Brief book review: Joe Haldeman's The Forever War

I've been catching up on some cyberpunk classics this fall, but I also finally got my hands on Joe Haldeman's Forever War.

The Forever War is one of the classic works of military science fiction, but with the distinction that the author served in Vietnam as a combat engineer. It's that experience that lends strong verisimilitude to much of the story, especially to anyone who's ever been involved with a real-life military organization. Also thankfully absent is the macho chest-pounding that is so disgustingly prevalent in the genre, especially in its more ludicrous offerings.

There's an afterword by Peter F. Hamilton, where he says:

Unlike a lot of books written in the early seventies, he's managed to create a functioning universe and human society which has barely dated. Yes, the actual dates are wrong. We didn't have interstellar ships in the mid-nineties (shame!). But anyone picking this up fresh today would be hard pressed to know that it was written long before the internet, mobile phones and iPods were in existence.

I liked the book, but we have to call bullshit on this one. Parts of the novel haven't aged that well, such as the emphasis on sex and sexuality, and there is an expansive section set on Earth that serves its dramatic purpose excellently, but falls apart under critical scrutiny. While it does an excellent job of conveying the alienation soldiers feel on returning to civilian life, the details of the dystopic world Haldeman depicts just don't hold water. Also, exactly contrary to what Hamilton says, it's painfully obvious at times that Forever War was written before the information revolution.

While it's often depicted as a Vietnam war analogy, which it in some sense is, The Forever War is first and foremost a great novel. I was steeling myself for the possibility that it would be Space Vietnam, with Space Cav troopers flying into a space jungle in space helicopters, but the Forever War is proper science fiction, not just an analogy in space. It should be required reading for anyone interested in science fiction.

Fantasy roundup: A Song of Ice and Fire

Yes, the George R.R. Martin epic. I was ill in January and read it. I'm trying to not include any real spoilers.

Verdict: undecided but highly pessimistic.

George R. R. Martin's massive epic is a fantasy re-working of the Wars of the Roses, coming soon to a TV near you as an HBO miniseries. The written work itself is gigantic, taking up six brick-sized volumes. Inside is a very well-written story that follows the families of Lancaster and York in their epic struggle for the kingdom of England. While they fight each other, beyond Hadrian's Wall the Scots and undead Picts are gathering, and Prince Edward is gathering an army on the Continent to regain his kingdom. Shit, I forgot to swap in the fantasy names. Sorry. Also, there's, um, an evil Zoroastrian woman. That's my blurb. Deal with it.

The quality of writing is very good, there are memorable characters and moments, and the story does grip you badly enough that even when the flaws of the books had become glaringly obvious, I still finished it. When I say finished, I mean I read the volumes that have been published so far. The next one's coming out in 2005, and even thoguh there are still times when I get confused as to what year it is, I rarely get that confused. It's now six years late, and if I had to lay money on it, I'd bet it's never coming out.

Why? Because the book is out of control. The narration skips between several characters, which is good at first, but gets somewhat confusing before long. The main problem is that the characters change, and not always for the better. Most of the last book was spent following around characters I just don't care about, while everyone actually engaged in something important was conspicuously absent. So much, in fact, that the author added a postscript where he promised to catch up with them in his next volume, coming up six years ago! Oops.

From the originally simple story of Lancaster-versus-York, the story has expanded to the point where we've been all over the Mediterranean with Prince Edward, visited the King of Scotland's court and spent a good deal of time in the succession dispute of the Isle of Man. While some of our characters are doing that, one particularly important one has just escaped the Tower of London, another character is maxing and relaxing with the lunatic Zoroastrians on what, geographically speaking, can only be Sealand, while the queen has a half-hearted lesbian fling and goes all Civ II on us by considering switching to Fundamentalism for all the free Fanatics. Meanwhile, one character is in Venice, sweeping floors at a temple and masquerading as a fishmonger, one is being held captive in Norwich and the rest of them are just plain missing.

In short, there are so many characters doing so many things that it's genuinely difficult to keep up with the story. I could live with that, if I only cared about it. The worst thing about the books is that the central theme of this huge story of intrigue, pseudo-history and slightly disturbing sexual content is anticlimax. Nothing ever works out the way it should, everyone is always disappointed, everyone gets betrayed and everything just generally goes to hell. Now, I'm all for portraying a war, especially a civil war, as pointless. It's just that you run into trouble when you hammer us over the head with how horrible and depressing and anticlimactic everything is and still expect us to be interested in the story.

As for the story itself, quite frankly, I don't even know what the main plot of the book is any more. The story has moved on from the first book, so far, in fact, that I really don't know what the main plotline is any more, which means I don't know what's significant and what isn't. The characters I cared about have been punched in the guts with anticlimax after disappointment after actual punch so often that I've just stopped caring any more.

This, incidentally, is another reason why I'd bet money the series won't be finished. How do you bring a massively complicated story to a satisfactory ending when the overriding theme of your work is disappointment? The only real options I see are either that the story will end in a massive anticlimax, or a truly disappoiting cop-out happy ending. My money's on the character whose viewpoint we started with waking up and realizing it was all a dream.

In the end, a verdict. I don't want to say "don't read it". This is a very well-written, initially captivating work. Besides, maybe the publicity of the HBO thing will induce the author to actually finish it. But as it stands, even if the next part comes out, I'm not ready to recommend this to anyone either. Around halfway, the captivating story with its memorable characters turns into an endless, dreary slog through a horribly depressing fantasy re-enactment of the Wars of the Roses. All I can do is give my warning, and admonish the prospective reader to beware of the anticlimaxes, the disappointment and the sheer boredom.

In all honesty, even if the next part does come out, I'm not even sure I can be bothered to read it. I think I lost all interest in the story in the last part. If I'd known it only keeps getting worse, maybe I'd have stopped reading much earlier.

Come to think of it, I guess that ended up being a more definitive verdict than I thought I'd give.

Fantasy roundup: The Black Magician Trilogy

Or, next up on my fantasy book review-o-rama, at least the first two books of it.

Verdict: Don't bother.

The first book of Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy follows the life of Sonea, a young slum girl. She lives in a city where the poor are kept in line by the Magicians' Guild, but it turns out she can do magic herself, and hijinks ensue. If you want a proper blurb, read the back of the book.

I liked the first book. Sonea is a decently-written, almost memorable young girl, and not only are there some good moments in the book, but you end up sort of caring what happens to her. That's why the second book is such a crushing disappointment.

This may be a mild spoiler, but it's on the back cover of the second book. The second book starts with the main character studying at the Magicians' Guild. The plot is mildly interesting, but there are several small problems and one really big one. For starters, the language gets a bit embarrassing at times, especially when one of the wizards goes on a boat with rooms in it. I admit that knowing something about sailing ships and having read some first-class nautical fiction may spoil a person, but everything even remotely sea-going in the book is, at best, not quite horribly wrong. As I said, it's a bit embarrassing.

Sonea's life in the magicians' guild comes over all Harry Potter, which I suppose is to some degree unavoidable, but therein lies the one thing that made me stop reading the book: in the second book, she's not the same character any more. In the first book, she's a tough, resourceful, streetwise slum kid, who, unlike the usual computer role-playing game incarnations of such, is somewhat believable. In the second, the street kid has been replaced with a scared, whiny little brat. To give you an idea, in the first book, when someone lays hands on her, she punches them in the face; in the second book, when a spoiled kid calls her a name, she starts crying and hides in her room.

For Harry Potter, going to magic school brought about a miraculous transformation from nerd to jock. In Cavanan's character's case, it does the exact opposite and transforms her into a sissy. Now, if the point was that her old skills and connections are useless in this strange new world and she's confused, that would be fine; I'd even expect it. What I can't stomach is that through the simple act of being accepted into a school, she completely jettisons her old personality. The plain fact of the matter is that there are two different protagonists in the first two books, and for a character-driven story, this is a bad thing. It's a crying shame, as after the first book, I was looking forward to the sequel; about a third of the way in, I couldn't be bothered to keep reading.

The first book was an entertaining read and showed promise, but on the whole, I'd advise against reading it. If you like it, you'll just be horribly disappointed by the sequel.

Fantasy roundup: part 1

I'm currently engaged in a large fantasy reading project, and every now and then I'll try to translate it into the odd book review.

Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun

I bought the two-volume set, and I have a quarrel with the blurb. On it, no less a writer than Ursula LeGuin calls Wolfe's work "breathtakingly original". No, it isn't. The Book of the New Sun can be truthfully summed up as Elric of Melniboné in Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Add a pinch of Lovecraft and trace amounts of other ingredients, run the whole thing through a thesaurus, and voilá: the Book of the New Sun. Breathtakingly original? Hardly.

If that's true, then why does the same blurb say that it's been voted the best fantasy work ever, after the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit? Because it is the best fantasy since Tolkien. Maybe it isn't built from the most amazingly original blocks, but I don't care, because it's mind-blowingly good. If you haven't read it, you must.

Wolfe is a narrator and, in Tolkien's terms, sub-creator, second to no modern fantasy or SF writer. The attraction of the books isn't so much the world itself, or even the narrative or characters, although I have nothing bad to say about any of them. It's the pure skill with which he weaves everything into an incredibly immersive and compelling text. The four volumes of the Book of the New Sun are that rare kind of fiction that you can't put down, and wish would never end.

I'm struggling to think of some kind of negative "however" here, but I don't really have one. Other than the afterwords, in which Wolfe pretends he's created the text by translating it from an original, which are stupid and only detract from the story. Don't read them, and you'll be better off. His taste for obscure words may take a bit of stomaching; it's a fine line between creating an exotic feeling and pure sophistry. I think it works, but that might conceivably be a sticking point.

Having said that, I can't recommend these books highly enough. If you're at all interested in fantasy and haven't read them, go do so. Now.

Best short fiction ever

Or at least the best short fiction I've ever read:

The book in question is a collection of short stories, all based on this Dinosaur Comic from five years ago. You can get it from Amazon. I suppose that in order for this to be a proper book review, I'd have to explain what it's about and then wax lyrical about how awesome it is. But this is the Internet, so just read the comic and you'll get the idea.

My biggest problem with the book is that I read very quickly. The stories are so good I don't want to finish the book too soon, so I'm trying really hard to pace myself and only read a couple a day. It's difficult.

So yeah, it's the best fiction I've read for a long time. That should be enough of a review.

Mannerheim's empire

I'm currently reading Mark Mazower's excellent Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe. I was first introduced to Mazower in my political history studies, where his Dark Continent was mandatory reading, and I recommend it to anyone interested in Europe between the two world wars.

In Hitler's Empire, he writes:

Postwar, a collective amnesia seized countries like Italy, Hungary and Romania that had fought alongside Hitler and run parallel occupations of their own. The Croats and Slovaks had acquired their own states, Bulgaria had swallowed up neighbours' lands, and Hungary regained mych of the territory it had lost in 1918. Mussolini had dreamed of a new Roman empire and sent his conscripts to the Cyclades if they were lucky and the Sahara, Slovenia or Somaliland if they were not. Romania had administered the Ukraine, festooned Odessa with corpses and hurled hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the struggle with the Red Army. Baltic, Belorussian and Ukrainian nationalists had all fought on the German side too in the hope that they might benefit.

One country that also ran its own parallel occupation was Finland. Risto Ryti and Mannerheim dreamed of a Finnish empire encompassing the Kola Peninsula and Eastern Karelia, with Finno-Ugrian client states stretching all the way to the Urals. Finnish troops divided up the population of Soviet Karelia into arbitrary racial groups and shut the Slavs up in concentration camps, in preparation for turning them over to the Germans. Finnish East Karelia was to be populated by war veterans turned smallholders in a scheme that almost exactly mirrored Nazi plans for occupied East Europe.

In today's Finland, the Finnish imperial project is conveniently forgotten or glossed over. The "collective amnesia" is so strong that even Mazower's book totally omits any mention of the Finnish occupation. On page 327, he even goes as far as to claim that Finland was "only interested in fighting... for security". This is said without footnotes or references, as if it is an obvious enough fact to not need a source at all.

Certainly there are definitions of security by which Finland invaded the Soviet Union and tried to establish its own eastern empire in the interests of "security", but in that case we will have to argue that Stalin also invaded Finland in 1939 for reasons of "security". Patriotic Finnish historians do in fact maintain that Finland is entirely blameless in everything connected to the Second World War, and even the fact that Finland invaded the Soviet Union is the Soviets' own fault. That this is precisely what Stalin's regime said of the Winter War doesn't trouble them at all, because the Soviet Union was intrinsically evil and Finland is intrinsically good.

Similarly, according to Finnish patriotism, because Finland is intrinsically good and Hitler's Germany was intrinsically evil, nothing the two countries did can be compared to each other. In this way Finnish historians can bemoan the terrible atrocities of Stalin and Hitler, and simultaneously consign Finland's own aggression and dreams of a racial empire to convenient oblivion. Our collective amnesia stretches comfortably into the 21st century.

Mazower's otherwise excellent book provides a telling example of practical amnesia. He has no sources for any of his statements on Finland in the war, but thanks his colleagues in the acknowledgements. One of them is Finnish professor Martti Koskenniemi, who we may guess is at least one of Mazower's sources on matters relating to Finland. So either a distinguished Finnish historian is totally unaware of Finland's imperial project, or has chosen to tell his colleague that Finland "only fought for its security", omitting any mention of an occupation and imperial ambition that is fully documented in Finnish academic literature.

The other alternative is that Mr. Mazower hasn't done any research at all into Finland's policies and war aims in the Second World War, and has simply assumed that they were essentially defensive. Whatever the truth, it's bizarre to read a fairly involved account of Romania's occupation policies on the Eastern Front right next to a denial of the very existence of any Finnish occupation at all.

Book review: A Wolf at the Table

Here's another bildungsroman.

Augusten Burroughs: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father



This one deals with a darker subject matter. A Wolf at the Table is a prequel of sorts to Augusten Burroughs's autobiographical Running With Scissors, and like it, this is billed as a memoir. It is the story of a young child brought up by a mother whose mental health is failing, and a psychopathic father. It's a very powerful, dark story that I can't in good faith recommend to any sensitive readers.

There's a fundamental problem with writing all fiction. If I recall correctly, it was Russian playwright Chekov who said that if a pair of pistols is seen above the mantlepiece in Act 1, they must be used in Act 3. The problem is familiar to anyone who has ever read a detective story: the murderer must be one of the people we're introduced to at the beginning of the story. This forces the narrative to be, in a sense, predictable.

Burroughs's memoir suffers from a form of this. It is so dark, so miserable, so psychotic, that the reader very quickly becomes inured to the darkness and lunacy of it all. From the beginning, all of the young protagonist's attempts to win his father's heart fail, and all the pets he has meet unfortunate ends of some kind. To be blunt, by the time he gets a guinea pig, you know it's going to end up dead. I think this is a terrible shame, because it really detracts from a well-written book, but it is its major weakness. The author paints a powerful picture of living with a psychotic father, but trivializes it by heaping misery upon misery, fear upon fear and disappointment upon disappointment until it all becomes predictable and, frankly, boring.

On the other hand, the last chapters of the book, set in the protagonist's youth and later days, seem strangely detached from the whole. It's as if they were pinned on as an afterthought, as forced closure to create a "story arc" worthy of Hollywood. They don't really seem to add anything to the story.

In between the rather formulaic recitation of family misery are excellent moments of storytelling. At times, Burroughs (an assumed name) creates a very convincing, engrossing narrative that one can't help but be immersed in. These flashes of brilliance are too few for me to really recommend this book to anyone unless the subject particularly interests them, but they're there. It's a strangely dual book: on the other hand, the power of personal experience shines through it, but on the other hand, it seems to be so rigidly welded to the conventions of storytelling, story arcs and literature in general that much of that power is wasted. This combination makes the book memorable and forgettable at the same time, which is an odd experience.

In short, A Wolf at the Table is memorable, powerful, tragic, and forgettable, conventional and trivial at the same time. Technically, I suppose that makes it a very accurate memoir of life, but at the same time, a strangely split reading experience.

My recommendation is sadly banal: if the subject of a boy growing up with a psychotic father fascinates you, give it a shot; otherwise, don't bother.

The man who created one of the most kickass female characters ever has passed away

Last Wednesday I lost yet another piece of my childhood. Peter O'Donnell passed away aged 80.

I can't do justice to him right now. I know he was an old, ill man but... damn.



Sure, Modesty Blaise is a pulp heroine but she is a well-rounded believable character... well, okay, her skills are incredible but she is still a human being, and I love her. I've loved her since I was a kid and read Taste for Death. The first English language novel I ever read was I, Lucifer. I hunted the used books stores for the books and the comics. (Now, thanks to Amazon.com and eBay, I've managed to collect all of the 13 novels & short story collections, but am still working on the comics.)

Even the historical romances (more like adventure stories) O'Donnell wrote under the pseudonym Madeleine Brent are much more feminist than many of their like, and this from a British man who was born in 1920. I had been reading them for years before I found out they were written by him. (Yes, I'm old. This was before Wikipedia.)

Thank you for giving us the stories I can read over and over again, Mr O'Donnell. Thank you for giving us characters whose fates still make me laugh and cry (I might never forgive you for Cobra Trap, though, you old bastard).

Rest in peace.



Modesty: "No villains, no victims, no blood sweat and tears... We'll take a little break, Willie love, just you and me."

Willie: "Best bit of it all, Princess."

Book review: Look elsewhere, reader

For reasons known to at least some of my readers, I've been busy with bildungsromaner lately. It occurs to me I should probably write up small reviews of them as I read. Here goes.

Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel



On this business of bildungsromaner, it seems impossible to avoid Thomas Wolfe. According to the back cover, Look Homeward, Angel's "largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers." It is "rich with lyrical prose".

Here's some. It's part of his description of the protagonist as an infant.

And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, he felt unfathomable loneliness and sadness creep through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never. (p. 32)

Not just never, but five never. The reader is powerfully reminded of terrible poetry. Generally, the quality of the prose is acceptable, but I'm tempted to say that overall, Look Homeward, Angel manages to capture everything that's bad in American literature.

First, there's a terrible mania with family history. I don't know if it's because the United States has such a short history of its own, but for some reason many American writers are obsessed with totally trivial family histories. Mostly it must reflect the mania with family and heritage that so many Americans have. In keeping with this, Thomas Wolfe starts his story with the protagonist's father's early days. We're given a detailed account of his business dealings, his alcoholism, his marriage and his property deals, not to mention the construction of his house.

I need to digress for a moment, because there may be some younger people reading this. In the old times, before digital cameras, after a vacation you had to take the film from your camera to be developed in order to get your holiday snaps. There were two options you could pick from. Normal people got them developed into, well, photos. If, on the other hand, your sole thought in taking the pictures in the first place was the future torment of your friends and relatives, you got slides. These could be loaded up into a projector and shown to hapless guests ad infinitum. It was a form of torture, sure, but you have to remember this was centuries before the Geneva convention.

Reading Thomas Wolfe's chronicle of his protagonist's family, like nearly all other American authors' similar chronicles, is exactly like looking at someone's vacation slides. You want to stand up and shout: "I don't care!" The first three chapters of Part One are dedicated to the mind-numbing tedium of the Gant family. Matters of business and property, family history, and especially money, are dealt with in suffocating detail. This chronic overexposition stretches to cover food, too; there are endless lists of foodstuffs and desriptions of eating, cooking and of the food itself. None of this has any conspicuous literary merit, or any storytelling purpose: the author just seems to be convinced that it's vitally important for us to know what kinds of fruit the Gant family ate for its own sake. At one point, there's a multi-page list of the smells the young protagonist has encountered. Smells.

This might not be so bad, but it's combined with another problem of American literature: flowery prose and pathos. The great, overflowing emotions fairly gush off the page in paragraph upon paragraph of "oh, woe is me". Wolfe indulges in entire paragraphs where he lets the pen fly and describes, in his own pseudo-poetic style, the terrible angst and pathos of his characters, from the drunk father to the frightened mother and even, as quoted above, the entirely implausible existential angst of a year-old child. One expects the baby's first words to be an eloquent lament to the sky on the crushing misery of the human condition.

In short, the book is rich with lyrical prose in the same way that nuclear waste is rich with radiation: true, but you sure don't want any on you. The syrupy prose, gushing adjectives, endless exposition of inanity and interminable lists combine for a reading experience "rich" enough to induce vomiting.

My recommendation? I don't know. I couldn't be bothered to finish it. The book is massively long and tremendously boring. About a hundred pages in I still didn't care about any of the characters, or feel like suffering through another "stream of consciousness" narrative or account of a land deal. I predict most other people won't, either. Give this one a miss.

Happy Birthday Danica McKellar!

Right. Time to get this blag back on track. I'll try to finally get a couple of 2009 recap posts done next week.

In the meanwhile, it is a tradition on this blag to mark birthdays of hot chicks. January 3. is the birthday of Danica McKellar.



Danica is an American actress, best known for her role as Winnie Cooper in the TV show The Wonder Years. As you can see, she has grown up nicely. She has a Bacon number of 2.



Though a child actor Danica didn't neglect her education, and majored in mathematics, which is hot. As an undergraduate at UCLA she co-wrote a mathematical paper on what is referred to as 'Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem'. This gives her an Erdős number of 4, and makes her one of relatively few people with a finite Erdős-Bacon number.



She is also the author of New York Times bestselling books Math Doesn't Suck and Kiss My Math, which encourage schoolgirls to study mathematics, and challenge the unfortunate notion that math isn't for girls. Go Danica!



A mathematician, role model, and hot chick: happy birthday Danica!

Book review: Legacy of Ashes

This time, a book recommendation! Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the 2007 National Book Award winner for non-fiction.

The book is exactly that, a history of the CIA from its founding to 9/11 and beyond. In my opinion, this is one of those books that anyone really interested in the way the world works today, or in global history from 1950 onward, needs to read this.

Weiner draws together a narrative of the CIA's history, and highlights the one fact that has very often been its most conspicuous trait: sheer incompetence. As Weiner explains, the agency's covert operations have been at best questionable and at worst downright amateurish.

A far more serious failure has been the CIA's failing as an organization providing intelligence to the President. Over the years, the CIA's analysts and intelligence gatherers have consistently been neglected in favor of covert operations, sabotage, election-rigging and assassination. Having read Weiner's book, it's fair to ask what, exactly, a succession of American presidents and intelligence decision-makers imagined the job of an intelligence agency to be? It certainly doesn't seem to have been gathering intelligence.

How good is the book? So good, in fact, that the CIA has issued a rather sniffy rebuttal. This prompted my co-blogger Juho, currently reading the book, to wonder how long it took them to realize it had been published.

There's also a longer review of the book on the CIA website, where they lambast it for some factual errors. I'm in no position to disagree with them, but as something of a historian, in my opinion the most signal merit of Weiner's book is that it has such explanatory power. This account of America's consistent failure to supply its decisionmakers with good intelligence goes a long way toward expaining some of that nation's greatest failures in the 20th century.

A significant trend that develops very early in the book is the distortion on intelligence to fit either the White House's or the CIA's political agenda. As this book makes manifestly clear, the Iraqi WMD episode was not the first time intelligence data was manipulated to serve political ends. As it stands, it won't be the last.

This book will expand your understanding of the political history of our world immensely. A must-read.

Brief book review: The Middle Sea

Here's another review of a disappointing popular history book, this time by the Viscount Norwich! I mean, of course, John Julius Norwich's The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (Vintage 2007).

In brief, it's a popular history book on the Mediterranean. And it's that one little word, "history", that gets it in trouble. Here's some examples.

First, in Chapter I: Beginnings, he tells us all about the Hebrews, the Exodus, King David and the kingdoms of Israel and Judaea, basically recounting the biblical narrative. As it happens, there are a few problems with that. The simple fact is that the archeological record just does not support the historicity of any of the events he recounts. For at least a good part of his first chapter, Norwich has seen fit to completely abandon sources and simply recount the Bible as fact. Now, if this was a book on the Bible, why not, but this is presented as a history book.

Another tidbit from the first chapters: in Chapter III, titled "Rome: The Republic":

The rise of Rome was due, more than anything else, to the character and qualities of the Romans themselves. They were a simple, straightforward, law-abiding people with a strong sense of family values, willing to accept discipline when required to do so (...)

It feels like the entire passage was lifted from a Victorian schoolbook. The national characteristics of the Romans were the reason for their success. Obviously, that implies that the national character of other Mediterranean peoples must have been inferior, because the Romans were able to subjugate them. See where we end up? He is basically reiterating the classic, racist paradigm of history where "superior" nations triumph over "inferior" ones because of their "racial characteristics".

**

After a beginning like this, I didn't hold out much hope that the book was going to be worth reading, and it isn't.

In a book that purports to be a history of the Mediterranean, there is a surprising lack of attention given to, well, the Mediterranean. The sea itself is barely present in the narrative. Instead, Norwich is content to recount the basic political history of nations on the Mediterranean coast at a high school level, albeit at some length.

The simple problem of the book is exactly this. If you have any knowledge of the history he writes about, you will find this book largely trite and uninformative. I would advise you to not read it. If, on the other hand, the subject is fairly new to you, I strongly caution you to not read it, because you won't be able to tell which parts are actual history and which are pure hogwash. So in a very real sense, this is a book no-one should read.

Brief book review: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Last weekend, I took it upon myself to read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Having read it, I can't understand what all the fuss is about. Also, it was apparently an influence on Fallout 3, and that influence is responsible for all the stupidity I complained about in my game review.

Basically, the Road is a rip-off of JG Ballard's early sci-fi novels, most notably Drought. The novel is startlingly similar to Ballard's stuff, but with the imporant difference that it's stylistically decisively inferior. McCarthy writes a very simple, down-to-earth style, which he occasionally interrupts with ridiculous flights of purple prose. The impression is occasionally very jarring. Overall, the writing and plot is captivating enough that it keeps you reading, but the purple prose is sometimes so awful it reminds me of Andy Remic. Seriously.

I didn't think the book really had any theme or message. Of course, I could be wrong. From the Wikipedia article:

British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet" in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem."

Oh, for crying out loud. You needed a novel to tell you that we would find it hard to live without any plants or animals at all? That, though, really is the sum total of the environmental message of the Road.

On a Fallout note, this is apparently the reason there isn't any vegetation in the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3. Having read the book, I now understand that the makers of Fallout 3 were trying real hard to give the game a "Road" vibe. I wish they hadn't, frankly.

To rant for a moment, I feel like these days, entertainment and art only comes in one of two varieties. Either it has no theme at all, no message, nothing to say about anything, or it has a single message that it bludgeons you senseless with.

The Road is firmly in the first camp. I didn't think it had any meaningful theme. Overall, it's captivating enough to make you read it through, but it's short enough that that isn't any challenge. It's a forgettable, mediocre novel. I can't for the life of me understand why it won awards.

Verdict: don't bother. Read J.G. Ballard's Drought or Drowned World instead.

War Machine: a close reading, part 1

Recently, a friend of mine ran across a novel that seemed so hilariously awful he had to share. The book in question was Andy Remic's War Machine. Just using Amazon's "Look inside" feature led to so much fun that I obviously had to get him the book.

I mean, it's got Edge and Bono from U2 on the cover. How can I not buy that?

You'll notice it's billed as "rock-hard military science fiction". For so many reasons, I felt I had to read the damn thing. I mean, I've been writing about all things military for a living for nearly ten years now, I've been reading science fiction for nearly twenty years, and hell, I'm still technically majoring in English. It's a book I simply have to read. What's more, it's published by Solaris Books, which is ultimately owned by Games Workshop! And because I believe I have to read it, I'm also going to be sharing it with the world, i.e. you.

In other words, I'll be doing a close reading of Andy Remic's novel War Machine on my blag, starting soonish. Before I get to the text itself, though, I'd like to say a few things.

In doing this close reading, I may occasionally be a little harsh. I tend to be a little harsh about a number of things on this blag, but I'm not going to apologize. I don't criticize people in order to offend them or to get kicks out of it; the easiest way to describe my approach is that I follow my version of the somethingawful.com credo: if you publish it and it sucks, I'm going to make fun of it. We'll shortly be seeing if War Machine sucks. (if you visited amazon.com and read any of the excerpts, you may already know the answer)

My approach to literary criticism is strongly text-centered. To exaggerate, I don't particularly care who wrote a text and why, and I certainly don't want to try to discover the author's opinions or preferences by studying their text. The approach I'm going to be taking here will be reading the text as it is, without more context than the one provided by the book itself. I'll probably make an occasional foray elsewhere, but in the main I intend to concentrate on the text itself.

**

Having said that, in the interests of good writing it'll be proper to get in some background first. The author, Andy Remic, is a former English teacher from Manchester, UK, who has written a number of games for the ZX Spectrum back in the day. That's him, from Wikipedia:

In his blog, he described himself as an "Author of high-octane fast-paced kickass Fantasy and Science Fiction novels". On his website, he poses with a chainsaw (bottom of page). And the book itself contains both a dedication and an "about the author" section. Here's an excerpt from the surprisingly long dedication:

"How many men have been where we've been? And seen what we've seen?"

No matter what happens, we're not little men.
Hats on!

Not to be outdone, here's "About the Author" from the end of the book:

Andy Remic is a young British writer.
He has an unhealthy love of martial arts, kickass bikes, mountain climbing and computer hacking. Once a member of an elite Combat-K squad, he has since retired from military service and works as a biomod and weapon engineer at the NANOTEK Corporation.

From amazon.com:

About the Author
Andy Remic is a young British writer and teacher from Greater Manchester. During his teaching career he developed an interest in martial arts and is now expert in unarmed combat. He can kill a man with a single blow, but prefers writing and hacking computer systems. War Machine is his fourth novel.

There's so much I could say about these descriptions. I'll just note, though, that in case you're fooled by the recurrence of the word "young", a Google search leads one to understand that he was born in 1971. If 38 is a "young author", then, well. You know.

**

This is the kind of fellow whose work I'll be reading. Oh, and, um, do you suppose this counts as a book review? Because this is what he says about book reviews, on the aforementioned website:

How do you deal with the people who don't like your books, and tell you as much? If a person doesn't like my books - no problem. Everybody has different personal tastes, and I suppose my work is as acquired as any Islay whisky. After all - there are plenty of books I don't like. However, the pieces of shit I really do hate are failed-writers turned book reviewers - they really make me boil, and then know who they are. I'd certainly like to meet a few face to face.

I could be a real dick and wonder what, exactly, a failed-writer is, but I won't, nor will I ask whether he hates failed writers who review books or hates everyone who reviews books and is insulting them. In the first case, he should be OK with what I'll be saying, but in the latter case, I guess not.

Why am I being a dick about this? There's a real simple reason. He isn't, by any means, the first or the last author who hates book reviewers. I have no sympathy for this rubbish at all. In my opinion, it's perfectly simple. If you publish something, let alone if you're selling it, you're going to be criticized. Sometimes that criticism is probably going to be unfair, and it's perfectly OK to respond to that. But as for hating book reviewers in general?

In a free market economy, criticism has an important function. Every book that's out there has some gushing blurb from a publisher telling you it's the best thing ever, and every book that's notable enough to be commented on will probably have at least a page of quotes of other people gushing about it. Because practically every book has this, it contains no real information. Most of us people who read book would like to know if the books in question are good or not before we make a decision to buy them. That's what book reviews are for. They're a fairly essential service. If you hate the people who write them, or are going to respond with some inane argument on the level of "well why don't they write themselves then", you have a problem.

If you choose to write and publish a novel, you're putting it out in the public domain for us to see, read and experience, and to talk about. If you don't like some of the things people say about your novel, that's just tough. As for the level of class it shows to rail and swear about them on your website, well, like I said, I don't go in for biographical criticism.

A wit suggested to me that maybe he's looking to set up as the Uwe Boll of literature.

**

Let's get to the book itself. Here's what the author himself had to say about it, in an interview for SFX magazine:

SFX: Again, no spoilers! But what's the basic premise of your new novel?
RE: "War Machine is a sizzling rollercoaster of a novel with a gratuitous excess of violence, sex, dark humour and exotic aliens all wrapped up in a high-octane cling-film plot concerning an elite military unit illegally reformed who must battle across alien planets to discover justice, truth and revenge. Initially, the story begins with a quest to find an artefact which will reveal to Keenan the person who killed his wife and children."

Can you imagine a person really talking like that? Would you call something you wrote a "sizzling rollercoaster" "wrapped up in a high-octane clingfilm"? If not, then you're clearly not the kind of non-little man who writes Combat-K novels.

SFX: Solaris are calling you "the new master of rock-hard science fiction" - what's the appeal of this sort of writing, and how do you deliver?
RE: "I have a very low boredom threshold. And I love science fiction. However, in years past, nothing I read seemed to deliver the sort of high-explosive thriller-driven adventure I was looking for. So I decided to write my own. I suppose one way of looking at it is that if the work of Iain M. Banks (of whom I’m a great fan) is categorized as Space Opera, then my work would be classed as Space Opera – The Punk Remix. So, a sprawling canvas of interesting yet volatile characters, exotic war-torn alien locations held together with fast action, guns, chases, fights and battles, clever plot twists and a liberal pepper sprinkling of black comedy. Dune crossed with Jonny Rotten. Disney merged with The Clash. Doctor Who on heroin. Buffy, when she’s grown up and become a hooker. Hell, Star Wars with rag doll corpses and the Sith being real evil bastards."

So, we're in for some Rock-Hard Military Sci-Fi, or Punk Space Opera. What does that mean? Damned if I know. It all sounds really edgy!

This is what amazon.com says about the book itself:

Product Description
In a time of post-Singularity and FTL travel, the Helix War has raged across galaxies. When ex-soldier turned privite investigtor [sic], Keenan, takes on a new case, he must overcome his demons and gather together his old military unit, a group who swore they’d never work together again....

The first sentence is reproduced verbatim on the book's back cover. It's the first issue I have with the book, so I'll start there.

In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which an equation "blows up", as Mathworld puts it. Back in the '80s, US professor and author Vernor Vinge coined the idea of a "technological singularity", which meant a point at which the growth of technology reaches such a high rate that we cannot extrapolate the future beyond it from where we are now.

As Remic's novel doesn't seem to provide any alternative meaning for "Singularity", the assumption that a sci-fi reader will make is that the blurb is referring to a technological singularity à la Vinge.

And that's why it's so pointless. If the future beyond a singularity can't be predicted, then it's logically impossible to write a novel set in a time after a singularity. In the same interview, Remic says his "Combat-K" novels are set "a million years into the future". That's a ridiculous number; we, homo sapiens, haven't been around for even close to a million years. A million years in the future is an impossibly long time to make predictions, as is any time beyond a technological singularity. The best you can do is guess, and by the very definition of a singularity, your guess will be based on incomplete data and can't really be accurate.

The blurb on the back cover continues:

Ex-soldier Keenan now works as a private investigator on a planet at the peaceful fringes of the Quad-Gal. Following the brutal death of his family he's run up hefty debts, gained a bad reputation and become a heavy drinker.

So it's a post-Singularity novel featuring an alcoholic private dick? Some singularity.

**

So we have a book called War Machine, with half of U2 on the cover, billed as "rock-hard military science fiction". It's set in the pointless contradiction that is a "post-Singularity" future where there are alcoholic private investigators. The author poses with chainsaws, describes himself like a 12-year-old and hates book reviews.

All this, and I haven't even started reading yet.

Book review: A Splendid Exchange

I recently picked up William J. Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, and was quite disappointed.

According to the back cover blurb, he "tells the epic story of global commerce, from its prehistoric origins to the myriad crises confronting it today". Obviously, I was interested.

In the first few chapters of the book, Bernstein touches on a couple of areas that I happen to know someting about: the history of Islam, and sailing. That's where the trouble starts.

To start with sailing, on page 76 Bernstein says this:

Even so, Mediterranean shipping did benefit from the introduction of the Arab triangular lateen sail, which enabled vessels to tack into the wind, a feat not possible with the square rigging of Western antiquity.

First of all, as even the Wikipedia article will tell you, the lateen sail did not originate with the Arabs. Much more importantly, though, I'm baffled as to what Bernstein thinks tacking means. Again, the Wikipedia article is perfectly clear:

Tacking or coming about is the maneuver by which a sailing vessel turns its bow through the wind so that the wind changes from one side to the other.

The question is, what other kinds of tacking are there, apart from tacking into the wind? The reverse maneuver is called wearing. Much more importantly, though, square-rigged vessels, of antiquity or later times, are perfectly capable of tacking "into the wind"; it would be strange indeed if they couldn't.

The confusion persists later, when Bernstein talks about Chinese junks (p. 98):

The Chinese military leadership made maritime engineering a high priority, and their boatyards began to turn out many types of huge military and maritime (!?) vessels with... advanced fore-and-aft sails (which enabled ships to tack almost directly into the wind).

What on earth is a non-maritime vessel? The confusion with tacking continues; here Bernstein seems to confuse tacking with sailing close to the wind.

The larger point, however, is that on the topic of sailing, Bernstein clearly has no idea what he's talking about. This doesn't stop him from making statements about sailing. The question obviously becomes: is he taking other matters he's writing about equally lightly?

I can attempt a partial answer by looking at his chapter on the birth of Islam; Chapter 3: Camels, Perfumes and Prophets.

Bernstein discusses the birth of Islam in strangely contradictory terms. Pages 66 and 68-69:

66: "There [Mecca], the incense trade catalyzed the birth of Islam, whose military, spiritual and commercial impacts transformed medieval Asia, Europe and Africa."

68-69:

Exactly how Mecca became a bustling commercial center is something of a mystery; it produced nothing of value, was not a great center of consumption or government, and had little strategic worth. (...) The role of the incense trade in the city's rise is also uncertain: ther eis controversy as to whether or not the main caravan route bypassed the town. (...) In a narrow sense, Mecca may be thought of as a miniature, parched, landlocked Arabian version of Venice, whose food supply and rhythms of daily life hummed to the tunes of trade, whether or not it actually sat on the main incense route.

The problem is that Mecca was never any such thing. Here the reason for Bernstein's confusion is amply clear: his bibliography and notes omit any mention of the definitive work on the topic, Patricia Crone's Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. Crone's book makes it perfectly clear that Mecca was only a bustling center of commerce in later Islamic traditions. There is absolutely no historical evidence to support those traditions. Almost unbelievably, Bernstein credits the siting of Mecca 100 miles away from the trade route to Nigel Groom's Frankincense and Myrrh; apparently Bernstein is unaware that Crone's book even exists.

Bernstein, has been quite content to write a chapter on the topic without even consulting such standard texts of Islamic studies that should occur to every undergraduate student. He doesn't seem to use any of the current scholarly works on the topic, but instead references books like Karen Armstrong's biography of Mohammed. Karen Armstrong is not a trained historian or islamicist, but an ex-nun. He quotes her work, but ignores any serious academic sources. The source material for the chapter is at best haphazard; in my opinion it can fairly be described as inept.

**

So far, I've read Bernstein's work on two areas that I have some knowledge in, and in both I've found his methods leave much to be desired. Despite what seems to be a total ignorance of sailing, he glibly makes statements about it. In writing on Islam, he is quite content to use sources that seem to have been selected at random. I stopped reading the book shortly later, as I don't see that a more comprehensive criticism is worthwhile. The way he treats these two areas is so incompetent that it throws the entire work into question. Has he been as haphazard in his source material for other claims? I'm not competent enough in those areas to say, but I have my doubts.

**

As a sidenote, reading reviews of the book is frightening. In lieu of a review, the New York Times printed a page-long summary of the book and called it a review (here. According to its back-cover blurb, the book was selected as "An Economist Book of the Year".

Most frighteningly, historian Paul Kennedy reviewed the book for Foreign Affairs, no less. Here's what he said:

A Splendid Exchange is a work of which Adam Smith and Max Weber would have approved. And it is all the more interesting because it is written by someone who is deeply knowledgeable about and active in the financial world yet finds the time to write graceful and insightful history with a delicate display of scholarship that conceals a vast erudition.

I find several of his insights to be, at best, questionable, and the scholarship he displays in the chapter on Islam is delicate in the sense that a car crash is a delicate display of driving.

I would assume that anyone who has the slightest background in Islamic studies could poke considerable holes in Bernstein's work. That even someone like Paul Kennedy seems to accept the entire work at face value is a powerful reminder of how important it is for us to read critically.

**

Having said all this, I certainly can't recommend Bernstein's book to anyone. The inept scholarship of his chapter on Islam is enough to raise serious doubts as to his methodology and rigor; serious enough to me that I can't take his book seriously as a work of history, even popular history. If all of his facts have been checked as rigorously as those on sailing and Islam, I can't even imagine what the rest of the book might contain.

Book review: McMafia

Misha Glenny's book McMafia has such a hideously stupid cover that it put me off buying it for an entire year despite my great interest in its topic. I mean, come on:

What the hell is that, a Chinese GTA ripoff? It's awful.

What makes the cover art even more terrible is that the GQ quote on the cover isn't that far off. Glenny's written a wonderfully informative, perceptive book on global organized crime that I think really is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the world works.

The only unfortunate aspect of the book is that sometimes Glenny starts propounding solutions. Occasionally these are obvious ones; he agrees with such hideous left-wing anarchists as the Economist magazine that drugs should be legalized, and his book is an excellent argument in favor of legalization.

On the other hand, though, because he's mainly concerned with organized crime, this leads him to take rather a strange perspective on some things. For example, he details the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the criminal gangs, mafias and oligarchs that took control in Russia. Because he sees all of these as inherently negative, in Glenny's book Vladimir Putin assumes a heroic status as a champion of law and order! To anyone in the least bit familiar with Russia's burgeoning securocracy this is at the very least amusing, but really closer to frightening.

Sometimes Glenny calls for wider international measures to control something or the other, and several reviews of his book, like the one linked to on the Wikipedia page at salon.com, make the explicit comparison that international affairs must be regulated by a supranational entity just like the markets must be regulated. This is all so much left-wing claptrap, but luckily it very rarely distracts from the point of the book, which is to take the reader on a guided tour of the world of organized crime.

Mmm. Or-ganized crime.

**

Definitely a book worth reading, despite some of its biases. This should be essential reading to anyone who wants to talk about drugs, prostitution, human trafficking or terrorism.