New Skies
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
275 pages
published in 2003
I didn't know this was meant to be an "anthology of today's science fiction" for a "new, younger generation of science fiction fans" until I got
this home from the library, as I only got it because Patrick Nielsen Hayden was the editor and I was curious to
see what his tastes were like. I thought New Skies was an anthology of new science fiction, but instead it's a showcase of science fiction
stories from the last twenty years, aimed at an audience new to the genre. Still, it's as good a test of Patrick's tastes as any, as not only did he
have to select his entries from over two decades of stories, but he also had to select them to show off the width and breadth of the genre, be not
too long and accessible to younger reader. A huge task indeed.
Since I've been reading science fiction for quite some time now, I'm not exactly the target audience for New Skies; I don't know how some
thirteen year old kid would like this book, but I enjoyed it. New Skies does a good job of representing how much different kinds of science
fiction stories there are and how much fun they can be. None of the stories were the kind that makes your hair stand on edge, but they're good representations
of what you can expect in science fiction and they're accesible.
Britain's Gulag - The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
Caroline Elkins
475 pages including index
published in 2005
Before Tom Wolfe used "Mau Mauing" to describe the ways in which well meaning, white government officials where cheated out of welfare money through
racial intimidation, Mau Mau was synonymous with a much greater terror. Mau Mau was the stuff of white colonialist nightmares: a freakish native cult
of criminals and gangsters that savagely attacked innocent white settlers in their very homes, killing them and their families, mutilating their bodies.
Sure, these people said they were freedom fighters, but you couldn't take this claim seriously. Everybody who mattered knew Kenya wasn't ripe at all for
independence, that only the poison the Mau Mau spread through their pagan rites would cause the natives to question the benevolence of the British
civilising mission in the country. Britain was therefore justified to use harsh measures to suppress this savagery and fortunately managed to do so,
protecting the white settlers and loyal natives and crush the rebels, though it took them eight years, from 1952 to 1960 to do so.
That's the myth of Mau Mau. The reality as Caroline Ekins describes in Britain's Gulag - The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya is far different.
There were incidents of Mau Mau savagery, but the British and settler response to it was much greater and was systematic, not incidental. It was under the
Kikuyu of central Kenya, the most populous of the ethnic groups in Kenya and the group with the greatest grievances against British rule, as much of their
land had been appropriated for white settlers that the Mau Mau rebellion was the most widespread, therefore the British did to the Kikuyu roughly what
the Germans did to the Polish during World War II. The nazi plan for Poland had been to destroy its population as a people by murdering its intellectual
elite, remove it from all the best parts of the country and herd the rest into the wastelands to serve as uneducated slave labour, with any resistance
brutally put down. What the British did to the Kikuyu in Kenya was not quite as bad, but it came awfully close. It was motivated by security concerns
rather than deliberate planning, but the endresult was still that less than fifteen years after World War II the British in Kenya had recreated much of
the nazi system in dealing with the Kikuyu's struggle for freedom.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City -- Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
365 pages including index
published in 2006
The Emerald City was what its inhabitants called the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2003-2004: a pleasant bubble of transplanted America, cut off
from the everyday reality of Iraq, the ultimate ivory tower where the Coalition Provisional Authority that was in power in that year made its plans for
the future of Iraq, unhindered by much knowledge of the world outside their bubble. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an eyewitness account
of that first year of the American occupation of Iraq, as seen from inside the bubble. It's a story of how wide eyed innocents and well intentioned ideologues
came to Iraq to remake the country into a model of Jeffersonian freemarket democracy, with little more to recommend them for the job than their personal
loyalty to Bush and the Republican party and how they were cruelly disappointed by the reality of post-war Iraq and its missed opportunities.
In short, this is a whitewash, though perhaps not a conscious whitewash. It's true the New York Times quote on the back calls this a
"A visceral --sometimes sickening-- picture of how the administration and the handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq"
and that every other page or so has you slapping your face at yet another incredibly obvious stupidity, but in the end it's still a whitewash. The
clue is in that word bungled. As if the Bush administration and their lackeys in Iraq started the war and subsequent occupation with
the best of intentions, but lacked the competence to fulfill them, or took the wrong decisions for Iraq not to further their own ends, but because
they were a bit naive about the realities of the country. The book is steeped in the assumption that, while the people in charge may have made the
wrong decisions, they had every right to attempt to make those decisions. It's like reading a book on British rule in India that only tells of
the problems the British had in establishing their rule and in the day to day running of their empire, without ever questioning the presence of
the British there.
When your local library's automated lending system refuses to recognise a book you're attempting to borrow when it's clearly there in front of you,
it's enough to make you a little bit paranoid, but when that book is Bad Monkeys, an example of American Paranoia at its finest, with
a Christopher Moore quote on the cover saying "Buy it, read it, memorise then destroy it. There are eyes everywhere.", you become more than
a bit paranoid. Little did I know then how appropriate that little incident was. Bad Monkeys is one of those books that makes you look twice
at every CCTV camera on your daily commute, not to mention much more innocent examples of street furniture for signs of hidden cameras.
You might know Matt Ruff from Sewer, Gas & Electric, his brilliant and hilarious
parody-slash-update-slash-mixup of the stoner paranoia classic Illuminantus! trilogy, not to mention that bible of teenage
libertarianism, Atlas Shrugged. If that novel showed Ruff's absurdistic, bombastic side, Bad Monkeys is toned down,
sleek and effortlessly cool. It still taps into that vein of essential American paranoia that also drove Sewer, Gas & Electric, but
this time it's more refined, less consciously wacky.
Whose Body?
Dorothy L. Sayers
191 pages
published in 1923
Back in 2001 when I started this booklog I'd just discovered Dorothy L. Sayers and her Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, which explains the
high porportion of them amongst the crime fiction I read in 2002/02. At the time I read whatever one I could get my hands on, without regards to
publication order, which led to some unfortunate accidents, like reading Have his Carcass before Strong Poison. Once I'd finished
the series I was a bit sated, which explains why I hadn't read another Lord Peter novel in over four years. But when I was looking for a light, short
detective novel to read in bed one dreary weekend, my eye fell on Whose Body? and I thought it high time to reread it.
Whose Body? is the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, originally published in 1923. We first meet Lord Peter in the back of a cab, on his way to
a rare books action, when he realises he left his catalogue at home. One damn and a annoyed taxi driver later, he's back just in time to hear his man Bunter
answer the phone. Luckily he come home when he did, because it's his mother, the Dowager Duchess, who asks him to help with a spot of bother for one her
acquaintances, Tipps, who just found a body in his bathtub - a stark naked body, apart from a pair of eyeglasses.
