Martin's Booklog

The Voyage of the Sable Keech — Neal Asher

Published on September 6, 2008

Cover of The Voyage of the Sable Keech

The Voyage of the Sable Keech
Neal Asher
506 pages
published in 2006

On second thought, this might have been the wrong Neal Asher book to start with, being a sequel to an earlier novel set in an universe that itself has been worked out over the course of a half dozen or so novels. But it was the only book I had with me, so I persevered. Fortunately The Voyage of the Sable Keech was standalone enough not to be completely opaque. The reason I wanted to try out Neal Asher’s work was because he kept being compared to people like Ken MacLeod, John Meaney, Alistair Reynolds and Liz Williams, part of that whole generation of late nineties British science fiction authors I like so much. Happily he didn’t disappoint, even if this was a bad book to start with.

What I liked about The Voyage of the Sable Keech wasn’t so much the plot, as that was fairly confusing since I had not read The Skinner, which this was a sequel to. What got me was both the inventiveness of the world Asher created as well as the matter of fact way in which he presents his world. In some ways it’s easily as baroque as some of China Miéville’s novels, but Asher’s writing style doesn’t draw attention to it the way Miéville’s does.In some ways The Voyage of the Sable Keech reminded me of Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, as it has a simular outrageous mix of technologies and powers, just in a science fiction setting rather than a fantasy one.

Reporting War — Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer

Published on August 20, 2008

Cover of Reporting War

Reporting War
Stuart Allan & Barbie Zelizer (editors)
374 pages including index
published in 2004

Having kept a politically orientated weblog the past half decade or so I’ve become acutely aware of the limitations of journalism, particularly during wartime. The current war for South Ossetia provides a good example of these limitations, were we’re seeing live how difficult it is for journalists to even get to the combat zone, not to mention how dangerous, as the death of a Dutch camera man proved. Perhaps more worrying, as the conflict continued the reporting on it which started off fairly neutral has become more and more partisan, especially once the United States and the European Union got involved in its resolution, with Russia pictured as the agressor when in fact it was Georgia who started the war. Russian statements are treated with skepticism while quotes from approved official sources, like the Pentagon or NATO are quoted verbatim. In general the war is treated through an American or European lens, rarely from the point of view of the Russians or Georgians, let alone
the Ossetians…

All these problems are described in Reporting War, a collection of essays on the role of journalism in wartime, its difficulties and dillemas. Published a year after the American invasion of Iraq, a lot of attention is of course paid to the problems of that particular war. The book doesn’t just look at the role of the journalists themselves, but also how they are dealt with by armies and governments involved in war, with a specific focus on the US army’s management of journalist during the first and second Gulf War. What’s more, several essays look beyond the physical reality of reporting wars to the role the media plays in general in covering wars. Not every conflict is covered equally after all.

Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side — Clive Stafford Smith

Published on August 17, 2008

Cover of Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side

Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side
Clive Stafford Smith
307 pages including index
published in 2007

Lord knowns there have been a lot of depressing books published about America’s war on terror; not to mention a metric shitload of blogs writing about it, including my own. So what good is yet another book decrying the injustices committed at Guantanamo Bay? After all, if you don’t know about them by now, you’ll never know. But when the author is one of the lawyer volunteers defending the victims of the war on terror, who has been coming to Guantanamo for years and who also manages to inject some humour in what’s otherwise a bloody dreary subject.

Clive Stafford Smith is somebody who has a lot of experience with worthwhile but hopeless causes, as he spent years working on death penalty cases in the American Deep South. When the news about the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp became known he didn’t hesitate, but immediately got involved. Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is based on his personal experiences at Guantanamo. The title is a reference to the fact that all the lawyers have to stay on the leeward side of the bay and therefore have to take the morning ferry to get to their clients each day. Surprisingly for a book on such a dark subject matter, Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is quite funny in places, due to the absurdity of some of the situations Clive Stafford Smith and his clients find themselves in.

New Skies — Patrick Nielsen Hayden (editor)

Published on August 4, 2008

Cover of New Skies

New Skies
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
275 pages
published in 2003

I didn’t know this was meant to be an “anthology of today’s science fiction” for a “new, younger generation of science fiction fans” until I got this home from the library, as I only got it because Patrick Nielsen Hayden was the editor and I was curious to see what his tastes were like. I thought New Skies was an anthology of new science fiction, but instead it’s a showcase of science fiction stories from the last twenty years, aimed at an audience new to the genre. Still, it’s as good a test of Patrick’s tastes as any, as not only did he have to select his entries from over two decades of stories, but he also had to select them to show off the width and breadth of the genre, be not too long and accessible to younger reader. A huge task indeed.

Since I’ve been reading science fiction for quite some time now, I’m not exactly the target audience for New Skies; I don’t know how some thirteen year old kid would like this book, but I enjoyed it. New Skies does a good job of representing how much different kinds of science fiction stories there are and how much fun they can be. None of the stories were the kind that makes your hair stand on edge, but they’re good representations of what you can expect in science fiction and they’re accesible.

Britain’s Gulag — Caroline Elkins

Published on August 3, 2008

Cover of Britain's Gulag

Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
Caroline Elkins
475 pages including index
published in 2005

Before Tom Wolfe used “Mau Mauing” to describe the ways in which well meaning, white government officials where cheated out of welfare money through racial intimidation, Mau Mau was synonymous with a much greater terror. Mau Mau was the stuff of white colonialist nightmares: a freakish native cult of criminals and gangsters that savagely attacked innocent white settlers in their very homes, killing them and their families, mutilating their bodies. Sure, these people said they were freedom fighters, but you couldn’t take this claim seriously. Everybody who mattered knew Kenya wasn’t ripe at all for independence, that only the poison the Mau Mau spread through their pagan rites would cause the natives to question the benevolence of the British civilising mission in the country. Britain was therefore justified to use harsh measures to suppress this savagery and fortunately managed to do so, protecting the white settlers and loyal natives and crush the rebels, though it took them eight years, from 1952 to 1960 to do so.

That’s the myth of Mau Mau. The reality as Caroline Ekins describes in Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya is far different. There were incidents of Mau Mau savagery, but the British and settler response to it was much greater and was systematic, not incidental. It was under the Kikuyu of central Kenya, the most populous of the ethnic groups in Kenya and the group with the greatest grievances against British rule, as much of their land had been appropriated for white settlers that the Mau Mau rebellion was the most widespread, therefore the British did to the Kikuyu roughly what the Germans did to the Polish during World War II. The nazi plan for Poland had been to destroy its population as a people by murdering its intellectual elite, remove it from all the best parts of the country and herd the rest into the wastelands to serve as uneducated slave labour, with any resistance brutally put down. What the British did to the Kikuyu in Kenya was not quite as bad, but it came awfully close. It was motivated by security concerns rather than deliberate planning, but the endresult was still that less than fifteen years after World War II the British in Kenya had recreated much of the nazi system in dealing with the Kikuyu’s struggle for freedom.