I'm not a great fan of Adam Roberts, as my reviews of his first two novels, Salt and
On, as well as his first book on science fiction show. He has a
style of writing that is too flat and detached for my liking, a penchant for using unlikeable characters as his protagonists, some difficulty
in creating a good story and a view of science fiction I don't share. In both Salt and On Roberts had created
interesting settings, but fell down on providing the characters and story to do justice to them.
Swiftly, not to be confused with his earlier collection of short stories also called Swiftly, is Adam Roberts' latest novel,
a continuation of Jonathan Swift's classic proto-science fiction novel, Gulliver's Travels. Roberts takes Swift's satire on early eigthteen
century Britain and Europe and imagines what could've happened if Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and the Houyhnhnms were real, what the world could've
looked like almost one and a half centuries later, in 1848. Now there are huge armies of Liliputians (or rather the more reliable Blefuscudians)
working in England's industries, bought and sold as so many animals. The Houyhnhnms have been enlisted as His Majesty's Sapient Cavalry, while
the Royal Navy has killed most of the Brobdingnagians as a menace to the British Empire. There's another war with France going on, one England is
winning handily, laying siege to Versailles.
We got the Americans at war in not just one, but two Asian countries (and looking to add a third), a deeply corrupt and arguably unelected president in
the White House, a lame duck and deeply loathed Labour prime minister, a financial meltdown and the return of stagflation and now UFO sightings are making a combat?
We're just doomed to live through a remake of the seventies, aren't we?
And like every remake it's louder and brassier than the original...
Righting English that's Gone Dutch -- Joy Burrough - Boenisch
Righting English That's Gone Dutch
Joy Burrough - Boenisch
166 pages including index
published in 2004
I was going to start this review with a funny paragraph containing most or all of the errors Joy Burrough - Boenisch talks about in her
book, but decided to be merciful and spare you the hilarity. If you do want examples, I'm sure I've made most of the mistakes she mentions
at one time or another, either here or on my other blogs. Though I pride myself -- like everybody else in the Netherlands -- on my good command
of English, both written and spoken, I still make the ocassional mistake, especially when tired or in a hurry. It's in those circumstances, when
I'm not paying quite enough attention to what I'm writing and rely on instinct, that Dutch habits take over and mistakes are made, because I
use the wrong translation, attempt to use Dutch rules of grammar, or do something else that works in Dutch but not as well or at all in English.
Which is what Righting English That's Gone Dutch is all about: those errors people with Dutch as their first language make in English
when they go by assumptions carried over from the Dutch. It's intended for people who are perfectly comfortable writing in English, perhaps a little
bit too comfortable, but who don't quite have the command of English a native speaker would have. As the author puts it, it's for people who write
perfectly grammatical English, but with a Dutch accent: Dunglish. As such Righting English That's Gone Dutch isn't intended
for people who only have a modest grasp of English, but for those of us who can write English perfectly well, apart from several niggling habits
we've carried over from Dutch.
Showing off my taste in music and failing miserably
A music meme, courtesy of the Gaping Silence "Pick an album
for every year of your life". The albums I chose are not necessarily the best, but are my favourites of that year. Some years were very difficult,
like e.g. 1980 or 1991 because so many good albums came out that year. A lot of metal made it on the list, though not deliberately. It's just that
in the nineties especially I lost most interest in rock or pop. To mkae it slightly easier, I excluded all live albums or boxed sets or that sort of
thing.
1974
Hawkwind
Hall of the Mountain Grill
1975
Pink Floyd
Wish You Were Here
1976
Parliament
Mothership Connection
1977
Ian Dury
New Boots and Panties
1978
Bruce Springsteen
Darkness on the Edge of Town
1979
Gang of Four
Entertainment!
1980
The Teardrop Explodes
Kilimanjaro
1981
Duran Duran
Duran Duran
1982
Iron Maiden
Number of the Beast
1983
Doe Maar
4US
1984
Prince
Purple Rain
1985
S.O.D.
Speak English or Die
1986
Talk Talk
The Colour of Spring
1987
Anthrax
Among the Living
1988
Slayer
South of Heaven
1989
Nine Inch nails
Pretty Hate Machine
1990
Banlieu Rouge
En Attendant Demain
1991
Gorefest
Mindloss
1992
Biohazard
Urban Discipline
1993
Paradise Lost
Icon
1994
Entombed
Wolverine Blues
1995
My Dying Bride
the Angel and the Dark River
1996
KMFDM
Xtort
1997
Rammstein
Sehnsucht
1998
Asian Dub Foundation
Rafi's Revenge
1999
In Extremo
Verehrt und Angespien
2000
Hefner
We Love the City
2001
Daft Punk
Discovery
2002
The Streets
Original Pirate Material
2003
Dizzee Rascal
Boy in Da Corner
2004
Dilated Peoples
Neighborhood Watch
2005
Art Brut
Bang Bang Rock and Roll
2006
Arctic Monkeys
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
2007
Bonde do Role
With Lasers
(I wonder what Darren would make of this meme and whether he can think of anything outside
77-86...)
Last week I noted that, for all the attention paid to it, knife crime is only a minor problem
compared to the number of young adults and children killed or wounded in traffic accidents each year. Surprisingly, nobody in the British media or
politics picked up on this eminently sensible point and the hysteria has flown richly this weekend. The Tories want everybody who carries a knife to
go to prison, while Jacqui "useless" Smith wanted every knife criminal to visit their victims in hospital, before denying she ever mentioned it, after
everybody with even one functioning brain cell pointed out how stupid that was. Even the LibDems came up with something noble sounding but impractical,
but who cares about them.
If you look at it rationally, the treatment of "knife crime" as a serious political issue is absurd. Yes, it is quite awful that some twenty people have
been killed this year in knife attacks, that several thousand more have been injured this way, but statistically it's just noise, as my comparison with
the number of young people killed in traffic last week showed. So why isn't there the outrage about traffic accidents as there is about knife crime? It's
not even as if politicians can do much about knife crime, beyond passing yet another tabloid-driven emergency law.
The thing is that knife crime, unlike road safety, can be presented as a moral issue, a story of bad people and innocent victims. (I suppose this is
why this sort of media-political hysteria is called a moral panic.) The tabloids love this sort of story of course, gets their readers in
that frothing rage they like them in, against "that sort of people", which can be either chavs or Blacks, or both, according to the tabloid's style
and flavour. For politicians it's a safe way of raising their profiles, coming over all tough on crime and with little consequences if they get things
wrong doing so. But it's a distraction from the real issues that desperately need attention, it creates an atmosphere of fear and distrust and it
doesn't help with Britain's very real problems: the economy failing, the environment collapsing and a government stuck supporting two hugely unpopular
imperial adventures.
The Later Roman Empire
Averil Cameron
238 pages including index
published in 1993
As you may have noticed if you're a regular reader of my booklog, is that I've developed a mild obsession with Late Antiquity and
the Roman Empire, fueled by the two excellent books i got out of the library last year, Peter Heather's
The Fall of the Roman Empire and Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome. Before that I'd
only read about Rome in a few history lessons at school, a couple of popular history books for kids and a shedload of Asterix comics,
all of which emphasised the early days of Rome, up until Caesar and Augustus, with perhaps a bit of Nero thrown in. Everything after the first century CE
was largely ignored or at best only mentioned briefly; the later centuries of the Roman Empire are seen as an afterthought, a long slide into barbarism
ala Edward Gibbon.
Yet if you start reading more academic treatments of Roman history, you soon discover that this view has long been abandonded, ever since the publication
of Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity in 1971. That was the first popular book to do away with the idea of the dark ages,
re-emphasising the continuity between the Christianised empire of the third century CE and the Early Middle Ages, as well as the continuing survival of
the Eastern Empire centered around Byzantium, as opposed to the Western Empire's breakup. Averil Cameron's The Later Roman Empire is one
product of this re-emphasis. Published in 1993 as a volume in the Fontana History of the Ancient World, it shows that the view put forth
by Peter Brown has won mainstream acceptance. It is meant as a standard textbook on the late Roman Empire, because none such was yet written in English,
as the preface explains.
British Summertime
Paul Cornell
404 pages
published in 2002
British Summertime was a novel I didn't have high expectations of, but which pleasantly surprised me. It was one of the first books I
picked up on my latest library run, as something that looked good enough to take home if I didn't find anything else. Although I did find several
other, more promising novels that day (including Ink and Swiftly, I still took it home with me, read a couple of pages and
banished it to the bottom of the stack. It was only when I'd finished all the other novels I'd picked up that I started on this and to my amazement
found myself utterly captivated. I was all the more surprised because it quickly turned out that this was a deeply Christian novel, while I am anything
but.
Usually, religion is politely ignored in science fiction, apart from the occasional made-up pagan rites to spice up some space opera or other. And when
it does appear, it's usually because the author has an axe to grind. It's rare to find genuinely Christian characters in science fiction without them
being stereotypes, but British Summertime has them, as well as a plot revolving around the literal truth of Christianity and manages to do
so without me throwing the book against the wall. Not a mean feat, that. It works because Cornell treats it as just another interesting science fiction
idea to play with.
Ah, the "it's not racism if it's not about *race*" thing.
Problem is, THERE ARE NO HUMAN RACES. The fact itself that you establish a distinction between "racims" and "other stuff" sorta proves that
you are a racist.
Because, well, how do you say that somebody is, say, an Arab? Is a half-British person whose mother is Egyptian Arab? Well, that's hard
isn't it? There have been people in Egypt long before the tribes from the Arabian Peninsula swept there, and who is to say what part of
her genes is "Arab"? And frankly, y'know, it's not as if people aren't mixed up plenty. Time it was when a geneticist did a DNA examination
of the people residing in Italy and found that there were only two groups genetically diverse enough to be told apart - in Tuscany and in
Sardenia.
There are no human races. The "race" idea in America mostly applies to descendant of African slaves; but Africa is such a genetically
diverse mix that the only thing that distinguish these people is the color of their skin, a very superficial characteristic, and one,
as we know, that is not "really" important because there are black people who can "pass" and they are certainly still considered black
or mixed "race" at best.
There are no human races. Not only we are all, of course, capable of producing offsprings, we are all made up of far more diverse genes than
people believe - including African genes in James Watson.
[...]
Because race, my friend, is in the eye of the beholder. Race is the square hole bigoted people push you in, no matter how round you are.
And if you hate and despise people based on one fact you know about them, their faith or lack of it, their skin color, their class, their
gender, their lack of gender, the way the choose to entertain themselves in the privacy of their own bedrooms or out there in the public
square - then, my friend, you are the same sort of shit whatever you choose to call your bigotry and if you keep wasting your breath by
tracing lines in the sand, then it's your own humanity that you are condemning.
Quite a lot of bigots are targeting Muslims and hiding behind the figleaf of criticising their religion rather than their persons, but
would we accept the same excuse from somebody who goes on about "the Jews" and "Jewish influences"? Of course not. But somehow it's
still acceptable to pretend that the people who bang on about the Muslims are not doing it out of bigotry or racism, but just because
they're genuinely concerned about the illiberal nature of Islam or the oppression of women forced to wear burquas.
One telling example has been playing out in the Netherlands this week, where after a string of high profile free speech incidents, in
which e.g. art was removed from a public exhibition hall because it might offend Muslims, Geert Wilders' party, the misnamed Party for
Freedom (PVV), has set up a free speech hall int he chambers of parliament, in which such "censored" works would be shown. One clever activist,
who had remembered that certain anti-Wilders posters created by the Internationale Socialisten had been confiscated by the
police, called the PVV's bluff and entered said poster for the exhibition. Guess what? The PVV was only interested in "cases involving
Muslims".
To be fair, William Sanders using "sheetheads" to refer to Muslims is certainly no advertisment for science fiction, but at least
he's no Martin Amis who went
quite a lot further in his bigotry.
This is just a place for me to jot down some random thoughts and reactions to the news so I don't have to yell at the television or radio, or mutter to myself whilst reading the news.
Waffle
In which Reinder Dijkhuis, Adam Cuerden, Timm Brand, Geir Strøm and Jeroen Jager talk about comics, music, politics and the impending apocalypse.
Deltoid
A science orientated weblog by Tim Lambert.
Encyclopedia Astronautica
Incredibly cool site about the history of space travel, with lots of info about
the various space programs. Recommended for all spacenuts.
The Loom
A blog of biology and bioscience, written by Carl Zimmer.
Panda's Thumb
On evolutionary theory and the fight against the intelligent design loons
Pharyngula
Science, politics and the intersection between them. By PZ Myers.
Real Climate
A commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists.
