Martin's Booklog

Slavernij en Beschaving — Karwan Fatah-Black

Published on April 29, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Slavernij en Beschaving

Slavernij en Beschaving: Geschiedenis van een Paradox
Slavery and Civilisation: History of a Paradox
Karwan Fatah-Black
192 pages including notes and index
published in 2021

Thanks partially to the Black Lives Matter movement, the slavery debate has erupted once again in the Netherlands. For years and decades those descended from enslaved people have been lobbying for recognition from the Dutch government for the injustices done to their ancestors. While in the past decade both governments and public opinion have been increasingly prepared to indeed acknowledge these, there’s also still a large minority resistant and hostile to any such recognition. Partially this is the usual far right suspects of course, but there are also certain ‘respectable’ historians allergic to anything that looks like an apology for slavery. There is a tendency within the Netherlands to want to have our glorious past as a Great Power without acknowledging the human costs that came with building our empire and wealth. Anything that even hints at the fact that the prosperity of the Netherlands during our Golden Age and beyond was built upon murder, rape, genocide and slavery is immediately rejected. Despite this resistance though the interest in coming to terms with our past has grown, in no small part thanks to the efforts of those whose ancestors were the victims of Dutch greed. Official acknowledgment on all levels of involvement in the slave trade has been growing, with the Dutch government formally apologising for the slave trade not long ago.

Despite this, the question remains why there was and is still so much resistance to this acknowledgement of simple historic facts. Everybody agrees slavery is bad, it has been abolished since 1863, it’s been explicitly named as a crime against humanity by the UN since its foundation, so why this hesitance? That’s the question which led Karwan Fatah-Black to write this book. For him, this resistance flows from the Narrative that has been created about slavery in the West, a narrative that minimises and absolves Europeans from their responsibilities for slavery. Anything challenging this narrative feels like an attack not just on our history, but ourselves for having profited from its existence, no matter how indirectly. If we want to come to grips with our history of slavery therefore, this narrative first needs to be dismantled before the reality of slavery can be made clear: this is the goal of this book.

To do so, Fatah-Black first establishes what this narrative about slavery is. It starts with the idea that slavery was an inevitable and uncontroversial part of all ancient civilisations, particularly those that form the cradle of Western civilisation: Greece and Rome. Slavery as an universal concept every society participated in and which was the same in every civilisation that had it. Building on that, the idea is that the existence of slavery taught the West how important freedom is, while the rise of Christianity meant the abolishment of slavery in Europe, with Europe therefore leading the way towards a higher civilisation. Sadly however, as European nations started exploring the world, they came into contact with lesser civilised countries, where slavery still existed and had no choice but to accept it and use it themselves. However, thanks to the Enlightenment they were also the first to voluntarily abolish first the slave trade and then slavery itself, again leading the world.

It;s a very self serving narrative of course, as if we introduced slavery only to be able to abolish it later. But it is something that is still adhered to by many people, including historians. It ties in with the idea of slave owners as good patriarchs protecting people who were just not capable of leading themselves, who needed a firm hand to kep them fed and content. Nasty but seductive, Fatah-Black attempts to dismantle this story by first looking at historical slavery and then extending this history by looking at the voices of actual enslaved people themselves. In that first part, Fatah-Black goes from ancient Greece and Rome, to slavery in the Islamic World, to Atlantic slavery and in each period examines the idea that slavery was indeed natural and uncontroversial. In the second part, the idea that slavery was abolished voluntarily purely though the good will of the western powers is demolished.

To start with the latter, Fatah-Black goes into the history of slave rebellions, focusing in on Haiti and how this was the first country to abolish slavery and did this entirely through the efforts of the enslaved population. Inspired by the ideals of the French revolution the enslaved freed themselves, while France betrayed its own ideals with its attempts to re-enslave them. Of course Haiti was not the only revolt against slavery and Fatah-Black also looks at other examples. The intention is to show that even without the abolition movements in England and elsewhere, there was resistance against slavery and that this resistance sooner or later forced the abolition of slavery. He also provides the example of Tunesia, which abolished slavery in 1846, well before the Netherlands or the US did, to show abolition was not dependent on being a ‘western’ or christian society.

That there was this resistance and that this resistance was widespread is of course already an important clue that slavery was never as accepted or natural as its proponents then or apologists now like to claim it was. Even in societies like Ancient Greece or Rome where it was an accepted fact of life, there were still people who refused to and certainly a sense that it was not a good thing to be a slave. The idea that slavery is just a natural phase societies go through that will disappear once it is civilised enough is therefore shown to be wrong. Even in true slaver societies it is clear people knew slavery is wrong.

Remains the question why there is so much resistance against the true history of slavery and the unsavoury role western countries like the Netherlands played in the Atlantic slave trade. Perhaps it’s just not wanting to feel guilty for enjoying a level of wealth that is partially built on this crime. If we pretend slavery is just a normal thing societies go through, that we are actually praiseworthy for ending it voluntarily, no need to feel guilty or make reparations.

Hello America — J. G. Ballard

Published on March 21, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Hello America

Hello America
J. G. Ballard
224 pages
published in 1981

I must’ve last read this sometime in the late eighties, back when I was dependent on my local library for my science fiction and fantasy. Said library had a rule that adult fiction could only be borrowed if you were at least fourteen years old; it also had a rule that you could only borrow four fiction books at a time. I however had found a hack for both rules: foreign language novels didn’t count for either. Which meant that once I could read English, I started reading every English language sci-fi book the library had, including this one. Not sure I finished it at the time, but I was reminded of it through Phil’s review, where he characterises it as “a minor Ballard” and going “completely off the boil” halfway through. That picked my interest enough to want to reread it and you know, he wasn’t wrong. In fact, I would go further and argue it never really got going as a story. There’s little of Ballard’s normal inventiveness or imagery here and it feels tired from the start. It doesn’t help that it was dated even at the time of publication by having Jerry Brown as the last president of the United States…

The core idea of the book, that America was abandoned rather than destroyed, is interesting. The oil crisis of the seventies here continued unabated into the 1980s and 1990s, leading to a de-industrialisation of the USA, with people migrating back to Europe and Asia not long after. By the turn of the millennium America is all but abandoned, a few decades later even the pretense of an American government in exile is also given up. The energy crisis is handled better in the old world, where giantic environmental engineering projects damn the Bering Strait to provide farm land in the Arctic circle, but condemning the American east coast to becoming a desert while the west becomes a jungle. All this is explained in chapter seven of the novel rather than more organically, in one big infodump. It’s a very seventies sort of apocalypse but it also reminds me of some of the paranoid rightwing fantasies of the eighties were America is either betrayed or given up on, without ever being explicitly conquered or destroyed, the fear that the world could continue on even without it. Ballard’s version of course only works if you don’t look at it too hard, which I feel goes for most of Hello America.

The story itself starts roughly a century after America was abandoned, when an expedition from Europe onboard the steamship Apollo (of course) sets foot on American soil for the first time in decades. They’re there to determine the cuase of the radiation leaking out from the continent. Decades old nuclear reactors may be leaking, as may some nuclear weapon storages, but it also looks suspiciously like an actual nuclear detonation. The handpicked crew of teh Apollo needs to answer this question, but Wayne, our protagonist isn’t one of them, as he stowed away, keen to visit the country his ancestors came from and his father disappeared in. Wayne is not, to be honest, a very active protagonist, mostly moved by what’s happening around him, rather than initiating his own actions. Which is not a problem as long as the expedition is on the move, but does mean, as Phil noted, that the second half of the book is much weakened when they reach Las Vegas and just stay there as things happen all around him.

The image of the United States Ballard presents in Hello America is very much rooted in 1950s & 60s pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, the Kennedies, “Indian” tribes modeled after Chicago gangsters or stereotypical Divorcees, with the Executives tribe members all having brand names like Heinz or Xerox, etc. The villain of the piece is even called president Manson. Even for 1981 this seems a bit much. The first half of the book, with the expediotion trecking through an endless desert following the ancient highways, from motel oasis to motel oasis has almost an overdose of what you could call stereotypical Ballardian imagery: empty swimming pools, cracked concrete et all. The second half in Vegas, doubles down on the kitsch, with a musical performance by a small army of robot replicas of the various US presidents.

In the end, this was a failure. Entertaining enough on a chapter by chapter basis, it failed to form a coherent whole and its momentum completely disappeared in its second half, which indeed took me twice as long to read as the first. It just became a chore to finish, something you shouldn’t be able to say of any Ballard novel.

Power in the Darkness — Wiebren Rijkeboer

Published on February 5, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Power in the Darkness

Power in the Darkness: Britse Postpunk en New Wave
Wiebren Rijkeboer
213 pages
published in 2022

If you judge a book about music on how much it makes you want to listen to the music it’s talking about, Power in the Darkness was a huge success. After reading it I spent weeks going through my post-punk and new wave album, while also looking for some of the artists that were new to me Wiebren championed in its pages. Not that I needed much encouragement: this is part of the music I grew up with, background noise growing up as a kid in the eighties. If I wasn’t old enough nor cool enough to have bought the singles myself, at least I knew them from their appearances on the Dutch equivalent of Radio 2. Wiebren Rijkeboer, born in 1959, a decade and a half before me, on the other hand is old enough to know the bands covered first hand and that comes through in the book.

Power in the Darkness‘s structure is quite simple: a short introduction that lays out the parameters of the project, followed by a chronological look at some eighty-five post-punk and new wave albums released between 1978 and 1993, each by a different band. It starts in 1978 with the Buzzcocks’ Another Music in a Different Kitchen because punk’s definitively dead by then and ends in 1993 with East Village’s Drop Out for less obvious reasons, roughly where Britpop took over. Geographically Wiebren’s focus is limited to the UK and Ireland (and forgive the Dutch habit of calling this all British in the title). He also limits himself to bands, so no Elvis Costello or Ian Dury here. This is very much a personal project, a sampler of what post-punk and new wave have to offer, not the ultimate guide. As you may expect, the emphasis is on the years 1979 to 1982, with a long tail through the rest of the eighties and early nineties.

Each album discussion is only a few pages long, in which Wiebren introduces the band and context in which it was made, gives a quick impression of what it sounds like and takes a quick look at the band’s other noteworthy releases. Most of postpunk’s usual suspects are there: Buzzcocks, the Fall, Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, but there are also some much less well known bands mentioned. Doll by Doll, The Records, Cowboys International, Random Hold: all new to me. Always a good thing when a book can introduce you to new to you artists and give you enough context to know whether or not you’ll enjoy them.

Genre wise, the boundaries of post-punk are not very strictly guarded here. A lot of gothic acts like The Mission, Sex Gang Children and Sisters of Mercy creep in here as well, though Wiebren calls them ‘positive punk’ which, no. Post 1985 as well what makes the featured acts post-punk or new wave becomes a bit less clear too. The Stone Roses or Primal Scream don’t quite fit in here, if obviously inspired by the earlier bands.

In all, if you can read Dutch and have a limited knowledge about post-punk and the period in which it was dominant, this is a good introduction. There are no obvious omissions nor anything included that clearly shouldn’t have been. You could listen to worse music than the albums featured here.

The Soul of Anime — Ian Condry

Published on August 26, 2023Leave a comment

Cover of The Soul of Anime

The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story
Ian Condry
242 pages including notes and index
published in 2013

Sometime in 2015 I became obsessed with anime. I’m not sure why, but from something that I had only a passing interest in, it became an overwhelming passion in the course of a few months. Before long just watching anime wasn’t enough and I wanted to know more about its history and the context in which anime was made. So I started reading blogs and anime websites and then looking for books. At the time a few books kept popping in any anime discussion that went further than whether Goko could beat up One Punch Man. Those included Sait Takami’s Beautiful Fighting Girl, Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and this, Ian Condry’s The Soul of Anime. I bought all of them, I tried to read all of them, but never managed to finish or understand any of them. I can only blame my own inexperience and lack of knowledge; I just didn’t know enough about anime back them to be able to understand them.

I was reminded of this book earlier this week by a tweet complaining about the lack of understanding of what anime is, which brought me to pick it up again. This time I managed to understand its purpose a lot better, now that I wasn’t labouring under the misunderstanding it was intended as any sort of history of anime. Instead what Condry was trying to accomplish should’ve been clear to me from the title. He was trying to pin down the essence of what makes anime anime, when it was no longer sufficient to say that anime is just Japanese animation. Much of the actual animation work after all is outsourced to other, cheaper countries, like Korea or the Philipines. At the same time, anime even at the time of writing was increasingly aimed at an international market, not necessarily the domestic Japanese markets. Similarly, the success of anime in e.g the United States also led to various local anime-like projects, like Avatar: the Last Airbender. Yet anime is clearly is its own thing, so how do we find out what that particular thing is made of?

Condry tries to answer this question through making use of techniques developed in ethnography. Specifically, he does so by interviewing and especially observing the people working on creating anime. For Condry, what makes anime interesting is the way it is being made. And he means that in the broadest possible sense of the word. The Soul of Anime looks not just at how various studios work, but also at e.g. the fansubbing community. As Condry explains in the first chapter, the book is the result of half a decade of field work done between 2004-2010 at various anime companies: mainly Gonzo, Aniplex and Madhouse, supplemented by visits to other companies in both Japan and the US as well as explorations into various fan activities. Condry also looks into the history of anime, though it’s fairly superficial, to further support his thesis.

For Condry, the “Soul of Anime” is its social aspect. Anime as a collaborative enterprise, networks of people interacting with their own ideas about anime, where the distinction between professionals, producers and fans, consumers is not that clear. It’s that collaborative creativity that links fan labour and professional labour for Condry, that made anime into the worldwide media success it is now. So for example you had the top down push of Nintendo’s global marketing campaign and the pull of overseas fans wanting to see the anime version of their favourite game that made Pokemon a global powerhouse. It is a decent enough explanation for what makes anime and the anime media complex different from other media, but I’m not quite convinced that this really is all this unique to anime, especially now.

There is no getting around it: The Soul of Anime is dated, in some aspects badly dated. The book was published in 2013, which already makes it ten years old, but worse, most of the field work Condry did was done in 2005-2006. A lot of his references therefore are almost two decades old at this point and take place in a very different world. There’s no mention of streaming in here. Crunchyroll was founded in 2006 but was still a piracy site at the time. Overseas fans still had to get their anime either from tv broadcasts or through licensed DVDs. Anime was popular outside Japan, but still very much a cult phenomenon mostly. Espcially in the fansubbing section of the book, things have changed so much that it has become mostly useless for understanding modern anime culture.

Reading The Soul of Anime is like opening a time capsule of what anime was like in 2006, on the cusp of global success and mainstream acceptance, but hesitant about what that would mean. Which means that Condry spends time examining the Gonzo series Red Garden as an example of an internationally orientated anime series because it’s set in New York. In a world in which Netflix and Disney order their own anime series this is small beer indeed. In 2023, with anime being a globally consumed medium and streaming media in general being much more globally orientated; Netflix streaming Korean game shows and cute romcoms alongside Mexican and Spanish mafia dramas, some of its uniqueness has been lost. This is also true in fandom, with fandoms for mainstream ‘properties’ evolving to be more like anime fandoms.

I’m not sure whether this undercuts Condry’s thesis, but it is something to take into account when reading The Soul of Anime. In the end it is a very mid-2000s look at what anime is, with very mid-2000s idea of what anime fandom and otakus are like. I’m not sure it really fits modern anime fandom anymore. Nevertheless a good, accessible book to get into anime criticism with.

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

Published on May 28, 20231 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.

Which of course doesn’t mean the stories here are bad, but they are typical Analog stories, all but one having been published in 1961. Each at its heart is a puzzle story, where the protagonist — like the writers invariably a man — is presented with some problem or conundrum he has to solve and through some clever deduction, manages to do so at the end of the story. Some of the stories in this volume, like Teddy Keller’s The Plague are more straightforward than others. The best, like Lloyd Biggle’s Monument are a bit more elaborate in disguising the formula. Stylistically there’s little variation either: each story is told in a matter of fact, no-nonsense style with little room for any stylistic flourishes. Winston P. Sander’s Barnacle Bull was the exception to this, which is not a surprise as Sander is a pseudonym for Poul Anderson. Overall this is not a bad anthology, but very much of its time and type with no real surprises. There are of course no female authors included.

Monument (1961) • novelette — Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
For an Analog writer, Lloyd Biggle was a bit of a liberal, here writing a story you could call anti-colonialist. A lone astronaut crashes on an idyllic alien planet and as the end of his life nears, he’s gripped by the fear that once this planet is officially discovered, the inhabitants will be quickly assimilated and have their culture destroyed. So he hatches a plan. Decades later, once first contact has indeed been made, the inhabitants still follow the Plan to the letter, as seen through the eyes of a series of well intended but confused witnesses. Written at a time when tourism and cultural imperialism were indeed destroying native cultures all over the world, Monument‘s heart is in the right place, but this is still a very liberal sort of white saviour fantasy. It’s cynical about how developed countries deals with native interests but not cynical enough — no mass graves here. The best story in this anthology, despite this.

The Plague (1961) • short story — Teddy Keller
A new mysterious plague — or is it a poison attack — is sweeping America and it’s up to one tired non-com to solve the mystery. This seems to be Keller’s only science fiction story, judging from the ISFDB. Competent but very straight forward as said.

Remember the Alamo! (1961) • short story — T. R. Fehrenbach
Fehrenbach was actually a Texan historian rather than a science fiction author; this and one other story for a Texas themed anthology are his only sf stories. This one is a neat little story about a confused time traveller who comes back to a pivotal moment in American history which a lot different from what he remembered happening.

The Hunch (1961) • short story — Christopher Anvil
An interstellar scout is sent on a dangerous mission with all the experimental, high tech new gadgets he didn’t want nor trusted on his ship, to understand just why two equally high specced scout ships had disappeared. The answer turns out to have been a particular bit of technology that was a bit too helpful for its own good. Something that any computer user stymied by some equally helpful piece of software can appreciate. Christopher Anvil was the quintessential Analog writer, good at writing clever puzzle stories, delivered with a sense of humour. He also had a bit of a libertarian streak, as best shown in Pandora’s Planet.

Barnacle Bull (1960) • short story — Winston P. Sanders
If you didn’t know that Winston P. Sanders was a Poul Anderson pseudonym, you could’ve guessed from the protagonist being Norwegian. Serving on a Norwegian interplanetary expedition in fact, attempting to cross the Asteroid Belt when things start getting wrong. The radiation levels in the ship keep slowly rising, communication with Earth is lost and the crew has to make the decision to continue or turn around. Each option brings its own dangers and the fact that multiple expeditions before theirs never made it weights heavily on their minds. The cause of all this misery can be found in the title; the solution is obvious in hindsight but not when you’re reading.

Join Our Gang? (1961) • short story — Sterling E. Lanier
This is actually Lanier’s first story, a typical Analog ‘Earth men beating aliens by clever trickery. In this case a proud, caste bound alien species is on the brink of space travel but refuses to join the thousand worlds of Sirian Combine, the one thing that ensures peace in this part of the Galaxy. Through what’s basically biowarfare they are persuaded to change their minds and join the gang. More cynical than many such stories are, like the one straight after it in this anthology. Lanier was an interesting, if minor writer, friends with Tolkien; Hiero’s Journey is a minor post-apocalyptic classic.

Sleight of Wit (1961) • novelette — Gordon R. Dickson
A human scout lands on the same planet in the same part as an alien colleague. Now each has to find a way to take the other prisoner and take them home just in case the other is hostile. Naturally the Earthman comes up with a clever scheme. This is apparently the sort of story Campbell approved of. Dickson had written and would write much better stories. His Dorsai novels about a planet of superhuman mercenaries being his best.

Prologue to an Analogue (1961) • novelette — Leigh Richmond
The world keeps running into crisis after crisis that are miraculously resolved through inexplicit means. Could the Witch themed commercials for cleaning products shown after each news broadcast have anything to do with this? Weakest story in the whole anthology for me, as it’s all done so very plodding and in service of a mawkish point about the power of the common people. Might be forgiven because it looks this was Leigh Richmond’s first published story.

Save for Monument there are no essential stories in this anthology, but it is a good look at where the Campbell edited Analog was at at the start of the sixties. Campbell of course was a massive racist and (borderline) fascist, whose best days as an editor were long behind him, but the stories here are mostly harmless. Probably not of interest to anybody who didn’t inhale this sort of science fiction as a child like I did. You can see why the New Wave that would sweep this all way a few years later was so necessary. Speaking of which, there is still a certain innocence to these stories that you don’t see with similar stories post-New Wave, as those were written in the knowledge that they were obsolete.