Martin's Booklog

The End of Eternity – Isaac Asimov

Published on January 20, 2008

Cover of The End of Eternity

The End of Eternity
Isaac Asimov
192 pages
published in 1955

So it turns out that in the more than seven years now that I’ve kept this booklog, I had not read any Asimov novel at all. Which is somewhat strange, as it was for a large part due to discovering Asimov in my local library’s youth section that I became a science fiction fan. I, Robot for example may very well have been the first proper science fiction book I ever read. For a long time Asimov was
in fact the gold standard against which I measured every new science fiction writer I came across. If they weren’t at least half as entertaining or interesting I wouldn’t bother with them. Of his many novels and stories it was this, The End of Eternity that was my favourite, one of the first science fiction books I bought for myself and the first to introduce me to the idea of time travel as more than an excuse to visit scenic parts of the past. Rereading it, the question was whether it would be as good as I remembered it to be. So many novels first read as a child disappoint when you reread them; fortunately this didn’t. In fact, it read almost exactly as I expected it to be.

The central idea in The End of Eternity is the existence of Eternity, an organisation that monitors and safeguards all of humanity’s history from the first invention of the secret of time travel. Most people outside of Eternity think the organisation only exists to facilitate trade between various centuries and perhaps in some vague way protect them from the unspecified dangers of time travel. What they don’t realise is that Eternity in fact exists outside of time, from which realm it can not just study and monitor time, but alter reality to make sure that humanity is kept on an ever increasing path to perfection. A whole organisation of Computers, the people who calculate these reality changes, Technicians, who execute them and various other specialists all work together to this goal, over a span of time that is literally millions of years long. Power is provided by tapping into Nova Sol, the Sun as it goes nova at the end of its lifecycle. An incredibly neat idea, not quite original to Asimov, but as I said the first time I encountered it was here.

Head-on – Julian Cope

Published on January 19, 2008

Cover of Head-on

Head-on
Julian Cope
203 pages including index
published in 1994

So this Julian Cope is a bit of a character. For about two years in 1980-81 he was one of Britain’s pop idols, having hordes of 13 year old fangirls following his band, The Teardrop Explodes from concert to concert, fullfilling almost the same role as bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet would fill a little bit later. All this while the band started as a serious, proper grim post-punk band. No wonder Cope went of his rocker and the band disbanded. It wasn’t the end for Julian Cope though, as he would start a succesful solo career in the mid-eighties, become a cult figure in later life and even find the time to write two big, influential books on the surviving prehistoric monuments of Britain and Europe. Head-on is his autobiography.

Well, the first part of his autobiography, the story of his life from childhood to fame with The Teardrop Explodes to the point that it all went south. The rest he’s written about in another volume, Repossessed, which I haven’t read yet. I was a bit Coped-out after reading Head-on, which wasn’t an easy read, especially in the second half of the story.

The Fall of the Roman Empire – Peter Heather

Published on January 5, 2008

Cover of The Fall of the Roman Empire

The Fall of the Roman Empire
Peter Heather
572 pages including index
published in 2005

I found I hadn’t read enough about ancient history in recent years, so I went looking for some interesting books on Roman, Greek or other ancient cultures. The Fall of the Roman Empire was what I found, a new look at how Roman domination came to an end. I’d been interested in that topic again since watching Terry Jones’ excellent series The Barbarians, which revised the traditional picture of hordes of uncultivated barbarians coming over the borders for an orgy of rape and plunder. The Fall of the Roman Empire is in a similar revisionist vein. Though Heather goes much less far than Jones in revising the traditional relationship between Romans and barbarians.

Now my knowledge of Roman history is not extensive, to say the least, mostly build on having read the usual popular history books everybody with the slightest interest in history reads at age twelve, which tend to be fairly conservative in their outlook, often a generation or so behind academic consensus. Therefore I wasn’t that surprised that while I thought Heather’s main point, that the Roman Empire didn’t so much collapse because of structural defects, but because of several contigent factors coming together at the worst possible moment, was quite radical, a little bit of googling seems to show Heather is actually somewhat of a counterrevolutionary. His position as set up here is that the Western Roman Empire did in fact collapse, at roughly the time tradition has always set it had, but that this wasn’t the overwhelming catastrophe of myth and that this wasn’t a pre-ordained outcome. This is halfway between the traditional view of the End of Civilisation for a Thousand Years and the revisionist view of denying that a collapse happened at all, that the Roman Empire continued as Byzantium and in the west more or less morphed into its succesor states.

The Fall of Yugoslavia – Misha Glenny

Published on January 4, 2008

Cover of The Fall of Yugoslavia

The Fall of Yugoslavia
Misha Glenny
314 pages, including index
published in 1996

The Fall of Yugoslavia was the first book I read in 2007, I got it as a Christmas present from Sandra. I had put this book on my Amazon UK wishlist quite a while back, after having read Glenny’s The Balkans 1804-1999, which was an impressive overview of the modern history of the Balkans. I thought it would be a good book to start the new year with and was not disappointed.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned the past few years blogging the War on Iraq it’s that you can follow the news on tv, read the newspaper reports and magazine coverage on a subject and think you know what’s going on, when in fact you’ve only gotten part of the facts, often arranged in a preconcieved narrative. Even if the news media are basically honest in their reporting, it is too immediate to see beyond the story being reported, to put them in context and digest them. At the same time, news thrives on new and unusual incidents, which greatly distorts the picture we get: in reality more people may die in single car crashes than multicar pileups, but the latter is the one featured on the evening news. Only the simplest of narratives can survive this process and governments and other propagandists make grateful use of it to push through their reality.

Intelligence in War – John Keegan

Published on January 3, 2008

Cover of Intelligence in War

Intelligence in War
John Keegan
443 pages including index
published in 2003

John Keegan is one of the better known British military historians, having been a lecturer at Sandhurst before becoming defence editor at the Daily Telegraph, as well as writing a slew of books about military history. Keegan seems to write two kinds of books: the first kind follows a war or campaign in some detail, while the second takes a specific aspect of war (or even war as whole) and follows its development through the ages. Intelligence in War is an example of the second kind. As you may guess, he’s somewhat of an establishment historian, accepting and understanding that war is an essential part of human nature, even if an unfortunate part. He’s therefore more interested in writing how wars are fought than how they come to be. Within those limitations he’s an excellent history writer, one of my favourites when it comes to military history.

Intelligence in War, as said, is typical of Keegan’s work. Through the careful selection of several case histories Keegan examines the role intelligence plays in warfare and its limitations and capabilities to influence battles. Keegan distinguishes five separate stages intelligence has to go through to be able to influence a battle: acquisition, delivery, acceptance, interpretation and implementation. Due to difficulties that can arise at each stage, Keegan is skeptical about how influential intelligence is for a given battle. His main thesis is that intelligence can be useful in battle, but is rarely decisive, even in those cases which are supposed to be the examples of intelligence determining the outcome of battles. For Keegan, intelligence is only ever a secondary factor in winning or losing battles, with things like the relative balance of forces and the determination and will of the opposing troops and commanders being much more important.