Summer Activities

In a bid to stop this blog devolving into a series of angry posts about Trump, Boris and Brexit, here is a round up of what I'm reading, playing and watching at the moment. In no real order, here we go:

PC Gaming

I continued to have a good time with 'Sunless Skies' after my previous post about it. However, having made it to Eleutheria and escaped without dying (brilliant change of pace there as you have to explore the new area unaided by familiar ports), I died a stupid death on my return to the Reach. I've yet to pick it up again but will have to at some point to see what the Blue Kingdom has to offer.

I picked up 'Into the Breach' in the Summer Sale and, while it is good, I think my expectations were a little high after the good press that it has received. On normal difficulty I find it much, much easier than the brilliant FTL and beat it regularly after only a handful of attempts. Will push the difficulty up to hard soon but I'm tempted to unlock and try out all of the Mech squads on normal first unless I get too bored by the lack of challenge first.

Finally, I'm giving 'Massive Chalice' another shot. The uneven difficulty and slightly oblique mechanics have put me off before but so far so good. I'm quite keen on the goofy humour and after finding ItB too easy the potential for characters to die suddenly (and even unfairly) seems refreshing and challenging.

Board Gaming

Out of the blue, a work colleague invited me to play in an eight player 'Game of Thrones' game with dragon expansion.

On top of it being a complex game in itself, I haven't seen the program or read the books so lacked any cultural context for the game. Everybody else was a hard core fan and I raised some eyebrows by calling my faction the 'Tulips' rather than the 'Tyrells' throughout.

Ultimately I had a good time though. Surrounded by other inexperienced players I quietly expanded with minimal conflict as the Starks and Lanisters wiped out the faction between them to the North. The dragon player (my work colleague) eventually won with some air strikes and a couple of canny alliances but since few people had played with the expansion this can possibly be put down to people not knowing what to expect.

Hell of a long game though. We played for nearly 6.5 hours with one short break.

Otherwise, at work I continue to have a very good time with quick lunchtime games of 'Codename Pictures' and slightly less fun with 5-10 player games of Saboteur.

Television

Not much to report here. I'm finishing up the first series of Netflix's 'Seven Deadly Sins', which I'm having an inordinately good time with despite the near constant objectification of the female characters.

Books

My reading list is threatening to bury me again after a number of impulse buys on Amazon. At my parents I'm reading a collection of A.E. Housman's Poetry and Prose which feels very high brow even if gets a bit samey and is highly dated in tone. I've also started Philip Pullman's Shadow in the North which I may drop or continue with based on mood and opportunity.

At home, I'm finishing off Kim Stanley's Robinson's Blue Mars which seems a little pointless after the energy of Red Mars and the interesting political machinations of Green Mars. As the author explores the realisation of what seems like his personal utopia the preachiness and superficiality of certain characters becomes ever more apparent. I'm also reading through Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm for something a bit more weighty. 

Finally, a work colleague has lent me three recent-ish National Geographics which are my current lunchtime reading when I'm not socialising or drinking. They are definitely growing on me and I like the reasonable length of the longer articles although, as I generally read British publications, the editorial style is very unfamiliar.

How old is atheism?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/17/atheism-has-ancient-roots-claims-new-study

Disclaimer: I have not actually read this book so am being snide about it solely on the basis of the Guardian article (a risky proposition given the general level of understanding in newspaper book reviews).

The argument does however seem to be lacking in nuance. Of course there were atheists in Ancient Greece. The intellectual proclivities of the pre-Roman Conquest Greeks are well documented and in some cases philosophers even received the backing of powerful tyrants with one eye on their reputations.  As Paul Kennedy has argued in his examination of the rise of Europe from the 16th century, political pluralism is always a boost to thinkers since they can easily migrate away from central authorities that clamp down on originality to freer polities.

Spotting the kernels of modern ideas is a common pursuit of scholars of the ancient world. Just do a google search on fascism and Plato or on the musings of Democritus on atomic structure. However, without an overarching theory of how these ideas developed towards the modern day they merely highlight the intellectual curiosity of the society that they arose in rather than telling us anything interesting about the ideas themselves.

Further there is no mention of the common tactic of accusing rivals of atheism as a form of propaganda. In large swathes of the world atheist has been a term of abuse and discrimination for centuries. Even in Ancient Greece we are informed that one of the charges brought against Socrates at his trial was impiety. Christian thinkers lined up after the fall of the Roman Empire to exclude atheists from their models of just societies and to condemn them to hell or purgatory for their lack of belief.

Thus it is hard to distinguish genuine atheism from its use as a term of opprobrium. Openly stated atheism could have lethal consequences in Christendom and much of the Arabic world. Searching for signs and double meanings hidden in the works of great writers who may have harboured doubts is liable to lead only to false pattern finding.

Long story short, atheism has almost certainly existed throughout world history but it is difficult to locate solid evidence for its continuity and influence outside of a few already well-documented examples.

New Discworld game announced

http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/games-news-180515/

So it looks like the next Discworld game will be based on the Clacks system that featured prominently in his later Ankh-Morpork books. I was generally more of a fan of Terry Pratchett's 'middle period' when he still made funny jokes but had mastered the rudiments of plot and characterisation. Nevertheless this piques my interest more effectively than the child-friendly Witches game that followed the original (and under-appreciated) territory control game.

Speaking of authors who I like - if you haven't read Neil Gaiman's 'Trigger Warning' you should do immediately. Along with American Gods and Sandman, I thought that his two earlier collections of short stories were among his best work, The new collection continues this trend with a marvellous and versatile mix of gothic horror, whimsy and sentimental tales.    

Hyperion living up to expectations

After an inexplicable delay in getting around to reading this one (I usually snap up anything in the astonishing SF Masterworks collection) I am really enjoying it.

Wait for the review that I'm sure will follow but after 100 pages I have to say that this is astounding. Best thing I've read since I discovered the Book of Skulls/  Charles Stross' bibliography.

On Libertarianism (and Scottish Sci-Fi Writers)

 “Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.” Iain Banks.

I've just finished reading Ken MacLeod's 'Intrusion' which contained some very interesting ideas about the implications of geno-fixing and the development of the surveillance state. 

I never know entirely how to feel about MacLeod. He was the protege of the late and much missed Iain Banks but, possibly surprising, this does not mean he is his political clone or even a close fellow traveller.

Having read Banks' entire back catalogue and being familiar with MacLeod from his Fall Revolution series and a scattering of his one off novels, I feel that the former is far more optimistic about the ability of institutions and assorted 'do gooders' to achieve positive change.

The Culture may be a post-scarcity, anarchist utopia but Banks does often present traditional hero characters working within some kind of institutional structure (Special Circumstances, Contact, his various mercantile or cultist clans); even if they are generally personally flawed and often fleeing some personal nightmare or atrocity.

By contrast MacLeod's characters can seem almost Randian in their attitudes and values. Intrusion and the Fall Revolution novels bring this to the fore in presenting self sufficient individuals engaged in life and death struggles with such unlikely 'Statist' or principled villains as the Labour Party, environmentalists and computer geeks.

Not that there is anything wrong with this. As I've said at the start of this article I find MacLeod's books compelling and imaginative (although I don't think his characters are ever quite as strong as those produced by Iain Banks). However, I do feel that it is a bit rich for libertarians to continue to present the strong State as the main nemesis of the free and the good. Ever since the Thatcher era we have seeed locked in a race for ever weaker government control. Capitalist libertarianism is certainly dominant now and for all off the doom-saying I don't see a return to totalitarianism being a threat again until governments can carry out basic functions like taxation and basic wealth distribution without being deterred by vested interests or hostile popular opinion.    

McCalmont rips apart Jackson's Smaug

http://ruthlessculture.com/2014/04/08/review-the-hobbit-the-desolation-of-smaug-2013/

"Peter Jackson is a terrible loss to the special effects profession and a terrible addition to that of professional film direction."

Ouch! Definitely worth a read if you like your film criticism insightful and acerbic.

I can't say that I rate Peter Jackson very highly as a director. I liked the original Lord of the Rings trilogy of films enough to keep watching but haven't experienced any desire to revisit them since.

Similarly I strongly agree that Jackson's decision to split the brilliantly concise action of the Hobbit across three films was a waste of good material. Ironically it matches Tolkien's own hubris in creating ever longer and more inaccessible fantasy epics as his career progressed. Fortunately he had the vision not to publish these literary monstrosities (a task that was left to his less restrained successors).

Fight Club vs Fight Club

So I've just finished reading Chuck Palahniuk's 'Fight Club'. I hadn't previously read the novel but am a big fan of the movie, which stars Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. In creating the film they stuck very closely to the book's script (which was proabably relatively easy as it is a slim 200 page paperback) and this only makes it more interesting to see where the divergences are and what effect they have on the overall experience.

1) Tyler's Dream - The final scene of the movie, as the skyscrapers explode to the sound of the Pixies 'Where is My Mind?' is a brilliant climax. It is a remarkably upbeat ending, since the narrator has 'killed' Tyler Durdan and has achieved his dream of financial revolution against the debt agencies and major banks. While the methods are crude and completely insane, I think many people would have some sympathy with such a redistributive motivation.

The novel provides a much darker presentation of this dream. Tyler's visions of hunting elk through the ruins of North American cities evokes the desolation of 'I am Legend' and suggests mass death and destruction in an apocalyptic end to civilization. The narrator is open about the roots of this dream in his personal envy. He wants to destroy the 'beaches of France' because he will never see/possess them. Instead of destroying the skyscrapers through some altruistic dream of freeing people from capitalistic domination he wants to use them to squash the images of the past contained in museums. Small details but they remove any sympathy you might have for his actions.

2) The Ending - The upbeat nature of the movie's cliffhanger ending is not maintained at the end of the novel. We continue the story after Tyler's execution to find that the narrator has been hospitalised. This location supports your pre-existing doubts about the unreality of the narrator's story but, assuming that it was broadly true, we are left with the continued menace of the Project Mayhem operation, which is actively working to retrieve the narrator. A sword of Damocles is left hanging over him and modern civilization.

3) Greater Unpleasantness - The scenes from the novel that did not make it into the film are exactly those that present the narrator/Tyler in their worst light. The tipping of a rich woman into a suicidal depression through deceit, the murder of a political investigator of Fight Clubs and the eventual killing of the narrator's long-suffering boss are all deeply ugly scenes. Their omission from the film enables the misbehaviour of the protagonists to be initally presented in a far more comedic manner. Tyler plays with nunchucks and engages in banter with the narrator rather than being the hard-headed zealot of the novel. This gives a markedly different feel to the film despite its superficial similarities to the structure of the book.

IKB or Zima Blue

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Klein

I had never heard of Yves Klein when I read Zima Blue, by Alastair Reynolds for the first time. Since the latter story had a fairly lasting effect on me I'm now experiencing one of those weird postmodern moments where you encounter the effect before its cultural cause.

Existential angst aside, I would strongly recommend reading Zima Blue. It can be found in Gardner Dozois' Best of the Best New SF or in Reynold's Zima Blue and is one of the sweetest and most thought provoking short stories to take on the theme of the relationships between identity, art and artificial intelligence.

China Mieville

This man sounds awesome. I've just read 'Embassytown' and am definitely going to look out for more of his books in the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_meiville

He also has the same birthday as me :)

'Embassytown' was a science fiction novel with a strong linguistic bent although it seems like the author practices many genres. I have a mixed record with books that focus on linguistics - I can rarely handle the non-fiction ones. They seem too full of jargon that I managed to get through primary school without ever getting a firm handle on and so I get bogged down and bored.

However, while I may not always fully understand linguistic themes when I encounter them in science fiction, I recognise that it can provide a very powerful hook for a story line. Babel 17 by Samuel Delany is one of my favourite books ever. It manages to keep the plot line simple by focussing mainly on two linguistic points:
1) How do you distinguish a language from a code via cryptography?
2) What effect it would have on a person not to be able to conceive of 'I'. Could they develop a sense of self or an ethical framework?

By repeated examination of these issues from different viewpoints the reader gets multiple chances to understand the nuances of them, bypassing the dangers of excessive jargon and high complexity.

China Meiville follows a similar line of focussed enquiry in 'Embassytown'. The 'Host' alien race in his book is incapable of speaking untruths. However, in engaging with humans they are forced to develop a limited facility for lying and they do so by physically examining individuals and objects in the world around them that they recognise as significant similes or concepts e.g. 'the man who swims with fishes' is like X or 'the girl who ate what was given to her in the dark' is like Y. I won't ruin the plot but it hinges around their learning to move from similes to metaphor, a transition which is seen as necessary for individual agency.

It is a very good book and not as heavy-going as it sounds. It reminded me a bit of 'A Case of Conscience' by James Blish but also seemed quite Samuel Delany or Iain Banks like at times.

'Dupin and Holmes' Part 1 - The Murders in the Rue Morgue

'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' was Edgar Allan Poe's first story containing C. Auguste Dupin, his Holmes like fictional detective, and the anonymous narrator, who bears more than a passing similarity to Dr Watson. The connections are no coincidence. Poe's detective stories were some of the first ever written and had a strong influence on Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes even mentions Dupin in 'A Study in Scarlet', denigrating him as showy and extravagant while conceding that he has some analytic skill.

So how do Holmes and Dupin compare? While both fictional detectives share eccentric lifestyles and a whimsical approach to the horrors they encounter there are some noticeable differences. Dupin and his narrator are Byronic loners. They spend their days in a dim, shuttered house, occupying themselves with reading, writing and conversation in perfect seclusion. Only at night do they venture outside into the city in conversation on the topics of the day or in silent observation of the Parisian populace. In comparison, Holmes' dark moods and eccentric working habits seem relatively normal and Watson is so ordinary that he seems to exist only to narrate and trigger explanations of Sherlock's methods by his slow grasp of what is going on. Dupin's financial situation and background is also more romantic (in the gothic sense) than Holmes'. Sherlock is portrayed as obtaining a fair wage from his investigations and living a comfortable middle class life. Dupin, in contrast, is a fallen aristocrat who despite his brilliance has had his energy crushed by poverty. The only luxury he permits himself is the buying of books to distract him from his meaningless life.

As to who is the better detective I will have to wait until I've finished the other two Dupin stories. I've not read every Sherlock Holmes story but I think I've read enough to attempt a comparison. My only preliminary conclusion is that Holmes is right to accuse Dupin of showiness. Considering Poe's love of atmosphere and the macabre I think it would have been more surprising if Dupin hadn't been a bit of a showman.

Unfortunately the story itself is not quite up to Arthur Conan Doyle's standard. Early nineteenth century Paris makes just as creepy a location for a cryptic detective story as late nineteenth century London. However, the reader is not given enough clues to be able to preempt Dupin in any meaningful way. In this respect, Poe might have been better off writing a full length novel rather than a short story so as to draw out the conclusion more slowly and give a few hints about where it was going before the last scene. A longer novel would also have enabled him to make the most of his strong characters and excellent scenario. The final reveal, that the murders were committed by an escaped Orang-outang, has more than a faint whiff of the ridiculous about it. Worse, a similar idea was used later and in a superior manner by Doyle. The 'murderous beast' turning out to be the killer has had some of the novelty value stolen from it by the excellent Holmes story, 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'.

A panoply of book reviews.

I usually have a couple of books on the go, especially when I have time on my hands. I try to pick them to complement each other, so one might be some brainless science fiction that I can read a few pages of at work when I get a moment and the other a biography of a physicist that I only brave when I can actually commit mind and time to it.

Recently however my reading schedule seems to have gone a bit haywire. I'm reading (or have recently finished reading) several books at once and am rapidly approaching information overload. Therefore, in order to get my mind straight and for the benefit of medical science if my brain actually physically explodes I thought I would do some brief reviews of each one and explain why I'm reading it (An eclectic mix of spoilers below).

1) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II (abridged) - by Fernand Braudel

Progress: Quarter of the way through.

Why I'm reading it/review: Back at university I did a historiography course which I generally found a bit dull but had occasional highlights that really stuck with me. Reading an extract from this book was one of those moments. I like Braudel's unswerving conviction of the predominance of long term geographical and economic factors over the opportunistic political actions of monarchs and rulers. It's a bit like reading Paul Kennedy but with a charming French writing style (especially impressive as it was drafted from memory in a German POW camp). It's also very well published with interesting illustrations spread throughout the text rather than whacked in a de-contextualized blob in the middle which always puts me off. The details of trade winds and the geography of the Mediterranean should be boring but it's actually pretty soothing. However, you can't read too much of it at once which probably explains the profusion of other books.

2) The Mammoth Book of Best New Sci-Fi 23- edited by Gardner Dozois

Progress: Recently finished.

Why I'm reading it/review: Picked up cheap in a charity shop for £2.50. Pretty good as it is RRP £10, 700 pages long and only came out in 2010. I've read the previous two collections so I knew what to expect. Very good selection with the highlight being John Wright's retelling of 'the Ring cycle' set on a severely damaged space ship where the crew have reverted to savagery. Interesting enough that I went straight to my laptop to read through the Wikipedia summary of Wagner's 15 hour opera. Other good stories included 'Events preceeding the Helvetican Revolution' by John Kessel, 'Infinities' by Vandana Singh, 'Paradiso Lost' by Albert Cowdrey and 'One of our Bastards is Missing' by Paul Cornell. My only criticism is that the front cover blurb blatantly lies. I was promised stories by Alastair Reynolds, Ken Macleod and Greg Egan, dammit.

3) Fragile Things - by Neil Gaiman

Progress: 3/4 of the way through

Why I'm reading it/review:

This one is from Poole library. I thought it would be a good bit of relief from Mediterranean as I approached the end of my Mammoth Sci-fi book. Bit of a mixed bag, most of it is good and creepy but only a few bits live up to the triumphant heights of Good Omens or American Gods. The real highlight was 'Keepsakes and Treasures' which reads like Gaiman was channelling Iain Banks. A tale of a disturbing muscle man working for a mysterious but powerful oligarch. The focus is on his past, from his first murder (aged 12) and subsequent hiring, through his brutal hunting down of men he suspects may have raped his mother and fathered him. An extremely dark look into the mind of a sociopath with (arguably) understandable reasons for his actions. I was surprised by the sensitivity of many of Gaiman's poems and short stories. It creates an extremely effective juxtaposition with the darker bits of the book, such as the story summarized above.

4) The Dunwich Horror - by H.P. Lovecraft

Progress: Finished

Why I'm reading it/review:

I forgot to mention above my other favourite story from Gaiman's collection. 'A Study in Emerald' is a macabre mixing of Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraftian mythos. By the end of the story we discover that Sherlock Holmes is working for 'the Old Ones' who rule through the monarchies of the world while Moriarty is what we would see as the hero, resisting the demonic beings that have taken over the world. I've always wanted to read some Lovecraft and discovering this book in Salisbury library seemed a good opportunity. Really good despite the fact that I'd had the ending ruined for me by a cheap retelling in a kid's book. Atmosphere was great but I think it was a bit silly of Lovecraft to make the 'Horror' that he's been building up to throughout the book invisible for the majority of the finale. Love the last sentence.

5) A Study in Scarlet - by Arthur Conan Doyle

Progress: Start of Part II

Why I'm reading it/review: More context reading for the aforementioned 'A Study in Emerald'. However, I also saw bits of the first episode of 'Sherlock' recently and it was annoying me that I had seen two reconstructions of this story without being able to recall the original. I found a copy on Project Gutenberg and am enjoying it greatly. Reserving judgement until Holmes finishes solving the case.

6) Teach Yourself Complete German

Progress: Chapter 15 of 23

Why I'm reading it/review: Sadly I've been neglecting this recently after an enthusiastic start. When I was applying for Modern History masters courses it was a good pressure release to practice some German language. Improved reading skills are sure to be useful wherever I go and it was something I could always work at if my applications were taking forever to come together or referees were slow in replying.

Phew, I don't think I'll be starting anything new until I've cleared at least half of that backlog! Luckily it is all so interesting I'm not losing heart and abandoning anything half read.

Conversations about the End of Time

Finished reading this book on the Millenium and the thoughts of Stephen Gould, Umberto Eco, Jean Delumeau and Jan-Claude Carriere on time and modernity today. (You can probably guess which two of these intellectuals I'd heard of before reading the book.)

Entertaining stuff with some imagery and thoughts that will stick with me. I especially liked Delumeau's apocalypse and millenarianism scholarship as I've never been sure what millenarianism actually meant yet it seems to come up a lot in Medieval and Chinese history. Also entertaining to detect the faint sense of unease about the Millenium bug, one of the biggest mass worry bloopers of, well, this millenium or the last one depending how you want to look at it.

However, the sense of despondence about modernity irritated me as usual. Is it mandatory to feel that the Internet is the beginning of the end for society if one is over 30 years old? Umberto Eco spent a long time talking about how it removes the ability of society to selectively forget, something he sees as key to collective memory. To paraphrase, having 14 million webpages is the same as having none since there is no filter through which this mass of information can be measured. However, modern society provides this filter just as previous societies did when one chose whether to read Jane Austen or Proust. Our education, parents, friendship groups and even traditions can direct us towards certain google searches and url entries. Nobody seriously sits down at the computer and tries to decide which of the 14 million websites they want to go on today.

Another crack in my rose-tinted view of Umberto Eco can hopefully be attributed to poor translation. In the same sentence he praises the 20th centuries increased sensitivity and tolerance of different races and uses 'Bongo-Bongoland' as a fictitious example of a third world UN country. Ugh, talk about missing the point. That wasn't socially acceptable in 1999 was it?

Ubik and Alternative History

Just finished reading Ubik which was even better than expected. Definitely one of Philip K Dick's best and I reckon they should get the 'Scanner Darkly' production team and the guys who made 'Inception' to collaborate on a film version.

It also got me thinking about the difference between alternate history and science fiction. Alternate history is obviously a branch of sci fi but people usually distinguish between it and speculative science fiction that imagines a plausible or possible future scenario.

This distinction would usually be fine but in the case of many works originally conceived as future science fiction the imagined future date has been reached and passed - 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1984 and Ubik (which was set in 1992).

So does the classification depend on the perspective of the reader or that of the writer? The perspective of Philip K Dick sets Ubik in the fairly distant future but from our perspective it could be seen as an alternative timeline where space travel and cryogenics advanced faster than in our real history.

It may seem an arbitrary and pedantic issue but I know that I have different expectations when reading alternate histories and speculative science fiction. Iain Bank's Culture is envisaged in the far future (or possibly in a different galaxy depending which books you read) so I don't really try to compare it on an equal footing with the democracies of today. On the other hand 1984 seems to openly invite the reader to compare it with the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and the directions in which technology allows politics to develop. Maybe it would just be more sensible for writers to refrain from putting what seems like a 'futuristic' date on the front of their new novel since chances are we'll get there eventually and people may still be reading their books.

Entropy and Anthropocentrism

Short one today as I'm still in a bit of a manic state after my trip home for New Years. I'm reading 'The Science of Discworld' which is good fun (although the Discworld bits are more engaging than than the pop science).

This got me thinking - isn't it amazing that evolution has put together an organism so self centred and far sighted that it finds itself sharing a galaxy with naturally occurring fusion generators hundreds of kilometers across and yet still starts worrying about the fact that in an inconceivable amount of time the galaxy will be too cold for humans.