Wis[s]e Words

Books read May

Published on June 1, 20102 Comments

This is much more like it. ~~Eleven~~ Twelve books read this month, a much more respectable number than I’d managed so far. Some excellent books read as well, as you can see below..

Life — Richard Fortey
Fortey is perhaps the best living natural history writer. Here he tackles the entire story of life on Earth, from its beginnings four billion years ago to us, intermixed with his personal research and recollections. Fortey is the kind of writer who could make the telephone book interesting, let alone a subject like this he is genuinely passionate about.

Kraken — China Miéville
Miéville’s latest novel is a fantasy romp set in contemporary London, where things are not quite what they seem.

Big Planet — Jack Vance
An early Vance novel of planetary romance, which I’ve last read myself a few decades ago. Slightly disappointing as my memory was better than the book turned out to be.

Next of Kin — Eric Frank Russell
An entertaining but slight space adventure story by somebody I’ve read very little of so far.

The Steam-Driven Boy — John Sladek
A collection of not very good New ~~Age~~ Wave stories that haven’t aged well. It’s all a bit too clever-clever and lazy.

Dry Store Room No. 1 — Richard Fortey
The second Fortey book I read this month, which is a look at how the Natural History Museum functions — part collection of entertaining anecdotes, part history, part autobiography. As everything Fortey does, its worth reading.

Why Buildings Fall Down — Matthys Levy & Mario Salvador
Two architects look at various examples of buildings falling down and why they do so. Very good, very clear at explaining complicated realities in a form even an ignoramus like me can understand without doing violence to them.

The 9th Directive — Adam Hall
Adam Hall is a British thriller writer I learned about through Charlie Stross. Found this novel at a jumble sale and read it in a day. Interesting Cold War thriller story written in a very flat affect style.

The British Tanks 1915-19 — David Fletcher
A sufficiently anorak look at the earliest British tanks and how they came to be. Lots of great archive pictures.

The Fox-Magic Murders — Robert van Gulik
The last ever Judge Dee story Robert van Gulik wrote, as he died shortly after. A classic detective story set in Ancient but historical China.

Foundation — Isaac Asimov
The stories that launched a thousand Galactic Empires. The first in the classic Foundation trilogy. Hari Seldon, the greatest psychohistorian ever predicts the fall of the Empire and hatches a plan to shorten the inevitable barbarism that will follow…

Foundation and Empire — Isaac Asimov
Second in the classic trilogy — now with actual female characters. The Foundation confronts the old empire and is then confronted by the Mule, the one factor psychohistory could not predict.

Second Foundation — Isaac Asimov
Third in the classic trilogy, to which no sequels were ever written. The Mule is vanquished, but now Foundation stands against Foundation…

Metal Monday: not so special K

Published on May 31, 2010

As I think said before, for some reason the groups I follow tend to cluster around certain letters of the alphabet: A-C, I, M and S being the most noticable. Which also means some letters have no representation in my collection whatsoever, like today’s letter: K. In fact, of the seventyfive bands known at the BNR Metal Pages, I only recognise a few and those I do recognise I’ve never really followed, like e.g. King Diamond, which a lot of my fellow metalheads at high school used to like back then. This is Abigail:

Some others are a bit dubious. Take KISS for example. Now the line between rock, hard rock and heavy metal is of course thin and easily crossed, but to me KISS is on the wrong side of the line somebody like Alice Cooper is on the right side off, in my definition of hard rock and metal. Still, there’s at least one classic KISS song everybody, including metalheads like:

KISS – I Was Made for Loving You:

An even more odd band to be represented at the BNR Metal Pages is Killing Joke, the UK post-punk band best known for “Love Like Blood”. As the site puts it, this is one of those “not-really metal bands that kind of sound like metal and that metal fans often like”. Fair enough and it gives me the chance to show two of their best songs.

First up: “Love Like Blood”

Somewhat later and different is the next song, “Democracy”, from the 1996 album of the same name. Somebody wasn’t happy with the state of politics in Britain…

Perhaps too honest?

Published on May 31, 2010

Says BLCKDGRD:

Every day I’m discovering more things I can’t personally change – though discovery is a lie, it’s every day acknowledging things I’ve always known but didn’t want to acknowledge. For instance, I’ve always known I’m not going to give up my job, my house, my car, my laptop, my season tickets in protest of jackshit. I’ll yodel, sign facebook petitions, buy local and organic, donate to local foodbanks and cat rescues, and I will never give time or dimes or votes to another motherfucking Democrat ever fucking again, but give up my pension, the escrow in my house, my petroleum-fueled Toyota, my sweet new Dell laptop, my ticket to Section 232 Row X Seat X and devote all said monies and energy into efforts that won’t fix a world my generation has made shittier? Sheeyit.

If we’re honest this goes for a lot of us. It’s the ugly truth at the heart of capitalism that we ourselves profit as much from an unfair, unjust, dangerous system as we are victim of it. Those of us who see the system for what it is and who as socialist or anarchist or whatever want to change it for the better know best how much the reality of everyday life forces us to make our compromises with the system. You can take a stance here and there or attempt to withdraw from the world, but as long as the system is there it forces you to acknowledge it and interact with it.

Foundation – Isaac Asimov

Published on May 30, 2010

Cover of Foundation

Foundation
Isaac Asimov
189 pages
published in 1951

If you’ve ever been in the Netherlands on 30th April than you know we celebrate Queensday (the queen’s birthday party, held on the birthday of the previous queen but don’t ask) by holding massive flea markets/car boot sales. Ideal opportunities to pick up a lot of books fast and cheap. This year it included a lot of Asimov books, from a guy selling off his science fiction collection, including all the good Foundation series books: Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. These were orginally written as short stories in the forties, then reworked into novels in the early fifties, among the first science fiction novels to be sold as such. Much much later Asimov would write new sequels to these three books, but those were .. not good.

The originals though were, if not the first Galactic Empire stories, the ones who popularised it and set the pattern for a flood of imitators (see for example Brian Aldiss’ two anthologies, Galactic Empires volume I and volume 2). Influenced by Edward Gibbons History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Asimov basically transplanted the Roman Empire to Outer Space and had it rule the Galaxy, a Galaxy devoid of any other intelligent life and in which it was axiomatic that humanity should be united under one emperor and ruled from one planet and anything else would be barbarism. Yes, these are all utterly clichéd and wornout concepts now, but don’t forget that this was first published in 1951 and based on stories from the forties, in other words, this is some seventy years old. You may therefore wonder if Foundation is worth reading for anything but historical value. Certainly Asimov’s reputation as a not very good writer doesn’t help — you don’t read his stories for his sparkling turn of phrase.

And yet…

The Amnesty rule

Published on May 29, 2010

Bouncing off my own post yesterday, Alex proposes the Amnesty rule:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this happen when B actually had a point – time after bleeding time, it followed this exact course. I therefore intended to declare this as a law, like Godwin’s Law. The Amnesty rule – anyone who asks “why doesn’t Amnesty speak out on X?” is lying.

This goes for Human Rights Watch as well. Though I couldn’t find it yesterday, I’m sure I’ve done posts before either here or at Prog Gold on this subject, showing some rightwinger bozo that no, AI doesn’t just criticise the US or Israel and yes, has actually spent more time campaigning on some cause or other he pulled out of his ass and never wrote about before or since…

It’s worse when this sort of thing comes from alleged lefties, masking as honest critics of Amnesty or whatever other human rights organisation which dared to criticise one of their hobby horses, when whatever miniscule amount of dirt that can be brought up is blown up out of all proportions but what AI actually does is completely ignored. Rightwing critics are bad enough, but relatively honest in their hatred of AI; the motivations of their supposedly leftwing “critics” is much more petty. Flying Rodent put it best, back when the whole sorry Gita Sahgal mess first came to light:

This excerpt represents the clearest statement of what I believe has motivated this whole sorry affair – a small group of like-minded journalists and bloggers determined to crush Amnesty, in the insane belief that a spontaneous uprising of somebody else will magic a deus ex machina human rights organisation into existence… that will say nasty things about Noam Chomsky.