Books read in February

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
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The Red Pavillion – Robert van Gulik.
A mock-historical detective story, based on an 18th century Chinese mystery novel starring Judge Dee, who was himself based on the historical Judge Dee and whom van Gulik appropriated for his series. You could call it orientalist, if not for the matter of factness with which the series treats its setting.

The Peoples of the Hills – Charles Burney & David Marshall Lang.
Worthy but slightly dull attempt to chronicle the early history of Armenia, Georgie, Eastern Turkey and the Caucasus by an archaeologist and a historian. The edition I read was from 2001, but this book was written in 1971, so it’s probably dated by now.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale – Iain Banks.
An enjoyable novel about a large sprawling Scottish family with a deep dark secret at its core, yes, somewhat like The Crows Road

The Jennifer Morgue – Charlie Stross.
The sequel to The Atrocity Archives, a fun spy romp mixed with geekery and high doses of Lovecraft.

The Earth: an Intimate History – Richard Fortey.
An excellent overview both of geological history of Earth and how geology developed as a science, told by one of the best writers of science books I know.

The Battle of Venezuela – Michael McCaughan.
An introductionary history of Hugo Chavez, the Boliverian Revolution he spearheads and the response he called forth against it. Slightly out of date, as it was written in 2004 but sharp, to the point and not too partisan.

The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality – Wolfram Wette.
After the Second World War Germany was quick to embrace the myth that while they were on the wrong in the war, the Wehrmacht was just doing its duty, did it “with clean hands” and that it was Hitler, Himmler and the SS who were the villains, not the ordinary men serving in the army. This book explodes these myths.

Ammonite – Nicola Griffith.
Excellent science fiction novel by a writer I need to read much more of. Feminist in a very natural way.

Selling Hitler – Robert Harris.
Robert Harris on perhaps the biggest publishing fraud in history: the fake Hitler diaries.

1610: a Sundial in a Grave – Mary Gentle.
A cast iron bitch of a novel, as you should expect of Gentle: a mixture of history, science fiction, Hermetic magic, esoteric knowledge and kinky sex.

Rivers in Time – Peter D. Ward.
A non-fiction book examining the three major extinctions that shaped our world, as well as the fourth one currently going on. Interestingly enough, while the idea that we are currently in a mass extinction event is not new, Ward argues that actually much of it has already finished millennia
ago…

Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut.
I last read this when I was thirteen or fourteen or so, it still held up, though it does feel much more dated than something like Catch-22, an anti-war novel of similar vintage.

Remembering the Nakba

Amsterdam, Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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On May 14th it will be exactly sixty years ago that the state of Israel was founded. A moment of celebration for the Israelis, but for the original Palestinian population of the country that day in 1948 was the start for a gigantic humanitarian tragedy: the Nakba, or catastrophe.

The Dutch Tropical Museum now has put up an exhibition on the Nakba, showing the eyewitnesses testimonials of those Palestinians caught up in it. Much of the video material used in this exhibition originated with the Nakba Archive, an international attempt to document and research the experiences of the first generation of Palestinian refugees from what would become Israel. This is important, because this generation is slowly dying of old age and this is the last opportunity to document their stories. The exhibition itself is also important, because the story of the Nakba is little known in the Netherlands, whose sympathies traditionally lie with Israel rather than the Palestinians. That an exhibition on such an important aspect of Palestinian history can now be shown in such a renowned museum with none of the usual zionist outcry is a good sign

Bridgend

Life under Capitalism
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What can you say about the Bridgend suicides? It’s a tragedy for the victims and the bereaved both, made worse by a torrent of media hype flooding over the town and the accompanying headlines. Worse is the talk about suicide pacts, copycat suicides and Werther effect, all of which sounds vaguely patronising at best, reducing the suicides and the pain and suffering they caused families and friends to some insidious trend or fashion. Of course the media, in love with itself as always, has also asked itself the hard (but exciting!) question whether they might not be to blame, their mighty influence causing the “epidemic”.

What rot.

Copycat suicides do happen, but they are not undertaken by people who are otherwise fine and just pushed into suicide by the media, or friends, or whatever. They’re a proximate cause, not the ultimate cause of suicides, as the Wikipedia article and the sources it cite also make clear. There’s more going on than just impressionable youths imitating each other. What exactly drove each of these victims to their deaths I don’t known and nobody knows, but I do know what created the pressures that drove them to their deaths.

The truth is, in Britain it’s now increasingly a crime to be a teenager. Day after day if you’re a teen, you are bombarded with the message that you’re scum: knife crime, binge drinking, anti-social behaviour, chavs: a constant litany of ills supposedly caused by teens. Meanwhile more and more repression against teenagers is tolerated by society, from using asbos to combat legal but “problematic” behaviour, to those mosquito anti-teen devices that chase them out of shops to the ever increasing presence of CCTV to keep them under surveillance. Politicians worry constantly about teenagers, the media reports on them, not for their sakes, but for the threat they supposedly are against others. Is it any wonder that many teenagers, derided as chavs from birth feel worthless? All our media stereotypes about teenagers are bad, from Little Britain to Catherine Tate. As if adolescence is such a happy time anyway.

But even if you’re not typecast as a chav or a hoodlum you have problems. Few teens, even those with nice middle class parents get to be Max Gogarty. All their lives they’ve been bombarded with commercials and aspirational messages telling them they should expect a good job, a nice house and car, holidays twice a year, all the trappings of the middle class lifestyles their parents have, only to discover once they finish school or graduate from university that it’s all a crock. Either, like in Bridgend, the jobs aren’t there or, like in London, there are no houses to be had for love nor money or even, as in Plymouth, both jobs are missing and houses are priced out of reach.

It’s this twopronged development that’s driving these suicides, the constant reinforcement that you’re scum, combined with the resentment and despair at seeing others have the good life that is forever out of your reach.

Israel is not South Africa

Israel/Palestine
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It may actually be worse, says South Africa’s minister for intelligence services and Anti-Apartheid fighter Ronnie Kasrils:

“When I visited the territories I also passed through Israel and I saw the forests that cover the remnants of the Palestinian villages. As a former forestry minister, this was especially striking to me. I also went into a few settlements. It was insane. Young Americans spat on the flag that was on my car. The occupation reminds me of the darkest days of apartheid, but we never saw tanks and planes firing at a civilian population. It’s a monstrousness I’d never seen before. The wall you built, the checkpoints and the roads for Jews only – it turns the stomach, even for someone who grew up under apartheid. It’s a hundred times worse.

“We know from our experience that oppression motivates resistance and that the more savage the oppression, the harsher the resistance. At a certain point in time you think that the oppression is working, and that you’re controlling the other people, imprisoning its leaders and its
activists, but the resistance will triumph in the end.

“We saw the entrance to Qalqilyah, the wall, the people standing hours in line at the checkpoints. It’s a beautiful country, I love its landscapes, but I know that it’s big enough to contain more people. Israel has developed very impressively, but how much more impressive it
would be if you brought about a just solution … I don’t care if it’s two states or one – it’s up to you, the Israelis and the Palestinians, to decide.

“I had coffee with the commander of the Erez checkpoint. It reminded me of the central prison in Pretoria, a place I’ve visited many times. And it was so awful to go through this thing in order to get to Gaza. At first I said that I don’t want to speak with the man at the checkpoint, but then I decided that was foolish. The Israelis were actually very nice to me.

(Via Heathlander.)

It’s David Brin’s Earth; we’re just living in it

Climate change, science fiction
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Yesterday Norway officially opened what’s been called a “Noah’s ark for plant life”:

Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, the “doomsday” vault is designed by Norway to protect the world’s seeds from global catastrophe.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a backup to the world’s 1,400 other seed banks, was to be officially inaugurated in a ceremony Tuesday on the northern rim of civilization attended by about 150 guests from 33 countries.

The frozen vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, war, natural disasters and other threats.

For those of us that have read David Brin’s 1990 novel Earth, this sounds eerily similar to the “Arks” he used as part of the background, wildlife refuges for animal and plant species that were dying out in the wild. Brin set his novel in 2038, but reality seems impatient. Brin must’ve been particularly well inspired when he wrote Earth, as these arks are far from the first “prediction” from it that have come true, as the Wikipedia article linked to above shows. What’s more, Brin put them together into a coherent vision of the near-future that to some extent seems to be coming true. Not in all particulars of course; science fiction cannot predict the future after all.

Brin wrote his novel at a time when, like now, environmental awareness was high. Acid rain had been known since the early eighties at least, while the disappearance of the ozone layer was common knowledge at the end of the decade and was finally acted upon then, decades after it first had been discovered, while global warming and the disappearance of biodiversity were just entering public awareness. That was a time when a fair few science fiction novels, unlike now, tackled climate change.

Coincindentally there’s a recent thread on torque Control on why it is that so few sf authors currently seem unwilling or unable to tackle climate change other than as background fodder. Perhaps because most of us, other than hardcore denialists, seem convinced it is happening and it can’t be stopped only migitated. Climate change as part of the consensus future, too big to ignore but also too immediate to make writing about it fun perhaps, unlike fifteen-twenty years ago.