books and books review – Wis[s]e Words

Open Access books at Pluto Press

Published on January 21, 2024Leave a comment

Pluto Press, one of the older radical anticapitalist publishers in the world, has made a selection of their published work available as Open Access books:

With the aim of accessibility and in the spirit of knowledge-sharing, a selection of our books is available to download through Open Access programmes. Here you can find links to the books on the OAPEN website, and on other platforms, where you can download electronic copies for free.

For anybody interested in leftwing, radical politics, history and theory this is a great resource.

Analog One — John W. Campbell, Jr (editor)

Published on July 12, 2023Leave a comment

Cover of Analog One

Analog One
John W. Campbell, Jr (editor)
169 pages
published in 1963

There’s a version of the history of science fiction that goes a little bit like this. It was invented in the late nineteenth century by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells (in a slightly more progressive version, in the early nineteenth century, by Mary Shelly). Then, in 1926 Hugo Gernsback made it a genre, with the creation of Amazing Stories, the first ever science fiction magazine. Sadly however, the quality of science fiction published remained low, most of it being space opera, just more pulp fiction. All this would change when John W. Campbell, Jr became editor of Astounding Stories, one of the many Amazing Stories imitators. Together with authors like Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and especially Robert Heinlein Campbell would create the Golden Age of science fiction. Post World War II science fiction having gained even more popularity, finally got the respect it deserved. No longer dismissed as ‘that Buck Rogers stuff’ fit only for infants, now, as Campbell’s editorial here has it, it’s literature to truly challenge yourself, for people unafraid to use their brains. In a symbolic gesture, in 1960 Campbell changed the name of his magazine Astounding Stories to Analog Science Fact & Fiction, heralding the changed status of science fiction. This is the context in which Analog One was published.

It’s a beautiful myth, but no more than that. The reality is that science fiction became respectable the moment the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That staple of the American imagination, the weapon that can wipe out an entire city, had become reality. Nothing really to do with Campbell, who in any case was diving deep into pseudoscience like the Dean Drive and Dianetics at this point. The new Analog too was no longer the top science fiction magazine either, with newcomers Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction taking its place. The writers who had made the magazine had left it, either like Asimov, leaving science fiction entirely for a while, or moving on to other magazines. Analog‘s decline is clear when you look at this anthology’s table of content: the biggest writers listed are Lloyd Biggle and Gordon Dickson, not quite up to the standard of a Robert Heinlein or Theodore Sturgeon.

This is why I need to move

Published on July 8, 2023Leave a comment

My Librarything collection currently has 8201 books listed. It’s not complete. it’s likely never to be completed as I buy books faster than I enter them. almost a quarter of them are ebooks. Those are not the problem. The problem are the six thousand physical books. Not to brag, but this is what you get for spending four decades reading and buying books: a house filled to bursting with them.

The four bookcases in my bedroom, loaded with manga, bande dessinee and comics

Which means my bedroom now has four of Ikea’s finest Billy bookcases in them. This is where I keep my physical graphic novels, European comics and manga. You may notice that the left most bookcase lacks an extension. For some reason Ikea slightly increased the height which made it just too high for my ceilings to fit a second extension. Really frustrating. Most of the comics here are European, with a lot of American graphic novels and trade paperback or hardcover collections as well. Most of my manga is digital: both cheaper and easier to store. Manga is also much more easier to read on tablet than European or American comics. Partially because they’re mostly in black & white, partially because the panels are bigger. It can be an exercise in frustration to read e.g. some eighties Marvel collection and having to zoom in to read the tiny tiny word balloons.

Part of the bookcases in my living room, fiction and non-fiction

Looking from my kitchen into the living room, only part of the bookcases can be seen. They cover fully three quarters of my wall space. Starting from left next to the kitchen opening, all the way around the room to the back. Only walls not covered is the back wall which looks out at the garden and the bit of wall where my computer desk is. They’re mostly full now, as you may have noticed. You may have also noticed the overflow on the dinner table. The beauty of living alone is that you can use it to store your current reads and nobody will object…. To conserve space my books are sorted by size before genre. Paperbacks by paperbacks, hard covers on top, trades in the bookcases not visible here. Most of my fiction is in paperback, the most convenient format. Non-fiction is a different matter. As for what I read, science fiction/fantasy, crime novels and history are my most read genres. But if you want to really know, read booklog.

Part of the bookcases in my living room, fiction and non-fiction

All of which is not even counting the floppies I also have. The eleven long boxes here are just the biggest part. Several more long boxes and crates are stashed elsewhere in my house, wherever there’s room. I spent roughly a decade and a half, 1987 to 2001 or so buying comics this way and it all adds up. The frustrating thing is that they’re barely accessible anymore because I just don’t have the room to open them.

Which is one of the reasons I’m looking seriously at moving out and back to my home town, where the houses are somewhat cheaper than over here. The other reason to be closer to my family and parents as they’re not getting any younger either. It would be great to find something where I could dedicate an entire room to my comics and not have to stash them in milk crates.

1983: The World at the Brink — Taylor Downing

Published on May 29, 2023Leave a comment

Cover of 1983

1983: The World at the Brink
Taylor Downing
391 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

If there ever was a movie that embodied the fears about nuclear war I had living through the early eighties, just old enough to understand the concept, it has to be Threads. I turned nine that year, just old enough to start to comprehend what nuclear war would be like. We had an insane cowboy in the White House who talked about a winneable nuclear war and a series of rapidly decomposing, extremely paranoid leaders in the Kremlin. One small mistake and the world would’ve ended. And while I didn’t learn about Threads long after the cold War had ended, I really didn’t need it to have nightmares. Any mention of anything nuclear on the news was enough to set them off. It didn’t help either that pop culture at that point was saturated with nuclear war imagery.

Fortunately, Threads was never broadcast in the Netherlands at that time, or I would’ve never been able to sleep ever again. Learning about it in a BBC retrospective somewhere around the turn of the millennium was traumatising enough already for the nightmares to return. That shot of the mushroom cloud going up over Sheffield with the old lady in the foreground pissing herself. That was the sort of fear and anxiety, that feeling of helplessness I grew up with in the eighties, in a country where you couldn’t pretend that you could have cool adventures fighting mutants afterwards. No, you either be dead or wishing you were. Being a sensitive kid I didn’t need to see nuclear war movies to imagine how horrible it would be. Which is why I won’t be celebrating Threads day by finally watching it.

Threads: Thursday May 26th 08:00

No, I prefer to feed my nightmares through print, like with Nigel Calder’s Nuclear Nightmares which I reread a couple of years ago. As with so many people my age I know, I can’t help but occasionally pick at that scab. Especially as I got older and learned more about the realities behind my nightmares, I can’t help but want to learn more about it, to confirm my fears weren’t unfounded. 1983: The World at the Brink is very good at doing exactly that. It not only confirmed that my childhood nuclear war paranoia was justified, it showed things were so much worse than I could’ve ever imagined back then. 1983 may very well have been the most dangerous year of the entire Cold War.

Boekenbeurs 1982 — 2023

Published on January 7, 2023Leave a comment

So many of the books on my bookshelves came from this place:

Front view of a bookstore with books stalled out in front of the shop window sheltered by a canopy above them

I used to have a set routine growing up in Middelburg in the eighties. Every other Saturday morning or so I would go to the local library, sometimes together with my mother, then on the way back home stop at this place, De Boekenbeurs, which was located just across the bridge from the library. There I would spent an hour or so carefully looking over its selections of secondhand science fiction and comics, deciding on what to buy now and what might still be available next time before parting with my hard earned pocket money. It was about the only bookstore in town that did carry science fiction and certainly the only one that a broke teenager like me could afford. After I moved to Amsterdam I’d still continue to visit every time I was back in my hometown because nine times out of ten I would find something interesting there. I did just that when I was visiting my parents for Christmas last December, but I won’t be able to anymore next time I visit, as today is its last opening.

It’s a familiar story for any independent bookstore I’d guess. De Boekenbeurs opened in 1982, founded by an ex-civil servant who wanted to strike out for himself. As many local bookstores, it always specialised in local history and such, most of which was of little interest to me, but it also kept more generic stock to fill its shelves. There was always a good chance of finding some unexpected gem among the airport thrillers and local celeb biographies. And then of course the internet happened, people found it easier to get their books online and the sort of serendipitous browsing that a local shop like that is ideal for fell out of fashion. The store reduced its opening hours, started selling online as well, but it was clear that, especially in the last few years, it had become a struggle for the owner, no longer that much fun. Which is why he decided to shut up shop, not having been able to find a buyer for it.

Nevertheless it managed to stay in business for forty years and a bit and I have been coming there almost as long. It was a life line for a nerd like me at a time when opportunities to read science fiction were limted to either buying secondhand or getting whatever the library deemed worthy enough to get. You need bookstores like this, somewhere where you can go in casually and be surprised at what you find on its shelves. Yes, it is easy enough to get what you want from the internet, but it’s the books you didn’t realise you wanted but were glad to find that you can only encounter in a store like this.

R.I.P. De Boekenbeurs. Thanks for your service and I’ll miss you.