The Trojans and their Neighbours – Trevor Bryce

History
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The Trojans and their Neighbours


The Trojans and their Neighbours
Trevor Bryce
225 pages including index
published in 2006

The cover looks like it should belong on the course book of a not particularly interesting IT certification course, but don’t let that fool you. Behind it hides one of the more engaging and interesting history books I’ve read in the past year or so. Which came as no surprise to me, as I had already read one of Trevor Bryce’s other history books, The Kingdom of the Hittites. The cover therefore couldn’t scare me off…

The subject itself helps as well of course. The story of Troy, the city at the heart of Homer’s Iliad, thought to be no more than a myth until Schliemann actually dug it up remains endlessly fascinating to anybody interested in ancient history. As Bryce mentions, even today the question of whether or not the Troy Schliemann dug up was the “real” Troy, Homer’s Troy is still hotly debated. But as Bryce argues, this is also the least interesting question you can ask about the actually existing Troy. Troy existed for several thousand years and was a flourishing community long before and after the Trojan War supposedly happened. With an emphasis on the Bronze Ages, The Trojans and their Neighbours attempts to put straight the real history and position of Troy — was it as important a city state as you would assume from Homer, or just another smallish Bronze Age settlement, and what were its relations with its neighbours?

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The End of the Bronze Age – Robert Drews

History
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Cover of The End of the Bronze Age


The End of the Bronze Age
Robert Drews
252 pages including index
published in 1993

Sometimes pickings are slim at the library and you just have to take what you can get rather than what you want. This is especially true for the history section, which is why I took out this book, as it looked the best of a sorry bunch. Luckily it turned out a blessing in disguise. The Bronze Age is not a period I know little more than a very few basic facts about, so any reasonably well written book about it is welcome. Even if, like this, it’s a decade and a half old and therefore likely to be out of date.

There is a catch however. The End of the Bronze Age is not a pop science book but a proper academic study, arguing a thesis and it assumes a certain background familiarity of its readers. I can usually fake this reasonably well, but of course I can’t really judge whether or not the conclusions its author Robert Drews reaches are justified by the evidence, only whether they sound plausible. And when you’re ignorant of a given subject, even abject nonsense can sound plausible — which has tripped me up before…These days I use Wikipedia as a sanity check: it’s not perfect, but on most subjects it’s a good indicator of mainstream opinion.

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The Hubble Wars – Eric J. Chaisson

Science
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Cover of The Hubble Wars


The Hubble Wars
Eric J. Chaisson
386 pages including index
published in 1994/1998

Having worked on a somewhat troubled project for the past few years, it’s a great comfort to know that even big science projects like the Hubble Space Telescope can suffer from similar problems. In Hubble’s case, bad project management and quality control meant it was only discovered after the space telescope had been launched that its main mirror had a serious flaw in its grinding which meant that it couldn’t focus properly. But that was only the most *ahem* visible of the Hubble project’s problems, as Eric J. Chaisson explains. And he should know, as he was a senior staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute when these problems occurred and hence had a first rank seat for them.

The Hubble Wars was originally published in 1994 and based on notes Chaisson made during Hubble’s commisioning period after launch, when the problems with the lens, as well as several others first cropped up. This then was largely written in the heat of the moment, without the benefit of hindsight, even if the edition I got out of the library was the updated 1998 one. This update was largely confined to a new foreword, an attempt to correct some of the misconceptions and hyberbole in the news coverage of Hubble discoveries. The rest of the book was largely left unchanged, though every now and then new developments are alluded to — and they’re not always well integrated. But that’s just a minor quibble. What remains is an important insight in how a big science project can go wrong, as it happened.

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Buy Jupiter – Isaac Asimov

science fiction
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Cover of Buy Jupiter


Buy Jupiter
Isaac Asimov
238 pages
published in 1975

It’s hard to know for sure at this late date, but Buy Jupiter, together with I, Robot, was probably the first science fiction book I’ve ever read. one of the. I must have been seven or eight years old or so and this and the few other adult science fiction books the local library had in its childrens section instilled a lifelong love of the genre. It was therefore with some sense of nostalgia that I reread this book for the first time in years — these stories were like old friends to me. Nostalgia can be a dangerous guide of course, as so many books can turn out to have been visited by the suck fairy since you last time you’ve read them, not to mention the racism or sexism fairy. Luckily none of them have been busy on Buy Jupiter, the stories were just as good as I remembered.

This despite the fact that Buy Jupiter is a bit of a strange collection, filled with twentyfive years of leftover stories. There isn’t any classic in this, no one story you would put in a Best of Asimov collection but this might actually its strength. Because it’s a filler collection, because most of the stories are short or very short, you get a huge variation of stories and subjects, a smorgasbord of Asimov’s fiction. A good introduction to science fiction as well, though even at the time I first read those stories they were already dated — you don’t pick up on that as a child anyway.

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Old Twentieth – Joe Haldeman

science fiction
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Cover of Old Twentieth


Old Twentieth
Joe Haldeman
272 pages
published in 2005

If there is such a thing as a baby boomer generation of science fiction writers, Joe Haldeman is the type specimen of them. Born in 1943 he was just old enough to be drafted at the height of the War on Vietnam after finishing college, got wounded in action and wrote his first book as a straight up retelling of his war experiences. His most famous novel is of course The Forever War (1975), which is often read as an allegory of the war and its impact on the people who fought it, a not completely unjustified view. Since then, the Vietnam war has cropped up again and again in his books as well as a more general grounding in sixties pop culture, often coupled with an encroaching sense of his own mortality as he has gotten older and obsession with the promise of evading death by becoming immortal (as e.g. The Long Habit of Living). This isn’t unique to the baby boomers of course, but this was the generation that promised themselved they’d stay young forever and then found out even they weren’t immune to entropy…

The Old Twentieth is a showcase for all these themes. It is not a good novel, if entertaining enough to finish. It’s not a good novel not just because the plot is dull, the resolution is trite, the characters are barely twodimensional and the setting is uninteresting, but because there just seems to be no point to this novel. It’s just 272 pages of not very interesting things happening, before they come to an unsatisfying conclusion and no clue as to why this story needed to be told. It reads reasonably enough on a sentence and paragraph level, but the overall story is so thin that Haldeman’s obsessions shine through it, bringing them to the foreground.

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