Martin's Booklog

Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town – Mary Beard

Published on July 12, 2009

Cover of Pompeii - The Life of a Roman Town

Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town
Mary Beard
360 pages including index
published in 2008

We think we know Pompeii. An ordinary Roman town like so many others in 79 CE, made extraordinary because it was overwhelmed without warning by the eruption of the Vesuvius, through its death granting us a rare glimpse of what daily life in the Roman Empire really was like. Under a metres thick layer of volcanic ashes Pompeii laid hidden for centuries, only discovered in the eighteenth century, its secrets kept intact, preserved by the very disaster that caused the death of the city. With the slow and careful excavation of the city those secrets are unlocked, giving up definitive answers to all kind of questions about how the Romans lived. This is the view of Pompeii that countless books, magazine articles and television specials have given us. Unfortunately, as Mary Beard explains in Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town, it’s wrong.

Or at least, not entirely accurate. As she explains, Pompeii wasn’t overwhelmed by an unforeseen catastrophe, as most likely its inhabitants had had at least several days warning before the actual eruption. Quite a few of them therefore had already left the town when it got buried, while many of the dead found under the lava had been overtaken in their flight, or while having sought shelter nearby or within the city itself. What’s more, the city wasn’t immediately abandonded after the disaster either, as all through the city evidence has been found of people coming back to their houses or businesses to rescue possessions – as well as of plunderers looking for easy riches. What’s more, once Pompeii was rediscovered, obviously things gut dug up, damaged, disappeared or just altered through being exposed to the elements again. All of which means that what we can see in Pompeii now is not entirely the city that the inhabitants would’ve known in 79 CE, that if we dig up a largely empty villa it doesn’t necessarily mean the Romans were great minimalists…

In Search of Planet Vulcan – Richard Baum and William Sheehan

Published on July 11, 2009

In Search of Planet Vulcan
Richard Baum & William Sheehan
310 pages including index
published in 1997

The classic idea of the universe was that it was geocentric: the Earth in the centre, with the planets, moon and the sun circling around it and the fixed stars as background. Over the centuries that central idea had to be modified with increasingly complex epicycles as the theory had to be adjusted to observational evidence. It was only in the sixteenth century that Copernicus, Kepler and Bruno challenged this Ptolemaic model and replaced it with the truth: that all the planets, including Earth revolved around the Sun. Copernicus was the first to propose this, Bruno would die at the stake for his advocacy but it was Kepler who figured out how the planets revolved and what governed their orbits. more than half a century later Isaac Newton formulated his laws of gravity, joining Kepler’s laws with more mundane events on Earth, finally providing a complete model of the workings of the Solar System. From then on, any planetary orbit could be calculated with the right observations and the use of Kepler’s and Newton’s laws.

except for one. The orbit of Mercury remained, as the subtitle of Baum and Sheehan’s book has it, “the ghost in Newton’s clockwork universe”. Time and again, no matter how carefully the observations were made and how intricate the calculations were, the two just would not line up. Even the best astronomers in the world, with the best observations could not make Mercury’s orbit confirm to what it should be according to Newtonian physics. It wasn’t until Einstein reformulated the laws of gravity that the reason why became clear. Newton’s laws break down near massive objects like the Sun and although “good enough” for most situations, Mercury’s orbit was just too close to the Sun and Newtonian physics just wasn’t accurate enough. Of course, until Einstein found the real answer, astronomers sought for other explenations for Mercury’s wrong orbit — and the most likely candidate was an undiscovered planet even closer to the Sun: Vulcan.

The Best of Murray Leinster

Published on June 28, 2009

Cover of The Best of Murray Leinster

The Best of Murray Leinster
Murray Leinster
368 pages
published in 1978

Yesterday was Murray Leinster day in Virginia set up to honour one of science fiction’s pioneer writers. Murray Leinster started writing science fiction before it even existed as a genre, 1919 with the story “The Runaway Skyscraper” for pulp magazines like Argosy. When Hugo Gernsback created the world’s first dedicated science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories in 1926, Leinster was there, with “The Runaway Skyscraper” reprinted in the July issue. Leinster continued to write science fiction through the Campbell revolution of the late thirties and forties, when the higher writing standards Campbell demanded were too much for many pulp writers and kept being published throughout the fifties and sixties. Though he wrote in other genres, science fiction always seemed to be his first love and several of his stories were first: the first story to predict the internet, the first alternate worlds story, one of the classic stories of first contact.

All of which is why I read this, The Best of Murray Leinster, as a short of honour, a way to remember one of science fiction’s pioneers. This is one of a series of absolutely brilliant short story collections put out by Ballentine/Del Rey in the seventies, collecting the best stories of the socalled Golden Age science fiction writers: people like Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett and Murray Leinster. Though long out of print as far as I known, this series can still be easily found in secondhand bookstores and is well worth searching out. As far as possible the collections were selected by the authors themselves, but sadly Leinster had already died by the time this collection was published. Instead it was edited by J. J. Pierce, who did quite a few of these. It’s a great selection, including the three stories I alluded to above.

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

Published on June 24, 2009

Cover of The Gone-Away World

The Gone-Away World
Nick Harkaway
532 pages
published in 2008

Whoa.

Now I understand why The Gone-Away World was one of last year’s most discussed science fiction books. I’d noticed the fuzz but not gotten my hands on a copy until yesterday when I checked it out of the library for beach reading, but once I got it home it gripped me and didn’t let me go until I’d finished it late at night after everybody else had gone to bed. Books like that are rare and you always finish them with a hint of regret that a pleasurable journey is over. And The Gone-Away World is very much a journey type of book, with plenty of amusing diversions along the way asnd in no hurry to reach its destination.

In fact, most of The Gone-Away World after the first chapter is a hugely extended flashback, only catching up to the present three fifths of the way through the story. Some may find this annoying enough to argue that the book would’ve been better off without that teaser. Personally I disagree, I think this structure was necessary. The “teaser” is there to get you interested in the world Harkaway has created, while the extended flashback explains both the personal history of the narrator and the world he lives in and how it came to be. When you rejoin the action after the flashback this added and detailed history gives added weight and poignancy to what happens next. It wouldn’t have worked if it had been in strict chronological order.

The Kingdom of the Hittites – Trevor Bryce

Published on June 20, 2009

Cover of The Kingdom of the Hittites

The Kingdom of the Hittites
Trevor Bryce
554 pages including index
published in 2005

The nice thing about history is that there’s so much of it, and so much still barely known. The Hittites are a case in point. Their existence was largely unsuspected until the late nineteenth century, when the first of their sites were uncovered in what is now Turkey and Syria. Here was a major Late Bronze Age civilisation and Near East superpower, an empire on par with Ancient Egypt or Assyria that lasted almost fivehundred years and nobody had a clue it existed. The sole cluess to their existence then known were some vague references in the Old Testament, from which they gotten their name as well as some mentions in the official correspondence of their rivals in Egypt, Assyria and Babylon but these were still largely untranslated when the first Hittite sites were found. The rediscovery of the Hittites is but one example of how much more complex ancient history is compared to the caricature we get of it in pop culture, which largely goes Sumeria > Egypt > Greece > Rome, with a sidestep to Israel.

What’s also nice about history is how fluid it is. We think we know the history of given region or country until a chance archeological discovery turns everything upside down again. Especially with subjects as far removed in time from us as the Hittite Empire, which existed roughly from 1650 BCE until about 1200 BCE, our views of it can change surprisingly quickly, as can be seen in The Kingdom of the Hittites. Originally published in 1998, the second, 2005 edition has been thoroughly revised with sections of every chapter having been rewritten, based on new discoveries and other advances since the original publication. If less than a decade of progress can make such a difference in a textbook like this it’s no wonder its author, Trevor Bryce, stresses that this is still only a preliminary history of the Hittites, subject to further revision.

As a textbook The Kingdom of the Hittites is firmly of the “kings and battles” school of history writing, with a companion volume dealing with society and daily life of the Hittites. Sadly the Amsterdam library didn’t seem to have that in its stacks. No matter, this was enough to be going on with on its own as well. The book is set up in chronological order, it starts with the origins of the Hittites and an overview of the history of Anatolia just before the Hittite kingdom was established and ends with the last known Hittite king. The reign of each known Hittite king is looked at, but as Bryce makes clear throughout, of some kings much less is known than others. Indeed, for several kings not even the approximate dates of their reigns are known. Two appendixes, on the chronology of Hittite history and the sources available to historians, make this problem even more clear.