User Profile

For fans of China Mieville and Mr Robot

Rudi is the most nondescript European ever. Accentless English, no easily discernable ethnic background. He works in kitchens, cooking and cleaning, and knows a lot about commercial dishwashers. The continent is in long-term phase of balkanization following the collapse of the EU, with political borders now looking like Holy Roman Empire's. Micronations spring up - 'polities'. Borders harden. Rudi also delivers packages for an organization called the Coerreurs. Europe's black market still believes in the spirit of Schengen. The Correurs fabricate backstories and get their staff to inhabit them. Missions are 'situations' and situations involve deliveries - at the lower rungs anyway. An anarchist DHL. Hated by Europe's authorities but not deemed a mortal threat thanks to its neutrality policy, the Correurs get left alone. But we're reading fiction so inevitably Rudi Gets In Way Over His Head[TM], finding himself on the run and piecing together a mystery that threatens his life.

Huthinson's vision of Europe isn't strictly dystopian, it's more interesting and nuanced than that. Nation-states seem to have lost some degree of control (or willingness to exert control?) over their territory and populaces, and are on the backfoot. An air of lassitude hangs over the continent. Things only work in spite of their design, and the simple act of living is a series of hacks and workarounds. A railway line turned itself into a polity. Two large paramilitaries born of neighbourhood gangs engage in a fight over control of a commieblock complex. Even the police can't be bothered quelling it. Rudi gets renditioned to an English Government blacksite (there's no more UK either) in central London that's a) remarkably hospitable and b) isn't apparently interested in the whole 'detention' or 'interrogation' bits of cross-border state kidnapping.

Until the last 50 pages or so it's a decent tech-thrillery romp in the near future with thoughtful worldbuilding. Then the book widlly changes tack by talking about an 18th century land surveryor called Whitton-Whyte, and Hutchinson drops the conceptual centrepiece of this series. Needless to say it gets quite interesting.

2023, Lisbon, Portugal. Our heroine is on family vacation when she meets Dark Handsome Local. Then an alien invasion commences. An instruction is delivered: humanity has 30 days to reach Antarctica. All hell breaks loose. Heroine and love interest make it in time, but many don't. Two million souls must start civilization on the most inhospitable continent, with a stack of airliners, aircraft carriers, tankers and submarines at their disposal. The book chronicles the establishment of McMurdo Station and three satellite towns on the peninsula as urban centers, and the longterm efforts the science contingent is making to adapt the species to Antarctica.

Smith knows he's no prose stylist, but the pacing is really good and he has an eye for the cinematic. No scenes get old. I read it in two sittings. The author brings to life a strange environment and society in quite creative detail. I was struck by how much the chaos of the first section felt like the start of the COVID pandemic, that sense of the world being profoundly changed, and our curious dread of the unprecedented.

The whole premise is ridiculous but I enjoyed it and plan on reading the sequel.

It's 1915. World War I rages in France. The war's eastern theatre, Asia Minor, includes the Arabian peninsula and the Levant (modern Syria, Jordan, et al). These lands are provinces of Ottoman Turkey. The local subjects, arabs, have only tribal affiliations, and lack nations of their own. What better way to cause headaches for our imperial foe than to facilitate the arab independence struggle, thought the British. The agent of chaos sent was T. E. Lawrence, AKA Lawrence of Arabia. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is his recount of their efforts breaking things, winning civilian hearts and minds, navigating tribal diplomacy and life, and keeping the British command satisfied.

The independence movement, essentially a fluid volunteer army on camelback, supported by the occasional sapper contingent and artillery strike from the British, required its members to subordinate their tribal politics to the greater goal of independence. This required charisma and farsightedness in its native leaders. Lawrence introduces us to Feisal the statesman and figures Auda and Nasir, heads of their respective clans and makeshift colonels.

Lawrence explains, 'the Arab war was geographical, and the Turkish Army an accident. Our aim was to seek the enemy’s weakest material link and bear only on that till time made their whole length fail [...] we must extend our front to its maximum, to impose on the Turks the longest possible passive defence, since that was, materially, their most costly form of war. [...] Our duty was to attain our end with the greatest economy of life.'

The book can be divided into two rough geographic sections of operation: the movement's work up and down the western coast of the peninsula, targeting the Hejaz railway and various Turkish garrisons. The latter section deals with their northern exploits in Jordan, Syria, Palestine, etc.

Given it was written a century ago, the text is probably having to do more things now than ever. It can be superficially read as history (my knowledge of the region before national borders were drawn was poor), as a professional soldier's epic memoir of two years abroad, and as a kind of disturbed adventure story whose narrator is forever at pains to examine and question the roles he played. In fact the author regularly provides psychological appraisals of the fighters both as unit and individuals. Remarking on the master-servant social dynamics in the context of volunteer soldiering, Lawrence writes, 'In this pledging of their endurance, it disgraced men if, from weakness of nerve or insufficiency of courage, they fell short of the call. Pain was to them a solvent, a cathartic, almost a decoration, to be fairly worn while they survived it. Fear, the strongest motive in slothful man, broke down with us, since love for a cause—or for a person—was aroused. For such an object, penalties were discounted, and loyalty became open-eyed, not obedient. To it men dedicated their being, and in its possession they had no room for virtue or vice. Cheerfully they nourished it upon what they were; gave it their lives; and, greater than that, the lives of their fellowship: it being many times harder to offer than to endure sacrifice.'

On customs of war: 'To an Arab an essential part of the triumph of victory was to wear the clothes of an enemy: and next day we saw our force transformed (as to the upper half) into a Turkish force, each man in a soldier’s tunic [...] The dead men looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining gently down, softening them into new ivory. Turks were white-skinned on their clothed parts, much whiter than the Arabs; and these soldiers had been very young. Close round them lapped the dark wormwood, now heavy with dew, in which the ends of the moonbeams sparkled like sea-spray. The corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground, huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if straightened they would be comfortable at last. So I put them all in order, one by one, very wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not of the restless, noisy, aching mob up the valley, quarrelling over the plunder [...] with death, whether we won or lost, waiting to end the history.

So much of the book details not only military movements but the nature of terrain on the peninsula (it's far more than just sand dunes), and the diversity of the co-operating clans: from the lithe Ageyl with braided hair, to the industrious Howeitat and Juheina.

One of my favorite vignettes from the peninsula section was when several slaves worked overtime at the height of noon to to unblock a well that had been hastily caved in by retreating Turks, sweat pouring off their backs as various wealthier soldiers promised them large payments of gold as incentive to work quickly. The book so often has the arabs using euphoric language to describe water, calling particularly fresh sources 'sweet', with different flavours. Indeed it was often a matter of life or death.

Books like this are practically impossible to write now, due to the nature of modern warfare and bureaucratic secrecy. Lawrence is a stirring writer, but always in the back of your mind you're aware he is essentially running agitprop with guns, using the arabs to achieve British imperial ends - an Edwardian-era black-ops specialist. Indeed even he referred to his work as perpetuating a 'fraud', never wholly convinced of its moral legitimacy but nevertheless taking solace in the righteousness of its process and ordeals.

Mainly a primer on the science informing SETI's search for life, rather than about SETI itself. Covers a lot of territory familiar to any science-oriented Youtube viewer, such as the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, the Kardashev scale. SETI as an organization/movement itself is barely touched on, which is disappointing, especially when you consider that the author is an insider. I did learn that the rate of species extinction on Earth is heavily determined by the solar system's oscillation above and below the galactic plane over a 62 million-year cycle. It has to do with the galactic 'halo' of protons being skewed to the underside of the galactic plane, whereas the 'north' top side faces the direction of Andromeda, the galaxy the Milky Way is hurtling towards. The closer the solar system is to the edge of the halo, the higher the extinction rates. Supposedly has to do with electromagnetic weirdness where the halo meets the interstellar medium. Fuckin neat.