Martin Wisse

Snow & Steel — Peter Caddick-Adams

Warfare and military history
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Cover of Snow & Steel


Snow & Steel: the Battle of the Bulge 1944 – 45
Peter Caddick-Adams
872 pages including notes and index
published in 2014

Nuts!

The story of the Bulge should be familiar. Hitler’s last roll of the dice, an offensive that nobody expected. The goal: to split the western allies apart by reconquering Antwerp. Elite panzers racing through the Ardennes, reliving the glory days of May 1940, expecting little resistance from the outnumbered and inexperienced American forces stationed there. the allied airfoces, grounded by bad weather and unable to come to the rescue. The unexpected resistance and Hitler’s hopes smashed at Bastogne, when after an imperious demand to surrender now the town was surrounded, the commanding American officer responded with a simple “Nuts!”

It’s a great story, a story the town of Bastogne dines out on to this very day. When I was there on holiday last October literally every second shop window had something about the siege in its display. It also has the benefit of being mostly true. But it isn’t the entire truth of the Ardennes Offensive, or Peter Caddick-Adams wouldn’t have needed almost nine hundred pages to tell its story. There were other sieges beside Bastogne, other places where American resistance held up the Nazi attack long enough for it to ultimately fail, other tales of heroism and tragedy to be told. Arguably, one could say that the fate of the offensive had been determined long before Bastogne had even been reached. Similarly, the story didn’t end when the siege of Bastogne was lifted. There was more hard fighting to be done, fighting which lasted into January and February of 1945.

It’s Snow & Steel‘s ambition to tell the entire story of the Battle of the Bulge, knowing full well it’s impossible to do so. As the author himself has admitted, the air war for example is barely covered in this book. Similarly, some important battles are barely touched upon, some phases of the campaign less exhaustively treated than others. What Snow & Steel instead provide is as good as possible an overview of the campaign as a whole, set in context of both what gave birth to it and how it in turn impacted the rest of the war. Not only that, Caddick-Adams also looks at its impact after the war, on the people that fought in it but also those who sought to learn from its lessons. He himself has a background in the (Cold War) UK military and knows from first-hand experience how the Ardennes Offensive was studied to prepare for the expected Soviet attack on West Germany.

The first third of the book therefore is all about establishing the context in which the offensive took place, why it was planned and how it was planned. The conventional idea about the Ardennes Offensive is that Hitler thought it up on September 16th, when he announced it to the commanders who would lead the operation. As Caddick-Adams shows though, Hitler had from almost the start of the fighting in Normandy aimed for a decisive counterattack against the Anglo-American forces landed there, there had been attempts to do so but ultimately it wasn’t until the Germans had been driven out of France and Belgium that there was an opportunity to do so. Once the situation had stabilised, both the target of Antwerp as the Ardennes as the sector to attack through made sense. Antwerp was the closest harbour to the front the Allies had, only recently opened. Without it, supplies needed to come all the way from Normandy and Bretagne again and it was this logistic strain that had stopped Allied progress in the first place. Doing it through the Ardennes, repeating the success of May 1940 made sense both psychological as military. It was a quiet sector, undermanned and with a number of green divisions just arrived in theatre. If it could be done by surprise and if it could count on the absence of Allied air support, the operation had a chance of succeeding, at least in its initial goal, crossing the Meuse.

Not that many of the actual commanders believed that was possible, let alone reaching Antwerp, but this was 1944 and Hitler was in no mood for dissent after having almost been killed in a Wehrmacht plot. A more realistic plan would’ve been to try and encircle the American troops in the Ardennes and at the border with Germany, to try and destroy 15-20 divisions that way to buy time to prepare the defence of Germany, but that was rejected. To be fair, such a success wouldn’t have mattered much, only postponed the inevitable. Only if Hitler’s plan succeeded and had the effect of tearing apart the western allies would Germany have a chance at a negotiated peace. As Caddick-Adams shows, this was an idle hope. Both the goal and the effects it would have were unrealistic. Even getting to the Meuse, basically the start line for the drive to Antwerp would require a miracle, everything going to plan and the Allied responding exactly like Hitler wanted them to. But it didn’t and they didn’t and by the end of the first day it was already clear that it would not work.

Ironically it might have been the paranoid security measures Hitler insisted on to keep the operation a secret that both made it such a surprise to the Allies and led to its ultimate failure. For various reasons, the usual intelligence the Allies relied upon were already less effective now the enemy was in its homeland. No need for encrypted radio broadcasts if you can use your secure telephone lines for example. At the same time, the actual participants in the operation were kept in the dark as long as possible. Initially only the highest commanders of the offensive were in the loop, while the average soldier was only informed just before the offensive started. There was little opportunity therefore for anybody to spill the secret, but it also meant the troops were ill prepared for the actual fight. Worse, with Hitler forbidding reconnaissance efforts or anything that could give away the game, the Germans were also much less informed about the Allied positions and strengths than you would’ve wanted to be.

When it comes to the actual battle, it becomes clear almost from the start that it would fail. Initial resistance is much harder than the Germans realised and the highly optimistic targets for the first day are reached almost nowhere. Worse, the Allied response is much quicker than Hitler had anticipated. Much of the credit for that Caddick-Adams gives to Eisenhouwer, who acted decisively from day one to get reinforcements to the front and to get the shoulders of the offensive stabilised in order to counter attack. With the failure to get through the Ardennes as quickly as was needed to be able to cross the Meuse and start the true offensive, the fighting became a war of attrition which the Germans would always lose. Ultimately it set the Allies’ plans for the invasion of Germany back a couple of months, but in return many of the elite troops and weapons they would’ve faced otherwise had already been destroyed in the Bulge.

I started reading this book because I went on holiday to the Ardennes with my family, visiting the Bastogne War Museum there, but also because of the excellent series of Battle of the Bulge programmes the Youtube channel WW2TV ran in early December. If you want to get a taste of Peter Caddick-Adams writing, then watch the presentation he did for that channel on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know. I really like the methological way Caddick-Adams sets out his vision on the Offensive and why it was doomed to failure in this book and if you want a one volume overview of the campaign this is the one to get. I would however recommend that you keep both Wikipedia and Google Maps handy to look up things, because it can be a bit confusing at times. Viewing the battlefields on Google Maps gives a better grasps at the geography and flow of the battles, while Wikipedia is handy to look up some of the less explained details.

Globalhead — Bruce Sterling

science fiction
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Cover of Globalhead


Globalhead
Bruce Sterling
339 pages
published in 1992

Good science fiction doesn’t predict the future; it allows the future to recognise itself in it. Globalhead is drenched in the zeitgeist of Post-Reagan America, yet occasionally there’s a glimpse of the far flung future of 2021 to be recognised. AIDS virus based RNA wonder drugs as the gimmick in its very first story, foreshadowing the very real mRNA Covid-19 vaccine I got just weeks ago. A character called Sayyid Qutb in “We See Things Differently” provides another mild shock. These glimpses of a still to be born future are jarring considering the stories in here are barely if at all science fiction, more slipstream perhaps, a term Sterling popularised at the time these stories were written. The most recognisable sfnal story here is “The Unthinkable”, a Chtuthlu Mythos inspired Cold War riff on Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos, itself an inspiration for Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War”.

What to make of the Bruce Sterling as seen in this collection? Best known at this time as the second half of “William Gibson andd…”, one of the “fathers of Cyberpunk”. As an editor he had created the anthology that would pin down and solidify the genre, as well as its main propaganda zine. As a writer, his version of cyberpunk took a very different road from the post-Gibson consensus he himself had helped establish. As a non-fiction author, his cyberpunk interests would lead him to write a book — published the same year as this collection — about the early hacker movement(s), the development of the early internet and how the law responded to it. But little is visible of this cyberpunk guru in this collection. No jamming with console cowboys in cyberspace; a bit of low tech phone phreaking for quarters is as cyber as it gets.

But one of the central tenets of eighties cyberpunk does shape the stories here though, the idea of America as a tired, broken country, clapped out and overtaken by others. William Gibson’s Neuromancer famously contained no American brand names, while so much of its imitators were obsessed by the idea that the future was Japanese, not American. By the late eighties the false dawn of Reagan’s morning in America had faded, as had the very real fear of an imminent nuclear dawn. What remained was the feeling that America was tired, shagged out and left to rot by its friends and enemies alike. “Jim and Irene”, The Moral Bullet”, “We See Things Differently”, “Are You for 86?”, even “Dori Bangs” are all set against this backdrop, either with future explicitly collapsed America or in a present that just feels that way.

The other two major obsessions in Globalhead are Islam and the collapsing Soviet Union, sometimes together as in “Hollywood Kremlin”. Both make sense in context. While Iraq was still a faithful ally, Lybia and Iran were the great bogeymen of the eighties, every Arab a terrorist. Sterling has a much more positive view of Islam. In “The Compassionate, the Digital”, the Union of Islamic Republics has created AIs that have mastered teleportation, while “We See Things Differently” has a reporter from another united Islamic Middle East coming to America to interview a new firebrand rock star. “The Gulf Wars” opens with a familiar image of burning oil smoke over a Middle Eastern city, only to pull back and reveal its set during the Late Bronze Age Assyrian/Elamite Wars. The contemporary Gulf War it refers to is the Iraq-Iran War, rather than the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

“Storming the Cosmos” is a collaboration with Rudy Rucker, a romp set in the high tide of Soviet space exploration, with a KGB stooge being forced to go on an expedition to the Tunguska Impact site in Siberia and finding ….something. “Hollywood Kremlin” has the first appearance of Leggy Starlitz, a sort of hapless trickster figure here involved in black market smuggling of Afghanistan sourced consumer goods into the Soviet Union by way of Azerbaijan, at time of writing still a Soviet Republic, barely. It and the second Starlitz story, “Are You for 86?”, in which he is involved with a feminist gang smuggling abortion drugs into the American South are clearly not science fiction. Neither are “Jim and Irene” or “Dori Bangs” even if they have a sfnal gimmick embedded in their story of lonely outcasts finding some measure of happiness in each other. The latter story is somewhat infamous as it stars actual, if already dead at the time characters, rock critic Lester Bangs and underground cartoonist Dori Seda.

The most ‘proper’ science fiction stories here are the opening story, “Our Neural Chernobyl”, about what happens when you mix d.i.y. genetci engineering with the hacking ethos, written in the form of a book review, always a chad move. The other one is “The Shores of Bohemia”, which doesn’t look like it’s science fiction until one cunning detail reveals its hand. This story in some ways looks forwards to Holy Fire, Sterling’s 1996 post-singularity post-cyberpunk novel set in a world ruled by a gerontocracy. The disruption that easily available immortality could bring is also a theme of “The Moral Bullet”.

Not every story in Globalhead worked for me. As a whole though it is an interesting look into what Sterling was thinking about at the cusp of the nineties, reacting to a world that was quickly moving out of its comfortable Cold War straitjacket. I can’t help but feel that he look slightly further than his contemporaries when using these events as inspiration for his stories.

Contents, taken from the isfdb:

  • 1 • Our Neural Chernobyl • (1988) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 11 • Storming the Cosmos • (1985) • novelette by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling
  • 65 • The Compassionate, the Digital • (1985) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 73 • Jim and Irene • (1991) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 119 • The Sword of Damocles • (1990) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 131 • The Gulf Wars • (1988) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 152 • The Shores of Bohemia • (1990) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 188 • The Moral Bullet • (1991) • novelette by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling
  • 216 • The Unthinkable • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1991) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 224 • We See Things Differently • (1989) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 249 • Hollywood Kremlin • [Leggy Starlitz] • (1990) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 285 • Are You for 86? • [Leggy Starlitz] • (1992) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 322 • Dori Bangs • (1989) • short story by Bruce Sterling

Nuclear Nightmares — Nigel Calder

Warfare and military history
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Cover of Nuclear Nightmares


Nuclear Nightmares: an Investigation into Possible Wars
Nigel Calder
168 pages including index
published in 1979

To distract myself from the current state of the covid-19 ravaged world, I read this cheery little treatise on the machinery for nuclear war. Many many years ago, sometime in the early eighties, I bought the Dutch edition for a guilder at a church fair. And boy was it worth it: I had nightmares for years. Not that you needed much to have nuclear nightmares in the early eighties; if you ever wonder why late Gen-Xers and early millennials are so cynical, it’s because we grew up with the idea that the nuclear holocaust could happen every minute just because some world leader was a bit too gung ho. Or some seemingly small mistake makes the Soviets think an American missile barage is on its way and this time there isn’t a junior officer brave enough to wait for confirmation before he launches a counterstrike…

But that is not the nightmare that Nigel Calder sketches in this book. His is a technocratic world, a world of rational men tending carefully balanced machinery designed to deliver megadeath on the enemy. Men who do not want to murder millions of people, but who will do so if and when it is asked of them. A world full of acronym littered dry, bureaucratic language that conceals the existentialist horror at the heart of it. An orderly world that calmly makes plan to destory or cripple the enemy’s ability to wage nuclear war, that worries about the vulnerability of MIRVED Minutemen III and whether they were safe enough and good enough to hit back at the Soviets after a first strike. Can we depend on the survivability of our systesm to give our leaders time enough to think about whether they want to strike back?

And then no two years later you got a fake cowboy in the White House talking about the Evil Empire, mentally disintegrating on the job and joking on live tv that the bombs will drop in five minutes. All while promoting implausible future wonderwaffen that would make America safe from nuclear attack forever.

And on the other side, a succesion of half dead paranoid survivors of Stalin convinced the west could and would attack them any minute. For all the Western hawks worrying about Soviet plans for world domination, more concerned with Dmitri in Leningrad finally getting a fridge and colour television, but worried that the imperialistic west was plotting to abuse a period of weakness.

But even when Calder was writing his book, he was chronicling an illusion. The neat, orderly world of calm dispassionate technocrats making brilliant plans for the end of the world was fake. The reality is shown in a much more recent book, Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control. In reality, there were at least half a dozen incidents in which an American nuclear weapon would’ve detonated on American ground but for a bit of luck, where nuclear bombs are safeguarded with nothing more than a simple bicycle lock, where instead of intricate control mechanisms and the decision to launch made only at the highest level, any Italian soldier could’ve launched a leased American nuclear missile because there were no safeguards.

In hindsight, I’m not sure if Schlosser’s reality wouldn’t have frightened me more than Calder’s already terrifying portrait of a mechanism that could sleepwalk into nuclear war. What comforts me is that the actual military commanders involved at the time seemed to think a nuclear war would never happen, that the entire idea of the Cold War turning hot was a fantasy. Just read the reactions of senior Warsaw Pact commanders (PDF) to the idea of actually going to war and how likely that had been. If only I had know that in 1984, having nightmares every time the news was about arms limitation negotiations or tensions in Europe.

Of course, within a decade this whole system would be obsolete, that existential threat vanquished, the whole complex revealed to be irrelevant, as the people of Eastern Europe rose up and overthrow those seemingly invincible ‘socialist’ dictatorships. That seventies idea that the only choice the world had was between an uneasy detente between twho hostile systems or nuclear annihilation that sets the tone for Calder’s book was shown up to be false by the actions of ordinary people, completely powerless to do what it was built for, safeguard the existence of its masters’ world system.

The late 1970s were a strange time, the Soviet Union slowly rotting from the inside out while the lunatics of Team B –the people who thirty years later would bring you the War on Iraq — were busy screaming their heads off that America was doomed because the commies were so much better armed and so much more ruthless. All that was fake, but at the time we didn’t know better. All the clever clogs and military commentators really thought that the West was losing the Cold War, that our vulnerabilities meant a nuclear war was inevitable if we didn’t want to go Red. So much of eighties pop culture is steeped in that American paranoia, from Red Dawn to Pournelle’s CoDominion stories where detente was interstellar. Meanwhile here in Europe we grew up knowning our towns were just a megaton apart from each other and we were busy cataloging the likely nuclear targets near our home towns.

A real great time to grow up in. Never thought I’d make it to adulthood, but here we are.

Sexiled — Kaeruda Ameko

Fantasy
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Cover of Sexiled


Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out, So I Teamed Up With a Mythical Sorceress!
Kaeruda Ameko
Miya Kazutomo (illustrator)
Molly Lee (translator)
174 pages
published in 2019

About halfway through Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out, So I Teamed Up With a Mythical Sorceress!, our heroine has uncovered a conspiracy at the magical school she graduated top of the class from, a conspiracy to falsely lower the score of female applicants on the entrance exams to keep the number of women admitted artificially low. When I read that, I knew this must have been a reference to the scandal of several Japanese medical schools having been caught in 2018 doing exactly that. In her afterword, Kaeruda Ameko admitted that it was indeed this story that led her to write Sexiled. A female power/revenge fantasy, as opposed to the numerous male power fantasies that litter the genre.

Like most light novels, reading the full title is enough to get a sense of what Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out, So I Teamed Up With a Mythical Sorceress! is about. Tanya Artemiciov is a talented mage and adventurer, who one day over breakfast is fired from her party by its leader, Ryan. She’s after all not getting any younger, must be thinking about getting married and having babies, right? So it would make sense for her to stop being an adventurer and do something more suited to women, like becoming a Healer, right? Needless to say, Tanya disagrees, storms off to the Western Wastelands to blow off some steam and as she attacks the innocent landscape, her magical attacks accidentally wake up a mythical evil sorceress. Oops.

Fortunately the Grand Sorceress Laplace’s is much nicer than her reputation — though she has a bit more self regard than normal — and after some …negotiating she and Tanya team up to take part in the upcoming Tournament, to take revenge on Tanya’s old team. However, because they’re both ridiculously overpowered, they need a third person to bring their average level down enough to be able to participate. They find her in Nadine Amaryllis, a clerk at the Adventurers Guild, who so happens to be a level 3 Healer. Normally nobody would be interested in such a low level adventurer, but thanks ot her their party’s level is lowered just enough to be able to meet the tournament’s requirements.

Nadine agrees to join, on one condition: Tanya and Laplace have to make sure her charge Alisa gets into the Imperial mage academy. Alisa is an orphan who has the sole care of her younger siblings, who needs to become a mage to be able to get a good job to provide for them. Tanya and Laplace are naturally touched by this story like the big softies they are and agree to it. It’s when Alisa takes the entrance exam that another candidate — a boy of course — spills the beans and Tanya and co learn of the conspiracy to limit the number of women passed. Which they quickly rectify.

This side quest to get Alisa in the academy is at the core of what Sexiled is about. It harkens back to what inspired Kaeruda to write the story in the first place, it shows the female solidarity that flows throughout it as well as the male fragility and sexism that Tanya and co are fighting against. Tanya, Laplace and Nadine naturally look out for each other, have each other’s back. Liberated from the expectations that the male dominated Adventurers society place on them, they can blossom to their fullest potential. With Laplace as the exemplar of what a woman can achieve if not stifled by archaic gender expectations, Tanya gets the chance to break free herself, from things like this:

“This style’s been in fashion ever since we found out that women have to expose as much skin as possible in order to boost their mana sensitivity.” Aha. That explained why it seemed as though every female adventurer was so ridiculously scantily clad: they were being lied to. Truly lamentable.

Yep, all woman adventurers have to wear Guild approved clothing, which mostly is skimpy and “sexy” rather than functional, with the excuse given as above, that it’s necessary. Here Sexiled neatly skewers fantasy convention, neither the first nor the last time it does so. All those stupid little ways in which fantasy can demean female characters are taken apart and rejected.

What Sexiled offers instead is solidarity. Laplace naturally sympathises with Tanya’s plights and helps her, while the both of them go out of their way to help Nadine and Alisa in turn, even though they could’ve found another low level adventurer for their party instead. And than there’s Katherine Foxxi.

Katherine is the Healer Ryan replaced Tanya with, the epitome of the Cool Girl, fawning over men and bitchy about any woman but herself. She hang’s on Ryan’s arms and constantly flatters him, but as Tanya notices, she doesn’t seem to mean any of it. The opposite of Tanya, who earnestly worked hard to become a great mage, Katherine is perfectly happy stoking the ego of men like Ryan to get what she wants, aiming to use him to look good in the tournament and get herself a better man. Yet once the tournament begins and Tanya’s party fights her, it turns out that she is actually a talented Mage in her own right, that had they met under other circumstances they could’ve been friends. And in the end, after Tanya and co’s inevitable win, that’s what they become, as Katherine wises up and changes her ways.

Sexiled was a quick read; you could finish this in an hour. Apart from its feminist message, it’s very much what you’d expect from a fantasy light novel, with a straight forward plot and a RPG based world, complete with Adventure Guilds and character classes and all that good stuff. As per usual, there’s a bit more exposition than you’d expect in a ‘proper’ novel, some mild confusion in point of view every now and again, but in all it’s very moreish. Luckily the next volume comes out in December 2019. Translation wise there’s the occasional hiccup where a sentence doesn’t quite make sense in English, but on the whole Molly Lee has done a good job, in as far as I can judge.

Example of one of the illustrations, as done by Miya Kazutomo.

The last thing that needs mentioning are the illustrations. They’re cute, sexy when needed, but no broken spines and I like the character designs. They whet the appetite for a manga or anime adaptation.

All in all this was a glorious romp and I’m looking forward to the next volume.

My Real Children — Jo Walton

science fiction
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Cover of My Real Children


My Real Children
Jo Walton
320 pages
published in 2014

It’s 2015 and Patricia Cowan is “very confused”, according to the notes in her dossier, eighty-eight or eightynine years old and suffering from dementia. Maybe that’s why sometimes she remembers marrying Mark and giving birth to five children, with four still births in between and sometimes remembers not marrying him and raising a family with Bee, giving birth to two children with a third child not of her body. She remembers her childhood well enough, anything up to that faithful moment when Mark asked her to marry him, but afterwards her memories are doubled.

Since this is a science fiction novel, this doubling is of course not a symptom of her dementia, but instead her ability to recall the life she led in two alternate timelines, the Jonbar point being that faithful call Mark made to propose to her. What sets it apart from most other alternate history stories is that it’s neither concerned with the differences with our timeline, nor with the big political events, but rather with Patricia’s life in both histories. The resulting book reminds me of nothing so much of the sort of novel the Virago Modern Classics line specialised in reprinting: domestically orientated novels by 20th century women writers highlighting the struggles of everyday women.

After the introduction My Real Children starts with telling Patricia’s childhood and student years in Oxford, where she meets Mark. It ends when he calls her at her teaching job after he fails to get the first he needed to continue his studies and proposes to her. Patricia at this point is a naive and provincial young woman, who in the WWII Oxford kept herself to circles fitting to her background as the daughter of non-conformists, joining the Christian Union and not being much involved in the social life otherwise. Her romance and engagement with Mark are very much chaste and it’s therefore not surprising that she doesn’t realise Mark is gay, something I suspected from the start and which was confirmed after the timeline forked.

At first that forking seems relatively innocent, with only Patricia’s own situation changed, but the changes mount up over time. A bit disappointingly, the changes in the wider world were much more negative in the timeline in which Pat’s own situation was much better in comparison with Tricia’s timeline, which was much more utopian compared to Pat’s. I’d have rather seen both timelines to be the sort of muddling through timeline that we ourselves are living in, where things are a mixture of bad and good. Instead there’s one line in which the Cold War ends much earlier and much more pleasantly than in reality and one in which the Cuban Crisis goes hot and leads to a limited nuclear exchange, setting a precedent for more (limited) nuclear wars.

But this is a minor quibble. The focus after all is on Pat/Tricia, with alternating chapters telling the stories of their lives, a few years at a time, not always matching up. In both of her lives Pat/Tricia is queer and bi, though in one life she discovers this much earlier than in the other. There’s a quietly feminist tone to the book as the both of them struggle against the expectations cast on them because of their gender and later, sexuality. Because we know how Pat/Trica’s story end so to speak, reading it is a bittersweet sort of pleasure.

This is not as upbeat and triumphal as her previous novel, Among Others, but it’s the more impressive for it. Among Others was grounded in Jo Walton’s own life, a celebration of how science fiction and fandom can overturn your life for the better. My Real Children is written in a much more sober mood, more ‘realistic’ I’m almost tempted to say. Science fiction does not tend to produce many books like this, firmly fixed on the domestic, the everyday lives that go on among even in an sf setting. It’s what makes My Real Children unique.