Over at James “sadly nto a Hugo Award winner yet” Nicoll’s place, while discussing a sf novel which will remain nameless, Fridgepunk remarks:
a lot of sci-fi makes a bit more sense if you assume it is all historical fiction written by people from a deep time future where the primary knowledge about what people were like back in the day is gleaned from the archives of FF.net and a stash of evopsych journals discovered amid the archeological remains of an objectivist’s “tomb”.
Ouch.
Farthing
Jo Walton
319 pages
published in 2006
At first glance Farthing seems to be a classic English cozy country house mystery, if set in an alternate England. There’s the locked room murder taking place during a weekend party at the Farthing country estate. There are the clues pointing all too neatly at one of the guests. There’s the doughty detective refusing to believe them and there’s the slow deduction of the real killer’s identity and motivations. It all feels like something Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey could’ve written — the latter’s unconscious class snobbery being consciously used here — but in the end Farthing turns out to be something very different from the cozy mystery or even alternate history tale it masquerades as. This is in fact a horror story, with the horror provided not by the plot or the characters, but through the setting. As Ursula Le Guin puts it in her front cover blurb: “If Le Carré scares you, try Jo Walton”.
Farthing grabbed me by the throat from the first page and didn’t let go; one of the very few books to have ever done that. As with any other alternate WWII story, part of that is due to what you know is going on in the background that the characters themselves do not know yet or only suspect. Every such Hitler wins story depends on the tension between what the reader knows happened historically and what the characters in the story know or do not know: sometimes this is done explicit, as in Fatherland, where the whole point of the book is to get the protagonist up to speed on what we as readers already know. In Farthing‘s case though things are kept implicit. What Walton does is let the essential horror of the setting speak for itself, keeping the swastikas and Gestapo goons offstage. What she does in fact is showing that England did not need these props to become a fascist state.
Epic is not the word for it, Chris Brooke’s Tour de Force retweeting of Tony Blair’s autobiography. Thanks to his sacrifice there’s no need to read it yourself anymore — you can get the gist of it from the quotes:
42. Blair, p. 65: “On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength.” Wed Sep 1 12:03:56 2010 via web
[…]
163.Blair doesn’t say that something is funny, he says (p. 290) that there had been “a proper quotient of amusement”. Wed Sep 1 19:15:17 2010 via web
[…]
215.Blair broods, p.373, every day, on the victims of his wars, & “uses that reflection to recommit to a sense of purpose in the bigger affair.” Thu Sep 2 09:27:54 2010 via web
216.Blair, p. 373, “can only hope to redeem something from the tragedy of death, in the actions of a life, my life, that continues still.” (Wow) Thu Sep 2 09:28:56 2010 via web
[..]
426.Blair, p. 509: “The British people, whom I genuinely adored… like a love affair, had ceased loving and were not going to start again.” Thu Sep 2 20:15:41 2010 via web
[…]
529.Blair, p.567: the killing of JC de Menezes was a “terrible error”, but he also feels sorry for the officers, “who were acting in good faith” about 21 hours ago via web
[…]
554.Blair, p. 578: the heart of New Labour was its “championing of aspiration”. “Equity cd not & shd never be at the expense of excellence.” about 21 hours ago via web
[…]
771.Blair, p. 670: “Keynes was a great man”, but “I bet he would be surprised at how his theory is being applied today.” about 14 hours ago via web
Negotiations for a rightwing government collapsed today, as the VVD and Wilders were no longer sure they could trust the CDA to keep up its part of the deal. Within the CDA critics of cooperation with Wilders had mounted a campaign against the coalition in the last week, with things coming to a head on Wednesday. Yesterday it may have seemed as if the conflict had been resolved, but since the three rebel CDA members of parliament could not commit to a guarantee to support the proposed government (which is not even constitutionally binding anyway), the VDD and Wilders pulled the plug on the negotiations.
It’s about the best result we could’ve gotten, even if this does mean that we’re back where we started, almost four months further and still no government. At the moment I’m not too unhappy about this anyway, as no new government means no spending cuts either. Had the VVD-CDA-Wilders coalition worked, we would’ve gotten two parties hell bent on slashing the welfare state combined with an out and out Islamophobe, not the best of combinations. Any other government can only be better, though I still expect cuts whatever combination of parties takes power.