Reviews and Comments

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.

Starting my third Vance series (after Durdane and Tschai). I'm commenting on this novel as a standalone read - the remaining two entries are to be read.

Cadwal is a planet with three continents orbiting a binary star. Designated a nature conservancy a millennia ago, the novel's titular station was set up on the planet as a base for conservation efforts. Over the centuries a permanent population took root, whose culture stems from the initial bureaucracy. This de facto nation, known as the Conservancy, has resorted to shipping in the far-future equivalent of coolie labour to perform menial jobs and do hard labour. Rigid social stratafication is the norm: Conservancy citizens are assigned a number upon adulthood which determines all their future prospects. The imported labourers are called Collaterals - essentially low-caste members of society. There's a breakaway settlement too, Yipton, a city-state of thatch and bamboo built partially on a lagoon.

Glawen Clattuc is our hero, a young man who works for the IPCC, the de facto police/investigation force. While Vance uses the police procedural formula to drive the plot (much of the novel amounts to a missing person search), the real focal point is the socio-political mess his latest offshoot of humanity has got itself into. In spite of its comfortable idyllic surface, Conservancy society is regressive and inbred, completely straightjacketed by the past and unwilling to reconcile the contradictions it presents to its inheritors. The novel asks, among many things, at what point a society is no longer bound, legally or morally, by the priorities of its forebears. Outside the bounds of Araminta Station authority lie the Yips. Vance uses a boys' trip to Cadwal's only brothel to portray an interesting independent culture, which I hope is developed further in the other novels.

It's an interesting read but small sections of it drag a bit (perhaps 10% of the total). World > plot > characters.

Read it in three sittings. Tells the story of Kaul Braun a piano tuner in 1960s London, going about his day-to-day. During his chats with flatmates Kolm and Strohmayer, their World War II experiences often come up, as do the Nazi war crimes tribunals currently underway on the continent. Braun's is a tale of escalating paranoia and the power of disbelief. It's a very focused thriller, simply but effectively told. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

The English Civil wars are living memory. A king is back on the throne, and a nation remains wary of Rome while adjusting to its newfound peace.

Pears begins with a simple plot detail, the death of a university academic. Readers have this story recounted by a Venetian fop called Marco da Cola, who introduces characters and remarks on the strange land and customs he finds himself amidst. The author gradually 'pulls the camera back' to reveal a web of intrigue and inhumanity involving a wide cast, years in the making, and he does it by retelling the same series of events from three additional perspectives. After the Venetian's version comes that of a proud hothead, bent on restoring his father's honor. Next comes the entry from a high-placed civil servant, convinced of the superiority of his own assessment. The last part is told by a priest in love.

Each successive account informs prior ones, serving to either muddy details that used to be clear, or crystallizing their importance. Entire characters, their background and motives and capabilities, are thrown into a whole new light. It's a mystery novel but it isn't concerned with whodunit as opposed to who-done-what and how it got done. There are several excellent reveals that tie plot threads together. The final account by the priest is quite introspective and does the least plotwise, but is where the novel really bears its heart - for while you think you're reading one type of story for much of the book's 600-odd pages, Pears is about to reveal another.

Interested readers shouldn't alternate between this and other books. This demands persistent attention. I found it worth diagramming the character relationships. It includes a 'dramatis personae,' many members of which are real historical figures. It's skilfully plotted and pretty engrossing.

Adam Reith and company are on a response mission to the planet Tschai, 212 light years away, after receiving a signal. Their reconnaissance craft soon gets hit by a missile from the planet's surface, stranding Reith with little hope of return.

Tschai hosts four distinct races who are at odds with each other to varying degrees. The Chasch, industrious urbanites, the Dirdir, highly stratified sport hunters; the Wankh, inscrutable in their cities of black glass, and hovering above (below) it all, the Pnume, aloof insectoid chroniclers of the surface's changing fortunes, a morbid subterranean priesthood. All four races employ a sub-race - mankind - or Chaschmen, Dirdirmen, Wankhmen and Pnumekin - brought to Tschai millennia ago in mysterious circumstances. Planet of Adventure is an escape story at first glance, and a good one, but it's also portrait of an alternate humanity that is profoundly dysfunctional, robbed of its inclinations to discover, to know, to imagine and create, and in some cases even its resemblance as human. What if we took Us and made us serfs of our domain instead of masters, and let that cook for 100 millennia? asks Vance. The nature of individual liberty and agency are also explored.

Reith teams up with Traz, an adolescent boy with major responsibilities and major totems to uphold, and Anacho, a Dirdirman fugitive. There is little character introspection (Reith is a Neil Armstrong-James Bond of the far future who doesn't have a qualm with kicking heads in if he has to) but they are still competently sketched, as are the supporting cast. The worldbuilding is the true highlight. Tschai is vibrantly colorful yet worn through. Tschai is pungent and rank and unfair and brutally transactional and at home with itself. Tschai works. Yet in retrospect it feels like all Vance ever describes is the color of the sky, the murky light cast by its star Carina 4269, the cuisine, and various episodes of haggling. I still enjoyed my time there.

The four books total about 450 pages. It's effectively a single four-volume novel. Vance doesn't muck around - his plotting and pacing is lean, in contrast to nearly any modern fantasy author, where 450 pages wouldn't see the first book finished. He achieves immersion by means other than padding the time investment. I wish SF/F authors rediscovered the value of basic writing economy (they might actually finish more series). I love Vance's brand of refined pulpiness and plan to read more of him.

Part social survey, part natural history, part travelogue.

The book is a study of Harar's people, human and spotted hyena alike, focusing on inter-species relations as well as how the hyena clans organize and behave inside and outside city walls.

The first chapters set the scene. Harar is a city of 100 thousand whose old quarters, known as Jugol, form a mostly walled complex about one square km in area. While it has many attractions for hyenas thanks to our ability to waste food, the city also has a cottage tourist industry in hyena feeding. Baynes-Rock examines two such operations, uncovering not only interesting logistical differences but very different underlying attitudes toward the animals they court. The author comes to recognize hyenas like so many other animals have distinct personalities.

The next chapters introduce us to the local Sofi and Aboker hyena clans, named after the two mosques that outside Jugol that fall within their territory. Hyenas mark clan boundaries using a range of scent glands. In open space these can be delinated clearly, but Jugol becomes a de facto neutral territory because of its overbuilt, cramped nature. Typically wary of humans, Harar hyenas employ the town garbage dump and nearby brush as a base prior to navigating the town. The author spends later chapters not only at the feeding exhibits but actively following them throughout the town, gaining greater knowledge of individual hyenas.

Hyenas feature heavily in Harari and Oromo folklore. The author investigates the legend of Ashura, an anti-violence truce involving a cauldron of special porridge, whose degree of overnight consumption by the hyenas is a portent of the future. They are also supposed to regulate and exorcize djinn (Islamic demonic spirits, origin of the English 'genie'). Several great interviews with local elders provide the details.

The author documents his trials and errors with getting to know the clan members. Becoming too familiar too quickly risks a devastating loss of trust. Some can develop a level of courage and inquisitiveness that becomes dangerous if not met with a quick response (namely curious biting). During his trailing sessions the author comes to relish the electricity outages because the lack of light attracts less attention.

You get immersed in the locale too. By the end of the read you realize you enjoyed your time in this sweaty, unkempt but very much alive, respectable and textured city. The mid section has the standard photo gallery to be expected of these assignments. In one shot he's literally head to head with one of the most familiar hyenas.

Pala is an island nation in South East Asia. It has engineered the ego out of human institutions, and over the course of 150 years the result is a state and society whose primary goal is generating fully realized, spiritually fulfilled human beings, as opposed to economic growth or military power - human beings as a genuine end instead of a means. Carefully managing a combination of Western scientific advances in medicine and sanitation with Buddhist ethics, it's largely avoided the repressions of capitalism and communism. What would a nation's social, cultural and economic architecture have to be like for this to happen? What kind of institutions would it possess? What foreign influences would it welcome or discard or completely invert to suit its aims?

We follow Will, a jaded English reporter who finds himself recovering in a Palanese hospital. Mobile again, he accepts a tour of the island, meeting locals and the diplomat from the neighboring nation of Rendang. Everyone speaks English! And speak it well they should, for these dialogues make up the bulk of this philosophical book about how we might defang and repurpose the worst tendencies of human nature. This is an ideas novel, pure plot and character readers should look elsewhere.

Will's guides see the first world, Europe in particular, as a tangle of mass dysfunctions responsible for widespread generational trauma, psychoses and sociopathy among its populations, stemming from its social and economic organization, its religious baggage and its disciplinary insistence on treating mind and body as separate. It turns out Pala has alternatives (and alternative purposes) for all sorts of things - the nuclear family, state education, hallucinogenic drug use, physical activity. A coming-of-age custom, the Pre-Elementary Test, sees participants scale a high edifice with not much equipment than a rope ('An ordeal [...] which is the first stage of their initiation out of childhood into adolescence. An ordeal that helps them to understand the world they'll have to live in, helps them to realize the omnipresence of death'). Families exist in the context of Mutual Adoption Clubs ('Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.' 'And what comes out of your open pan?' Will asked. 'An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty children of all ages.')

Pala isn't powerful or materially wealthy either. It knows what it's given up to achieve the intangibles. There is no large scale industry ('Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war'). Because a low level of income inequality is socially reinforced, it hasn't got financiers or captains of industry. Politically it's too federated - across geographic, social and professional lines - for any Great Man of History ('Muscle People' as the Palanese call personalities like Stalin) to amass an unassailable power base.

It's not a book about capitalism versus communism. To come away with that assumption is to have misunderstood Huxley's concerns. It's about one British man of letters daring to wonder, as he witnessed the British Empire rapidly being dismantled, whether some corners of the world might have a go at incubating real civilization. It's definitely about endings of all sorts - the latter half is packed with Buddism. It's a highly unbalanced novel, even by the author's admission. But it's never boring.

Augustus Melmotte is coming to town! Financier of the new world, host of Emperors, scourge of prudential regulators! He's incorporating the Mexican American Railway Co. in London, and looking for the right sorts to direct the enterprise. Thankfully he's found several young lords who happen to be inveterate gamblers.

London doesn't ask too many questions of Mr Melmotte, like how he obtained his fortune or trivial affairs like capital structure. Why bother when it's self-evident he's a man of action who knows how to get things done.

Let's meet the board. Felix Carbury, a feckless waste of space who mooches off his mother; Lord Nidderdale, a dopey aristocratic wallflower; Miles Grendall, a man to make an amoeba in cryogenic stasis seem inquisitive; and Paul Montague, a comparitively ordinary chap boasting a head least unscrewed.

Felix wants to marry Melmotte's heir, Marie, to fund his lifestyle, but prefers a country girl as his sidepiece. Paul desires Felix's sister, Henrietta, as does Henrietta's cousin, the sanctimonous but sympathetic Roger Carbury, nearly twice her age. Paul's tempestuous ex from the United States, one Winifred Hurtle, crossed the pond to old Blighty to pay him a visit in the meantime.

The engine of this 800-page satirical chonker is Mr Melmotte and his navigation of high society's commercial interests. Hideously transactional and with a pathological want of self-insight, he hustles as hard as a politician trying to contain an illicit sex island clientele list. The book has loads of amusing vignettes like the gambling sessions at the Beargarden gentlemen's club, and the company board meetings. You'll meet about 20 characters and get to know them well. If Dickens excels at caricature, Trollope's forte is having the reader go 'yep, I know this person IRL' all too often. His portraits of Roger Carbury and Winifred Hurtle are highlights. The tangle involving Paul, Winifred, Roger and Henrietta is nearly moving in its resolution.

If you decide to invest the time, it's worth noting that marriage in Victorian times is a very different and far more serious matter compared to now, especially for young women. I suspect choosing wisely back then determined not onlya woman's financial security but also her social mobility and lifestyle quality for the rest of her life. Ouch.

This is an apocalpyse novel at its heart - one triggered by social and technological disaster instead of a natural event. We follow several characters who live in several different nation-states, known simply as The Federation, the Union and the Republic (the real-world countries they represent become obvious). The one unifying aspect of all their plots is the need to maintain contact with another human being somewhere in the world, and the ways in which government seeks to prevent/distort/interfere with communication. It's also about the relationship between state and citizen, and whether systems are truly able to change from within or require exogenous factors/black swan events to undergo real transformation.

The author spends a lot of time talking about the Federation's dreadful control architecture and the effects it has on the books characters and Federation society at large. However it struck me that much of it has analogs in Western countries - de facto social credit schemes, surveillance meshnets, advanced behavioral fingerprinting, etc.

The novel isn't totally pessimistic, ending on a note of hope. There's a long afterword by the author regarding his intentions in writing the book (it felt like a cheatsheet though - apparently just putting the answers in the back in case your readers don't get the text is a thing in genre fiction now?). It's a very 2020s novel.

This is a temporary DNF, and one of my big disappointments of the year. I read to approx. p220, giving up during an extended (and frankly inane) overstuffed dialog sequence.

I like the author. Palmer is intelligent, and passionate about her chosen subjects. I share a stack of the same interests, particularly censorship (she has a couple of great lectures on YouTube about the subject, explaining what censorship regimes really do, how they work, how universally slipshod they are, etc.)

I also like the book's key ideas. My social milieu DOES matter more to me than the country on my birth certificate, and that SHOULD count for something. But I couldn't grok her writing style. It's baroque. Too wordy, too 'mannered'. The framing device she employs is original (a history of events, about which extraneous details are included, like editorial decisions and commentary on people) but I can't help but feel it got in the way of the story. Pacing is weird: I read practically half the book and it felt like only a couple of things had happened.

The extensive cast doesn't help things either. Then add in alternate names for certain characters, used in the same paragraph. Then add unconvential punctuation. The book has an obsession with names and titles.

I might pick up the book and the series again later on and discover a favorite. But I know it didn't hold me on the maiden read. A pity.

Excellent overview of the subject. A highly readable, down to earth, unpretentious prose style. It avoids the trend in a lot of popular history writing of gradiose puffery of the topic (10 page forewords, hysterical framing, etc). I read it in about four sittings. Available from your shadow library of choice.

It covers the whole year of 1066 and starts from the perspective of the peasantry, describing key social institutions such as the villlage, the thanes, the forums for dispute resolution called 'hundreds' and so on. I didn't know that English monarchs were elected by a sort of proto-parliament, and that heredity was a secondary factor in determing kingship.

It illustrates the key figures involved. You get a keen sense of their psychological states and the political hands they were dealt: Edward the Confessor's frustration with his duties and never feeling truly at home with his own people, in part due to his sanctimonious faith; Harald Hardrada's Klingonlike thirst for violent skirmish and conquest (a shameless war tourist whose lifestyle could quite accurately be described as jihadist); William's blind self-confidence and almost lunatic trust in fate, regardless of how stacked against him the odds were of his campaign succeeding.

One of the key takeaways about the conquest itself: the unwitting use of psychological warfare (against the English monarch Harold) thanks to the indirect involvement of the Catholic church, and how effective it was in sowing FUD.

The sections on how ill-equipped the Normans were for seafaring were also fascinating. Indeed in the 11th century boats were about getting armies from one landmass to another and nothing else; the concept of a fighting maratime force such as a navy really wasn't a thing.

Marek a god-fearing shepherd's boy does his pious best to make sense of grim life circumstances until one day he makes an impulsive decision during an excursion with the landlord's son. The book reads like The Life of Brian crossed with Caligula or something directed by Branden Cronenburg.

It's a pithy study of resentment in all its flavors. Ludicrous and depraved yet readable. The characters are often preoccupied with wrongs, slights, past mistakes and post facto justifications of behaviour. Most of them are either idiots or scoundrels. Ina, a longlived wet-nurse, and Grigor, an elderly man turned Cynic (the original Diogenean sense of cynic) were my favorites.

The setting is never stated but my guess is circa 5th century Anatolia or Armenia. The early book refers 'fair northeners' who are 'amoral' and 'well suited to servile tasks', which I read as slavs of some description. A key scene indicates the place is mountainous, and nearby place names bear some resemblance to real locales such as Pripyat, Ukraine and Istria, Croatia.

A minor gripe from a non-American reader: on a few occasions I got taken out of the setting due to Moshfegh using Americanisms, such as 'moseying'. The author is American so it's kind of understandable, but it still struck me as a weird word choice given the subect matter.