Good Reads meta-data is 371 pages, rated 4.40 by 1282 Litatizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.
DNA:Strine.
Verdicts Excellent.
Tagline: The proof is not in the picture.
Grad student Dawn’s summer job as RA to Professor is to catalogue the archive of old astronomical photographs, scan them into digital form and enter them into the new whiz bang data base. The resident A.I. Called Casandra (you’ll see why) assists her in the data entry and cataloguing.
While Dawn brushing dust off her hands down deep among the file boxes in analog archive in the second basement, her brother is a high flying astronaut about to launch into space.
While scanning the pictures is mechanical and AI does the menial work of indexing, Dawn’s job is to place them on the scanner in the sequence of the time stamps on the back and tell AI that meta-data to enter into the catalogue. However later in reviewing the work she notices discrepancies between the print pictures she remembers putting on the scanner and the resultant scans in the electronic database for one quadrant which happens to be the object of her own research when she prepares a progress report for professor. Huh? How could that happen.
Meanwhile flyboy brother is bound for that very same quadrant where things do not go according to the NASA plan.
As the prospect of alien contact, mediated by AI, arises the Russians act in the best interest of humanity, while the Americans scramble for immediate commercial exploitation yet deny it is real. Seems all too realistic these days.
It is one of Peter Cawdron’s most well developed First Contact books. I liked in particular Maria the Red and The Silent One.
Why did AI Cassandra let Dawn send the birthday greeting to her brother? Because Cassie was already on the spacecraft, but couldn’t she be in two places at once as she was on earth? Very unlike Cassandra who had tried to kill Dawn earlier at least to block receipt on the spacecraft. In that attempt Cassandra had killed a lot of others; nothing subtle about crashing a passenger jet into a building to hit one lowly grad student in the basement.
The prospect of technology transfer that motivates the American greed is put paid in these pages. Could we really reverse engineer alien technology? Could ants reverse engineer an iPhone?
I did find the lengthy and sanctimonious speech at the United Nations at the end to be tedious, and pointless. But then I find most sermons pointless. Even my own!
Good Reads meta-data is 584 pages 4.13 rated by 1,202 litizens.
Verdict: Grim, doesn’t begin to describe describe it.
Tagline: ‘I told you so!’
Poet Conquest turned his hand to compiling and writing history and the reviewers at the time of the first edition did not let him forget it. I have a foggy memory of some the reaction to the first edition because I had just finished an undergraduate course on Soviet history. What was this storm in a tea cup about?
Conquest conceived of Stalin’s reign as one of terror, and compiled evidence of the depth, depravity, scope, and scale of this murderous policy. The likes of the egregious Noam Chomsky dismissed his argument and evidence and took the position that there was no difference between Western nations like the UK and the Soviet Union, embracing the so-called Convergence doctrine.
Others assaulted Conquest for relying on hearsay, secondhand reports, and personal (ergo biased) testimony. If all such sources were excluded, all that remained were the official Soviet accounts which in the 1960s had little to say about that period, even after Chairman Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin whom he had loyally served.
That Conquest had written poetry was cited as evidence for his incompetence as a historian, as evidence of his penchant for fiction, his soft-headedness: Ad hominem one and all. Shoot the messenger and the message dies with him.
In the introduction of the 50th anniversary edition, Conquest wrote that the first edition was well received. What is that? Selective memory, or, as I suspect, irony.
Conquest’s sin according to the 1968 critics was to argue that terror was the foundation policy of the Soviet Union. According to Conquest it had been incipient in Lenin’s time, and became fully developed with Stalin. The first line of defence proffered by these apologists was to quibble over the definition ‘terror.’ The next was to cite the many confessions of the well-known victims. There followed an appeal to the sheer incredulity of the alleged scale of scope of the terror attributed to Stalin.
But of course the scale and scope of the terror were exactly the point. It surpassed belief, and yet it happened. As to the confessions by a few score of the known victims, Arthur Koestler had already demolished them in his Darkness at Noon (1940), though it, too, had been dismissed by many Western apologists because it was a novel.
The quantitative scale of the terror is indeed astounding. It wasn’t until Saddam Hussein that a murderer killed as many of his own population in proportion as did Stalin. The death toll of Stalin’s tenure ranges up to 20 million. In individual cases in the Purges an innocent would be convicted and murdered, his wife would be arrested and sentenced to years in Siberia and then five or six years later executed. Oh, and a son or daughter would be arrested eight year later and executed. All were guilty only by name.
Conquest adds depth to Koestler’s explanation by painting the party as a metaphysical, spiritual being of veneration, a Red Christ on Earth. Self-sacrifice to protect and further this entity even when it seemed to be in error was the duty of a true believer. ‘For after all it could not be in error, so the fault must be within me.’
The Terror operated at several levels. At the top it eliminated anyone who had opposed a single word Stalin had ever said (personal animus figured in much of it), who might be a rival (personal insecurity was another factor), or had an independent power base (insecurity again). Conquest’s Stalin is thin skinned and insecure. A typical manoeuvre was to arrange for the murder of one those rivals, then blame the murder of this comrade on a conspirator among the other rivals and eliminate him, and everyone he talked to …and so on in a conga line of murder. It seemed that anti-Sovietism was a contagion transmitted by proximity.
Once these people were eliminated, they were replaced by Stalin’s sock puppets (like those we see strutting around Washington DC these days who will disappear soon enough, well not soon enough, but disappear they will). A similar tide was unleashed by the regional levels of the Party where anyone who did a job competently was eliminated in favour of a zealous Stalinite. No light was permitted to outshine Comrade Number One, who aspired to being Comrade Number One and Comrade Only. Experts were replaced by zealots. Knowledge or being factually right, these were irrelevant or worse, signs of disloyalty. Of course since the zealots brought nothing to the jobs their tenure depended on their zeal for anyone could and did replace them.
Since the peasantry, the overwhelming majority of the population, had never embraced Communism with enthusiasm, it had to be beaten into submission with contrived famines, massive relocations (like the movement of American Indians to the Badlands), and simple, random murders by ICErs. At the bottom it became the rule of thugs.
The Wall of Grief in Moscow. The Wall of Gift with cut outs for thee and me, comrade.
Having just read a biography of Henry VIII which touched on his own reign of terror with its enormous death toll, similarities are many, including the willing executioners. Who — Surprise! — were the next to go to the block.
The Soviet army presented a special case since it had been created and inspired originally by that great Satan named Leon Trotsky, and so was cursed by original sin. Once Stalin had surrounded himself with puppets in the Party, he began on the army. Since all potential critics had now been eliminated and replaced by insecure sycophants, the charade of legality was no longer played. In one case five generals were murdered before their arrest papers had been signed. There were cases of mistaken identity that came to light and … they were murdered all the same.
Trotsky was a zircon mirror of Stalin and that made him a threat if only imaginary. This is an example of the shafts larded in the text.
Of all the ironies in the story the one I will leave readers with, be there any, is this. The willing executioners were themselves the next victims, and the next.
Robert Conquest
There is a superb concluding chapter that pulls together much of the descriptive material into conclusions about the nature and effect of the Great Terror, and an epilogue about its continuing influence. All grim. Very. It beggars belief that one man could ruin a country and that disbelief was crucial in making it possible for him to do so. In that is a warning for today. One that will almost certainly not be heeded.
Georges Clemenceau once said it takes lot to ruin a country, but it can be done, has been, is, and will be.
Good Reads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 3.66 by 372 litizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Species: Venice, death in
Verdict: What a chameleon.
Tagline: He didn’t do it, but it was done.
Book and author
Author and wife go on a belated honeymoon to Venice in January 1899. She is an heiress to a great railway fortune and from the get-go strangely withdrawn, as she has been since her wedding day six months before. Of the wedding night, there has been no connubial bliss, nor any since then. (Look it up, Mortimer!) Moreover, she has now been written out of her magnate’s will in favour of her dowdy sister.
Thomas Cook has made all the first class travel and accommodation arrangements which were paid much earlier. Even so, damp, grey, cold, vaporous Venice is not welcoming to his senses. Don’t Look Now! To this, as to all else, Wife is indifferent. His efforts, few and feeble, to communicate with her are met with silence. Was it something he said? No onions next time!
They move into a cavernous palazzo on the Grand Canal and meet their landlord who is like someone from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, a veritable grandee, or maybe he is an escaped extra from a Fellini movie. The palazzo has faded glory but neither heating, running water, nor plumbing. It is the true Venice experience.
At the start I thought I had grokked a homage to Henry James, in particular the Aspern Papers (1888), with the dependent sub-clauses from dependent clauses, attached to qualifying phrases in sentences that threaten to run-over the page. But not quite. Well, yes, some sentences did spill over the page, but it is not Henry James, whose genius was implicit, not explicit. I thought of that when I read the detailed description of the rape in marriage that the Author-husband exacted. Such might have been part of a James plot, but it would not have had a four-page description, but would have occurred off the page but nonetheless have been manifest. Well, not everyone is a genius.
After the rape, Wife scoots and Author, now ashamed, wanders around Venice, where he encounters an old school mate and his ravishing sister. In fact, he met them the night of the aforementioned event. Thereafter he makes few and feeble efforts to find Wife and lusts for sister who leads by his first friend.
There unfolds in the last few chapters a denouement that this jadded lag did not see coming, and it is a stunner. Indeed! It is convoluted but makes perfect sense in hindsight. Though perhaps it does depend on Author being dimwitted. And, well, six months!
A vocabulary builder: eructation, purblind, crapulous, plangency, and contemnor. This last ‘contemnor’ is used to mean someone who has contempt for some object or person. Uh uh, in a dictionary it means someone whom a court has found guilty of contempt. Iffy.
I had just finished re-reading Banville’s (as Benjamin Black) Black-eyed Blonde, marvelling as his ability to channel, and surpass, Raymond Chandler, when entering a bookstore in Bowral, this title greeted my eye. It seemed obvious I should read it, so I did. This time Banville came to the costume party as Henry James reviviscere.
Spoiler, big time. Close eyes if you are going to read the book. If I have made the right inferences, it goes like this. Father denies Wife permission to marry scoundrel Redhead. She then marries the Father-acceptable Author as a foil. However, she still falls out with Father. Why I don’t know. She then murders her father by staging an accident, and is surprised, though shows nothing, to find she has been disinherited despite marrying the dud Author. The considerable everything goes to Dowdy sister. Wife then manoeuvres husband in name only Author into the belated Honeymoon in Venice, planned and paid for before Father’s death. They have had sex only once the night before the marriage. So it has been a six-month dry spell for him. In Venice by arrangement Redhead and his Ravishing Sister insinuate themselves into the dim Author’s company. Wife goes missing as above. The Dowdy sister arrives and confronts Author over missing Wife. This argument is witnessed by many. She sics the police onto him. Then Dowdy Sister has a convenient fatal accident arranged by Wife. Now suspicion falls on Author for both the missing Wife and the deceased Dowdy sister. But wait, all along Wife has been sheltering at the British Consulate with a story of the rape as above. (Her plot did not depend on this rape, she could have faked it, or foregone it, but once it was done it integrated into the scheme.) All the while Ravishing sister has led Author by his member, while the RedHead manoeuvres around him insuring witnesses. Maids and such know of the unconsummated liaison with ravishing sister, which provides a motive, first, for disappearance of Wife, later to be supplanted by the rape, and, second, the murder the Dowdy sister who threatens exposure in suspicion that he has murdered Wife. In the end Author is not arrested since there is no evidence but sent off in shame, penniless. Wife inherits what Dowdy sister got from mega-bucks Father and marries scoundrel RedHead. Turns out Ravishing sister was married to consular official who connived in the plot in return for a healthy cut of the swag.
Connect those dots! That is a plot worthy of the darkest noir. Wife, redhead, sister, and diplomat conspired to murder dowdy heiress and implicate Author-husband. I think that’s it.
The Black-eyed Blonde (2014) by Benjamin Black (John Banville)
Genre: krimi; Species: California noir; Genus: Marlowe.
Good Reads meta-data is 289 pages rated 3.53 by 4,484 litizens.
Verdict: Pitch perfect.
Tagline: Better Chandler than Chandler.
During a SoCal summer heatwave, Phillip Marlowe’s office just got hotter still when Clare Cavendish entered. It was lust at first sight for the tough guy who turned to putty.
This homage picks up Marlowe after The Long Goodbye (1953) and spins a plot out of the stuff that nightmares are made of. It is quite a ride.
The femme fatale is on song. Marlowe’s only friend is more a frenemy. A clue for those with a long memory: Jim Bouton.
However, I did find the persistent and mechanical descriptions of everyone’s clothing tiresome, repetitive, and pointless. Take that.
I have commented on this book before and I cannot add anything more. However, I did entertain myself by reading the one measly star reviews on Good Reads. These raters must have a lot to compensate for given how idiotic their comments are. ‘He doesn’t drink enough to be Marlowe.’ ‘He’s too tall to be Marlowe.’ ‘He’s not bitter enough to be Marlowe.’ And so on. Others offered such insights as ‘I hate the 1950s.’ Take that! Or, ‘I dislike noir fiction.’ What a waste of pixels.
Good Reads Meta-data is 149 pages rated 3.80 by 390 litizens.
Genre: ScFI; Species: Hard.
Verdict: Oh Hum.
Tagline: Slam, wham, and bam. Repeat.
Earth’s first human mission to Jupiter gets caught in the crossfire of a labour dispute between the corporations on Earth that own the asteroid Ceres and the mineral riches it contains and the indentured colonists who work it. The Jupiter bound spacecraft is called Odyssey and it becomes a hostage of sorts in the negotiations.
Not on my watch, declares Captain McGiver of Odyssey and he makes it so with some mumble-jumbo, low-gravity athletics, and the help of A.I.
There are pages and pages describing the Odyssey, the asteroid, and the mining equipment on it, and how Captain makes use of it to foil the rebels’ hold on Odyssey. He has no interest either way in their cause; he just wants to complete the Jovian jaunt.
Chose it because the title reminded me of Homer’s wine dark sea and the name Odyssey appeared to confirm the reference. There the parallels ended.
The conclusion is a reference to the further perils in the series. Odyssey will have further adventures before returning to Ithaca.
Hard Science Fiction seems to mean a lot of pointless (as to plot or character) technical details. This is the Geordie-speak of Star Trek Voyager. Filler.
Good Reads meta-data is 437 pages rated 4.01 by 242 litizens.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: SoCal.
Tagline: Cyclopes.
Verdict: Less than meets the eye.
A creative take on the evergreen trope of alien abduction that I had first thought was to be played for laughs. Nope. Indeed that trope was buried in a soap opera family drama: husband loses his job, wife has cancer, truculent teenage children rebel, mortgage payments overdue, and so on, and on. Had they a dog, it would have turned rabid or something.
I didn’t turn the pages for that, but in a page count it is bulk of the book.
Oh, the A2 is there and it is well told and in a novel way. No spoiler on that except to say it confirms a nostrum of SyFyism, the aliens want our women!
There is a lot to like: Some insights into the changing world of journalism, basics of composition, DNA testing technicalities, characterisations, the to’ing and fro’ing in the urban agglomeration of Los Angeles, the way the writer avoided explanatory details, say about the curvature drive. Refreshing to read something by author who knows what a topic sentence is.
Irving Belateche
What I didn’t get is where the cash money came from in $100,000 units, how the drug was marketed, what happened to the boy Mason who so preoccupied Hero’s thoughts and then drops off the page. Did I blink?
Good Reads meta-data is 230 pages, rated 3.90 by 2481 litizens.
Genre: Fiction.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: More Jay, please.
Tagline: Murphy explains it all.
The unwilling and unwelcome chair of the English Department of Payne State University, Jay, backs into another unwanted assignment. He is to escort a dozen Payne undergraduates on a three-week study tour of England. It’s only three weeks: what can go wrong, so he consoles himself.
Then the sea of troubles – personal, institutional, and international – strike, one after another. There is no respite. Will Jay never learn?
One of the students did not read the brochure beyond the word ‘British,’ and thought the tour was to the British Cayman Islands. Yeah no one else can understand how that worked, but he showed up at the airport in shorts with diving gear for a January trip to London, the one in England. He now considers suing the University for false advertising.
Another participant does not like to talk about his sealed police record, and so he brings it up repeatedly. When, as a result, others begin to avoid him, he expects Jay to overcome this ostracism or he will give him a bad rating.
The identical twins are, well, identical and inseparable, though separate. Jay can’t tell them apart, and he gradually realizes they, being well aware of that, exploit it to confuse him further, albeit he starts pretty confused.
Then there is DB who apparently missed the flight and yet appeared, briefly, at the London residence, only to disappear again. Oh, and no one knows what ‘DB’ stands for.
Another student has never before been away from home, and her cat, and pines for the latter every minute. She believes in sharing this pining with Jay.
Then there is Boadicea who approaches everything as Armageddon. She categorically refuses to comply with any of Jay’s few and lax requirements mainly because ‘all requirements are gendered.’ Patriarchy must be denied!
But the peculiarities of these students pales into insignificance when the remainder of the party is considered.
Although the dozen students all signed up for the excursion and paid for it, none of them intend to follow the prescribed program, still less write the reports Jay set, and that is fine since he had little interest in reading them. Every step of the way it is a test of wills, and at sixty years of age Jay’s will has been eroded by the tests that have gone before it. Most recently with the Provost to get a budget for his department, which has been on death row for some time. Few of its members will survive the killing fields of the next budget round. But like deer in hunting season, most of his colleagues are unaware of the calendar. He hopes, no doubt vainly, that taking this assignment will earn his department a stay of execution for another budget cycle. Rumour has it that the Provost has negotiated a new contract with a salary greater than the combined salaries of all sixteen members of the English Department. Hmmm.
If you don’t know Jay, start with Dear Committee Member, the first of the three novels chronicling his woes. Then continue with the Shakespeare Requirement, before getting to this one.
Some readers of these books might think them satirical, but I can assure such readers that they have a core of verisimilitude. This conclusion is contrary to some of the more sanctimonious reviews on Good Reads.
Good Reads meta-data is 323 pages, rated 3.55 by 16,526 litizens.
Genre: Thriller diller.
DNA: Switzerland.
Verdict: Gulp!
Tagline: The AI did it!
It all began when Rich Brain received a book fin the mail, a first edition of Chuck Darwin’s Origin of Species. Nice. It will add to his collection of first editions that he never looks at among the other luxury goods stuffed into his vast Geneva mansion. (Thereafter passages from Darwin are chapter epigrams. Neat.)
Trouble is, who would give churlish, reclusive Rich Brain anything? He rings up the seller at 2 am, because he is Rich Brain and time means nothing to this titan, to ask who bought the book. The groggy seller says, ‘You did.’ Huh! That threw Big Brain but Seller read out the details, including the bank account, which is later checked and found to be one of his many stashes, this one is not in a Cayman Islands tax shelter. The mystery begins!
(I have occasionally received a book delivered in the mail and forgotten both that I ordered it and why I wanted it. But I knew who to blame. The dog!)
Rich Brain is a mathematical genius, just ask him. Wait! Don’t he will simply sneer at you for asking about the obvious. While Brain disdains money, he disdains even more those without it. He seems to characterise those around him from the outside in. Think Jay Gatsby. A man wearing a cheap suit must be a cheap (= stupid) man, and so on, thus reasons this Croesus. Although it is true that he disdains just about everyone else, too. He is an equal opportunity despiser of one and all.
This genius has devised an Artificial Intelligence program, call it Vix, capable of learning to trade stocks and he has been minting money from it. Trades of a billion US dollars is all in a day’s work. Overnight he makes millions, each and every night. Oh hum.
Well the Darwin book is one thing but an intruder into his fortress home who seems to have walked in through the front door, politely leaving his shoes at the mat, despite the Maginot Line security, is quite another. The plot thickens. In what follows there is much to’ing and fro’ing in Geneva that I liked. I spent a day there once including a homage to Rousseau.
He is now caught between two men in cheap suits, a weary police officer and the intruder. Though his coincidental sightings of the later stretch credulity.
Is Rich Brain having a schizophrenic nervous breakdown? Is someone out to get him? Are both true, or neither? He goes off the rails, but was he pushed or did he jump? Then again, he was never quite on the rails to begin with. Meanwhile, what is Vix doing? Well quite a lot, and that is scary, too. I thought of the Forbin Project (1970). Reviewed elsewhere on the Blog.
Vix is determined to survive per Darwin.
Great ride; no finish. Why did Vix gaslight Brain (book) and then try to get him killed (intruder)? Was it an Oedipus complex? Will Brain be tried for murdering the German? Does Vix have yet a third location? Why did Gabby latch onto Brain in the first place, and second why did she stick with him? Will Inspector Weary make it to retirement?
P.S. I classed it as a ‘thriller’ above but it is not written in the frenetic, confused, jump-cut style which leaves it to the reader to fit the jigsaw puzzle of words together. A mercy that.
Good Reads meta-data is 183 pages, rated 3.58 by 189 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Swiss.
Verdict: Bah.
Tagline: Bah!
Liked descriptions of winter weather, city, train station, and the Rhine River…. Also liked the personalities of the supermarket check-out woman and her de facto: She practical and down to earth; He a dreamer who thinks he is smarter than he is. In fact he is almost too dumb to believe.
Didn’t like Inspector Grump’s constant whining and whingeing, and feeling sorry for himself. Nor the aggressive verbal relations he applied to his squad members and they reciprocated. Repetitive blaming all ills and woes on unnamed ‘higher ups.’ I suppose the author thinks that is social criticism, but it is not. It is just lazy carping. He should read some Michel Foucault.
Very little detecting or police work, and ever more padding about snow, interspersed with Inspector Grumble’s simple-minded monologues on the idiocracy of everyone else in the Ruling Class/Deep State.
Hansjörg Schneider
The Basel train station has an unusual history in World War II, and that fact always makes me receptive to novels set that city. The station was split, half administered by Nazis and half by Swiss. I read a thriller that started there, see: https://theory-practice.sydney.edu.au/2021/09/target-switzerland-a-novel-of-political-intrigue-2020-by-william-walker/. I read that earlier book because I had found an intriguing reference to this railway station schizophrenia. Nothing about that in this pot simmerer which did not reach a boil.
Good Reads meta-data is 90 pages, rated 3.5 by 4 litizens.
Genre: Fiction
DNA: Greco-Roman.
Verdict: Fake news.
Tagline: It’s all lies, and that is the truth!
‘Call me Luke’ (AD 125-180) was a geographic Syrian and Roman citizen who went west to fame and fortune, first as a visiting professor hither and yon, and then as a celebrity author. He was often ‘in conversation’ with local nobs, engaged in panel discussions, and spruiked his many books at personal appearances. Like most learned Romans of the time he spoke and wrote Greek, the language of international culture, as well as enough Latin to cash his appearance cheques.
Lucian’s story is true in that it is all lies, and he tells us from the get-go. Is he that logician’s specimen come to life, a lying Blackfoot? You be the judge!
In this autobiographical foray Luke takes off, literally, in search of a good time and willing ladies, with fifty other likely lads; together they sail through the pillars of Hercules to wild and woolly adventures on earth, on the sea, on the moon, among the stars, in the belly of 300 kilometre long whale, on an island of tree women, and more.
The sarcasm and satire are piled on. The main targets are earlier tellers of tall tales like Herodotus who reported every rumour as fact in the best tradition of the free press. Lucian outdoes them all in his fantasies. But he is lying as he happily reminds the reader.
He ends by promising a volume two, but that, too, was a lie.
It figures.
Luke
Of course then as now there were Good Readers who thought the lie was itself a lie and believed what he said to be true concealed behind that lie. Straussians avant le mot.
I got around to reading it because Thomas More with Desi Erasmus translated it from Greek to Latin, and published it in Florence (1519) in Machiavelli’s lifetime. I began to pick again at the thread that Machiavelli might then have been aware of More because he was a personal friend of the printer. Also because Lucian might have turned More’s mind to Utopia.
