Martin's Booklog

Fields of Conflict – Douglas Scott, Lawrence Babits and Charles Haecker

Published on May 15, 2010

Cover of
Fields of Conflict

Fields of Conflict
Douglas Scott, Lawrence Babits and Charles Haecker
450 pages including index
published in 2009

Fields of Conflicts is a collection of essays on battlefield archaeology, based on papers presented on a conference of the same title as the book, held in 2004. Battlefield archaeology as a separate discipline is a relatively recent development, even if military history is of course of quite ancient vintage. Astounding as it may seems, battlefield archaeology only got started in the early eighties, with a groundbreaking research paper on the Little Bighorn battlefield. Though it seems obvious in retrospect to apply archaeological techniques in researching battles and battlefields, battlefields are such ephemeral sites, battles rarely lasting more than a day, while archaeology traditionally focused on sites that had been inhabitated for centuries, that it’s no wonder it took so long for somebody to do so. That somebody was Douglas Scott, also one of the editors of this volume and you realise the impact of his research by seeing how often in the essays collected here it is refered to.

In fact, Douglas Scott is so influential that I’ve seen him on the History Channel showcasing his Little Big Horn research a few years ago, which was the first time I heard of battlefield archaeology. It was fascinating to see how it was possible to almost track the movement of single soldiers on the battlefield by hunting for the detritus they left behind in the course of the battle. Fields of Conflicts shows how much can be known of even obscure battles this way, through creative use of archaeological techniques and especially metal dectoring, but also how much still remains unknownable as well. It’s a fascinating read even for armchair historians like myself, a glimpse in how the real professionals handle these problems.

The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall

Published on April 6, 2010

Cover of
The Raw Shark Texts

The Raw Shark Texts
Steven Hall
427 pages
published in 2007

The Raw Shark Texts was marked as science fiction in my local library, which is why I glanced at it while browsing the fiction shelves. “Mindfuck” would be a better classification howeve, one of those books that break down the realities of your world and has you looking for monsters out of the corners of your eye. Reading it on a long, delayed train journey with nothing else to distract me while it was slowly getting dark helped a lot as well.

Steven Hall sucked me in from the first two sentences: “I was unconscious. I’d stopped breathing.” I should quote the first three and a half pages to show how Steven Hall builds up the scene from there, as his hero wakes up in an explosion of coughs and deep breaths, takes stock of his situation and then realises he doesn’t know where he is or who he is. He pats his pockets, locates a driver’s licence and tastes the name it gives him: Eric Sanderson. The scene ends with that discovery, with a new scene opening in a therapist’s sitting room, as she explains what’s been happening to him. While she explains, flashbacks explains how Eric got there: going downstairs from the bedroom he awoke in, he found a letter by the telephone, a letter from “the first Eric Sanderson”: who tells him to go to this therapist.

Black Man – Richard Morgan

Published on April 3, 2010

Cover of Black Man

Black Man
Richard Morgan
630 pages
published in 2007

This was too much of a rerun for me. Black Man (published in the US as Thirteen for obvious reasons) has much the same plot as Morgan’s first novel Altered Carbon. A worldweary, cynical but ubercompetent mercenary is blackmailed into going after a murderer and in the process uncovers a far greater and more horrible truth than he suspected existed or his employers necessarily wanted him to find out. As with every Morgan novel I’ve read so far it’s an edge of your seat thriller, keeps you engaged to the bitter end, but five minutes later you’re thinking “that’s all“? I got the feeling Morgan was going through the motions, his heart not in it and it just seemed too slight to be worth a Clarke Award.

One big reason for the discomfort I felt was the silly worldbuilding. Morgan is excellent at creating a “realistic” sounding world, using infodumps, incluing and jargon to create an image in his readers’ heads, but it doesn’t work when he bases his future on the infamous Jesusland map. Remember 2006, after Bush had started his second (stolen) term and before the Congressional midterm elections, and how many of the liberal leaning blogs were despairing of their country? How it really seemed for a moment the US was split in two, with progressive coasts and an ignorant flyover country? Yeah? Remember also how fast that changed once the Democrats actually won an election? Well, it’s this that Morgan bases his future on: the Jesusland maps and books like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas. It was already dated when he was writing it, now just feels hopelessly silly. It makes it hard to take the world Morgan created seriously.

Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City – Gwendolyn Leick

Published on March 21, 2010

Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City

Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City
Gwendolyn Leick
252 pages including index
published in 1993

Continuing with my interest in Bronze Age history, I got Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City from the library, about the only book on Mesopotamia actually present there at the time and not hopelessly (decades) out of date. I know little about Mesopotamia other than the stuff everybody knows, it being probably the oldest civilisation in the world, inventors of written language and the city, yaddayaddaya. All I knew about it I learned from my old childrens encyclopedias, long obsolete even when I read them some twenty years ago…

Gwendolyn Leick didn’t set out to write a general history, but more of an overview of the ten most important cities that made up the area: Eridu, Uruk, Shuruppak, Akkad, Ur, Sippar, Nippur, Ashur, Nineveh and Babylon. She does this in chronological order, with Eridu the oldest established and Babylon the youngest. Considering that Babylon was an old, old city when Rome yet had to be founded, you can imagine how old the earliest cities were, as far away in time from the founding of Rome as we are from its fall. Which is the most important point that I picked up from this book, how long Mesopotamia’s history was, that later cities might have had the same sort of relationship with the very first ones as we have with Rome and Greece.

Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan

Published on March 9, 2010

Cover of Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon
Richard Morgan
534 pages
published in 2002

Altered Carbon is Richard Morgan’s first novel. It made a strong impression, winning the Philip K. Dick Prize for best novel in 2003, as well as being optioned by Joel Silver, the sale of the movie rights enabling Morgan to become a fulltime writer. Since then Morgan has written several more novels, part of the same generation of British science fiction writers as Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I knew of him, but had not read anything of his until last year, when I read Broken Angels and was sucked in from the first page. So not for the first time I started a series in the wrong way, as that was actually the sequel to this book — not that it mattered, as all they shared was the hero, Takeshi Kovacs.

Whereas Broken Angels was a Dirty Dozen type war romp with the cynicsm turned up to eleven, Altered Carbon is more of a Chandleresque film noir story. It starts with Takeshi as amercenary on Harlan’s World being caught and killed in a police dragnet, to wake up on Earth minus one partner and forced to solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft, which everybody but the murder victim in question thinks is suicide. If Takeshi refuses to cooperate or fails in his task he’ll go back in storage for the next couple of centuries or so.