At the Edge of the Solar System
Alain Doressoundiram & Emmanuel Lellouch
205 pages including index
published in 2008

In 2006 the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto, long the ninth and last planet in our Solar System from being a planet into a socalled dwarf planet, a new category not just meant for Pluto, but also a half dozen other planets that had been recently discovered at the edge of the Solar System. With the number of planets rapidly rising and estimates raging from a 200 to 2,000 more to be discovered as well as the general feeling that Pluto, only one fifth the mass of the Moon just did not fit in with the rest of the classical planets, this new categorisation was needed, halfway between true planets and asteroids or comets, now classified as small Solar System bodies.

Surprisingly for such a dry subject, the reclassification of Pluto led to a huge amount of media coverage and some controversy; many people, including myself, saw the argument as somewhat specious or had a sentimental attachment to the idea of the classical nine planets. They now were confronted with the reality of the Solar System being massively more complex than they had suspected, with our knowledge of the very edges of it having expanded massively since even the late seventies. Which is where At the Edge of the Solar System: Icy New Worlds Unveiled comes in: an introductionary text book about these discoveries and how they were made.

Though a relatively short book, the main text only being 178 pages long, it packs in a lot of material. It’s a good overview not just of what we know is in the trans-neptunian Solar System but also how we got to know this. Much of what oressoundiram and Lellouch talk about I knew at least a bit of already, but the way they have put it all together made me understand it better. It’s laid out as a text book, with frequent explanation boxes to go deeper into scientific concepts or astronomical techniques mentioned in the main text, without breaking up its flow.

The book starts with a very short history of how our ideas evolved from antiquity to the year that Pluto was discovered, 1930, focusing on how measured inaccurancies in the predicted orbit of each successive outer planet led to the discovery of Neptune, Uranus and ultimately Pluto. In the second chapter the focus lies on Pluto itself and what eighty years of observation taught us about it: not very much, due to the huge distance it’s from us. It was only in 1978 that somebody actually noticed that Pluto, which we thought had a mass greater than Mercury, was actually a double system with a moon almost as big as itself, Charon. As we slowly got to know more about both Neptune, especially its moon Triton and Pluto/Charon, the more something seemed off about calling Pluto a planet.

From there it’s a logical step to look back at how the Solar System might’ve started and what that may imply for trans-neptunian space, as well as where comets come from. Then it’s back to the outer rim and the Kuiper Belt, originally a theoretical concept for the origin of comets, a huge second asteroid/cometoid belt of icy worlds which Pluto is in the middle off. As more and more objects, comets, plutinos and other exotic worlds were being discovered, the belt moved more and more from theory into reality, the more so as more proper, Pluto like planets were being discovered in the nineties and early twentyfirst century.

In the fifth chapter the writers go deeper into those newly discovered worlds, what they look like (as far as we know) and what else we can tell about them from Earthbound observation. The sixth chapter meanwhile is all about the Pluto controversy. As the discoveries detailed in the previous chapters undermined Pluto’s uniqueness the need for a reclassification grew and ultimately ended as I described above. There is something to say for this, even if you can’t help but suspect part of the motive for it is to keep the number of proper planets down, as there indeed isn’t any good reason to keep Pluto one, but none of the other worlds, when some are barely smaller, some as big as and some even are maybe larger than Pluto itself.

Finally the book ends with a short chapter on the history of the outer Solar System as far as we know it and what we don’t quite have figured out yet about it, the biggest of which is why the Kuiper belt ends so abruptly. Is that just a question of more observation or could there be a true mechanism in the history of the early Solar System present that could explain this. The very last chapter then takes a quick look at the near future and the projects that are under development to give us a much better view of the outer Solar System and which might help us solve these problems.

I read At the Edge of the Solar System: Icy New Worlds Unveiled in just a few days, mainly while commuting to and from work. Reading any scientific book that way can be a recipe for disaster as you can’t get in the flow of it, but the way Doressoundiram and Lellouch have written it made it a breeze to get through, while still keeping a relatively large information density. If you’re interested in Pluto and the outer Solar System but not that familiar with it, this is a good introduction.

Star Hunter
Andre Norton
96 pages
published in 1961

For a lot of American science fiction fans my age or older, Andre Norton was the first “real” sf writer they ever read, largely because she was hugely prolific and specialised in what we’d now call young adult novels. For some reason however she was never all that popular in the Netherlands so I’ve read little of her work so far. But that’s changing, thanks to Project Gutenberg, who have a fair few of her books available, those on which the original US copyrights had not been renewed. Star Hunter is one of them, originally published as an Ace Double. I read it during a couple of lunch breaks at work.

Ras Hume is a pilot for the Out-Hunters Guild who on a trip to the newly discovered planet of Jumala has made a discovery that could make him incredibly rich, but to exploit it he needs to make a deal with Wass, the biggest crime boss on Nahuatl. What he found was the lifeboat from the Largo Drift, a space ship which disappeared six years ago, taking with it the heir to the Kogan estate. He also has a plausible candidate to play the part of Rynch Brodie, the teenage heir. What he needs Wazz for is to condition this boy to actually believe he is this heir, then he will be let lose on Jumala for Hume to discover him when he brings over the safari party he’s scheduled to pilot there. It’s an almost foolproof plan, surely nothing can go wrong.

But there wouldn’t have been a story if something didn’t go wrong. The patsy Hume has chosen, Vye Lansor, an orphan plucked from the foulest bar in Nahuatl’s spaceport, was conditioned and dropped on Jumala, but the condition wasn’t good enough and he remembers flashes from his true life. Worse, while Jumala was deemed fit for human visiting and free of intelligent alien life, something has been woken up by the safari party and Hume and Lansor/Brodie find themselves as grudging allies against this alien menace as this attempts to herd them towards imprisonment in the hills of Jumala.

Since Andre Norton has only ninetysix pages in which to tell her story, it obviously has to be tight. Which means that while we do get a resolution to the central plot line, the mystery of the aliens and why they attacked the safari party is never followed through. Hume and Lansor bond, fight their way out of the alien traps and survive and that’s it. A bit unsatisfactory, but not the end of the world.

In the same way, there’s little room to develop the settings, Nahuatl and Jumala, very much. Both are solid pulp sf settings, feel more like small towns than whole planets, but are deftly sketched in by Norton with a few neatly chosen details, especially Jumala. There are the watercats for example, dangerous aquatic ambush predators lurking in creeks and rivers, and the scavengers that come out of the water to finish off their kills — or the watercat, if it’s unlucky. Clearly some thought has gone into setting up the planet, even if it’s only a stage for a pulp adventure.

As science fiction Star Hunter is of course incredibly dated, of the rockets and blasters school of adventure sf. The scheme that drives its plot, to substitute some lookalike for the heir of a vast estate, has long ago been made impossible by the development of cheap DNA testing, while most of the technology on display that isn’t part of the standard sf furniture doesn’t really look all that advanced either. But these are just quibbles. Taken on its own terms, this is a tight, fun, enjoyable little story. Ideal for reading in some stolen moments at work…

Rule 34
Charlie Stross
358 pages
published in 2011

It’s only thanks to Christopher Priest’s tirade about this year’s Clarke Award shortlist that you remember that you haven’t reviewed Charlie Stross latest novel, Rule 34 yet. You know that, like Halting State, which it is a sequel to, it’s written in the second person and you briefly toy with the idea to write your review the same way. But then you come to your senses and decide to write the rest of the review in a less irritating way.

Not that I minded the second person point of view in Rule 34, as Charlie Stross made it work and it fit the central metaphor of these books, reality as a massive multiplayer immersive game. At the same time I can see where Christopher Priest is coming from when he writes:

Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet.

It’s funny because it’s true, if mean spirited. As a writer Charlie Stross does bring a kind of geeky enthusiasm to his novels that can be wearing if you don’t share his interests. Stross’ writing style is snarky rather than witty, more interested in conveying information than in a mellifluous turn of phrase and he can be prone to a bit of infodumping. As with using second person point of view, it is not to everybody’s tastes. And if that’s the case for you, as it seems to have been for Priest, it would be a slog to get through Rule 34.

Yet neither his writing style nor his choice of the second person viewpoint is a flaw in Rule 34; instead they’re deliberate choices made to enable Charlie Stross to tell the story he wanted to tell with this novel. Like its predecessor Halting State this novel is an attempt to create a plausible near future Scotland by looking at various contemporary trends and extrapolating them a couple of decades into the future. As fitting an “internet puppy”, most of these changes are technological, extensions of current computing trends a few years down the road, but Stross looks beyond what might technologically be possible and embeds these developments in a political and sociological context.

The central idea at the heart of Rule 34 is that of the panopticon singulary, the way in which technological developments, commercial pressures and the law come together to kill privacy. The second person viewpoint in which it is written drives this home, because it makes the reader complicit in the panopticon: the characters become the reader’s avatars, as if this is a videogame rather than a novel. At the same time, Stross’ writing style, detached & snarky distances you from the characters as well which again reinforces that sense of complicity, of voyeurism.

For the people caught in Rule 34‘s plot, Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, banished to the Rule 34 Squad, the one dealing with all the pervy crimes, Anwar Hussein, a Scottish-Pakistani petty criminal turned honorary consul for a small, new Central-Asian state and “John Christie”, point man for The Organisation, having to negotiate their way through life with this sort of omnipresent surveillance is just part of their daily routines. So Liz spents her entire working life in CopSpace, through which she both has access to all data the Scottish police forces acquire and the system can keep taps on her. Hussein meanwhile is expected to keep his smartphone on and with him everyday so the polis can snitch on his location 24/7, while “Christie” has to take pains to avoid areas with too high a surveillance level, like airports.

Rule 34‘s story starts with Liz being called out to a crime scene, a suspicious death of an ex-criminal, who died while getting a colonic irrigation from an old Soviet machine that used to belong to Ceasescu… A true double wetsuit job, it at first just seems a regretable accident, but of course there’s more going on. Anwar Hussein meanwhile is beginning to wonder why exactly he has been made honorary consul for Issyk-Kulistan for. “John Christie” finally knows exactly what he’s in Edinburgh for, to recreate the Scottish branch of The Organisation. Each of these three protagonists thinks they’re at least somewhat in control of their own lifes, even if they’re now clearly been caught up into something bigger, but this turns out not to be the case.

Instead through the course of the novel it becomes clear that they are each being nudged in some way or another to perform certain actions, by somebody who knows how to do this for each of them individually and without their knowledge. Nudge theory is quite popular with the current British government, who see this as a cheap and easy way to get the hoi polloi to behave themselves and the more data you got on people the easier it becomes to find the right nudge. Current implementations are still primitive, in Rule 34 Stross imagines what it would be like if the people doing the nudging had perfect methods and all the data needed to use them, thanks to the panopticon. None of the protagonists ever quite catch up with the fact that they were being nudged or the overarching plot these nudges served, but the reader does get to know who is behind everything that happened and why.

As said Rule 34 sets out to create a plausible near future world which we could concievably get through from where we are now. Charlie Stross has done the most difficult job any sf writer can undertake, try and predict not just what new technology could do, but how it will be used and how the law, government and societies as a whole will handle it. As such then it is a worthy novel to be on the Clarke Awards shortlist.

Laurels Are Poison
Gladys Mitchell
237 pages
published in 1942

Whereas my fiction reading mostly centers around science fiction and fantasy, Sandra was always more interested in other genres, especially that of the classical cozy detective story. Her alltime favourite was probably Margery Allingham, but Gladys Mitchell was a strong second. Now while Mitchell was as prolific as any of the big name writers, averaging one novel a year, she never was as popular as an Agatha Christie or Ngaoi Marsh and her books weren’t reprinted as often, which meant they’re much harder to find than those of her more famous counterparts. Which is why Sandra had only a small number of Gladys Mitchell novels, but she read and reread them at least once a year. Of that small number, I think Laurels Are Poison was the one she reread the most, certainly the one she had read the most recent before she died. Which is why I decided to read it as well.

Laurels Are Poison stars Mrs Bradley, Mitchell’s version of the noisy old biddy detective ala Miss Marple (Christie) or Miss Silver (Patricia Wentworth). Mrs Bradley has been hired as head warden of one of the houses of a women’s training college. That’s her cover, but she’s really here to investigate the disappearance of the previous year’s warden, Miss Murchan, who was last seen at the end of term dance and never came back. As soon as she arrives at the college, it’s clear somebody doesn’t want her to start her investigation, as amongst a flood of not very funny but innocent practical jokes some not so innocent traps are set for her…

From that description this may sound like a bog standard detective story and in some sense it is, but the mystery of Miss Murchan’s disappearance honestly isn’t the reason you keep reading. Instead it’s the setting and characters that make this book. Mrs Bradley is the usual, sensible, almost omniscient older woman detective, but for once she’s not a spinster, but instead a modern career woman, well known in her field and who has been married several times. Her physical appearance as described by Mitchell through the viewpoints of her other characters is not flattering, “the old crocodile” being the mildest.

Alongside Mrs Bradley, several other characters are followed: Deborah Cloud, the sub warden and three students Laura Menzies, Kitty Trevelyan, and Alice Boorman, the “three musketeers”, all four of which will wittingly or unwittingly help Mrs Bradley solve the mystery. Deborah Cloud, or “the Deb” as the students call her is mostly there as the innocent bystander there to ask the questions the readers might have, while the three musketeers, especially Laura, play a more active role in the resolution.

For long stretches of the book the mystery itself disappears to the background as we instead follow the daily lives of the three students and the sub-warden, all done in a jolly hockeysticks, slangy tone of voice which took me some time to get used to; some examples can be found at the Gladys Mitchell website. Overall the tone of the book is light, amusing, slightly tongue in cheek. What surprised me was the date of publication: 1942, which you wouldn’t have known from the story, with no mention of war whatsoever. Instead it reads as if it was written in the 1930ties.

On the whole I found the book a bit of a mess; entertaining but not very focused. I think I will read more Gladys Mitchell, if only because Sandra rated her so highly, but this wasn’t as good as I expected it to be.

Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth
Dean Mullaney & Bruce Canwell
324 pages
published in 2011

If you’re not a hardcore comics nerd you’ve probably never heard of Alex Toth, one of the greatest cartooning geniuses American comics have ever seen. That’s because he never really had a comics series or character that he made his own, but instead had his art scattered over hundreds of seperate assignments for dozens of publishers, often wasted on formulaic, throwaway stories. His true genius lay in his approach to the art form, the way he stripped down cartooning to its essentials, never putting down one more line than was needed. Once you see his artwork you can understand why he’s so revered by his peers, a true “artists’ artist”, but first you needed to find his artwork, which has long been difficult to find other than by hunting through back issue bins.

This has changed in the last decade or so, fortunately, as the American comics field in general has become more aware and interested in its heritage, leading to a flood of high quality reprint projects as well as art books/biographies focusing on individual artists. Toth has had some attention paid to him before, but with Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth, the first of a trilogy of books devoted to Toth’s life and career there finally is a book that does true justice to Toth’s genius.

It does so by being more than just a lavishly produced, gorgeous looking coffee table book and biography but also a showcase for Toth’s artwork. As many or more pages are devoted to reproducing Toth’s art, including a huge selection of complete stories as there are to talking about his art; there are only a few pages entirely devoid of his artwork. It’s this that makes Genius, Isolated such an important book, a demonstration of Toth’s artistic genius as well as an archive of stories that haven’t been seen since their first publication decades ago. Such showcases are important to establish an artist’s reputation, as they provide both a convenient sampler for people new to them, as well as a signal that yes, this artist is important enough to merit a fifty dollar art book.

There is a downside to publishing so many complete stories in this book, as I explained a few days ago at Wis[s]e Words, which is that you can’t help but notice how many of the stories Toth did his best work on were, to be honest, not nearly as well written as Toth illustrated them. If, like me, you tend to focus more on the story than the art when reading comics, it can be a handicap in appreciating Toth’s work.

Fortunately Toth’s art is strong enough to overcome this handicap; you can’t help but fall in love with it. What characterises it is his use of strong, angular lines to sketch his figures, the use of black shapes, silhouettes and shadow both to create mood and to compose his pages and panels, the economical way in which he conveys emotion with just a few lines and how he places his characters to guide your eye over the pages. Composition is the key word with Toth; at each level — panel, page, story — he excels in creating a holistic experience and make it look natural. Apart from that, his artwork at his best is drop dead gorgeous, the kind of art that leaves you staring at it open mouthed in sheer admiration.

The text that goes along with Toth’s artwork concentrates on the artist’s life and career, providing a decent biography, though not really much more than that. It’s good enough as it goes, but I would’ve liked to see more discussion of Toth’s art and how he created it. There is some of that, but not enough for my liking. Hopefully we’ll see more of that in the next two volumes in the series.

Keeping it Real
Justina Robson
279 pages
published in 2006

Justina Robson is one of those writers I’ve known about for years, but have never read anything by so far. One of the new breed of British science fiction writers who popped up around the turn of the millennium, her first couple of novels found critical acclaim, each being nominated for the Clarke or BSFA Award. Unfortunately popular success seemed to elude her however, until she started the Quantum Gravity series, of which Keeping it Real is the first novel.

It is also the first novel of hers I’ve read. A high concept description of it would be urban fantasy meets cyberpunk, a bit like the old Shadowrun role playing game but much less naff. Personally I’ve always thought cyberpunk was urban fantasy’s science fiction’s mirror counterpart anyway, so the combination seems logical. As Robson explains it in the prologue, an unknown “quantum catastrophe” in the Superconducting Superconductor in Texas in 2015 had torn reality into six realms: Earth, now called Otopia, Zoomenon, the realm of Elementals, Alfheim (elves country), Demonia, home of demons, Faery, home of fairies and finally Thanatopia, supposedly the realm of the dead though no human being has ever visited. The catastrophe was quickly dubbed the “Quantum Bomb” on Otopia, with the big question that keeps human philsophers and scientists awake at night being whether the Bomb really recreated reality or just made it visible to Otopia.

Such questions isn’t what keeps Lila Black (21) awake at night. Wounded, tortured and almost killed during a clandestine mission to Alfheim two years, she has been rebuild, better, stronger, faster but with added loss of humanity, as well as being cut off from her family, who thinks she died. Now she’s assigned to her first mission and for all her build-in weaponry and fusion powered systems, she’s less than confident in her own abilities. Especially because it involves playing bodyguard to an elf rock star called Zal, who has gotten death threats because elven don’t rock and if they do, loads of people, elven and humans both, don’t like it.

After her experiences in Alfheim Lila is understandably not too enamoured of elves, though she strives hard to hide her feelings, does her best not to be charmed by Zal’s charisma. There is the additional complication of being ensnared into an elven Game, a danger that’s always present when humans and elfs mix. And with the sexual tension between Zal and Lila soon thick enough to cut with a knife, it’s clear what a Game would be about if she entered it.

At first Keeping it Real‘s plot seems fairly predictable, until Robson gets it properly going, when we quickly learn that the reasons why Zal needs a bodyguard are a bit more complicated than just having recieved death threats. Instead he’s at the centre of an elaborate scheme dreamed up by some of the more conservative powers in Alfheim, who want nothing less than to sunder all access to the other five realms. Lila finds herself in the middle of all this, fighting to keep Zal and herself alive.

As a heroine, Lila Black is, depending on your perspective, cursed with awesomeness or blessed with suck. She has a fusion heart, lots of weaponry hidden in her body and titanium bones, but she feels she has lost her humanity. It’s not an unusual position for a heroine of a modern urban fantasy to find herself in of course, but Robson makes Lila’s internal turmoil and despair convincing, which is the greatest strength of Keeping it Real.

It is what makes me want to read the next book in the series.

Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity
Rosamond McKitterick
460 pages including index
published in 2008

I knew Rosamond McKitterick from the volume in the Short Oxford History of Europe series she edited, which is why I picked up Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity from the library. Charlemagne himself has only relatively recently picked my interest, mostly through having read Emperor of the West a few years back. Interest in Charlemagne in general has rather picked up in the past decade, as the search for a common pan-European identity has taken on obvious political significance, what with the EU and all.

Which is where this comes in, as Rosamond McKitterick attempts to get back to contemporary sources to re-evaluate Charlemagne and his reign, without the interpretations later historians have given them. Her goal is to in this way provide a new critical understanding of what these sources tell us about the development of the Carolingian empire, its political identity and how these changed during Charlemagne’s reign. It makes Charlemagne a heavily text orientated history, as McKitterick examines the narrative representations of Charlemagne produced during his lifetime and shortly after. To be honest, at times this made it heavy going, especially when I read most of it during the morning and afternoon commute.

Charlemagne is divided into five chapters. In the first McKitterick tackles the problem of how Charlemagne has been represented in late eight century and early ninth century sources, like the Annales regni francorum produced during his lifetime and revised shortly after, as well as purely posthumous sources like the Vita Karoli. The largest problem with these sources is of course the dating of them, which is far from easy; obviously it makes a difference if a source is truly contemporary or written several decades after his reign, with memories having become unreliable in the meantime and political useful interpretations of it having been developed…

The second chapter: Poppinids, Arnulfings and Agilolfings: the creation of a dynasty, is the closest this book comes to a narrative history as McKitterick gives a short overview of the rise of the Carolingian dynasty and Charlemagne’s own rise to the throne, first as ruler together with his brother Carloman, then on his own. The assumption underlying much of Carolingian history is that Charlemagne had fallen out with his brother at some point, but as McKitterick shows, this is actually not easy to prove using contemporary sources. From there on, she moves on to Charlemagne’s own succession as well as the growth of the empire during his lifetime.

The third chapter introduces another important aspect of Carolingian history where the orthodox interpretation might not quite be in synch with what can actually be deducted from the historical documents available: the royal court. She first looks at the representations of the court in various types of texts, then at what we might be able to conclude from these, in the context of whether the image of Charlemagne’s court as an itinerant one, travelling with the king between palaces, is actually correct. She also looks at Charlemagne’s own travels, the political and diplomatic space in which he operated and on a more meta level, at the survival and redaction of royal charters and what information these can give us.

The fourth chapter builds on this, examing the king’s own communications both within and outside the empire and what they reveal about the Carolingan political identity and programme, if there was such a thing. This and chapter five, looking at the religious aspects and ideology of Charlemagne, were the hardest chapters to finish, as McKitterick’s analys of the primary documents on these subjects is somewhat less than gripping, to be honest.

On the whole Charlemagne wasn’t quite the history book I was looking for, but it is obviously a valuable contribution to Carolingan studies.

The Better Part of Valor
Tanya Huff
411 pages
published in 2002

Once I had finished Valor’s Choice, I knew I was going to have to go back to the bookstore I’d found it in and get the other two Tanya Huff books I’d saw there too. To be honest, I hadn’t even taken me as long as finishing the first two chapters to decide this. I’m always on the lookout for good, intelligent military science fiction and Valor’s Choice was just that, which meant I had to get the sequels too. What I especially liked was the absence of the sort of nasty rightwing politics souring me on so many other mil-sf writers.

The Better Part of Valor starts with staff sergeant Torin Kerr just back from her mission in Valor’s Choice. Having had words with general Morris, who was responsible for said mission, she is immediately sent out on another one by him, without her own platoon even. Whether this is punishment or reward she isn’t sure, but it turns out she will join a new marine platoon put together from scratch to protect a scientific expedition to an “unidentified alien vessel drifting dead in space”. She hopes it will be an uneventful recon mission, but after the last one she was sent on by general Morris, she isn’t hopeful.

And since we wouldn’t have a story if her pessimism was unjustified, she turns to be right. The reason why her new platoon was put together from individual specialists was to help avoid the media, but they turn up at the shipwreck anyway, the first of things that go wrong. Then, when Kerr, her platoon and the scientific specialists and journalists actually enter the alien ship, things go worse as an attempt to drill through part of a wall leads to an explosion, the loss of the airlock and attached shuttle, with the surviving members of the expedition having to find another way off the ship. The ship in the meanwhile isn’t as dead as it first seemed and starts to throw “tests” at Kerr and her people and turns out to be capable of influencing events outside itself as well, as it takes over the expedition’s own ship. Then, to top it all off, the enemy shows up, racing towards the same airlock Kerr and her people need to reach…

In the Valor series universe humans are one of three races that perform military services for the Confederacy, a loose gathering of intelligent species who never needed any military support until they ran into the Others, the first species that listen to reason but wanted to conquer the entire Confederacy. Which were humans and the two other “primitive” races, the Taykan and Krai, came in, offered membership in return for their military services. The way Huff writes these aliens there’s little difference between them and the human marines, all are more marine than alien. There are just a few stock traits each has: the Taykan are perpetually horny and their pheremones can inflame human passions too, while the Krai are true omnivores always talking about how good their teammates might taste, who are as flexible with their feet as with their arms, sometimes to the disgust of their team mates.

The news crew that shows up is more alien, being Katrien, small, furry, very cute, somewhat on the obnoxious side, either a racial trait or just a consequence of being a reporter. Unfortunately, Katrien being the Dutch name of Daisy Duck, I kept imagine them as just that, as aliens in pantless sailor outfits…

The plot reminded me of the those old Spacequest/Spacehulk boardgames, where you have to get a load of spacemarines out of a similar situation while coming up against various alien menaces. It’s not a novel story by any measure, but well told, even if it could’ve been a bit more claustrophobic for my liking. On the whole Tanya Huff turned out to be a writer who is very good at making you want to read on and on; I finished this in less than a day again.

Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680
Wil O. Dijk
348 pages including index
published in 2006

I got this book out of the library soley on the strength of the author’s own story. Wil O. Dijk was born in Kobe, Japan in 1934, the daughter of a Dutch businessman and a Montenegrin-Burmese (!) mother. As a child she lived in Japan and Burma, with her brother got sent to Singapore when war broke out in 1941, became a prisoner of the Japanese there, like so many other children, while her mother fled to India and her father joined the British 14th army. They all survived war and after being reunited with their parents she and her brother spent some years at boarding school in Holland, before they returned east to Karachi when the Korean War broke out. There she stayed, met her husband, a Dutch foreign service employee, travelled with him from posting to posting all over the world, raising three daughters in the process, then came to stay in Holland permanently in the 1980ties. Wanting to reconnect with her Asian roots, she enrolled as a mature student at Leiden first to study Japanology, then to specialise in Burmese history, the end result of which is this book, written when she was well in her seventies!

Even without the author’s lifestory I would’ve gotten this book though. The focus in Dutch colonial history has understandably always been with Indonesia as well as with the colonies in the Americas, Surinam and the Dutch West Indies, as these were the most enduring, important and longest lived Dutch colonial ventures. With some exceptions (Nieuw Amsterdam obviously, South Africa), the rest of Dutch colonial history is mainly a concern for specialists. Which as Wil O. Dijk makes clear in her introduction, goes double for Dutch involvement with Burma, largely neglected even by specialists, yet no less important and interesting for it.

It’s not for lack of sources that this subject has been neglected for so long: the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) archives are largely complete and extensive, recognised as long ago as 1939 by D. G. E. Hall of being a rich source of informaetion of the VOC’s trade with Burma. It’s this data that forms the basis for this book, painstakingly gathered by Wil O. Dijk for her dissertation. This is the sort of tedious, labour intensive research that’s sometimes dismissed as beancounting by more trendy historians, but which is essential as a foundation for further research. It does perhaps make Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 somewhat dry at times therefore, but that can’t be helped.

The Dutch East India Company had been founded in 1602 as a monopoly for the Dutch trade with Asia. Its mission was to exploit the trade potential there to establish itself in the lucerative spices trade with Europe and to muscle out the enemy, Spain and Portugal. In this early stage it was not yet the colonising power it would become in later centuries, depending more on intra-Asian trade to finance the spice trade, which is where Burma came in. Burma was both a place where the VOC could sell (e.g. clothes and textiles from India) and buy (gold, long peppers, tin, rice, various kinds of wood) and make a profit at both ends. What’s more, getting into the Burmese trade would also win one over the Portuguese, who had been in the Gulf of Bengal for decades. In fact, one Portuguese adventurer had carved out its own kingdom in Burma, but came to a sharp end and was impaled, once this kingdom was reconquered by the Burmese.

The Burmese trade promised rich rewards to the VOC, but trade was never straightforward. The kingdom of Pegu, as the VOC knew it, was ruled by strong kings who kept trade restricted and who at all times were concerned about the stability of their own power, determined not to undermine e.g. the royal monopoly on rubies. They kept prices for import goods artificially low, prices for export products high, quantities of many goods restricted and on the whole the VOC was very much dependent on the sometimes arbitary decisions of the Burmese king.

Which is why it was hesitant at first to get into Burma, despite its rich potential, as it could not be certain of steady, year on profits. After the first few hesitant years though this worry was no longer a concern and while the trade did decline somewhat in later years, it wasn’t this that got the VOC to withdraw in 1680, but more the increased competition of other European (and other) trading companies and more importantly, its own internal restructuring. In the later part of the seventeenth century the VOC more and more focused on the direct trade with Europe, rather than the intra-Asian trade, starting to become a true colonial power with imperial holdings in Indonesia and the Spice Islands. While the Burma trade was very profitable, it no longer fitted its strategy, so it was abandoned. Some halfhearted attempts would be made a few decades later to reopen it, but this came to nothing.

When I normally think about the VOC and Dutch exploration in Asia, the picture I get is one of imperialism and colonalisation, with the native civilisations as the inferior, exploited party. But what Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 shows is a situation in which the Burmese, far from inferior, are actually the superior power, with the VOC as just one of many trading parties, neither particularly welcome, nor particularly feared, quickly replaced by others once it upped sticks. The Burma trade for a few decades was very important to the VOC, but the VOC was never all that important to Burmese trading…

So all in all, Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 does well both in sketching what these five-six decades of Dutch-Burmese trade looked like, its impact on VOC and Burma both and in presenting the data that support these conclusions.

Dragonflight
Anne McCaffrey
303 pages
published in 1968

Because I’ve been running my booklog since 2001 I know it’s at least a decade or more since I’d last cracked open an Anne McCaffrey novel, yet once upon a time her < cite>The Dragonriders of Pern series was very important to me. Like so much science fiction and fantasy I discovered the Pern books through the local library, first reading them in Dutch, then continuing in English after I discovered the later books were only available that way. Over the years I devoured everything of McCaffrey I could lay my hands on, but I got less and less enjoyment out of her later novels, until I stopped reading them all together. Which is why I hadn’t read her in more than a decade and why it took her death to get me to reread the Pern novels. Which is a shame, as rereading them now makes clear how good McCaffrey at her best really was.

And Dragonflight was the best story she ever wrote. The two novellas that form the first twothirds of it, “Weyr Search” and “Dragonflight were rewarded with a Hugo and a Nebula Award respectively and are worth it. I had remembered Dragonflight as a fairly light novel, but it actually starts out quite dark, with Lessa, its heroine being the sole survivor of a coup against her family, plotting revenge as a kitchen drudge against the evil lord Fax who had taken over her hold. She’s not a nice person at all at the start of the story, completely focused on getting her own back and on making the hold as miserable as possible. But she also has a secret, a bond with the watch wher, a telepathic reptile like animal used as a watchdog. Little does she know that this is a hint to a much greater destiny for her…

Meanwhile F’Lar, a wingleader at Benden Weyr, where the last remaining dragonriders of Pern live. Once upon a time there were six Weyrs, to defend Pern from the dangers of Threadfall, spores drifting in from Pern’s sister planet the Red Star, but the last threadfall was hundreds of Turns ago, five of the Weyrs have been abandoned and the Holds, where the bulk of population lives have forgotten their obligations to the Weyrs, while the Weyr itself has forgotten its duty to Pern and nobody longer believes in Thread. Nobody but F’lar that is, and his brother F’Nor, who still keep the old traditions in honour. And now F’lar is visiting Ruantha Hold, Lessa’s Hold, looking for candidates for Impression, for young girls to bond with newly born dragons as the next generation of dragonriders. Three guesses who becomes one of the candidates…

But this is just the start of Lessa’s and F’lar’s adventures. There’s still the menace of Threadfall to overcome, the resistance of the Holds to the Weyr and the continuing problem of how one small Weyr of dragonriders can protect the entire planet when it needed six much bigger Weyrs in the past, with much more experienced and better prepared riders… Both Lessa and F’lar have their roles to play in resolving this, but Dragonflight is largely Lessa’s story.

Dragonflight was written in 1968/69, long before the fantasy boom of the seventies, when fantasy was still very much an offshoot of science fiction. A lot of the tropes and cliches of epic fantasy can be seen in embryonic form here and I suspect Ann McCaffrey’s dragons have had just as much influence on the shaping of genre fantasy as Tolkien’s hobbits have, even if it’s less recognised. But Dragonflight isn’t quite fantasy, even if it has firebreathing flying dragons, a medievaloid society and a fight against unreasoning evil at the heart of its story.

Because the dragons are genetically engineered from the fire lizard indigenous to Pern, the unreasoning evil is just an alien lifeform doing what it must do to survive and spread itself, while the medievaloid society is the descendant of colonists from Earth who had to abandon most of their high technology because Pern wasn’t suited for it combined with the pressures of Threadfall, which explains why there are Holds but no cities: Thread can’t burn stone so people live in caves and other rocky places. What’s more, these explanations for the dragons et all aren’t there just as handwaving: scientific curiosity plays a huge part in the plot of Dragonflight and its sequels as the Pernians rediscover the world they’re living on. That’s part of the appeal of The Dragonriders of Pern for me, that process of discovery, though it would get a bit silly in the later novels.

Another part of what made Dragonflight and the other dragon novels so popular and important for so many people for such a long time is Anne McCaffrey’s ability as a writer to suck you into the story, what Jo Walton called readability when discussing John Wyndham: “the ability to write a sentence that makes you want to keep reading the next sentence and so on and on”. McCaffrey had that in spades, where no sooner have you finished the first novel, you want to start the next one.

Which is just what I did.