Imperial Life in the Emerald City -- Rajiv Chandrasekaran
A good but limited critique of the United States occupation of Iraq, which concentrates on the blunders made by the CPA, but which doesn't
question the fundamental right of America to actually be in the country.
New Skies -- Patrick Nielsen Hayden (editor)
A collection of science fiction stories from the past two decades, aimed at younger readers new to science fiction.
Some duds, but on the whole it does give a good oversight of what you can expect from the genre.
Last van de Oorlog -- Stef Scaliola
A history thesis turned into a book, this looks at the ways in which the debate about the wars fought by the Netherlands to hold on to Indonesia
in 1946-1949, in particular the warcrimes committed during it and how these have been covered up or revealed. Scaliola looks at the roles
journalists, historians, politicians and the veterans themselves played in this process of remembrance.
Britain's Gulag -- Caroline Elkins
Incredibly depressing, this is the history of Britain's attempt to quash the Kenyan struggle for independence, largely by emulating the way
the nazis behaved in Poland. Pogroms, a massive concentration camp system in which almost the neitre Kikuyu population of Kenya was held as
slave labour, roaming death squads and institutionalised torture of the worst kind were all part of this attempt to crush the Mau Mau rebellion and
make the Kikuyu into obedient, loyal subjects of the white settler population. All this seven years after World War 2.
Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side -- Clive Stafford Smith
Clive Stafford Smith is one of the volunteer lawyers respresenting the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. This is his personally informed account of
America's Gulag Archipelo and its absurdities. Remarkable funny in places.
As Sir Roderick Braithwaite, the astute former ambassador in Moscow and a man sympathetic to Russians pointed out some time ago, Russia has done far more invading than it has been invaded. Napoleon and Hitler failed to conquer Moscow but Russian armies – Tsarist and Soviet – have occupied every European capital east of the Rhine.
[...]
President Sarkozy's remarks that Russia had some rights in Georgia sent a chill down the spine of Baltic states which have Russian speaking citizens, installed after Stalin's invasion of these small countries in 1940. Finland, which fought a war with Russia in 1940, shivers at what the new Putin doctrine might mean.
[...]
Putin may have thought that sweeping the Georgian pawn off the board was the end of the game. Alas, it is is only the beginning, and Britain cannot betray Poland and its fellow EU and Nato allies as Chamberlain did in the 1930s.
McShane does seem to have a talent for distilling all the cliches uttered about Russia's "aggression" in Georgia to the purest grade of wingnuttery, doesn't he, with his talk about not betraying Poland "as Chamberlain did in the 1930s." It's great stuff, but to me Marko still has the edge, as he wouldn't make such schoolboy errors in his rants.
Jamie is annoyed at how a perfectly natural bit of Russian
forward planning is seen as evidence of nefarious intentions:
Have we really got so used to just blundering about that the existence of a plan -- in this case the organisation of a response if attacked,
the institutional capability to bring it about and the intelligence assets to get the timing right -- in itself qualifies the Russians as aggressors?
Apparantly we have, as I've not only seen this argument --that their quick response time proved the Russians had planned this conflict and were just
waiting for an excuse to attack -- in the Danger Room post that irked Jamie,
but also in the big NYT
writeup of the war, as well as on various liberal geopolitical blogs. Considering the speed with which the Russians responded -- Georgia started its
invasion of South Ossetia on August the 7th and by August 10th the Russians had chased them back over the border-- it's a natural conclusion to jump to.
But it's the wrong one. There's nothing strange about the quick Russian response, considering the crisis had been simmering for months, had just heated
up in July and gotten active in the first week of August. All armies make contingency plans and it makes sense for the Russian troops stationed in North
Ossetia to have a plan on how to deal with a Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. Furthermore, because there's only one route between the two Ossetias,
one that could be cut off relatively easy, it also makes sense for the Russians to start moving troops the moment Georgia attacks in earnest, as they
can't afford to be stuck on the wrong side of that tunnel when that happens. They need to establish a foothold outside the tunnel, keep it open for
reinforcements and of course keep the Georgians from blowing it up. The Russian commander might even have standing orders to move in if Georgia gets
too aggresive.
Now if we look what happened two weeks ago, we saw the Russians responding almost exactly in the pattern I just described. Their local forces moved into
South Ossetia in a hurry, with some local air support but no air superiority and got to Tskhinvali roughly a day after the Georgians had started their
invasion. At that time the Georgians were largely in control of that city, but there were still pockets of resistance. The Russian counterattack drove
the Georgian forces from the city, but wasn't strong enough to prevent them from regrouping and going back on the offensive. It was only after the weekend,
on Monday and Tuesday that the Georgians fled South Ossetia and the Russians moved into Georgia proper. And it was then that I first saw stories saying
that the Russians had planned this invasion.
By the time it became clear Saakashvili had gambled and lost, it was this narrative --that Russia had lured him into invading as to have a pretext for
dealing with Georgia once and for all-- that became established in the western media. With Georgian territory now in firm Russian control, it was
easy to show Russia as the aggressor, as long as Saakashvili's blunder could be ignored or whitewashed. The idea that Russia entrapted Saakashvili
was tailor made for this.
Clive Stafford Smith is somebody who has a lot of experience with worthwhile but hopeless causes, as he spent years working on death penalty cases in
the American Deep South. When the news about the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp became known he didn't hesitate, but immediately
got involved. Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is based on his personal experiences at Guantanamo. The title is a reference to
the fact that all the lawyers have to stay on the leeward side of the bay and therefore have to take the morning ferry to get to their clients each
day. Surprisingly for a book on such a dark subject matter, Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is quite funny in places, due to
the absurdity of some of the situations Clive Stafford Smith and his clients find themselves in.
The books listed are representative of a particular subgenre or development, not necessarily the best books of the past two decades.
they're all books I've read myself
No series, because that would be cheating
As with the original lists, the John Clute and Peter Nicholls Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction is added as a free, twentyfirst choice. I've looked hard for another essential non-fiction book, but there isn't any
of the same stature.
Books are listed in order of publication, from 1988-2008
Brothers in Arms (1989) -- Lois McMaster Bujold
The Miles Vorkogisan series is one of the best examples of mil-sf or military science fiction, a subgenre that came to prominence in the late
eighties/early nineties. lots of it is dreck, rightwing power fantasies, but Bujold proves it is possible to write good mil-sf novels.
Rats and Gargoyles (1990) -- Mary Gentle
A somewhat overlooked writer, but where she went with this novel a lot of writers would follow later, exploring a world where a different sort of
science was established.
Earth (1990) -- David Brin
To a large extent, we're living in the world Brin described here. 'Nuff said.
Use of Weapons (1990) -- Iain M. Banks
The best of the Culture and the best of the New Space Opera that got going in the late eighties.
Heir to the Empire (1991) -- Timothy Zahn
Surprisingly readable, this book opened the floodgates for a veritable deluge of Star Wars tieins, comics, merchandise and ultimately the prequel movies.
A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) -- Vernor Vinge
Vinge had already established his idea of the Singularity in his earlier novels and stories, but with this novel it started to dominate science fiction,
as a whole generation of writers became convinced that the Singularity was real
and needed to be worked around.
Snow Crash (1992) -- Neal Stephenson
The book that opened up cyberpunk to be more than just the adventures of lowlifes with hightech.
Ammonite (1993) -- Nicola Griffith
Though at first it looked to have disappeared in the eighties, science fiction exploring feminist and gender themes was still being published.
Ammonite was one of the first and best of a new wave of these sort of novels.
Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) -- Jonathan Lethem
Science fiction has never been as hermetically sealed from the rest of literature as some of its fans like to think and writers have crossed over in both
directions since before there was science fiction, but what was new in the 1990s was that there was a whole generation of literary writers fully aware of
all science fiction traditions, who moved in and out of their genre when the mood struck them.
Axiomatic (1995) -- Greg Egan
Greg Egan's first short story collection. Egan was the last major writer whose strenght was unambigiously the short story rather than the novel as well as
the hardest hard science fiction writer of the nineties.
The Star Fraction (1995) -- Ken MacLeod
During the eighties it had been the Americans who led the way in writing near future science fiction; cyberpunk being a largely american affair. With
The Star Fraction the Brits took over the torch.
Catch the Lightning (1996) -- Catherine Asaro
Science fiction romance, a very succesful subgenre but largely ignored by the critics... Not my genre either.
In the Garden of Eden (1997) -- Kage Baker
The first in a popular series of time travel/secret history novels where the focus is not on either the time travel or the secret history, but
on the somewhat mundane concerns of the hero of the series.
Cryptonomicom (1999) -- Neal Stephenson
Another breach in the walls of science fiction's insularity: this was labelled science fiction, sold as science fiction and generally accepted as
science fiction, but was it really?
Perdido Street Station (2000) -- China Miéville
The book that launched the New Weird, the closest science fiction has come to another cyberpunk or New Wave movement.
Nine Layers of Sky (2003) -- Liz Williams
One example of a growing subgenre of books with a real world grounding intersected with a retrofuturistic, steampunk sf element.
Fitzpatrick's War (2004) -- Theodore Judson
By now, the mil-sf genre has crystalised so much razorsharp parodies of it are possible. In one neat package, all the cliches of the genre are
skewered.
Accelerando (2005) -- Charlie Stross
An example of the new blogdriven generation of authors like Scalzi and Doctorow, nerdy, computer and internet literate to a degree rarely found in
previous generations. (Don't mention Jerry "I need my friends at Cisco or IBM to reboot my modem" Pournelle)
The Vance Integral Edition (1999 - 2006)-- Jack Vance
The ultimate in fandriven publishing projects, but it wasn't alone; NESFA press for example also published a lot of new, definitive collections of
old favourites.
Farthing (2006) -- Jo Walton
One example of the maturing of the alternate history genre, accesible to both fans and those new to the genre with a writer confident enough not
to spell things out, not to use shock tactics to show the essential horror of an early peace between England and Germany in World War II.
This is a personal list, selected (with the exception of the Vance Integral Edition) from my own personal library. There are obviously holes in it,
subgenres I don't read or examples of trends I don't like (e.g. self-indulgent sequels by once great authors, carnage porn). If you got books I missed,
you could always make a case for them in the comments.
The Aleutian Trilogy, Gwyneth Jones (starting 1991)
The Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson (starting 1992)
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
The Flower Cities sequence, Kathleen Ann Goonan (starting 1994)
Fairyland, Paul McAuley (1996)
Diaspora, Greg Egan (1997)
Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds (2000)
The Arabesks, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (starting 2000)
Light, M John Harrison (2002)
Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002)
Evolution, Stephen Baxter (2003)
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson (2003)
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
Air, Geoff Ryman (2004)
River of Gods, Ian McDonald (2004)
Accelerando, Charles Stross (2005)
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (2005)
It's a bit heavy on the series and a bit light on female authors, but its worst flaw s that there is little variety in the type of science fiction books
on display here. There's only one short story collection (two if you count Accelerando, which started life as a series of short stories), but
no less than six different series considered essential. There's a lot of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk (Stephenson, McAuley, Egan, Gibson and Stross),
as well as New Space Opera (Banks, Simmons, Reynolds, Baxter), some smattering of big literary books (Harrison, Ryman and Mitchell, arguably Gibson
as well) and in general these are all Big, Important books liked by science fiction critics. Which is understandable, as this list was created by
a a panel of science fiction critics after all. This is not to complain that this list is
too literary, far from it. Most of these books are hardcore science fiction, beloved by fans and critics alike and which were paid a lot of attention
when they were originally published. It's a great list of books, but I think it will give you a skewed view of "the state of science fiction" of the past
twenty years.
For a start, if you really wanted to show how science fiction developed over this time period, one of the first books you have to put up would be
Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, the first in his trilogy of Star Wars spinoff novels, because it was in no large part due to these
that the fortunes of this franchise revived. Its success led to a veritable flood of other Star Wars spinoff books and comics, proved that there was
still a market for Star Wars so ultimately paved the way for the prequels. Frnachise books have always been an important, if slightly embarassing
part of science fiction, so a list of essential books needs to have at least one of them.
Also conspicious by their absence is any kind of mil-sf or alternate history novel. You could argue that the Jon Courtenay Grimwood series is alternate
history, but there the divergence is only used as background. What's missing is a novel like Christopher Priest's The Separation or
Jo Walton's Farthing, where the point of the novel is to explore how history could be altered and what the consequences would be, rather than
using this as just another exotic setting.
As for mil-sf, this is a genre that came of age exactly in the timeperiod covered by the list, yet you wouldn't know it from this. Partially this might be
because so much of it is so goddamn awful, but there have been some good examples of the genre as well. If David Weber is a step too far, what about
any of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels, or even Theodore Judson's Fitzpatrick's War?
But the most glaring mistake on this list is that it has Greg Egan's Diaspora, rather than any of his short story collections, which are a)
much better and b) much more representative. Egan was one of the last sf writers who came to prominence through writing short stories as opposed to
novels. Sure, there have been many writers since then who've broken into science fiction with short stories, but I can think of only a handful who got
the same buzz as Egan did solely on their short stories: Ted Chiang, Paolo Bacigalupi (even if I can't stand them myself) and perhaps Charlie Stross. To
leave out Luminous or Axiomatic in favour of Diaspora is just bizarre.
Remember Nipplegate, when the BBC allegedly only used closeups of Sharron Davies' head and shoulders because otherwise the viewer might be distracted
by her bullet points, so to speak? No? Well, some people do and started googling for pictures the moment Sharron Davies first appeared at the Beijing
Olympics. Coincidently (?) many of whom seem to be Everton
fans.
So thank you internet perverts, for driving up the hitcount, even if I'd rather y'all had come here for the brilliant posts rather than the cheap sexual
thrill.
The key demands are that the Georgian leader pledges, in an agreement that is signed and legally binding, to abjure all use of force to
resolve Georgia's territorial disputes with the two breakaway pro-Russian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia; and that Georgian forces
withdraw entirely from South Ossetia and are no longer part of the joint "peacekeeping" contingent there with Russian and local Ossetian forces.
Medvedev also insisted the populations of the two regions had to be allowed to vote on whether they wanted to join Russia, prefiguring a
possible annexation that would enfeeble Georgia and leave Saakashvili looking crushed. If he balked at the terms, said Sergei Lavrov, Russia's
foreign minister: "We will be forced to take other measures to prevent any repetition of the situation that emerged because of the outrageous
Georgian aggression."
Saakashvili wanted a quick blitzkrieg war to forcibly rejoin South Ossetia with Georgia, confident in his army's ability to defeat the Ossetian
militia after all the financial support and training it had gotten from the Americans. He never prepared for the worst case scenario, but that's
what he got. Even now he's belligerent, despite the loss of not just South Ossetia, but also Abkhazia and with the Russians having crushed his army,
when it actually fought and not ran away that is. He's the perfect
example of how infectious the neocon/Bushite mentality is, in that he seems to think that bellowing loudly about how evil the Russians are and dodgy
metaphors about Munich 1938 can change the reality of the crushing, unnecessary defeat his country has suffered.
The Russians on the other hand must be nearly as happy as The War Nerd
--who was just happy to see a proper war for once-- with this war. At last they got to humiliate one of the upstart breakaway republics that used to be
theirs, not to mention the yanks by proxy, got Abkhazia and South Ossetia handed them on a platter and an opportunity how magnanimous they are by not
overrunning Georgia entirely.
Fair point to Saakashvili though, he does seem to have won the media war, as most western media seem to either accept that Russia was the outright
agressor, or that it somehow "forced" Saakashvili to invade South Ossetia, despite all evidence to the contrary. As The Exile calls it,
Georgia made full use of "the CNN effect", by quickly getting its talking points about the war across to the opinion makers, as well as having
Saakashvili looking all western and decent and talking English, contrasting well with the much less western looking, odd talking Russians. Even the
Russian spokespeople speaking English did so with thick accents and saying loony things; one I heard threatened nuclear war if the Ukraine made good
on its threat to deny Russia's Black Sea fleet a return to harbour. Moreover, the Georgians were better at getting moral support by showing footage of
Russian atrocities, as I wrote on Monday. This went so far that CNN used footage of
Tskhinvali ruins caused during the Georgian offensive when talking about the Russian attack on Gori! Well played Saakashvili, but it didn't matter in the
end.
This is just a place for me to jot down some random thoughts and reactions to the news so I don't have to yell at the television or radio, or mutter to myself whilst reading the news.
Waffle
In which Reinder Dijkhuis, Adam Cuerden, Timm Brand, Geir Strom and Jeroen Jager talk about comics, music, politics and the impending apocalypse.
Science fiction and fandom
Ansible
David Langford's near legendary fanzine and website.
Charlie's Diary
By science fiction writer, technogeek and old style UK liberal Charlie Stross.
Kathryn Cramer
An editor of science fiction anthologies, Kathryn writes intelligently about sf and other stuff.
Making Light
Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden's blog embodies the best of fandom.
Deltoid
A science orientated weblog by Tim Lambert.
Encyclopedia Astronautica
Incredibly cool site about the history of space travel, with lots of info about
the various space programs. Recommended for all spacenuts.
The Loom
A blog of biology and bioscience, written by Carl Zimmer.
Panda's Thumb
On evolutionary theory and the fight against the intelligent design loons
Pharyngula
Science, politics and the intersection between them. By PZ Myers.
Real Climate
A commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists.
All the rest
24-hour Drive-Thru
By Mitch Wagner, computer journalist and sf fan. Good on tech news and internet issues.
Branko
Technology, comics and other stuff by Branko.
Caveat Lectorzilla
Written by Dorothea, this is an exuberant mix of geekery, personal issues and sharp observations.