books and books review – Page 3

Not even leaving language untouched

Published on February 7, 2022Leave a comment

This bit in Marco Roth’s review of several Russell Hoban novels hit a chord with me and made me scrabble in my bookcases for my own copy of Riddley Walker:

Unlike Tolkien’s Middle Earth and its logical Elvish languages, intended to provide an ordered universe for dualistic fantasies of good v. evil, Riddley Walker’s world is our own, warped to breaking point. The pleasure of puzzling over Hoban’s inventiveness is complicated by the horror of the novel’s premise. The hellish aftermath of nuclear winter isn’t funny, and every pun or chopped up bit of language is a trace of this, as well as a game for the reader.

Adam Roberts in his foreword to the 2012 SF Masterworks wrote about being sixteen in 1980 when reading Riddley Walker and “the pervasive, acute anxiety that nuclear war might break out any day”. I’m a decade younger than him and I also remember that fear growing up in the eighties, only receding in the latter half of the decade. It might not be a coincidence that this novel, though started the year of my birth, 1974, was only finished and published in 1980. Roth cuts at the heart of Riddley Walker with this paragraph: nuclear war as a disaster that not just destroys society, but language itself. It reminds me of Threads, which similarly argued that the real disaster of nuclear war wasn’t just the war itself, but the destruction of human culture in its aftermath. My own fears at the time were more primeval, as in just not wanting to die in a nuclear war. It’s only later that I understood that as the true horror of a nuclear war. The threat of the destruction of not just civilisation, but of humanity smashed back to the stone age, its history lost, unable to climb back on.

That’s the difference between Riddley Walker/Threads and most American nuclear holocaust fiction. By the eighties it was impossible to pretend here in Europe that a nuclear war could be survived, let alone won; there just isn’t any place to escape to if the bombs had started dropping. In America on the other hand, with its still massive wilderness, you could imagine surviving away from the cities, rebuilding something akin to civilisation. Whether that would’ve been true is another matter.

Snow & Steel — Peter Caddick-Adams

Published on January 7, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Snow & Steel

Snow & Steel: the Battle of the Bulge 1944 – 45
Peter Caddick-Adams
872 pages including notes and index
published in 2014

Nuts!

The story of the Bulge should be familiar. Hitler’s last roll of the dice, an offensive that nobody expected. The goal: to split the western allies apart by reconquering Antwerp. Elite panzers racing through the Ardennes, reliving the glory days of May 1940, expecting little resistance from the outnumbered and inexperienced American forces stationed there. the allied airfoces, grounded by bad weather and unable to come to the rescue. The unexpected resistance and Hitler’s hopes smashed at Bastogne, when after an imperious demand to surrender now the town was surrounded, the commanding American officer responded with a simple “Nuts!”

It’s a great story, a story the town of Bastogne dines out on to this very day. When I was there on holiday last October literally every second shop window had something about the siege in its display. It also has the benefit of being mostly true. But it isn’t the entire truth of the Ardennes Offensive, or Peter Caddick-Adams wouldn’t have needed almost nine hundred pages to tell its story. There were other sieges beside Bastogne, other places where American resistance held up the Nazi attack long enough for it to ultimately fail, other tales of heroism and tragedy to be told. Arguably, one could say that the fate of the offensive had been determined long before Bastogne had even been reached. Similarly, the story didn’t end when the siege of Bastogne was lifted. There was more hard fighting to be done, fighting which lasted into January and February of 1945.

Why keep a large library?

Published on September 11, 2021Leave a comment

Umberto Eco walking through his 30,000 library to get a book he knows exactly where to find it is such a power move:

Some nerdy Economist writer: hE cAn’T hAvE rEaD aLl ThOsE bOoKs:

I’m a huge Umberto Eco fan, fiction and non-fiction.
But his private library – said to contain 30,000 books – is clearly nonsense.
That’s more than *a book a day every day of his adult life*. Can we please get a tiny bit serious?

All in defense of the idea that people only keep books to impress others, a dumb person’s idea of what would impress a clever person. Why would anybody be impressed by the mere fact you can write books written by much more smarter people than you (and the occasional numbnut)? But what struck me the most with this particular tweet from that thread was the sheer inability to understand what a personal library is for and how it functions. That idea that it should only contain the books you’re going to read immediately, that anything else is preening is just incomprehensible. Fair enough if that’s your personal preference, but beware that it’s a strange notion to have if you’re not forced to by matters of economics or convenience.

part of the bookshelves in my living room

The entire thread has a very, ah, economist view of books in that they have to be useful and should be discarded if no longer so. It’s on a par with the prolier than thou leftie clickbaiter that you should sell or donate any books you have read or not planning to read right now because otherwise you’re hoarding. The assumption that you always know what you want to read or need to read and can plan accordingly and therefore you only need to keep those books to hand. Real life never works that way. And even if it did, insisting this is the only way to read is denying yourself the pleasures of choice, of having that freedom to say fuck it and read something else.

oh also, people have a comically phony number of books!
The dude in FT story has a library of 8000 books – has he been reading 2 books a week for 80 years??

A solid year of reading (say 50 books) = 90cm of bookshelf. So people with 100m of books are full of it.

Perhaps it’s just that you’re a slow reader if you think fifty books is a year’s worth of reading and that’s why you’re so amazed at libraries of thousands of books. But to think Umberto Eco, of all people, wouldn’t have been able to read all the books in his library? Not that he necesssarily had, as Eco knew the value of unread books. The incredulity at what are not that large libraries is hilarious, the misunderstanding that every book in it is meant to be read is dangerous. Not every book you buy needs to be read right away; not every book needs to be read at all. There’s a pleasure in simply having a book. Lords know I’ve bought books with no intention to read them. The greatest joy of any library is having books at hand to be able to read whenever you choose to. Especially if, like Umberto Eco, you grew up pre-internet when you either had to have them yourself or you had to hope the local library had them or you were out of luck…

Let’s just get rid of this idea that you have to justify why you keep a library or when or how you read. Just accept that people differ in how they read and that there’s more value in a library than it just having the books you need to read right now.

Globalhead — Bruce Sterling

Published on June 9, 2021Leave a comment

Cover of Globalhead

Globalhead
Bruce Sterling
339 pages
published in 1992

Good science fiction doesn’t predict the future; it allows the future to recognise itself in it. Globalhead is drenched in the zeitgeist of Post-Reagan America, yet occasionally there’s a glimpse of the far flung future of 2021 to be recognised. AIDS virus based RNA wonder drugs as the gimmick in its very first story, foreshadowing the very real mRNA Covid-19 vaccine I got just weeks ago. A character called Sayyid Qutb in “We See Things Differently” provides another mild shock. These glimpses of a still to be born future are jarring considering the stories in here are barely if at all science fiction, more slipstream perhaps, a term Sterling popularised at the time these stories were written. The most recognisable sfnal story here is “The Unthinkable”, a Chtuthlu Mythos inspired Cold War riff on Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos, itself an inspiration for Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War”.

What to make of the Bruce Sterling as seen in this collection? Best known at this time as the second half of “William Gibson andd…”, one of the “fathers of Cyberpunk”. As an editor he had created the anthology that would pin down and solidify the genre, as well as its main propaganda zine. As a writer, his version of cyberpunk took a very different road from the post-Gibson consensus he himself had helped establish. As a non-fiction author, his cyberpunk interests would lead him to write a book — published the same year as this collection — about the early hacker movement(s), the development of the early internet and how the law responded to it. But little is visible of this cyberpunk guru in this collection. No jamming with console cowboys in cyberspace; a bit of low tech phone phreaking for quarters is as cyber as it gets.

Rereading: Trilobite! — Richard Fortey

Published on February 12, 2021Leave a comment

Despite the oodles of spare time allegedly freed up by being forced to work from home thanks to Covid, I haven’t actually managed to read all that much this past year. Whether it’s lack of interest, lack of energy or something else I don’t know, but I’m lucky if I managed to get into the double digits this year of books read. To be honest, it has been a bit of a trend for me the last few years. Having kept a booklog since 2001 and having been deeply involved in science fiction and fandom in 2010-2015 just caught up with me. As I got into anime I spent less time reading; when covid hit I thought it would give me time to read again, but so far it hasn’t. Until yesterday, when I felt the need to read something comforting, something I hadn’t read in a long time and my eye fell on Richard Fortey’s Trilobite.

Richard Fortey is a writer I got to know thanks to Sandra, who was a huge fan of his. One of the advantages of being in a relationship with somebody who’s as big a reader as you are. Whereas I was always interested in history, science fiction and the like, she was more into the natural sciences, sociology and detective fiction. Our tastes overlapped in places — after all we first met in a Terry Pratchett related IRC channel — and where they differed there was always an opportunity to get to know a new writer. Thanks to Sandra I read a hell of a lot more classic detective novels than I otherwise would’ve had, but also a lot more of pop science books like this one. She always had an eye for interesting, entertaining science books. Trilobite
I last read and reviewed in August of 2004, so high time to reread it. Below is the original review, warts and all:

Cover of Trilobite!

Trilobite!
Eyewitness to Evolution
Richard Fortey
269 pages, including index
published in 2000

I’ve always liked trilobites, but never as much as Richard Fortey liks them. He is genuinely enthusiastic about them, which comes through on every page of this book. For a subject which could easily be made dull, this is a good thing, though at times his enthusiasm is slightly wearing. Never mind though, if you have even the slightest interest in trilobites, he will suck you in. Fortey has a knack of describing the various species of trilobites with such clarity that even somebody like me, who didn’t know a pleura from a glabella was able to picture them in his mind and understand the differences.

Trilobite! is not just about trilobites however, as the subtitle, Eyewitness to Evolution indicates. Fortey uses trilobites to illustrate the larger story of evolution and the workings of science. His book not only tells of the evolutionary history of the trilobite, but also of the history of their discovery and the evolution of our understanding of them.

Popular science books, especially those written by non-scientists, often have a tendency to focus on those areas of science in which a dramatic story can be told, either because the subject matter itself is so dramatic, or because the story behind the science is. At first glance, trilobites offer neither. The animal itself is so common a fossil, existing in so many variations as to have been dubbed “the beetle of the Paleozoic”. Fascinating in its anatomy to be sure, but without the vicarious thrill of the dinosaurs. Furthermore, the history of trilobite research, as detailed by Fortey, is one of gradual discovery and steady progress. There are no heroic tales of young, brilliant scientists with outlandish but correct theories fighting the hidebound establishment to get them accepted here.

Since that is not the way most science works anyway, that is probably a good thing. Anything the subject might lack in conspicuous drama, it more than makes up for in the enthusiasm Fortey brings to his trilobites. The history of both trilobites itself as well as the history of our understanding of them comes alive through it.

Take for example how Fortey starts Trilobite!. The first chapter mixes personal reminiscences with a short overview of where trilobites come from and what the book is about and manages to refer Thomas Hardy, who used a trilobite to great effect in his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes. It is at once both interesting and warm, an appealing jumble that’s neither pedantic nor pretentious. Most of the rest of the book is the same way, somewhat less structured than others may have thought wise, but none the less interesting for it.

Halfway through the book, Fortey partially abandons his trilobites to examine how the abundant presence of trilobite fossils has helped our understanding of evolution. Since trilobites fossils are so common and trilobites existed for such a long time, they make it easy to trace evolutionary processes.

One part of this diversion has Fortey butt in to the ongoing arguments about the socalled “Cambrian explosion”, that time when life, according to Stephen Jay Gould and others, exploded into an incredibly array of forms and designs, most never seen again afterwards. (Gould’s version of this event is explored in Wonderful Life.) Fortey himself is somewhat skeptical of this notion and shows how this theory has changed since the publication of Wonderful Life.

After this diversion, Fortey goes back to his trilobites, with a general description of the lifes and times of trilobites. He ends it with an impassionate crusade for scientific curiosity and its importance, even if it doesn’t bring anything of immediate applied value.

In all, Trilobite! is everything a good popular science book should be: interesting, enlightening and humane. Recommended.