Anansi Boys – Neil Gaman

Review by Rashbre

Some musical soundtracks seem to follow us around. ‘The Supermen’ by David Bowie, pops up in my head from time to time. It starts,

“When all the world was very young,
and mountain magic heavy hung,
the supermen would walk in file,
guardians of a loveless isle
and gloomy browed with superfear
their tragic endless lives could heave nor sigh
in solemn, perverse serenity, wondrous beings chained to life.”

Neil Gaiman starts his Anansi Boys novel with the words “It begins, as most things begin, with a song”, so I feel the lyrics above are somehow appropriate.
Now freeze frame to me, resting from the road in a small and mystical town called Stone Mountain, in Georgia, USA. I was in a small café, sipping Java by a rack of books including the then freshly published “American Gods” hardback by Neil Gaiman.

I soon had a new companion for my journey.

Now anyone who has read Neil Gaiman will know that there are some strange games in his writing and that he can use a colossal palette to describe his ideas and those of his godlike characters. Back to Bowie:

“Strange games they would play then
No death for the perfect men
Life rolls into one for them
So softly a supergod cries”.

And the American Gods book became a fitting backdrop to my journey across the USA at that time, with its story of a released prisoner named Shadow and a set of epic circumstances he finds himself entwined within after sharing a flight with a character called Wednesday. The gods are deciding what to do with America.

But this review is supposed to be of Gaiman’s later book called Anansi Boys, which I just read on my travels. I was hoping there would be some overlap and indeed there is. Some plotline similarities (death of wife opens the first book and death of father is a central point in the later book). There is a significant overlapping character- Mr Nancy. And the story also involves gods, but of a different complexion to the American soul seekers of the first book.

The dead father of Fat Charlie (our initial hero) in the Anansi Boys turns out to be a human form of Anansi, the African trickster god. Fat Charlie (with Afro-Carribean connotations) is surprised to learn that he has a brother, Spider, who has inherited some of their father’s godlike abilities. After calling for his estranged brother by talking to a spider, the brother comes to visit Charlie.

A set of pivotal identity theft begins to occur as the brother Spider gets Charlie fired from his job, steals his girlfriend and creates a situation where Fat Charlie is arrested and suspected of murder.

Charlie decides to use magic to remove the unthinking rather than evil Spider, but unfortunately things start to go somewhat awry.

Where all were minds in uni-thought
Power weird by mystics taught
No pain, no joy, no power too great
Colossal strength to grasp a fate
Where sad-eyed mermen tossed in slumbers
Nightmare dreams no mortal mind could hold
A man would tear his brother’s flesh, a chance to die
To turn to mold.

Now I don’t want to give away too much plotline, but let’s say the style has good narrative, much humour, clever storytelling and entertaining twists. It does weave a web and part way through I found myself wanting to unravel what was to happen. Gaiman manages to progressively reveal that ‘things are not always what they seem’ and to cross from a netherworld to a real world within a sentence.

The difference from the earlier book is one of scale. American Gods swept across the souls of a nation, whereas this book makes greater reference to family, sibling rivalry and an esoteric form of rites of passage. If American Gods is a thunderclap across a continent – potentially devastating but somewhat impersonal, Anansi Boys is more of a large furry spider on the arm – immediate, very personal, somewhat scary and potentially quite tickly.

Far out in the red-sky
Far out from the sad eyes
Strange, mad celebration
So softly a supergod cries

Far out in the red-sky
Far out from the sad eyes
Strange, mad celebration
So softly a supergod dies

If you like the idea of this, read both books. I happened to read them in the order of publication, I don’t really think it matters in terms of their concepts or from the perspective of continuity. And yes, the lime is relevant.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch – Retrieval artist novels

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s The Disappeared is the first in a series of novels set in the milieu of her novella “The Retrieval Artist.” Now, I haven’t knowingly read the original novella, though it’s on my list of things to do, but I was attracted to Rusch’s writings when I read “Diving into the Wreck” in Asimov’s magazine (see below).

The Disappeared combines two genres, really, because it’s a police procedural with a science fiction backdrop. It’s an absolutely cracking premise: imagine cultural relativism and multi-culturalism to an nth degree, whereby humans are obliged to abide by the decisions of multi-cultural courts to pay for the consequences of crimes committed against aliens on alien planets, and the police have to enforce those laws and decisions.

For example, commit a crime against one species, and the courts may rule that your firstborn belongs to that species. Your choice: don’t have children, or try to disappear, witness-protection style, and start a new life with no connection to your old. In another instance, your sentence might be several years on an alien penal colony.

Disappearance agencies spring up, arranging for people to shed their old identities and live under a new name, somewhere else. But what happens if that agency turns out to have a corrupt employee, willing to sell your new identity to those with the original warrant? And is it really corrupt, when what the agencies are doing is illegal? It’s all good stuff, and Rusch keeps the picture complex. Your sympathies lie both with the helpless fugitives, who in some cases were merely high-spirited youngsters, or didn’t understand the laws they broke or the offence they caused; and with the cops who are obliged to enforce the laws they have no liking for – themselves in fear of accidentally crossing the line. Even the aliens are not portrayed as wholly evil – ruthless, perhaps – as they try to see justice done.
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The second in the Retrieval Artist series of novels, Extremes is a classic police procedural science fiction hybrid, with action that takes place, 24-style, over just one day.

As a failed writer (among many other failures), I find it interesting to see Rusch’s narrative technique. She moves rapidly between three main points of view (Flint, the Retrieval Artist, De Ricci, the cop, and Oliviari, a Tracker posing as a medic), picking up each strand of narrative, not after the elision of some time, but where she left off. There isn’t time, in other words, for one character to learn the full details of what another knows, and so all three of them reach their own conclusions based on their own portion of the evidence.

The crime in question is a murder during a – preposterous – extreme sport event on the Moon. Unbelievable, you’d think, if you didn’t already know the hilariously stupid risks people already take on Earth in order to entertain themselves. Of course people will try equally stupid things on the Moon.

So, police procedural, but what does SF add to the mix? The setting, obviously, plays a key role. One of the great details of Rusch’s Retrieval Artist future is that people inhabit domed communities on the Moon, which turns out to be not very glamorous. The air recycling is inefficient, so it can get stuffy; the community has expanded haphazardly over a length of time, so there are old/new bits, crappy building materials, low quality synthesised foods, and so on. Crucially, in a domed community living on recycled air, the release of a deadly virus has a particular impact.

This creative use of the setting extends into the 3rd in the series, Consequences, in which an assassin doctors a crime scene by reprogramming the cleaning robots. First of all they suck up the blood and brains; then the killer re-arranges the bodies, and the robots spew it all out again in a pattern to match the new arrangement. Genius. How would Gil Grissom cope with that?
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For the 4th of the Retrieval Artist space Opera Mysteries Kristine Kathryn Rusch returns to the initial premise of the series, which is the convoluted and difficult legal system that surrounds human-alien relations.

The Disty are an alien race who are horrified by death, to the point where any contact with a dead body is considered a contamination that needs to be cleansed by ritual. They have hundreds of rituals, depending on circumstance. Any ground where a body is discovered is unclean, and those involved in the discovery need to be cleansed by ritual, too.

Depending on how close the unclean person is to the dead person, the ritual can be more or less invasive and destructive. If no family member can be found, the ritual is essentially the same as a death penalty.

Worst of all, the Disty have occupied Mars (a brilliant stroke by Rusch – all other Mars colonies I’ve ever read about were created by humans, and the idea that a planet in our own solar system can be under a completely alien system of government gives you the same chills you’d get if people in our society really could be [legally] executed for drawing cartoons.), which means that they live in close proximity to humans, who must tie themselves in knots in order to avoid contravening Disty law.

When humans fall foul of the Disty, the only realistic option is to disappear – witness protection (or Rushdie) style – to avoid the inevitable violent end.

Buried Deep opens with the discovery of a dead body, which – to the aliens’ horror – appears to have been buried underneath a Disty housing settlement for at least 30 years. The human female’s lost family need to be found for the cleansing ritual, or else the other humans involved (police, pathologist, anthropologist) will face a fate worse than (and including) death.

Unfortunately, the woman was not what she seemed, and finding her family looks to be an impossible task. Things go from bad to worse when a further 100 mummified human bodies are found in the same area.

This parable of extreme cultural relativism is at heart a mystery that needs to be solved, both to reveal an unwritten history (how did 100 bodies end up there?) and – perhaps – save the unwitting humans who stumbled upon a serious problem in the course of doing their jobs. Like all the best SF, it throws the world in which we live into a sharp perspective, exaggerating our own difficulties in rubbing along with religionist nutters of various persuasions to page-turning effect.

The Beatles: 365 Days – Simon Wells, Robert Whitaker

One of my xmas presents was The Beatles: 365 Days, a doorstep-thick collection of images from the Getty archive, notable for mostly being lesser-known shots, outtakes from sessions that yielded the images we've all seen a million times.

Each image is captioned as to the time and place it was taken, and it's a good way of re-presenting the old story, and astounding me all over again with how fucking hard they were worked in their brief stay on this earth.

The most striking thing, for me, is to see The Beatles standing next to other people, whether they be members of the press (visible through a smoky haze), or their young fans, or the shoulder-rubbing liggers of the 60s scene. Because in many of these shots, what astonishes most is that The Beatles appear god-like, bronzed, healthy, beautiful, even while all around them looked ordinary, spotty, freckled, and crap. Even the other slebs, the so-called beautiful people, look ordinary by today's standards, but the fabs look buffed, shiny, and wondrous. Even Ringo. To unleash their looks on an unsuspecting world was strange enough, but to back it up with obviously superior output was queer indeed.

Anyway, it's a nice book if you like that kind of thing. The format is crap, though, because it's too heavy and the pages are not easy to view, and too many of the pictures are portrait rather than landscape mode, so you're forever twisting this heavy object around to have a look. So, a smack in the mouth for the book designer. Top shot: Ringo in his hospital sick bed either just before or just after a tonsillectomy: smoking a fag. Priceless.

The Lincoln Lawyer – Michael Connelly

It seems like only yesterday that I was briefly reviewiing Michael Connelly's most recent Harry Bosch novel, The Closers, but here we are again with another new Connelly, and this one looks like it's going to be, to use lead character Mickey Haller's phrase, a franchise.

The Lincoln Lawyer is a bit of a departure for Connelly, who has mainly published police procedurals. We're still dealing with procedures here, but now we're on the other side of the courtroom aisle, with a defence attorney legal thriller. This is Grisham territory, of course, but I'm mainly familiar with Kate Wilhelm's Barbara Holloway novels. Wilhelm's Oregon-based Holloway is an idealist, who defends the innocent against the System. She plays to her reader's fantasies about being falsely accused and proving their innocence (and exposing the real bad guy) in court.

Connelly has gone for something different: a lead character who fits the description of (and even describes himself as) a sleazy defense lawyer ('scuse American spelling). He doesn't even have an office as such, but drives around in a $50,000 (I'm assuming long wheelbase) Lincoln Town Car (one of 4 he bought on a fleet deal) with a former client working off his fee as his driver.

Mickey Haller is the kind of lawyer Bosch hates, whom all cops hate, because he wheels and deals and sleazes his way through case after case, getting wrong 'uns off on the proverbial technicalities. This is ironic because Connelly cleverly (and subtly) lets you know that Bosch and Haller share a father. Both Haller and Connelly know that the system needs "sleazy" defence lawyers, because everyone has a right to a fair trial and due process. And due process and fairness are sometimes absent from police investigations; hence the existence of the technnicalities Haller uses to set his guilty clients free.

Haller's not cash rich, even though he has $200,000 worth of Town Car in his garage and a million dollar house. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence, with clients who sometimes pay cash, sometimes have to work off their fee, and sometimes can't pay at all. Which is why he's cautiously excited about a new client: a rich man accused of murder who could turn out to be a "franchise", the client who can pay and pay and pay. This is excellent stuff, full of procedural detail, which builds and builds to a gripping conclusion. It's written in an understated but clearly descriptive style, and you can smell the film that even now must be in pre-production (I kept picturing Joe Pesci in the part, but that's probably because of My Cousin Vinnie).

Connelly is on the top of his form, and you have to admire the amount of research he must have done to fully understand the world of the Lincoln Lawyer, and the court system – all based on a chance encounter at a ball game, several years ago. Haller is a wily, but sympathetic character, who is completely open about some of the sleazier actions he takes (like paying a freelance cameraman to turn up at court, so that his client fears publicity) in order to enhance his reputation. Now that Bosch is lingering on past his retirement age (in The Closers he was back from retirement to work cold cases), Connelly needed this to work, and it does. We're bound to see more of Mickey Haller, and I hope Connelly keeps knocking them out. The Haller-Meets-Bosch sequel is surely not far away?

And the Angels Sing – Stories by Kate Wilhelm

Previously unpublished review

Short story collections all suffer from hit/miss syndrome. A collection by different writers is easy to cope with. You finish a slightly duff story, and the next one will be in a completely different style by a completely different writer.

Single author collections are different, because a duff story might put you off reading the next, especially if it’s written in a similar style or authorial voice.

I have to say that I found the first few stories in this collection hard going, so it took me longer to read than it might have. On the other hand, once I got into it, some of the stories were so good that I wished they’d go on longer. Some left you with no other option than to put the book down, because you wanted the thoughtful aftertaste of reading to linger on.

These stories were originally published between 1970 and 1990, in markets such as Omni, Orbit, and Redbook. Some of those outlets clearly mark this as (potentially) a Science Fiction collection. But with Wilhelm, the S in SF stands for Psychological. So this isn’t full of space operas, nanotech, and tales of the far future. It’s more like a Tales of the Unexpected collection of stories with a twist.

They were collected together in this hardback edition by St Martin’s Press in 1992. Of course, this is already out of print, so I got my copy from one of the sellers on the indispensable AbeBooks. It turns out to be a copy that was once in the Californian Orange County library system. From the OC to Buckingham, via the internet.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this collection. The first few are a bit too “interior” and cryptic for my tastes, including the opener, “The Look Alike,” which starts strongly and fades away. “The Chosen” is an interesting time travel story with a twist, but “On The Road to Honeyville” seems a little pointless.

There’s better to come, though. “The Scream” is a terrific story, classic Wilhelm. It’s the story of an ill-fated expedition to a deserted Miami following some kind of apocalyptic breakdown of society and technology. She’s great at imagining what’s going to happen to us in the post-oil economy. How much will we forget, for example, so that we can no longer hope to cure what ails us?

“The Dragon Seed” is a very moving story about an unregarded, non-academic girl who turns up to work for a horticulturist. Like many of Wilhelm’s heroines, she’s much stronger than she seems to be. “Forever Yours, Anna” is the story of a graphologist trying to unravel the mystery of some letters written by an unknown woman. Again, there’s a twist in the tale, but it’s a truly unexpected one.

The final story, “And The Angels Sing,” is in some ways the signature piece. A small coastal town’s newspaper editor rescues what he thinks is a girl from a storm. Think The Shipping News meets ET, and you get something of the flavour. Except, is the alien benign or something more sinister? And is it dying, or is it hunting?

My feeling is that Wilhelm is better at the longer form of the novel or novella. Her short fiction can be a little bit too weird for some tastes. You can see how this ended up being withdrawn from circulation. It’s a little bit too literary and psychological to appeal to the hardcore genre fan, and yet a little bit too strange for mainstream tastes.

Enjoy new fiction – get a subscription

Recently, I caught up on my Asimov’s reading.

I subscribed, I think, around this time last year, when the dorrar was very weak against the pound, but it took ages for my first issue to come through (I think it was the April/May double issue). I may even have subscribed considerably before I think I did, and moved house at least once before the first issue arrived. Even then, there was excess postage to pay on it, which I could never work out why.

Anyway, I think my subscription is at an end now, but I wasn’t going to renew just yet, because I’d only read up to August, which meant I had September, October, November/December, and January backed up on the shelf. But, of course, five days in France and I devoured the lot (in between naps and meals), and I’m gonna renew straight away.

I’ve always been fond of the short form of SF. Each issue of Asimov’s usually gives you a novella (I’m thinking 40,000 words? Correct me if I’m wrong), a couple of novelettes, and several short stories, and the quality is consistently high. It’s a great way to discover (and support) new writers or rediscover those you thought were dead (!).

I particularly enjoyed the Kristine Kathryn Rusch novella, “Diving into the Wreck,” from the December issue. So impressed, I just ordered 4 of her books from Amazon. As is traditional with Science Fiction, the cover illustration is a long way from being illustrative of the story itself, which is a spooky tale of “deep space diving” into an abandoned ship which is 5,000 years old, and a long way from where it could possibly be, given its type etc.

The story is an example, I suppose, of the New Space Opera. This sub-genre has moved on from speculating about the next few hundred years and has leaped ahead, dealing with mind-boggling numbers, sending humanity into impossibly distant futures. It’s exactly the kind of thing that would have saved the Star Trek franchise from falling over itself so badly, by squeezing the various spin-offs too close together. Imagine if they’d jumped forward, say, 5,000 years, into a future in which Earth is a mere legend among the Diaspora of humanity.

Anyway, you can’t see that kind of thing on the telly, so you have to read about it in Asimov’s and its ilk. The stories will vary, from New Space Opera to Alternate History, to retold legends and myths, psychological puzzles, end-of-the-world tales, stories about the future of the War on Terror, the post-oil economy, nanotech, biotech, that kind of thing. Occasionally, you’ll read something so brilliant that you’ll head off to check out the rest of that writer’s bibliography.

Other SF Magazines are available, or you can try Ellery Queen for mysteries or Hitchcock for horror.

The Jewish War – Flavius Josephus

Review by Simon Holyhoses

I’ve just finished reading the penguin translation of Josephus’ Jewish Wars.

It documents the attempts of the Roman militia to subdue the Jews from the time of the emperor Nero (is it earlier than this? It must be but I can’t remember direct mention of earlier emperors) through to Vespasian (The action ends in around 70 AD).

One of the more interesting accounts is the capture of the hill fort at Masada. This takes place at the very end of the book. The fort was basically impregnable, with its own wells, food supply, and heavy fortifications at the top of a ravine that surrounded the fort on three sides with sheer drops of several hundred feet.

The romans simply piled up rubble at the side, built a road of stone up to the top, used a battering ram to knock a hole in the outer wall, then set fire to the inner wall (made of wood and earth). When the Romans finally broke through the following day they found the entire population dead as a result of a suicide pact.

Nearly a thousand of them: children, women, and the men.

It was said that one woman survived, by hiding in caves during the mass suicide, to tell the tale. Each man had killed his own wife and children, before being killed by one of 10 other men. The 10 men who remained then drew lots to see which of them would kill the other 9 before finally killing himself.

This, apparently, was to enable them to retain their dignity, and, practically, to prevent the children being sold into slavery and the women being raped. The men would have been killed by the romans anyway so for them it was a “no brainer”.

One of the things that particularly struck me throughout the whole thing is that in this translation there is nothing about Jesus. Certainly a lot of the narrative is contemporary with the supposed life of Jesus, and yet there is nothing. Strikes me as odd since he was supposedly a bit of a bad ass trouble maker.

Apparently, according to an appendix in this translation, there was an alternative manuscript found, written in Slovenian, that mentions certain things pertaining to the early christian church, but these are not thought to be authentic: they’re thought to be added later by interested others.

Last night I watched a program on TV called Digging for Jesus. It was very much a yes-we-have-no-bananas sort of affair but reasonably interesting nevertheless.

The conclusion was that although the archaeological evidence is consistent with the accounts of the New Testament, there is no hard evidence for Jesus whatsoever. That’s hardly a surprise is it? It mentioned that the relics are actually very much dependant on a huge act of faith for their religious value rather than actual history.

It conceded that Pontius Pilate was a roman governor in Judea during the rule of the emperor Tiberius. I’m sure Pilate is mentioned in The Jewish Wars, so again that pre-dates Nero. In fact I’m sure it was the mention of Pilate that made me think “wot no Jesus?” in the first place.

One thing I did learn is that the “Bet” prefix in biblical place names (e.g Bethlehem) is equivalent to our “ham” suffix (e.g Nottingham). It means a farmstead.

On a very tenuously related note I was surprised that in most European countries it is a criminal offense to deny the existance of the holocaust. The UK is an exception although there is strong lobbying in favour of compliance.

What a very strange law. It seems like a law forbidding gay men from being attracted to other men. And how could you enforce it? Maybe I’m missing the point. I would have thought that anyone who seriously tried to deny the holocaust would be laughed out of the door anyhow.

On Reading Lists…

Post by Simon Holyhoses

A very long time ago I set myself up with several programs of reading.

The first one was to understand European literature. I started off with classical greek. I started to learn classical greek itself but soon slacked off and started reading translations (Loeb, Penguin, Oxford classics etc).

Yes, they can be dry and dusty like an old man’s cock, but I’ve been from Homer’s star-roofed plains of Troy to the Munchausian tales of Lucian; from the youthful, sexy iambs of Archilochus to the crusty poetical jigsaw puzzles of Callimachus. Never mind the sheer and rocky tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, or the Bucolics of Theocritus, Bion and the rest.

All these years on, I’ve got 7 books left to read before I can begin reading translations of literature written in Latin from the Roman empire.

But something awful has happened. Recently I’ve taken to noting dates in the covers of books when I start to read them, and again when I finish them. Partly vanity, partly a practical way of tagging a book to say that I have read it.

It seems that since August 2003 I’ve read just two books. Translations of Arrian’s “Campaigns of Alexander”, and Josephus’ “Jewish Wars”. This is horrifying news. On that basis it may be another three years before I finish the Greek stuff.

It get’s worse though. Not only is this a startling reminder of my own mortality and status as a Failed Reader of Literature: it is also a shocking indicator of the folly of much that I do.

You see, I have lists of translations of Sanskrit, Anglo-Saxon literature, the Viking sagas, Middle English stuff, Renaissance works, Tudor stuff, The Romantics, Fin de Siecle poetry, First World War stuff, James Joyce, Kathryn Mansfield, Virginia Wolf. And that’s just the European Literature.

Here alone I’m forced to conclude that I already have more books than I will get to read before I snuff it.

Three years ago I stopped reading computer books: they are the modern equivalent of the chap book; disposable trash that is of no use to anyone who isn’t terminally bored.

There’s music too. I have a cabinet of bookshelves full of books about music: tutorials, theory, about guitars and amplifiers. What about all of those?

There’s my philosophy list. When I say “philosophy”, I mean analytical philosophy rather than the looser modern bookshop definition along the lines of “New Age” or “Religion”. Theory of Mind. Formal Logic. That sort of stuff. I’m currently bogged down in Kant (and probably have been for about 5 years now).

And there’s all the miscellaneous clutter I’ve picked up along the way: stone-age history, Egypt, Incas and Mayans, early China, a book about the Queen of Sheba. There’s a cupboard full of books about war that my mum’s friend Eddie has leant me.

And the current list of “must read soon” books that don’t fit into a list:
a) Where late the sweet birds sang – Kate Wilhelm (Rob lent me this several lifetimes ago).
b) The history of association Football which I want to read as a sort of posthumous cap tipping to my dad.
c) The labyrinth of time – saw it mentioned in an astronomy magazine and thought, “yes”.
d) A fat book about wild flowers that seems to offer no practical use other than as coffee table fodder.
e) The fossils of florissant – it is possible to know what butterflies looked like 30 million years ago.
f) History of Country Music.
g) A Basque grammar that I bought for a laugh.
h) Last but not least, a book about how to be self sufficient, which my wife bought me. It has a useful chapter on how to manually slaughter pigs and cattle. This may well be the ace up my sleeve come the post-oil-economy apocalypse.

Forty Signs of Rain – Kim Stanley Robinson

With the recent publication of Fifty Degrees Below, a sequel to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain, I thought it was time to check out Robinson’s take on climate change.

As one Amazon reviewer puts it, with this climate change trilogy, Robinson is setting himself up as the Anti-Crichton. Michael Crichton has recently caused controversy with State of Fear, his take on environmental issues, and has been adopted by some elements of the US Congress as a credible sceptic on the issue of global warming.

On this blog, we like to cover the big issues. Which means we don’t pay much attention to the whole Iraq thing, which is going to seem very small potatoes indeed should our civilisation come crashing about our ears.

‘We can go to them and say, look, the party’s over. We need this list of projects funded or civilisation will be hammered for decades to come. Tell them they can’t give half a trillion dollars a year to the military and leave the rescue and rebuilding of the world to chance and some kind of free market religion. It isn’t working, and science is the only way out of this mess.’” – Forty Signs of Rain, p290

Global warming and climate change can be slippery terms. I believe the latter is probably inevitable, but I think we all know that a phrase like global warming is counter-intuitive, because one of the ways the climate could change is that a lot of us could get very, very cold indeed. Cold enough to consider killing cats and dogs for their fur, perhaps, Mr McCartney.

The issue rests on two questions. Is climate change a result of human activity? And, if so, can human activity do anything about it? I think the answer to the first question is not enough data (which is essentially Michael Crichton’s position). And I think the answer to the second is, well, then it’s probably too late.

And let’s not confuse things by pointing out that the polar ice caps on Mars, as well as those on Earth, are shrinking.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing style. He goes in for Hemingwayesque zero-degree narration, which is quite clever, but when the subject matter of the book is a little bit dry, well, it can be a little bit too dry. But it is a sophisticated style, and unless I’m being particularly thick, things aren’t necessarily all that they seem. Here, for example, is one Amazon reviewer’s take:

this is not as billed – most of the story is lost in the minutia of venture capital funding and the mechanics of scientific research. The most important event in the book (the stopping of the Gulf stream) is disposed of in a short telephone intercept…

Indeed. This reader was certainly reading for the plot, and didn’t really enjoy the stuff about venture capital and real-world politics. But, actually, that’s the most important thing in Forty Signs of Rain. Robinson’s setting it up that way because the way science is conducted, and the way politics works, is precisely why there is not enough data on climate change and why the political will to do something about it is absent.

One of the main characters, Frank Vanderwal, is on secondment to the National Science Foundation in Washington. Just before his year is about to end, he issues a parting shot, complaining that science is conducted wrong, that it shouldn’t rely on proposals and response to proposals, and should instead be setting the agenda and demanding funding for certain research. What’s wrong with science, and with the politics of global warming, is that it relies entirely on lobbying – on the one hand – and on grant application and review on the other. What governments should be doing, argues Vanderwal, is commissioning research, asking or telling scientists what to research based on what organisations like the NSF – in collaboration with similar organisations all over the world – are saying.

It’s quite hard to get your head round, but that’s what Forty Signs of Rain is about. First of all, scientists aren’t really free to collaborate because of the obsession with capital and money and patents and exploitation of discovery. So there’s too much secrecy – and that’s within one country, before you even consider the paranoia of governments and security agencies. And research is too dispersed and scattershot, again because scientists are working in commercial environments, looking for breakthroughs that will be profitable.

So scientists aren’t really speaking to each other, and they don’t really understand each other, and this atomised approach to a huge potential problem like climate change means that nobody is joining the dots, seeing patterns, and identifying possible solutions. And if someone does spot something potentially interesting – as Vanderwal does – then they have too much self-interest for it to be shared with the wider community.

This is one of the cleverest aspects of the book. Vanderwal’s internal monologue is sometimes anthropological (we are all primates, fresh from the savannah, and a lot of our behaviour is based on the instincts of primates) and sometimes concerned with game theory, and in particular whether altruism or selfishness will win the game.

This could fool you into thinking that Vanderwal is a good guy, the moral compass to point us through the maze of Washington and scientific politics. Like this Amazon reviewer:

…some fairly poor attempts to inject some excitement in to these scenes of domestic bliss, in the form of an encounter with deadly nightshade and a near miss with the kid and some passing traffic (and with another characters pointless road rage encounter)

The character who has the “pointless” road rage encounter is Vanderwal. Except it’s not pointless, obviously. The point is, Vanderwal (observing humanity dispassionately, thinking of us all as primates driven by instinct) is not perfect, and not infallible. He’s driving in the multi-occupancy lane and attempts to avoid detection by cutting up a pickup truck in order to hide his car from a patrol car. Clever, he thinks, except the pickup truck driver has an attack of road rage and pursues him through the streets.

In other words, Vanderwal thought he was controlling a situation, but got it badly wrong.

Lesson two. Vanderwal sees a grant application from a mathematician that could have some exciting impact on research into gene therapy. He happens to have connections with a company doing research in gene therapy, so he “cleverly” sees to it that the funding application is refused, in order that the company can make the researcher a job offer and keep his research for themselves.

Except, of course, Vanderwal is outmanoeuvred by another scientist on the funding committee who has exactly the same idea about a company she is connected with, doing research that (it will turn out) is loosely related to gene therapy, but more directly relevant to finding a viable carbon-fixing solution.

As for the deadly nightshade, it was actually poison ivy, and I wouldn’t care to suggest that the encounter will prove to be irrelevant.* It might even be interesting, later on.

In any event, Vanderwal is not as clever as he thinks he is, and when he meets a mystery woman later on in the book, you get the feeling he’s being played. This is all going to pay off in the sequels to follow.

Forty Signs of Rain lays out the problems with scientific research, the difficulties of political lobbying, and the sometimes awkward human relationships involved in both. The sequel will describe the onset of severe climactic change, when the global temperature plummets. This is set up with two slices of beautiful irony. On the West Coast, an unusually lashing storm (part of a Hyperniño in its 42nd month) causes massive erosion of sandstone cliffs at Encinitas, near San Diego. This is not a fictional threat. This, from the Las Cruces Sun:

Sand and solitude
Want to escape the hordes that descend upon most San Diego beaches? Go to Encinitas and turn west on D Street. The avenue dead-ends where the land plummets to the ocean, and there you will find a wooden staircase leading to the small, narrow beach about 60 feet below. Down here, you will find no hot-dog stands, no lifeguard and no restrooms. But you will find room to spread out, especially on the weekdays. (The beach can be thick with surfers on the weekends.) Just make sure you plant yourself well away from the cliffs, which look about as solid as Social Security’s future. “

Turn west on D Street, it says. The land plummets to the ocean, it says. Where are Streets A, B, and C, I hear you ask? Lost to the sea, in October 1889. Robinson merely points out that what happened once will surely happen again.

And on the other coast, more irony. First victim of the coming catastrophic changes in climate? Why, Washington DC, of course, which is a mere 10 feet above sea level and built on a swamp. A couple of storms converge, coincident with a high tide, and politics-as-usual is under water.

Excellent. I’ll read the first sequel in the new year.

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*Poison ivy has interesting properties: only a billionth of a gram of the potent Urushiol oil is needed to cause a rash; and only 7 grams of the stuff would be needed to cause a rash in every person on earth. It remains active even on dead plants for at least five years; and samples centuries old have still caused rashes.

Failed Writer, or…?

Cooler King

If you had to fail at anything, what would it be? When I was relatively young, I wanted to be a writer. I can remember writing short stories (usually involving space and rockets) when I was 7, 8 years old, and I “rediscovered” writing in my mid-teens, in a forehead-slapping moment. How could I have forgotten this?

But as well as wanting to be a writer, I was restless and impatient, so when I wasn’t immediately successful (like Françoise Sagan, say), I became somewhat disillusioned. But I kept writing. In my early days of blogging I posted quick summaries of my various unpublished novels (search for the word “unfinished” on that page, there are five!). Ideas were easy to come by, until I was around 30, and now they’re not. But another thing is that I ceased to believe in myself as someone with something to say, if you know what I mean.

In the spirit of putting myself into the skin of a 3rd party, an editor say, I asked myself, if this manuscript arrived on my desk, would I want to read it? And the answer was no. The same thing, more or less, happened with regard to poetry, which was something else I used to do. I realised, in my mid-20s, that I absolutely loathe poetry – especially my own. So I knocked it on the head.

When I was still at school, I had a vague ambition to be some kind of professional writer. I knew early on that the chances of being a Don Delillo, someone who has always made a living from being a novelist and nothing else, were remote, so I knew that “professional writing” would have to involve journalism or reporting or something.

But being feckless and lazy, I didn’t fancy going to journalism school, working for a local paper, or doing any other kind of scut work. I wanted to leap over the dues-paying and become, say, and instant Alistair Cooke, or, more likely Anthony Smith whose series of Radio 4 talks, “A Sideways Look” I admired very much.

Both Cooke and Smith were masters of talking about one thing whilst really talking about another. At the height of the Watergate scandal, Cooke would give one of his weekly talks on the subject of something like saucepans… and only at the end of the 15 minutes would the penny drop, and you would realise he was actually talking about Nixon, and what a crook he was. I exaggerate, but you get the point.

Because just reporting the news wouldn’t interest me; and I wouldn’t want to get trapped into being some kind of specialist in politics or war. No, I’d want to just sit in my gaff and make stuff up. Unfortunately, this career path failed to open up before me.

But blogging is great, isn’t it? Because you don’t have to please anyone but yourself, and you can be your own Anthony Smith and take a sideways look at every bloody thing.

Then there’s the other thing about writers, which is that – on the whole – they’re all so damn ugly. Goodness gracious! Some of them, to quote Quentin Tarantino, look like they fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Ugly, fat, with Coke-bottle lenses in their unflattering glasses. Apart from JK Rowling, who is shaggable because she doesn’t look actually horrific and is as rich as you-know-who, most writers I’ve seen are more Stephen King than Steve McQueen. Most celebrity mugshots show people looking at their absolute DUI worst, but look at Steve! Cool as a cucumber.

Film directors, apart from actor-turned-director types, follow pretty much the same pattern. Peter Jackson, for example. It’s almost like a pattern: ugly, misfit people bring their fantasies to life on the page and on the screen. One of the big problems I had with that whole Lord of the Rings trilogy was the way it pandered to the worst elements of fandom – the shut-ins, the mad people in the cultural attic, the ones who love fantasy and sf and play role playing games, too.

I’m no oil painting, as you know, and I’m generalising a little too much (likely to upset Vulcans and non-Vulcans alike), but in the end, being a writer isn’t the same as being a rock star, and the adoring fans of writers are not the same people, on the whole, as the adoring fans of rock stars. So if I had to choose, I’d rather be a “failed musician” than a “failed writer.” And, frankly, and I wish I’d thought of it when I was younger, I think I’d rather be a “failed actor” than just about anything. I should have been on the stage. You know it.