Generation A by Douglas Coupland

There’s a sense in which it is pointless to review a Douglas Coupland novel. When casting about for some non-SF to read recently, I realised that I (a) couldn’t remember which Coupland novels I owned and (b) couldn’t remember which ones I’d read, because (c), they all blur into one.

Which is not to say that there is no pleasure in reading his books, just that he’s so zeitgeisty that every single iteration of his works bears the same relation to our contemporary culture. He’s always just ahead of the leading edge, surfing the wave of our so-called progress, reflecting it back at us with a parabolic mirror in a tight laser-like beam.

Read Microserfs and then read JPod. It almost seems like the same book, with the same set of characters, except somehow things have taken a much darker turn, like life. Coupland seems to like his characters to come in fives: each a collective hive mind which merges into one – like his books.

Clearly, Generation A is meant to make us think about Generation X. The annoying thing about Generation X was the way in which Coupland’s invisible post-boomer generation was overlooked (again) by the media in favour of a younger, more attractive demographic. In the media, “Generation X” came to stand for Bright Young Hipster Twentysomethings. Advertisers are interested in the under-25s, so that’s what the media went for. Generation X was about the neither-fish-nor-foul people whose cultural identity has been subsumed by the overwhelming numbers of the baby boom and by the inherent sexiness of those born more recently.

Coupland clearly wants to start again, beginning Generation A with an epigraph from Vonnegut, in which the X-stands-for-invisible is misinterpreted as X-stands-for-penultimate, implying that the Generations Y and Z that followed would be the last. In this construction, Generation X is an apocalyptic novel about the approaching end times. Generation A, taking its lead from Vonnegut, offers to wipe the slate clean, implying that endings can also be beginnings.

Generation A begins with this premise: all the bees are gone. The bee apocalypse is probably harder for people to get their heads round than the climate apocalypse. The idea that food crops won’t be pollenated is too scary to even contemplate. In a world without bees, apples become a mind-boggling luxury. It’s not just that we’d have to go without things, but that we’d have to live with the knowledge that it would be our fault: we killed the bees. That’s like waking up in the morning and realising you’re Hitler. I have trouble convincing students that the reason why so much of the world hates and resents the British is that for a couple of hundred years of colonial expansion, invasion, and imperialism, we were the bad guys. Our former colonies have a few hundred years to go before their future Monty Python equivalents can make jokes about “What the British did for us” without wanting to blow something up.

Generation A is narrated by five individuals from different parts of the globe, each of whom is stung by a (supposedly extinct) bee. The puzzle is to work out what happened and why. Why these people? In seeking the answer, we encounter a version of our society, the one we live in, with its instantaneous global village communications and Asian call centres and its tendency to want to solve problems with drugs.

One drug in particular, Solus, acts on the brain’s chemistry in ways which make its users feel okay about being alone. It creates a sense of pleasure in solitude, the kind you get when you’re all “peopled out” from all the clamour and noise, and want to spend some time on your own. With solus, you feel that way all the time. Happy to live a separate life, not hankering for human contact or love, not worrying about your children or parents. Solus creates the same sense of contentment in solitude that avid readers get when consuming a novel.

The point that Coupland makes is that we keep volunteering for this stuff. We voluntarily consume the products of intensive industrial agriculture – even if it means the bees are dying. Some of us volunteer to drive over-sized cars even though the oil is running out. A small percentage of us volunteer to do most of the air travel, which is supposed to be Bad For The Planet. But instead of stopping it, somehow, we defend its right to continue.

More disturbingly, we’re being socially engineered by our gadgets. Who hasn’t checked a text or taken a phone call from a distant person whilst in the presence of someone else? We value the distractions our gadgets bring us, interacting with our friends via electronic means. We stick earbuds in our ears and hope nobody sits next to us on the train. We drive our children to school instead of letting them walk or take the bus. We’re all becoming more and more addicted to Solus, and we can’t turn it off.

Generation A, like all Coupland books, is at times very funny, but it’s reflected beam of light-from-the-future is piercingly accurate. Recommended.

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

After giving The Caryatids a bit of a slagging, I thought I’d go back to where it all started for Bruce Sterling, and assess is almost legendary early novel Islands in the Net, which was written long before most of the world had even heard of the internet (1988), let alone used it. Here’s what the Wikipedia on Sterling has to say about it:

A view of an early twenty first century world apparently peaceful with delocalised, networking corporations. The protagonist, swept up in events beyond her control, finds herself in the places off the net, from a datahaven in Grenada, to a Singapore under terrorist attack, and the poorest and most disaster-struck part of Africa.

It’s a trap, of course, to judge a work like this on the basis of its predictions. Like 1984, it wasn’t really in the business of predicting the future, just pointing out those aspects of the future which are/were already with us.

Nevertheless, like 1984, Islands in the Net does an extraordinary job of predicting some of the major issues of the early 21st Century: failed states as havens for all kinds of ‘pirates’, a world obsessed with so-called intellectual property, weak states, nuclear weapons falling into the ‘wrong’ hands, powerful corporations, and a growing dependence on electronic data. All of this is in there, and more. So, some things are “wrong”, and the world of the novel isn’t entirely recognisable as the one we live in, but it’s still as recognisable to us as some elements of Orwell’s 1984 (surveillance society, permanent war, two-minute hates in the media etc.).

That said, it’s still more of a Menippean Satire than a novel, though it has more narrative plot than The Caryatids. Clearly, Menippean Satire is what Sterling does. One thing he doesn’t really do is offer solutions to the various warnings in the book. Surely our personal data needs to be kept secure, and huge government databases are specifically not secure, but apart from adopting a paranoid style, there doesn’t seem much for an individual to do.

I enjoyed this more than The Caryatids, but still found it a bit of a drag. But then that’s true of a lot of important books, in the end, and maybe more people should read Sterlng. Islands in the Net on the school curriculum, anyone?

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

You can imagine that when Cory Doctorow reviewed The Caryatids on BoingBoing, I went straight onto Amazon to buy it. His enthusiasm for the book was boundless, and to be honest I was expecting an absolutely top drawer science fiction novel about climate disaster and its aftermath.

Read Doctorow’s review and you too may be inspired to buy it.

I was disappointed, however, not least because this isn’t actually a novel at all. It’s a Menippean satire in which a single character (in this case, a clone, so a character with multiple personae) circulates the world of 2060 and essentially interviews a variety of other characters with particular points of view. That’s it, really. It’s not that there are no ideas of interest here (all the ideas in Cory Doctorow’s review are present and correct), but there’s no narrative plot, no satisfying resolution, and no character development.

There’s a lot of gnomic speechifying, though the dialogue is oddly stilted (perhaps deliberately, given the characters’ Balkan origins), and so this reminded me of early Don Delillo novels like Americana for a lot of its length. Not as funny, though. In fact, there’s not a lot more here than you read in Doctorow’s review: you get the idea, but then it doesn’t go anywhere.

Disappointing. And by no means the best novel of 2009, I hope.

Spook Country by William Gibson

Inevitably, with William Gibson’s name on the cover, I found Spook Country in the SF section of my local Waterstones, but it’s really more of a techno thriller, except written more in the style of the espionage genre: low key, lots of inner voice, and the playing out of a game rather than the sense of an against-the-clock struggle. At least three genres in this hybrid then, not to mention William Gibson’s status (according to Amazon) as a “cult” writer.

There are three narrative threads here, which eventually converge for the climax. One narrative point of view is that of Hollis Henry, a musician-turned-writer who is trying to make a start on a career in journalism after losing most of the money she made as a member of a Pixies-like cult indie band on unlucky ventures. She’s taken an assignment for a mysterious startup magazine and soon finds herself lost in the kind of radical ambiguity characteristic of espionage. But what kind of espionage? Official? Unofficial? Industrial?

Another point of view is that of Tito, a young man in New York City who belongs to some kind of crime (or is it?) syndicate. He’s from Cuba, but his family is ethnically Chinese, except they speak Russian. Or Spanish. Or speak Spanish but text in Russian. Except its with the Roman alphabet, so they’re texting in an approximation of Russian. Tito is some kind of runner, dropping off iPods full of data for an old man, and escaping – when he needs to – with the urban acrobatics of freerunning.

He’s being watched by some kind of black ops agent called Brown, who may or may not have any official status, but who has kidnapped from the street a Russian-speaking tranquilizer junkie called Milgrim (rhymes with Pilgrim), who is our bewildered third point of view. Milgrim’s primary concern is always his next pill, but he’s also a survivor and an opportunist.

None of those providing a narrative point of view really knows what is going on, and they all go along for the ride for their own reasons, permanently confused and trying to make sense of the unfolding events, or looking for a moment of clarity. The techno- part of the techno-thriller concerns iPods, cobbled-together VR headsets, GPS chips, encrypted cell phones and container ships. Unlike other techno thriller writers, and probably because of his experience in SF, Gibson creates a timeless technological backdrop, any of which is possible now and not at all futuristic, but none of which can be particularly pinned down to a time or place. So there are no “amazingly fast” quad speed CDROM drives, just the taken-for-granted quotidian stuff we’re surrounded with all the time.

The most engaging of the narrative points of view, for me, is Hollis, the female singer from a defunct rock band. One member of the band is dead, another (like Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground) seems to have settled for suburban domesticity, while the lead guitarist – called Inchmale – is married and living in Buenos Aires. For Hollis, Inchmale is like a missing limb, not because of any romantic attachment, but because they were even closer: bandmates, creative partners, the Lennon-McCartney of Hollis’ band The Curfew.

Hollis starts of in LA, meeting with some artists who are using GPS data to create virtual art installations. But she’s uncomfortable with her assignment, not sure who she’s working for, and keeps encountering strange coincidences, or the feeling that she’s under surveillance. As her sense of paranoia grows, she gets sucked further into a mysterious world of semi-official espionage and shipping containers that seem to endlessly circle the world. (This shipping container idea reminds me of Don Delillo’s waste ship in his novel Underworld.)

I enjoyed this. It’s paced like a Le Carré-style espionage novel, but immersed in a recognisable technological world with some sense of morality eventually seeping through all the grey areas. Recommended.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s taken me a while to get round to the third in a sequence that began with Forty Signs of Rain, continued with Fifty Degrees Below and now concludes with Sixty Days and Counting.

This trilogy is a real achievement in sustained writing about difficult ideas. We’re by now familiar with main protagonist Frank Vanderwal and his friends the Quiblers and the exiled buddhists from Khembalung. If the middle book of the three was concerned with a low point (a big freeze caused by the stopping of the Gulf Stream), in this one there are reasons to be optimistic, even if the problems faced by the world are immense in scale.

Phil Chase, the Vietnam veteran with a sound approach to the environment and a personal attachment to Franklin D Roosevelt, has been elected as President and sets out to make a difference in the first 60 days of his tenure. He and his advisors are “decapitating” the World Bank, giving a “root canal” to the US intelligence services, and negotiating hard with the Chinese, who are behaving “like terrorists” in threatening to burn their carbon and fuck up the world unless certain concessions are made.

Creative (and extreme) methods of reducing greenhouse emissions and rebalancing the climate include pumping vast quantities of water out of the sea into desert basins and onto the Antarctic ice sheet; or converting all US power production to solar generators; or using the nuclear reactors in US warships as temporary replacements for dirty coal power stations.

With Phil Chase in the White House, it’s like The West Wing on steroids: the ideal President who dares to say the things that the American people supposedly don’t want to hear, who overwhelms the two Houses with positive environmental legislation, and who blogs his radical thoughts, unspun, for the whole world to read.

Meanwhile, Vanderwal negotiates his way around personal problems and profoundly difficult solutions to mega problems (no solution is ever seen as easy, but with military levels of expenditure, there are solutions available). Robinson uses Vanderwal and Charlie Quibbler to muse upon these problems, and upon Capitalism, Buddhism, Game Theory, intelligence services, gene therapy, and low impact living. Vanderwal has been without a traditional place to live for some time. He has variously lived in a tree house, a garden shed, and his van. His is the truly radical outlook: live without all the things you don’t need. Desire nothing except desirelessness.

In this final book, the Buddhists and the game theory (is altruism or selfishness best to “win” the game?) come together and make a brilliant kind of sense. The answer, of course, is that like Captain Kirk in the first Star Trek movie, you rewrite the rules of the game in which “always defect” was the best option. You do this because the accounting system used in the old game was using the wrong set of numbers. As Charlie Quibbler points out to the World Bank representatives, oil companies only make a “profit” if they don’t have to pay for the environmental damage. You rewrite the rules and altruism becomes the ideal way to live and the only sure way of winning the game, in which nobody wins unless everybody wins. In the end, this reads more like an anti-capitalist sermon at times, but it is powerful stuff.

I like it. I’m still sceptical about that ability of humans to realistically affect climate one way or the other, but I’m really glad I read these books, even if my head is still spinning from all the facts and figures. Make no mistake: these are the major texts on the possible impact (and solution to) climate change. Not only recommended but required reading.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

I’ve been reading a an omnibus collection of old SF stories lately, in a book picked up in a library sale for 20p. These are stories published in the middle of the 20th Century – at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, which some people term the Golden Age, or even the First Golden Age. It’s an era I’ve always liked, though as time goes on the connection between the fiction and what we know of science becomes increasingly remote. I read them now mainly for their nostalgia value: a simpler time, when people were free to imagine the growing of giant fungii in laboratories, when the Soviet Empire was in its pomp, and the Cold War was just getting started.

The Golden Age was followed by the New Wave, which I haven’t got as much time for. It’s either a load of old wank (Aldiss, Ballard), worthy-but-dull (Le Guin) or just apeshit (Dick). Some of it’s all right, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to seek it out.

Then came Cyberpunk, which I also think is largely a load of old wank: there’s too much showing off and not enough story. I’m a complete story whore: I read for the plot, and I’m not interested in the author’s theories about how language will evolve: whatever.

A more recent science fiction trend has been to think in terms of the Singularity: the paradigm shift that will see us all evolving beyond our current state of consciousness and becoming post-human. What can I say? The words “wank” and “a load of old” spring too easily to mind. I’m not a believer in paradigm shifts. As I’m fond of saying, it took 600 years of the observed data not fitting the theory for the so-called Copernican Revolution to happen. Not so much a paradigm shift as a slow moving dead weight.

It’s like what Kuhn says about Einsteinian physics. If Einstein was right, then Newton was wrong, but most of us still muddle along quite happily in a Newtonian universe. Human beings, argues Michel Serres are only ever 1% “modern” – the other 99% is ancient. We’re ancient up to our eyeballs, which is why we’re all so fucking irrational. We are still living in a world dominated by religious ideas which are thousands of years old.

Are we suddenly going to forget all this and become post-human? Maybe. British readers may remember some time ago Prince Charles banging on about Grey Goo: the nightmarish result of out-of-control self-replicating nano-technology. It’s the sort of thing Michael Crichton writes books about.

Anyway, Charles Stross’s Glasshouse is set in a post-human universe, one in which nano-technology and other wonders allow humans to transport themselves instantly from place to place, and manufacture just about anything with an Assembler-Gate – including copies of themselves made from suitable backups. In such a universe, human beings can adopt any physical form they wish, and can even edit memories.

The narrator of Glasshouse, Robin, is one such, who wakes up after a long war with a radically edited memory, and then finds himself in a female body living within an experimental society based on the “Dark Ages” – which start right around the time of the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1950s) and end some time in the middle of the 21st Century.

This experimental polity is a mixed-up version of the times we now live in, complete with irrational beliefs and rules, as well as rigid gender roles and huge pressure to conform to an “ideal”.

It’s social satire, of course, not “about” the future, but a barbed reminder that we are indeed (still) living in the dark ages. At times funny (as when the remade Robin/Reeve describes 21st Century customs using the puzzled terminology of his/her times) and disturbing (peer pressure is an ugly thing), this is as good as this post-human Singularity stuff gets: which is to say, it has its faults (a tad repetitive and slow-moving at times), but still manages to err on the side of entertaining.

Recommended.

Spin – by Robert Charles Wilson

It was one of those “out on a limb” books during the writing — the kind where you ask yourself, “Can I get away with this?” But they don’t pay you for timidity, I guess. Every time I’ve stuck my neck out, in the literary sense, I’ve been rewarded for it.

Robert Charles Wilson is fast becoming one of my favourite SF writers. I’ve already reviewed The Chronoliths and Blind Lake on this blog. Surprisingly, The Chronoliths didn’t immediately strike me on first reading, and it was only when I picked it up a second time that I really got into it. Probably I was stressed and/or thinking about something else the first time I read it. Blind Lake presented no such problems, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Spin is Wilson’s most recent book, and it’s a corker. The breadth and depth of his imagination is incredible, but more than that, this is a beautifully-written book, too. Its style reminded me – throughout – of Douglas Coupland, and there’s almost no higher praise I can give. Imagine if Douglas Coupland sat down and wrote an extraordinary science fiction novel, and you’d – possibly – get something like Spin.

The Spin of the title is an acknowledged misnomer – as becomes clear as the plot develops. Simple human frailty is one of the key themes of this book, and it’s the all-too-human inability to encompass scientific vastness that causes “the Spin” to be misunderstood and misnamed. There’s also the background hum of political spin to consider, and that too is a theme of this great book. What happens to politics, what happens to society, when we are confronted with a technology so advanced and so powerful that it is clear that human politicians are irrelevant?

Like a Coupland novel, Spin revolves around three close friends, characters whose relationships are often strained but nevertheless enduring. The three are sitting out under the night sky one day in their youth, and the stars go out. The reason for this – and the consequences of it – are everlasting, and the three individuals come to cope with events in their own ways.

What is blocking out the stars turns out to be an advanced technology put in place by a hypothetical alien intelligence. The universe outside the apparent barrier is vastly accelerated relative to time on earth, which remains – subjectively – the same to those who still live there.

The idea that human brains can’t cope with vast scales – like geological time, like distances measured in light years – is not new. The climate change lobby has had to invent ever more urgent reasons for people to worry about so-called global warming, simply because it became clear that a vague threat over 100 years hence just wasn’t seen as “a clear and present danger” by most people. So instead we have this invented “sudden onset” climate change, and every weather anomaly is seen as a further sign of our doom.

In Spin, the time outside the Earth’s artificial bubble is moving so quickly that millennia pass in a matter of subjective months. And it’s Wilson’s creative play with this idea that forms the fascinating core of this book. What happens to our sun over millions of years? What happens to the rest of the solar system? How might we humans deal with or make use of the anomalous passing of time? Such vast themes might seem cold an impersonal but for the Coupland-style human relationships Wilson puts into his story.

Highly recommended.

Fifty Degrees Below – Kim Stanley Robinson

This sequel to Forty Signs of Rain takes up the story in the aftermath of the flood that inundated Washington D.C. at the end of that novel. In Fifty Degrees Below we learn that the flood does little to change the political landscape, but that things do start to slowly change as the consequences of the halting of the Gulf Stream are felt.

One of the great fears of so-called Global Warming, the consequences of the loss of the Gulf Stream to Northern Europe and North America would be immense. Kim Stanley Robinson is alive with statistics. Size of population set against ability to produce food, for example. He points out that, as it stands, Europe just about manages to feed itself, but if it were to slip into a Canadian/Siberian style climate, that ability would be compromised.

“Fifty Degrees Below” refers to the winter temperatures experienced in Washington D.C. during a mid-winter “cold snap”. Minus fifty degrees F is (oddly) around -46°C (how does that happen?), so we’re on common ground here. At these temperatures, your car won’t start. Your arctic sleeping bag won’t help. Your power consumption will be so high that there will, inevitably, be power cuts. The only hope in those circumstances is real fire…

Now, the (pessimistic) Crichton take on this is that climate change is both inevitable and impossible to predict since change is all the climate has ever done, throughout history. KSR’s more optimistic viewpoint is that phenomena like the (theoretical) stalling of the Gulf Stream are caused by human activity, and – as such – can be cured by human activity.

One of the more optimistic projects proposed in Fifty Degrees Below is to work to improve the efficiency of solar panels so that somewhere in the South West desert of the USA, a large array of panels can supply the entire United States with electricity. Elsewhere, genetically engineered lichen boosts the carbon-fixing properties of trees; and the UN organises a Niven-like project to restart the Gulf Stream using vast quantities of, er, salt.

Such projects require political will – on the one hand – and high levels of international co-operation on the other. One of Robinson’s more optimistic predictions is that a scarily cold winter will encourage both to happen. But there’s your problem, isn’t it? Because if global warming is about warming most people won’t mind. As Shelagh Fogarty said on Radio Bloke this morning (in reference to the recent warm snap), “I was getting used to living in Seville.” So, of necessity, global warming needs to be about being bloody cold before anyone will want to do anything about it. It’s when his SUV won’t start that Joe America will pay attention.

Kim Stanley Robinson tends to do things in threes, so presumably there will be one more book (called Sixty Something Something?) to tie up the loose ends left by this one. Oh yeah, I just looked it up, and it’s to be called Sixty Days and Counting.

As always, I find KSR’s style to be less than engaging. His main protagonist, Frank Vanderwal, is still an idiot. In fact, there is more focus in this that previously on Vanderwal’s slightly fucked mind. Vanderwal’s mental state is a synecdoche or something for the global climate. While his brain doesn’t work properly, nor does the climate. He has a relationship with a mysterious woman from the intelligence community, but it’s hard to tell if she really exists. He lives in a tree house and plays frisbee golf with similarly homeless people. He is, it has to be said, hard to like.

Still, we need to know what happens, don’t we? So we’ll read the sequel. And this book is to be admired for its engagement with big ideas and huge problems. And the biggest problem, suggests Robinson (not for the first time in his writing career), is with the political system we call democracy.

State of Fear – Michael Crichton

What fascinates me about the negative reviews for State of Fear, Michael Crichton’s 2004 environmental thriller, is the way in which the reviewers clearly resented the lecturing (hectoring) tone of the novel, as if that was something new from Crichton.

In my experience (and I’ve read a fair few of his, though not all of them), that’s what you pick up Crichton for. He likes to do that thing that’s so tricky to pull off: to mix enough fact in with the fiction so that you end up wondering what is real, and what is possible. I think what annoys people is when he’s preaching about something that kind of contradicts something you hold to be true. And that’s what this novel is about. “Most people” buy into global warming. And “most people” are probably wrong. Anyway, you don’t pick up a Crichton for the characters or the snappy dialogue. If you do, then you’re sadly deluded and should read some different writers.

The premise of State of Fear is that Politics + Science = Bad Science. Now. If we were in the pub, and I expressed that opinion, I think a lot of people would agree with me. A well known phrase or saying concerning wood and trees springs to mind. Politicians, it’s obvious are not – in general – scientists. Go further: media people are not – in general – scientists, either. Most wannabe journalists and reporters are Arts graduates. Am I wrong? You know I’m not.

In my previous blog life, I argued several times that there simply isn’t enough data to support the theory of global warming (or anthropogenic global warming, to give it its full title). When they can’t predict the weather five days in advance, no way can they predict the global climate 100 years hence. In fact, as Crichton mentions in the novel, most environmental groups don’t even acknowledge theories about chaotic systems and complexity that have developed over the past 30 years. We all know chaos theory exists, that its central tenet is sensitive dependency on initial conditions. What that means, in practice, is that in large and complex systems there are far too many variables for any kind of accurate modelling or prediction. Computer models about what happens to our climate 100 years from now are just guesswork. Nobody knows. Predictions up to now, from as recently as 20 years ago, Crichton points out, have been wildly wrong. 300% wrong. What Crichton says, and I agree with him, is that until they manage an accurate prediction of, say, 10 years, we should just ignore the computers and hope they go away. He goes further: says there are too many computer geeks sitting behind computers, and not enough real research going on in the field. We don’t even know, he says, how to manage a national park as a wilderness. It’s true. National Parks have been around for 100 years or so, but it’s only in the last 10-20 years that park managers realised that forest fires are good for the environment and wild life.

What is certain is that the climate and the environment will change. Because that’s what they do. The Earth, says Crichton, is currently on its third major atmosphere. We’re in the middle of (or at the end of, who knows) a general warming trend that started in 1850 and came after a 400-year “mini ace age.” Note the use of the diminutive. 400 years, in these terms, is “mini.” In global terms, in terms of brains-the-size-of-planets, 100 years in this little world is barely measurable.

It’s clear to me that what’s going on, in terms of Kyoto and all the legislation coming down like birdshit from above us, is that governments are seizing upon an opportunity to increase taxes. It’s a Clarkson argument, but it’s right. For example, just the other day they were talking about making airlines pay VAT for fuel, which they don’t currently have to do. Adding VAT, they say, would be an anti-global warming measure. Except, if you think about it, it wouldn’t be. Imagine your £20 easyjet ticket. How much of that is for fuel? Say a fiver. Add VAT to the fiver: 87 and a half pence. So, are you going to cancel your weekend in Barcelona because the ticket costs an extra pound? No, of course you’re not. So, will adding VAT to airline fuel reduce the number of flights, passengers, or the amount of fuel used? No, of course it won’t. What it will do is raise £xbillion for the government to spend on sweets.

There’s so much debunking going on in this book that it made me laugh. I really enjoyed it, but then I didn’t come into it “believing” in global warming, so I wasn’t offended when all the people who believe in it are made out to be charlatans and idiots.

Now, one reviewer called Kim Stanley Robinson the anti-Crichton when he published Forty Signs of Rain, his own take on the global warming thing. But now I’ve read the Crichton I can see that the two novels share a lot of common ground. Central to both novels is the way that science is conducted, and both find it lacking. Both make strong arguments that environmental research should be double-blind, so that scientists aren’t influenced by their paymasters – no matter who they are. Both feature lead characters who are a bit dumb and lack affect. Both make arguments about events being manipulated to suit an agenda other than the truth.

Crichton is optimistic about the future. He thinks that people in 2100 will be better off than us, just as we are better off in so many ways than the people of 1900. Crichton sees fear being created by politicians and the media in cahoots with each other as panic follows crisis follows panic. If its not salmonella in chocolate bars, it’s p a e d o p h i l e s. If not them, then the environment. If not that, it’s the Iranians, or the Koreans. He points out that the whole global warming fear started around 1989, when the communist threat receded and the Cold War ended. It’s a cynical view, but its one with which I have sympathy. It’s a fact that newspapers have to be filled with something, and TV schedules all have news bulletins. And there’s a lot of complete bollocks out there, I’m sure we all know. And a lot of peer pressure: to conform, or face abuse. I’d argue that the real subject of this book is not really the environment but the media, and the way they fail to keep us informed.

Which brings me back to the beginning, and the abuse that was hurled at Crichton for publishing this. If they could burn him at the stake, I’m sure they would. It’s not a brilliant book, not even in narrow Crichton terms, but it is fascinating, and I think everyone should be exposed to these arguments, and feel like they need to learn more, before they spout yet more bollocks about global warming.

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.