The Obelisk Gate was, I’m very sorry to say, a sad disappointment to me. Especially after the brilliance of the first in the trilogy The Fifth Season. This felt to me like about a quarter of a book’s worth of plot, stretched out across a whole book, because it’s a trilogy and so, y’know, it needs three books. The plot did advance – in particular with Nessun, the young daughter we were chasing after in the first book – but not as far as one would’ve hoped. And the same style was there, with the main character being written about in the second person, by a mysterious voice. But it didn’t really add anything substantial to the amazing world that was created in book one, nor were there any particular plot twists to delight the reader.
Quite upset about this all, I have to say. I’m not sure I’ll be able to persuade myself to read the last one, in case that, too, is disappointing.
This is the first book in the “Wild Cards” franchise, which I’d not come across before, despite it now containing (according to the Wikipedia article) 27 books across four different publishers. It’s a set of short stories by various excellently-credentialled science fiction authors, all set in the Wild Cards alternate history, and edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass.
The set-up to this alternate history is simple: just after World War II, an alien spaceship crashes in the US, and the – very human-like – alien inside demands to meet the President, to mobilise the entire American military to search for another crashed spaceship, which this first alien claims to have been chasing. For inside this other ship is a deadly bioweapon, which if released will have potentially terrible consequences for humans.
And, of course, it does get released: the first of the short stories deals with these events themselves. The bioweapon turns out to be a gas which reacts with human DNA: only 10% of people are affected, and most of them are killed outright. A few, however, have their DNA mutated and acquire either crippling, or superhuman, abilities. Those deformed by the virus become known as Jokers, while those given superhuman abilities are known as Aces.
I was pleasantly surprised by the high overall standard of these stories. Too often I’ve read compilations that were a bit of a curate’s egg – good in parts. These were overall pretty consistently good, with several really hitting home at a very strong level.
The stories are set across the decades from the end of the war to the early 1970s, and contemporary history plays a big role. Initially the Aces are genuine superheros, and we meet a team of four who work at arms-length for the US government to help them with various foreign policy “interventions” in Argentina, China, Cambodia and elsewhere. But all is not always sunny: a couple of the stories dealt with the McCarthy era, where the House Un-American Activities Committee turns its spiteful gaze upon the Aces, and decides they’re not “American” enough, and have possible communist leanings (hey, they worked in China didn’t they?). It’s quite gritty, real-world stuff, and the short story “Witness”, by Walter Jon Williams, was one of my favourite.
I also liked “Transfigurations”, by Victor Milán, which is set in “summer of love”, and wraps around things like the Kent State Shootings, aka the May 4 Massacre, in 1970. These were nicely written stories that did a great job of taking real-life events and using them as a point of leverage for their plot, whilst not diminishing the tremendous impact of the historical events themselves.
Some stories just use the Aces/Joker storyline to come up with interesting characters. “The Sleeper”, by Roger Zelazny, and “Shell Games”, by George R.R. Martin are representative of this, and both showcase great authors doing something a bit different from their normal fare, and doing it very well.
I’ll definitely be looking out for more of these collections in the future. Some of the Aces/Jokers are I’m sure going to make further appearances – the final story, “Comes a Hunter”, by John J Miller, is surely just a teaser for a future visit by The Predator, while the alien visitor himself – Dr Tachyon – is here for the long haul, I’m sure.
The book was first published in 1986, but despite this, it’s aged extremely well. Overall, I’m giving this four stars – very enjoyable.
(Possible trigger warning: some strong sexual content in a couple of the stories. Yes, people had sex even back in the 1980s 🙂 )
This is a dark book, written from a place of nightmares that so many visit, and from which the fortunate might return. In it, William Styron, an author of some considerable skill, writes grippingly of his personal experience with depression. It’s a remarkable book, made all the more remarkable by the skill of the author – for the man can write. Here he is, near the start of this slim volume, in the car on the way to collect an prestigious literary award at a ceremony in Paris:
…it was past four o’clock and my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world. This is to say more specifically that instead of pleasure – certainly instead of the pleasure I should be having in this sumptuous showcase of bright genius – I was feeling in my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain.
This is a book from a place I have never been. Reading it was as much of an immersion in a different world for me as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. I have no personal experience of depression – I am about as annoyingly chipper as it’s possible to be (on the Big Five personality traits, I am at the first percentile on the neuroticism score – through no moral virtue on my part, I assure you, just luck in both genetics and lack of childhood trauma).
However, I read a second-hand copy of this book, and throughout it, a previous reader had marked certain passages with bright red crosses and underlines. This previous reader was my Margaret Mead: here was my guide to these difficult experiences, of which we still know so little. We don’t know how it starts, we rarely known why – and whether – it ends. Styron says:
I shall never learn what “caused” my depression, as no one will ever learn about their own. To be able to do so will likely forever prove to be an impossibility, so complex are the intermingled factors of abnormal chemistry, behaviour and genetics. Plainly, multiple components are involved – perhaps three or four, most probably more, in fathomless permutations.
As the author’s depression grows, his world folds in on itself and becomes darker still. He reads obsessively about the disease:
It has been established with reasonable certainty (after strong resistance from many psychiatrists, and not all that long ago) that such madness is chemically induced amid the neurotransmitters of the brain, probably as the result of systemic stress, which for unknown reasons causes a depletion of the chemicals norepinephrine and serotonin, and the increase of a hormone, cortisol. Will all this upheaval in the brain tissues, the alternate drenching and deprivation, it is no wonder that the mind begins to feel aggrieve, stricken, and the muddied thought processes register the distress of an organ in convulsion.
Many people find relief with various pharmacological treatments, but the author discovers that his particular version of the disease is resistant to the standard drugs, and even, somewhat alarmingly, finds eventually that the one he has been prescribed to help with his sleep is strongly contra-indicated for men of his age.
Eventually, in this hellscape, Styron’s thoughts become blacker still.
What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the fray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolic discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.
Styron becomes suicidal, and the margins of my copy gain further red crossings – this passage had two such notations:
The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come – not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Curiously, it is Styron’s own skill as a writer that saves him in the end. He sets out to write a suicide note one night in December, his loving and supportive wife asleep upstairs, but finds the words will not come. He cannot write to his own satisfaction, tears up the note, and in the middle of the night, wrapped in a blanket (the furnace is out), puts on a tape of a movie. In it, he hears a soaring contralto voice singing Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody. He is seized by the music, and the memories it brings of happier times
All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself. I drew some last gleam of sanity to perceive the terrifying dimensions of the mortal predicament I had fallen into. I woke up my wife and soon telephone calls were made. The next day I was admitted to the hospital.
Slowly, but surely, Styron does recover. He knows he may have remissions, but he also knows that with the right help, the illness will again run its course. And my anonymous guide, of the red markings? I saw, with some relieve, their mark beside the final lines:
There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair. I give this book five stars.
My headline for this book would be “Somewhat bloody, and completely bloody brilliant”. Five stars, very well earned.
I marvel, yet again, at how absolutely amazing some books can be at immersing you in their umwelt. This one combines great world-building, complex characters, and – most of all – some amazing prose that rises to the level of poetry at times. Because the plot is so stuffed full of surprises, I’m barely going to mention it. There’s great fight scenes (some are quite gory, if that might concern you), there are many hints of underlying glorious ages gone before (leaving, for example, the “focus moon” – which is a marvellous plot device), there is a fleshed-out background philosophy/spiritual side, and of course are heroes to root for and even the villains are multi-faceted. Perhaps the closest book I can think of is how I felt when I read The Blade Itself and found Joe Abercrombie.
In the end, you don’t read books like this for the plot, you read them because of the prose, and the world that envelopes you as you read. And Mark Lawrence does just a fabulous job with this. I haven’t read any of his others, but for sure I will be doing so. I’m not even going to give you any more of the storyline- I’ll just say that you have to read it, because it’s marvellous.
Here are some random snippets, to keep you going. He waxes philosophical at times – let’s look at time itself:
“All the world and more has rushed eternity’s length to reach this beat of your heart, screaming down the years. And if you let it, the universe, without drawing breath, will press itself through this fractured second and race to the next, on into a new eternity. Everything that is, the echoes of everything that ever was, the roots of all that will ever be, must pass through this moment that you own. Your only task is to give it pause – to make it notice.”
Or
“Your death has not been waiting for your arrival at the appointed hour: it has, for all the years of your life, been racing towards you with the fierce velocity of time’s arrow. It cannot be evaded, it cannot be bargained with, deflected or placated. All that is given to you is the choice: meet it with open eyes and peace in your heart, go gentle to your reward. Or burn bright, take up arms, and fight the bitch.”
The book, you initially guess, and then find confirmed, is about a young girl who ends up in the care of some nuns – people who might, in other worlds, be spiritual and charitable and kind, but who in this world are spiritual and cunning and combat-trained.
“You may be called upon to enforce the authority and the will of the church. It would be better if you did so in a manner that allows the transgressor to see the error of their ways rather than the contents of their body.”
Fight is what they do, and they are very, very, good at it:
“It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.”
But sometimes, the prose is just plain philosophical:
“‘It’s hard out there.’ Nona gazed towards the windows. ‘Running’s all right, but when you stop there’s the freezing and the starving and the dying.'”
or
“Children are like cats, only less useful and less furry.”
Enough, or I’ll quote the whole book. And although it’s complete in itself, it’s the first of a trilogy, which I was so thrilled to discover that I just went ahead and bought the others, sight unseen.
This is a fascinating behind the scenes peek into the neurology unit at Harvard Medical School, and the work there of Dr. Allan Ropper. It’s about real lives, and it’s all the more poignant for that – from people diagnosed with ALS, to minute brain injuries that cause bizarre behaviours, any number of the extremes that we could each fall into, that are ultimately caused by mis-wirings, mis-firings, or damage to our brains.
At ever turn, Dr. Ropper appears knowledgeable, intuitive, willing to listen, and empathic. These are real people he’s talking to, not anonymous patients, and his care and attention to detail comes across at every turn.
If you liked “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat”, there are many more such stories in here. But ultimately, for me, it was the humanity that came across – of both the author, and, ultimately, of his patients. We are all a ticking clock of immense complexity, and if dust bunnies stick a cog or two in all of us, the it’s just luck, not our moral right, that means we can still scrape through.
Really a very enjoyable book from Randall Munroe, which takes the graphical style of his brilliant going-15-years-and-still-funny xkcd web comic series, adds to it the self-imposed restriction of only using the thousand most common words in English, and pits it against various everyday “things” and attempts to explain them.
You get cross-section views of things like a datacentre (“computer buildings”), dishwashers (“box that cleans food holders”), and laptops (“bending computers”), as well as more abstract things like the US Constitution (“laws of the land”) and the periodic table (“the pieces everything is made of”). Munroe clearly had a lot of fun not just picking the things to explain, but coming up with cute names for them (“sky boat with turning wings” for helicopter, and so on). It’s perhaps a bit more fun if you actually know what he’s talking about, so you can work out what the actual concept he’s getting at is, but it’s fun even when I couldn’t quite get it!
Is this a book you could give to (say) a child, and expect them to learn about microwave ovens, or the Mars Rover? Perhaps not without additional guidance, but for grown-up kids (like me) it’s a delight. It’s charmingly done, and makes a much more entertaining coffee table book than many (physically it’s quite big – 23x34cm, although not super thick at about 1cm).
Four stars for flair and execution, and a bunch of fun.
A second excellent book The Invisible Library series, this picks up the story from the first book as Irene becomes Librarian in Residence in the slightly magical, slightly steam-punk, Victorian England, together with Vale, the great detective (think Sherlock Holmes, thinly veiled, as it were), and Kai, her apprentice. Kai – who we discovered in Book 1 is in fact a dragon, a creature of Lawfulness, working in human form – goes missing, taken by the Fae, who represent the side of Chaos.
As a Librarian, Irene is in theory neutral in this Lawful/Chaos struggle that spans many thousands of worlds in many times, but as Kai’s mentor, she feels a responsibility to find out what’s happening. From this, the plot is spun. And it’s a cracker, moving things into a Venice that’s much closer to the Chaotic side of things, where it’s always Carnival, and masks are de riguer. For me it slowed a little in the middle perhaps, as we started in Venice, but that was a momentary pause lasting only a few dozen pages, before things cranked up to full volume for the sparkling finale.
You perhaps don’t have to have read book 1, The Invisible Library first, but honestly I don’t see why you wouldn’t, as that’s a great book, too. Four and a third stars, for me.
On Playboy Bunnies, Princesses, Trainwrecks and Other Man-Made Women
For me this was an insightful and interesting exploration of the role women have played in (largely American) culture since the mid 1800s, seen through the lens of their portrayal in popular media. The author was a TV and then a film critic, and she looks at the roles women have been given to play, from The Philadelphia Story (1940) through The Stepford Wives (1975) to Frozen and beyond. Her take on things is always insightful and witty, and she made her points very well. I’m a late middle-aged, cis-gendered white man, and I was thoroughly enraged by the way in which women have been expected to politely play nicely as either background or suitable companions for the hero throughout the ages.
This sort of segregated role for women seems to be a creation of a post-industrial age. Hunter-gatherer societies will often have had men and women in broadly separate roles, but this didn’t imply any kind of power hierarchy – women in such societies would have openly laughed at the idea that men were “in charge” of anything (see Margaret Mead’s writings, for example). Such a hierarchy was present in the upper echelons of medieval society in the West, however, as women were often seen as useful pawns in the political wars of the time. I think some of the responsibility for this is the view clearly expressed by the Abrahamic religions that women need to be kept separate from men, and increasingly subordinate to them.
Quite how we get out of this, I’m no clearer than the author, but it’s clear that for the sake of everyone involved, we really need to find a better way to be in the world. This book reveals the “patriarchy” as alive and kicking back, and it’s not good for anyone involved.
I found this a thoroughly entertaining account by Max Tegmark of some of the “big questions” of modern physics, with a particular slant towards cosmology – what is our universe composed of, how did it come into being, what might be its ultimate fate, that kind of thing. Initially I wasn’t sure about the very personal style in which it was written, but after a few chapters I began to like it. Tegmark has been at the forefront of a number of these discoveries, and there are lots of semi-autobiographical anecdotes in here: ultimately, the cheerful and enthusiastic style did win me over, and I found it definitely added to my enjoyment of the book.
I realised as I was reading this that I haven’t really read a popular science account of these topics for perhaps 20 years, so I was definitely behind the curve with regard to things like dark matter and dark energy, and their abundance in the universe (making up something like 20% and 70% of all the stuff out there, respectively). This was a great account of all these theories, working through the evidence in particular from the cosmic microwave background, which has yielded two different Nobel physics prizes.
Tegmark moves the reader through all this at the same time as he elucidates his view of how it all comes together with quantum mechanics. I was pleased here to see the increasing acceptance by physicists of Everett’s “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, and how it’s taken over from the more historically popular Copenhagen interpretation, with its reliance on the horribly ill-defined “observer” causing a collapse of the quantum wave function. To the very limited degree that I’ve ever managed to get my head around quantum mechanics, it’s always seemed a complete fudge to say “these equations describe the universe as we know it to thirteen decimal places, but I don’t really like what they say about the nature of reality, so I’m just going to paper it over with this observer thing and then I’ll feel more comfortable”!
At this point, Tegmark starts to roll out the big guns of his theory. Not only are there multiple physically separate universes (because the initial expansion phase was so fast that light will never be able to travel from one to another), but also these universes will have different starting conditions. This provides an explanation as to why our universe is so “well tuned” for life – there are 30 or so physical constants whose values would only need to vary by a very small amount to have prevented life ever existing. Well that’s straightforward in this view- those other variations are just in other universes (inaccessible to our light cone). And quantum mechanics now says that physical reality also has other places where the alternate paths of quantum interactions are playing out – in some of these parallel worlds, Schrodinger’s famous cat is alive, in others it’s dead, and that’s all ok (unless perhaps you are the cat!)
Ultimately, Tegmark comes to argue that in fact these different worlds may not only have different starting conditions, but also entirely different laws. Not just (for example) different numbers of space or time dimensions, which is weird enough, but different kinds of physical existences. All our physical laws, he argues, are the result of mathematical symmetries – all the different kinds of particles (quarks, photons, etc) are predicted by symmetries in group theory, for example. Thus there will be other universes with other symmetries, based on other groups. An overwhelming number of these will be too simple to do anything very interesting, but some of them will be complex – perhaps complex enough to form other kinds of particles, and indeed other kinds of life, too strange to even imagine!
Since I recently read Group Theory and Physics, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I sympathised with Tegmark’s thesis here. It’s even reflected in science fiction in books like Distress, which again I read recently, and which is about how a “theory of everything” might decide which universe (which mathematical symmetries) we really live in. I’m obviously being swept up in a wave of theories and stories all about this – perhaps the cosmos really is trying to tell me something!?
Ultimately, these kinds of questions about the underlying nature of reality are profound, and perhaps even beyond our real knowing, but they’re great fun to think about, and Max Tegmark is exactly the sort of person who you’d want to be sat beside in the pub while you explored it all. This book is as close as I’m ever going to get to that, and I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity.
Another fun romp into a different version of the present day from Neal Stephenson. This one is about exploring different kinds of “present day”, as well as different possible histories! Our hero is Melisande (Mel) Stokes, a linguist of languages both ancient and modern, who is recruited by Tristan Loyd to translate a number of ancient documents. But first she has to sign the NDA, promising not to tell anyone about any of this, ever. Since she hates her current boss and her job as an overworked, underpaid, untenured lecturer at Harvard, she accepts the offer, and finds she has joined the mysteriously named DODO.
In due course, she finds that DODO are trying to build a machine in which people can once again perform magic – even though magic seems to have disappeared from the world in 1851. Magic, we in due course discover, is done by people who can access other “threads” of the present moment – alternative versions of the world that have split off but are still intertwined with ours. It’s all based on the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which holds that such world-splittings happen literally at every moment. People who can do magic – witches – can manipulate these threads in some way.
So Mel’s job evolves into recruiting a witch, keeping the witch on-side with the programme (witches turn out to be incredibly high maintenance), and working with the expanding crew in DODO to achieve their ultimate aim – using magic to “tweak” the past to the geo-political benefit of the current United States.
The characters are well drawn, perhaps with a little too heavy a hand in one or two places but not bad. And the plot is spun with the characteristic humour and wit of Neal Stephenson. I loved in particular the clashing of the two cultures – one represented by Mel and Tristan and their start-up style organisation, the other the full-press acronym-loaded bureaucracy and hierarchy of the US government, who we soon find out are funding the whole DODO thing. Delightful!
