S Lewis That Hideous Strength
O.S Nock The Settle and Carlisle railway
Adrian Tchaikovsky Children of time
Alice Roberts Tamed – ten species that changed our world
Jeff Long Deeper
David Halberstam The coldest winter: America and the Korean war
Ronnie James Dio Rainbow in the dark

The year of the lockdown – in books

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I’ve read more books in 2020 than I have read for many years. You might think that NOT commuting means I have less time for reading, but the data clearly do not bear that out. I have finished 57 books during the year. Three of them I started during 2019. As of Boxing Day I am still reading five or six books and will not finish any of them in the year.

Of the 57, 16 were re-reads. 43 books I read in physical copy, the remainder on a Kindle.

Emily St John Mandel’s account of a young actress caught up in an apocalyptic plague – “Station Eleven” – was my first of the year, followed quickly by Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Dogs of War”, which was about a world in which bio-engineered war-animals rebel against their corporate masters. The “collected intelligence” of a swarm of artificial bees was of particular interest in that story. Later in the year I read another high-concept novel about war, Adam Robert’s “New Model Army”, which is unusual and shocking in having descriptions of front-line warfare ravaging modern urban Britain – fighter aircraft strafing Guildford town centre, kind of thing. Some very thought-provoking ideas about direct on-line democracy there, too. Continuing the sci-fi line, I read Stephen Baxter’s “The Massacre of mankind”, being a sequel to H.G Well’s “War of the worlds”. My daughter recommended Margaret Attwood’s very readable apocalypse “Oryx and Crake”, which I perhaps oughtn’t have read during the fevered atmosphere of the first lockdown. I finally got around to reading Chinese author’s Cixin Liu’s “The three body problem”, which I didn’t find as exciting or as innovative as his earlier short stories. Of course I’m aware of the controversy relating to his views on who controls parts of central Asia, which we’ve become aware of since filming of this book was proposed. I was challenged – having had it on the shelf for years – by Ursula Le Guin’s “The left hand of darkness”. I read three Frank Herbert novels. “The dragon in the sea”, “Hellstroms Hive”, and “Dune”. A master story-teller, he. Apart from re-reading a few Heinleins (and Vernor Vinge’s startling “A fire upon the deep”), the final great sci-fi novel of the year was Robert Forward’s startling “Dragons Egg”, featuring a race of people living on a neutron star, and what happens when they encounter humankind.
Big hitters for me this year in the non-fiction space were Austin Kleon (“Steal like an artist” and “Show your work”). Kleon has written a series of short, entertaining books that encourage creativity. I’ve read American journalist Robert Kaplan. I started with his “To the ends of the earth” and “Eastwards to Tartary” and his very instructive book about the middle east, “The Arabists”. Staying in the middle east, I finally sourced a copy of Michael Elkins’ “Forged in fury”, about the creation of the State of Israel. Not a work I’d recommend to anti-zionists. I re-read Tristam Hunt on the English Civil War, I read Beevor on the Ardennes offensive. I read the engaging Andrew Marr on the history of Britain, and finished John Keay’s long and complex account of the history of China. I got through Yuval Noah Harari’s “21 questions for the 21st century” though it took me nearly a full year, and I read an inspiring account of Captain Cook’s life by my namesake Richard Hough. Anthony Beevor tells us, in his account of the Battle of the Bulge, about a certain Sergeant Salinger, who managed to write short stories whilst in the winter trenches in the Ardennes – this was before his big break with “The Catcher in the Rye”.
I re-read Tom Bingham on the Rule of Law, re-read HMS Ulysses, and read a life of Rasputin by Alex de Jonge. Remaining on the Russian side, I read P.S Nazaroff’s “Hunted through central Asia”, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The life of a dog”, an anti-soviet allegory whose writing – though not it’s publication – pre-dates “Animal Farm” by 20 years. The Soviets forbade it’s publication; this short and little known work did not appear until the 1960’s.
I’m still reading the official TED guide to public speaking as the year ends. I’m reading Gustav Herling’s GULAG memoir “A world apart”, Sashi Tharoor’s somewhat bitter and twisted “Inglorious empire”, and Muhammed Asaf’s “The road to Mecca”.
Reading should be a pleasure; it should be a distraction. It should entertain and it should inform. One might fall back on old favourites in times of stress. One might also, when feeling strong, test oneself with harder, more challenging material. I leave you with John Martin’s “A raid over Berlin”, an uplifting account of an RAF bomber command flyer’s time as a POW in WWII. Happy new year!

A review of The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter

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A review of The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter, one of the most prominent sci-fi writers around today, has written a sequel to H. G Wells’ “The War of the Worlds“. I confess I never read Wells’ original, but like most people of my generation I’m familiar with the story. Jeff Wayne’s concept album has played it’s part in that familiarity of course; “Forever Autumn” remains one of my favourite songs. A couple of years ago my wife and I went to see the stage show live in London – a real experience. It’s a story that touches every human heart.

I’m no real fan of H.G Wells, whilst acknowledging him as the outstanding futurist of his generation and one of the grandfathers, as it were, of the science fiction genre as we understand it today. I did read one of his short stories – written in Edwardian England more than a decade before the Great War and the invention of the tank – in which he describes great metal wheeled “landships”. It’s pleasing to read Baxter gives them more than a passing nod in this sequel.

The story, written in the same laconic narrative style as H.G Wells, recounts a second invastion of Earth by the Martians, in 1920. It’s readable and a page-turner, but I will reveal no more about it other than recommending it highly.

But here is where I enthuse about Stephen Baxter’s work, for alternative history is his real forte. He manages to challenge the idea that what happened in our past was immutable and things could only have been that way. The Martians invaded in 1907: they were foiled in their attempt by deadly pathogens. But as a direct consequence England and the British Empire never joined what his characters refer to as the “Schlieffen War” in 1914. In his history, there was no Great War, there was no Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were all defeated and tossed into prison.

The theme of “what might have been?” has entertained thinkers for all of history. What if Alexander the Great had lived? What if he had not recovered from a dreadful war injury he received when he was younger still? What if Henry VII’s oldest son had not died as a youth, leaving the throne open for his brother who became Henry VIII? What if the Nazis had successfully invaded?

Stephen Baxter in a number of his works, covers the the space-age era in this kind of detail. In “Voyage” he argues that humankind might have gone on from the Moon to visit Mars in the 1980’s – we could have; we just didn’t, for whatever reason. In “Titan” he sees an expedition to circum-Saturn space using Apollo-era technology, whilst Earth collapses into war, recrimination and apocalypse. In his short story “Sheena 5“, genetically-modified intelligent squid are sent to the asteroids to explore on behalf of humankind, because sending people is too expensive. They were betrayed: they were supposed to be unable to breed, but they could, and they did. Aggressive, intelligent, and capable of hard thinking, they return to Earth decades later as a space-faring species, to find humankind again mired in war, recrimination and apocalypse.

In “War birds” we see an alternative twentieth century far worse than our own, far worse than the worst nightmares of those who look down their nose at Donald Trump. The title refers to NASA’s space shuttles, which are seen and used almost entirely as fighter/bombers. We see Nixon rehabilitated; Tehran destroyed by an American atom bomb. A nuclear rocket blows up, rather like Challenger did in 1986, smearing radioactive material across the Florida sky. Reagan’s response is to start a nuclear war and destroy the Soviet Union. It gets worse…Stephen Baxter is willing to imagine the unimaginable in a quite relaxed and very English understated way. In his novel “Moonseed” (which does end on a positive note, though not before the Earth has been destroyed with billions dead) someone notes (after Arthur’s Seat becomes an active volcano) that “Edinburgh is Olympus Mons now”.

I do hope there’s hope: a review of The Rig, by Roger Levy

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I cannot now recall who recommended this story by Roger Levy: possibly William Gibson, on Twitter, or possibly the recommendation came from having read Dave Eggers’ upsetting story “The Circle”.

Do we judge a book by it’s cover? Alas, we do, and the publishers are complicit in this, bringing us paperbacks for womenfolk that are broadly (but not always) in light, pastel colours, and paperbacks for men, that are either black or in dark hues. You won’t be reading an Iain M. Banks novel in a paperback copy that is anything other than dark in colour. “Dark have been my dreams of late”, said Theoden King, in the Lord of the Rings. And well they might have been if he’d read this book or indeed a lot of other modern science fiction.

I long for science fiction that is positive and hopeful. I started “The Rig” and after a struggle at the start, I got into it. So I tweeted to the author that I thought it was great. [That this is possible at all is a both a blessing and a curse of modern social media]. I wrote to him, “I do hope there is hope”…

What we have in “The Rig” is a future where humankind has had to move to another “system” where there are a number of nominally habitable planets. Much is made of terraforming. Two planets are different – and one of them, Gehenna, a loosely Christian religious dictatorship, forms the background to the opening of the story. The story’s hero is, as some say, “on the spectrum“. Indeed, Alef is autistic to the point of being socially inadequate, but very, very clever. He – and his father before him – are the not exactly unwilling tools of an unpleasant gangster needing assistance with computers.

We’ve seen it all before. These gangsters and all their disgusting subordinate mercenaries, enforcers, mistresses and hangers-on all appear in the dark science fiction of such authors as Alistair Reynolds, Paul McAuley, Iain. M Banks and most particularly Richard Morgan. I grow tired of them. It displeases me that writers, publishers and indeed the reading public, seem have a fascination for them, all the sordid violence and mutilation, all the vengeance and torture. I agree with R.A Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long, who said in “Time enough for love”: “I’ve never understood the gangster mentality. I simply know what to do with gangsters“.

Notwithstanding all that, I found I could hardly put this book down, and I found that the plot drew me on. It was simple enough not to confuse me and yet refined and complex enough not to be completely see-through. You’ve got implicit discussion of the internet and what it all means; you’ve got old Earth clearly destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by some unexplained environmental catastrophe. You’ve got a dig at organised religion and for that matter, at Christianity. So far, so normal for “dark” sci-fi – all the right boxes are ticked. But, much more unusually, you’ve got an autistic main character whose feelings and thoughts the author has worked hard to portray.

I’d make a plea, as a Christian, for positive, hopeful and uplifting stories. I’ll admit the publisher may say “it won’t sell”, but you know – I think it will. Something that defies the rather H.P Lovecraftian view taken by nearly all modern science-fiction. In all my life of reading I can think of only a handful of authors writing such material. I was impressed by Maria Dona Russell’s “The Sparrow” – reviewed here, then we’re back to Stephen Lawhead, whose works “The Search for Fierra/The Siege of Dome“ and Dream Thief I read thirty years ago. Or even C.S Lewis’ classics like “Out of the Silent Planet”, “Perelandra” and “That Hideous Strength”.

Great future inventions

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I was minded to write about some of the great inventions we may yet see, and to look at the rich imaginations of some of our great sci-fi writers.

1. The diamond flechette gun in Alistair Reynold’s “Chasm City”.  A small and easily concealed hand weapon, made out of diamond and exotic forms of Carbon – because there is no metal in it, of course, it can be carried with impunity through airport scanners and other such devices.  It is clockwork and as well as being made of diamond, fires bits of diamond as projectiles. It might be clockwork but I don’t think the users wind it up. It is, as characters describe, a thing of ‘intense, evil beauty’.  “Chasm City” is set in the 27th century.

2. The Turing Gate in Paul MacAuley’s “Cowboy Angels”.  In an alternative reality, Alan Turing is not hounded to death by the state for being gay, but emigrates to America where he goes onto invent a strange gate or means to move between dimensions and alternate realities.  The Americans of that reality (not ours) take it upon themselves to visit their particular brand of democracy on all other Americas in existence. All well and good until they visit the reality where President Nixon was elected.

3. The cortical stack, allowing Digital Human Storage, in Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” and it’s two sequels.  This memory device is about the size of a cigarette butt.  The device is implanted in the spinal column soon after birth and records everything – sensations, memories, feelings. All can be backed up, everything can be uploaded into a computer as digital data.  Humanity is reduced to big data – both freed from death and enslaved by eternal life.

4. Douglas-Martin sun-power screens in R.A Heinlein’s “Let there be light”. Two inventors in the 1960’s perfect bioluminescent screens that can be used to convert electricity into light, or, if stuck in the sunshine, act as an effective solar panel, generating electricity.

5. The Bobble, in Vernor Vinge’s “Across realtime“.  A spherical and perfectly reflective indestructable minature cosmos, which can be created in any size from tiny up to tens of kilometres across.  They can last for moments – or for tens of millions of years.  Anything trapped inside endures NO duration at all, no matter how long they or it are stuck inside. They are effective one-way time machines.  Vinge has his characters use them as perfect (if someone inconveniently shaped) fridges, as remarkable air bags to protect aircraftmen in crashes, as restraints for madmen, as time machines, and as a means to contain political prisoners. Oddly he misses using micrometre sized bobbles as a building material.

6. The piece of paper as a computer in Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”. In the Diamond Age – late in this century – nanotech is all. An everyday piece of paper is many tens of thousands of molecules thick.  It’s a small matter to design the inside of it so that those many molecules can act as a kind of electro-mechanical microprocessor, churning through sums, doing calculations – doing computer stuff, in fact.

7. The genetically modified millipede used as sutures, in William Gibson’s “Count Zero“, set in the early 21st century but written in the 1980’s.  Our young hero is slashed across the back in a knife attack whilst on the run. The surgeon places a length of this millipede over the wound, ensures all the many legs are properly lined up on each side, and with a flourish, rips the spine from the brainless bio-artifact. It’s death spasm causes the legs to contract, neatly sewing a huge wound together in a split second.

8. Windows running on your clothes, and displaying in contact lenses, in Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbow’s End”.  Vinge can’t call it Windows of course, but calls it “Symphony”. Your clothes are embedded with threads acting as powerful microprocessors, and they are able to send information to contact lenses. Augmented reality – you want the low-down on this neighbourhood? Just google it and the info scrolls across the top right of your field of vision.  Communicate with your computer by sub-vocalising or just thinking what want to say,

9. The means to broadcast sound direct to your aural nerve – the “friend” device as seen in Stephen Baxter’s “Ark”.  Developed before 2020, the device renders earphones obsolete. A small instrument in your pocket, or your mobile phone, broadcasts sound in perfect hi-fi direct to your brain.  It’s a side issue in Baxter’s story which is about rising waters flooding the whole earth.

10.  The monomolecular spray-on hosiery in Iain M Banks’ “Against a dark background”. Others have said there are more ideas on one page of an Iain M. Banks novel than in whole books by other others. Here, he proposes a monomolecular covering for the female leg that looks great and feels great – spray on tights, in effect.

A review of “Dark Eden”, by Chris Beckett

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A review of “Dark Eden”, by Chris Beckett

I picked this up in a charity shop in Aberdeen: I’ve been in that shop a dozen times and bought nothing. Then, I go in on a rainy September morning, on the way from one meeting to another, and find not one, not two, but three books. I’m reading all three at once; this one I have finished already.

“Dark Eden” explores what might happen a few generations down the line, if a very few people – in this case, just two – found themselves having to scratch a living having landed with little or no equipment on a deeply unsuitable world. Stephen Baxter covers similar ideas in his “pendant” short stories “Earth II” and “Earth III”. Heinlein touches on it in a brief aside in “Time enough for love”.

Beckett neatly side-steps the science. It is not necessary to explain the biology and geology of his strange sunless world, quite literally enlivened by bizarre geothermal trees. But we’ve seen the life on geothermal vents on the seabed – such things are more than plausible. His forests are islands full of life and light, in a sea of darkness, snow and ice. In the story, the protagonists travel from one such island to another, to make a new life where there is more game, more space, more resources. It is an ancient story, going back a million years on our own world.

Where the story excels, is in dealing with human relationships. It deals head on with the very serious consequences of inbreeding several generations in from just one man and woman. Many of the population have cleft pallettes, hare lips and club feet – and are looked after by their healthier, luckier siblings. Truly a dark Eden, but with the warm light of compassion only now starting to flicker. The primitive society that has formed from the original couple is matriarchal, and the heroine can see that the time for this is ending, and that “the time of men” is coming. The hero, John Redlantern, as well as being a visionary, a Moses who leads his people through the wilderness, is also the first to commit murder, a destroyer of tradition and stability, and also inherently self-centred – it’s all about him.

Wikipedia describes the novel as “Social science fiction” which may not be flattering. But, “social science” is all over the story. Many important ideas are discussed. We see how hunter-gatherers can lay waste to swathes of forest over generations. We see how a matriarchal society can work where there is plenty – but how such a society begins to break down when resources are scarce. We see the effects of inbreeding. We see the importance of tradition in retaining knowledge in a society where there is little or no learning.

What I liked is that this is no dystopia: though things are going wrong, though things are changing, from beginning to end, there is a positive dialogue with what is happening and what has happened. In a genre where so often we find stories focusing on the negative – the very dark but excellent work of Richard Morgan and Alistair Reynolds are just two examples – it’s refreshing to see a positive outlook.

A review of “Dune”, by Frank Herbert

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Classic sci-fi: A review of “Dune”, by Frank Herbert

It is quite odd, re-reading Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel, to see his ideas  – written down in the early 1960’s and ahead of their time then – in relation to how we stand today in relation to Islam.

Dune, at one level, is a sweeping space opera, an adventure where two noble families battle for supremacy in an imperial setting – but set in a strange and far future.  Imperial politics are what they usually are – but are also subtly controlled by a shadowy and all-powerful female priesthood, the Bene Gesserit.  Interstellar space travel is controlled exclusively by the Guild of Navigators – and they accomplish it only by use of a difficult to obtain mind-altering drug.  This drug is made from a strange spice available in one place only in all the universe – the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune.  The novel is the story of two families fighting for control of the spice.

But at another level, Dune explores the culture of desert Arabs, and draws heavily on Islamic ideas such as jihad or holy war.  I don’t think a publisher would touch it if it was written today.  Indeed, even writing such a work would put you at risk from those who see Islam as completely beyond or above discussion – much less actual criticism.

Whilst is is broadly sympathetic to Islam and to desert culture, we see parallels drawn between the rise of the prophet, and the rise of Frank Herbert’s central character Paul Muad’Dib, and the holy war or Jihad that Paul Muad’Dib is so keen to prevent.  He sees it in visions and dreams: war, suffering, warriors and fighting, spreading out unstoppable from Arrakis, across the known universe.  And it is the last thing he wants.

As a writer though, two things to note: firstly, Dune as pure story seems much less sophisticated than later science fiction, and second, there is some wonderful mixing of metaphor and adjective, which I record here.  The central character Paul – at this point just fifteen but the son of a Duke – and his mother are marooned in the desert after a plane crash, and “…he inhaled, sensed the softly contralto smell of sage climbing the night…it had brought a stillness to the basin so unuttered that the blue milk moonlight could almost be heard flowing across sentinel saguaro and spiked paint brush. There was a low humming of light…”

I was charmed by the idea that moonlight could be heard, or that the smell of sage could be contralto, or stillness, unuttered.

A review of “The Sparrow”, by Maria Dona Russell

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Social science fiction: A review of “The Sparrow”, by Maria Dona Russell

Maria Dona Russell’s “The Sparrow” – a good and readable Sci-fi story. That is praise enough, in the end, in a world where readability and good English seem to matter less and less.

I write that, but I’ve just finished Stephen King’s classic novel “The Stand”. Stephen King is an icon amongst wannabee writers. In all of “The Stand”there are perhaps two or three adverbs. 28 pages into “The Sparrow” and one of the characters is doing something”expressively”. Hmm.

Whilst ostensibly writing sci-fi, she has used sci-fi memes to enable a discussion of such eternal matters as celibacy, pride, marriage, and relationship. Her Jesuits seem believable to me, though her space vehicles and her aliens are perhaps less convincing, and beg more questions than they answer. It’s an interesting point; after all, what is fiction for but to stimulate the discussion of ideas?

Her Puerto Rican priest Fr. Sandoz is the central towering figure; gaunt, hugely capable, prideful, strong. Yet he is utterly destroyed, ruined, by his appalling experiences on the alien world. It was his pride and strength that helped destroy him. He is healed and restored to wholeness in the end, not by the working of grace, nor even by human compassion, but by robust and stern treatment from his superiors at the Society of Jesus. This I find unconvincing – but I believe in grace.

Alpha Centauri is one of the very nearest stars to Earth. That humankind should receive radio signals from intelligent lifeforms from somewhere as relatively close as that, implies that the universe must simply teem with intelligent life around almost every star (in keeping with the ideas of older writers like Poul Anderson or even more modern authors like Stephen Baxter.) But she has not taken this idea forward.

The relativity and ballistics seem fine at first glance. Her space vehicle gets to Alpha Centauri in about 18 years (as seen from Earth) but time dilation makes the journey time about a year as seen from on board. The engines of her space vehicles remain as undescribed as those of Iain M Banks, and are even less convincing thereby. To accelerate at 1G up to light speed, and then decelerate again, as one must to reach Alpha Centauri in less than decades, implies quite remarkable fuel consumption. There are some interesting gaps in her engineering, but in the end her book is not about engines and aliens, but about people and human relationships. An astonishing work and I’m glad I found it.

The Treaty of Seattle

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(loosely and colloquially translated from the original Russish)

About that time, there was Treaty of Seattle, which marked end of long and bitter war, between Chinese on one side, and almost everyone else, on other side.  Some called it third world war.  Was last world war.  Major nations of world fought alongside our ancestors against China.  Long term effect of war was to re-ignite democracy in Russia and strengthen weakening culture in rest of world in last decades before start of Diaspora.

Though nuclear weapons were used, and some cities were destroyed, war was never “apocalypse” predicted in the literature and media of the world at that time.  It began some fifteen years earlier after aggressive and sudden Chinese moves into Russian territory.

At same time, Chinese miliary moved south towards continent of Australia.  Were very heavy losses at first – in first six weeks of war, ancient city state of Singapore had fallen, and all Russia east of Lake Baikal was in Chinese hands.  But all that ground was taken back over course of war.

Advance of Chinese brought political chaos across all earth, collapsing political unions and causing other minor wars.  Recent work by historians shows that discoveries in Antarctica, and what happened as a result (see Yekatarinburg offensive, Libby-Sheffield engines, Antarctic Discoveries) were rather more important to victory than once thought.

Human cost of Russo-Chinese War was over 4 million Russian and alliance dead, 30 million Chinese dead, and destruction of some Russian and Chinese cities. Also, Chinese Confucian culture was destroyed forever.

Following war, came launch of Russian starship Yekatarina Velikaya.  Exact date we can no longer be sure of, due to small differences between Standard years and Earth years.  But we believe this was around one hundred years after first man in space Yuri Gagarin.

The voyage of the Vanguard

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Most of us learned in school that the first interstellar crossing was made by the “New Frontiers”. Our very calendar is based on this; the Galactic calendar starts from the year of her return to Earth after her 74 year journey. But what is not so widely known, is that the “New Frontiers” was not the first human starship.  Another vessel had set out from Earth a century or so earlier.  This vessel was ostensibly lost in space – it was never heard from again.  Until now.

This presentation to the annual seminar of the Ancient History Society of New Rome, brings news of that long-lost earlier vessel. Her name was “Vanguard”. She was discovered about a century ago by an Iskandrian naval vessel, patrolling the depths of space between Iskander and Fatima. Because the fastest means of transmitting information from one place to another is by star ship, it has taken 105 years for the news to reach us here on Secundus.

The presentation is multi-disciplinary in topic and scope. It will cover the strange chance by which the Vanguard was detected at all; it covers the unusual engineering techniques used to slow her down, and it addresses the archaeological issues involved in getting aboard and then accessing her computer records.  Finally, it reveals the exciting discoveries that were made from those records, regarding what happened to the ship and the crew.

For when her route was plotted, it could be shown that the Vanguard had passed a planet centuries before.  When the Iskandrians visited that remote and uncharted world, they discovered it to be inhabited by humans – but not from the Diaspora. They were savage and intractable cannibals, but they were very intelligent savage and intractable cannibals.  They were shown by genetic study to be descendants of the Vanguard’s original crew.

(After a short passge in R.A Heinlein’s “Time enough for love“, where Galahad, over dinner, recounts to the table the story of this discovery,  causing something of a shock to Lazarus.)

Ebb

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Kenning was ahead, his sledge making a hissing sound as he pulled it over the ice, his red arctic wear bright against the white of the snow and the almost unbearable blue of the sky. The mountains reared to our left, the exposed rock predominantly brown in the sunshine, the snow vaulting gracefully upwards in smooth curves. To the right there was nothing – only the ice-shelf, almost flat out to the horizon, like solid light in the punishing glare of the sun.

A mighty wall of rock was exposed; the lowest ice levels in centuries, prompted by the highest temperatures, had melted so much ice that there was more of the bare rock of Antarctica visible than at any previous time in history. The mountain range curved round, only a part of it visible as the two men trudged towards it.  The shadows of seracs and pillars of ice showed black against the brown of the rock in the light of the sun. And there Kenning’s eye caught an anomalous shadow, a shadow bigger than the ice that caused it. It was still distant; John frowned under his goggles. After three weeks he was tired – and patient. Whatever it was could wait until they were closer. More steady footsteps, pulling hard against the heavy harness, straining against the wide straps that connected him to his sledge. His feet crunched against the ice and snow underfoot. His breath rasped in his ears, his heart beat thundering. The path lay slightly uphill, and the two men slowed down as the slope increased. As the incline leveled off again, Kenning stopped and leaned heavily on his sticks. He glanced around at his companion, and then back at the rock wall. The strange shaped shadow was some form of enormous cave entrance or depression, he thought. It was still a good five kilometres distant.

As they drew nearer to the rock wall, drawn automatically by the strange cave exposed by the retreating ice, something quite appalling started to dawn on them. For as their comprehension of the approaching cliff face grew better, they realised that this depression in it was quite artificial.  It appeared to be the entrance to a tunnel, perfectly round in shape, though half buried in ice. It was clearly enormous, the roof perhaps thirty metres above the surface of the ice, and even then the ice filled half of what was a large round shaft bored directly into the mountain.

Phil Keynes stared into the blackness of the tunnel. Ice filled over half of the wide bore, a ribbon of silver and grey disappearing into the gloom, colouring from white into grey as the light faded. He looked up at the sides, taking in the smoothness of the finish, the grey colour of something that looked like concrete contrasting with the light brown of the surrounding rock. This tunnel entrance had lain buried and concealed in the ice for millennia, brought to light only by the changes in climate that had started at the end of the last century. That it was not natural was beyond any shadow of a doubt; it must have been built in dizzying antiquity, perhaps even before the Antarctic ice cap had come into existence. It clearly predated all of human civilisation. Such a structure might be twenty thousand years old – or a hundred million. A very strange and ancient feeling arose deep inside Phil Keynes, not exactly terror, not exactly excitement. Here there was something awesome, maybe something great, perhaps something horrible beyond human comprehension. The stygian gloom of the tunnel as it disappeared into the rock of the mountain seemed to contain every kind of childhood bogeyman that ever existed. The atavistic fear of the dark that lies hidden even in the strongest men arose in Phil. And against himself, a Royal Marine and experienced soldier who had thought he had seen everything, he shivered.