Category: Book Review

The Library: A Fragile History (2021) by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree 

Good Reads meta-data is 518 pages rated 3.84 by 987 litizens. 

Genre: History.

Verdict: The new is old. 

Tagline:  Where’s Melville?  

A comprehensive survey of book collections from Alexandria – both ancient and contemporary – to digital.  Along the way is papyrus, vellum, linen, paper, and pixels. 

Books have always sparked conflicts by those looking for a fight.  Romans were one of the few conquerors who preserved the books of the vanquished for a time. Of course, these books were scrolls on papyrus, which is very durable, but burns easily and most of what they saved was in fact later lost in the convulsions of Roman history.    

There is always someone who opposes change.  When Greeks began writing plays on papyrus, Socrates decried it.  By writing things down, we no longer have to remember them and that will weaken our brains. Ergo the smartest people had an oral culture. Aborigines know that.

When Gutenberg’s printed books began to appear alongside handwritten manuscripts, Erasmus, among others, decried it.  Printed books were not invested with the effort, the grace, or the artistry of manuscripts. 

Priests and kings decried printing because it put books, including Bibles, into the hands of too many people without religious, social, or political censorship. That undermined both theological and political authority.  Books are like that. 

When e-Readers came along in the 1990s it was the same story, and still is. (We got our Rocket e-Books long ago when Bill Clinton was president.) Many today refuse to use a Kindle or any of its cousins because… [some reason or other].  

Then there were the wars over what is in the books.  When Martin Luther kicked-off the Reformation, he also toppled many a library.  Catholics purged monastery libraries (these being the main book collections) of Protestant-sympathetic items, and commanded their faithful among the book-owning aristocrats to do the same. That was the first shot.

Protestants replied in kind.  When Henry VIII closed monasteries their libraries were purged, i.e., most books were burned. Henry also sent scrutineers around the countryside to find books in the private homes of the wealthy reading class and purge them. Closet Catholics hid offending volumes in priest holes. 

This went on for a hundred or more years. More than one reader, more than one printer was murdered (executed) for possessing forbidden books by Catholic and by Protestant authorities doing God’s will. Sure. Happy in their work. 

Another skirmish concerned books (printed or manuscript) versus pamphlets, posters, coffee house sheets, newspapers, cahiers, and other ephemera. One of Christopher Columbus’s sons became an omnivorous book collector and he gathered everything on paper and then bound the leaves like books. The result is a social record still used by researchers today. Whereas when Thomas Bodley put up an enormous fund to build a library for Oxford University he forbid it ever to hold such trivialities. Sniff. Sniff.  

In the Nineteenth Century as literacy increased and the cost of making books decreased, then another front was opened in this culture war. It concerned the printing, distribution, and availability of books as the public library slowly emerged. The first fault line was non-fiction versus fiction.  Political authorities, social influencers, respectable investors wanted only pious, practical, uplifting books to be printed and to be available.  No Tom Jones or Moll Flanders, thank you. A benevolent coal mine owner might establish a library in a colliery town and stock it with books like, How to be a Good Employee, Coal Mining for Beginners, The Joys of Being a Child Miner, Taking Care of Tools, How to Survive on Gruel, Pray don’t Strike, Church not Union, and other such titles. Few locals visited such a library more than once. They wanted light, escapist fiction to divert them for a time from the realities of their lives or literature that promoted a better future in the here and now, not in the afterlife. 

This demand led book printers and sellers to form subscription reading libraries to cater for this taste.  This struggle went on for a long time, and in the early Twentieth Century Mr Mills and Mr Boon came along and supplied one part of this market, and still do.

In the Cold War libraries were again in the firing line. Demands were made to purge the shelves, but to warehouse the books to keep them out of circulation not to destroy them. The Bolsheviks of 1917, after the initial thrill of victory, realised they could sell the seized libraries, much of which were in Latin, French, or German, of the aristocrats to the West and did so. But in the USA the goal was to silence the books period, but it was too close to the end of World War II to license Nazi book burning, however tempting that was.   Below are some of the books recently banned in Florida.

The story in France is distinctive. After the Revolution of 1789 in the heady days of victory the winners declared all libraries public, the first and biggest of these is the Mazarin Library (which I have used), but they soon realised the stock of books was very Catholic, very aristocratic, and very reactionary.  They then banned just about everything and devised a censorship system that was so complex not even René Descartes would have been able to navigate it. When Catholicism made its periodic rebounds, those forces wanted psalters, hymnals, books of days, and little else.  When Jean Jaurès’s (1859-1914) socialists rose, they decided to make the local school room with its few dictionaries and primers the public library in the charge of an overworked and underpaid teacher. Thus a public library system was created without the expense of a building, staff, or funds to buy books. It was zero-budget policy hailed as genius.    

It was only in the 1970s that the French government funded a huge initiative to create médiathèques, several thousand of them to accompany the Minitel revolution. (Who remembers Minitel?) These were multi-media cultural, community centres and quite by accident have become the model that underlies a great many public libraries today like the one I visited the other day. On now entering a library no longer does one feel like one is entering a memorial tomb where all is hushed, if not quiet. Originally intended as a site for public access to Minitel and its adjuncts, the médiathèques have endured by adapting.

Andrew Carnegie paid for the library building in which I did my early reading; it was one of 5000 he paid for in the USA and UK which then included Ireland. The deal was, he would pay for a building, if the local town council would supply the land and commit to spend a sum equal to 10% of the building cost to stock and staff the library every year thereafter.  He offered six or seven types of building that might be selected, and if a town want to embellish or add to one of those at its expense, fine, but all had to include a Children’s Room. I am sure a shade of Herbert Marcuse can explain why this is an example of repression.  

Recounted is the hubris of the San Francisco Library that anticipated a future library without books, and so built at great expense a new public library with space for only a third of the existing book stock, and there being no budget leftover for storage, pulped much of the remainder or sold it (perhaps legally). According to these authors no records were kept because the card catalogue was the first thing to go and with it all the meta-data.  

There is a lot more in the book, but there is also a lot that isn’t there. It seems to me to be more about book collections than libraries.  By that I mean there is nothing but a few asides about how the collections would be organised for retrieval, stored against degradation, restored after damage, the professionalism of librarians, the gender balance among librarians, and so on. 

While closed versus open stacks are mentioned, that question is not connected to shelving. For open stacks to work there has to be some order based on content, whereas for closed stacks a shelf mark will do.  That is in open stacks all the books by and about Aristotle will be proximate, not so for closed stacks.

Nor do they mention that marvellous short story by Juan Luis Borges, The Library of Babel with its Purifiers patrolling the shelves on search and destroy missions like those now occurring in Florida. Nor does this book mention Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and the ineradicable quality of the ideas in books.  Nor the German librarians who secreted books from Nazis.

Of Beards and Men (2015) by Christopher Oldstone-Moore 

Goodreads meta-data is 352 pages rated 3.65 by 165 litizens. 

Genre: History.

Verdict: Occam did not do it!  

Tagline: Male-Patterned History.

To beard or not to beard, that has often been the question. Whether it is nobler, sexier, scarier, holier, smarter, easier on the skin and chin to have a beard or not to have a beard. Or just more manly to be bearded.  

In answering these momentous questions, men have turned to god, to science, to politics, and to women. They have also cast sidelong glances at each other. 

If god gave us beards, then we are meant to have them, that is one recurrent school of hirsute thought.  Another is that shaving is an act of obeisance to god. Is the beard natural, or a penalty for the fall from Eden? And so it goes. Priests have promoted conflict over this divide for millennia. Even the peace-loving Amish have fought over this question though the most persistent and violent these days seem to be the rabbis and imams.   

The science is no less mystical. The beard has been related to – sit down and brace reader – sperm, muscles, and brains by hundreds of savants. Autodidacts like Caesar reasoned that when he was going bald on top, if he pulled out all the other hair on his body starting with his face, the hair would grow back on his head, so he plucked away, including [use your imaginations]. Dopey, yes but no dopier than many scientific explanations, see the reference to sperm above.

Just when scientists settled on one explanation or another for face hair, an adventurer would find nearly hairless indigenous men in the New World or apes with hair everywhere except faces to say nothing of bearded ladies. The wheel of explanation had to be spun once again, and again.  Hygiene came into the question in the Twentieth Century. Did the beard harbour germs, parasites, or illegal immigrants?

Adolf Hitler, an exponent of the moustache, experimented with several different looks early in his career. The walrus moustache of a Bismarck was out, identified with the long-ago past.  The spiky moustache of Kaiser Wilhelm was out, being identified with defeat. To be clean shaven was a sign of modernity, discipline, and the future to be sure, but the moustache yet retained a certain martial quality that he wished to evoke. Advised by his lifelong bromance and sycophant Joseph Göbbels, Hitler settled on the toothbrush mo. That toothbrush moustache more or less died with him. No one else wants to recall him, evidently, for not even dedicated Neo-Nazis can be seen with one. His mo is now identified with failure, too.  

Although he was moustachioed, Hitler decreed his followers, including the army, be clean shaven modernists. Face hair was regarded as Jewish, Bolshevik, Slavic, or Gypsy. Not good. After the Night of the Long Knives, no other Nasty sported a mo. That shave was final.   

Those Bolsheviks grew and shaved sideburns, goatees, beards, mono-brows, and moustachioes to elude Czarist police. No disguise could protect them from each other.

Stimulated by some primal memory of ferocious cavemen, generals have sometimes concluded that a bearded soldier is more frightening than a shaven man, and ordered the troops to grow a beard.  Regiments of Napoleon’s cavalry were so ordered, with the further specification that the beard be long, glossy, and black. Not every horse-soldier could meet this standard and the entrepreneurs descended with black wax, false beards, and beard extensions that could be stuck on for parades and inspections. One regiment of the French Foreign Legion continues that tradition. 

Later, shaving became a sign of military conformity and discipline. It was also an indication that the soldier had been near soap and water to keep clean. Though even then generals themselves often kept at least a moustache to evoke the primitive warrior. 

Side Bar:  In many creature feature films the monster is usually hairy. Are there any smooth-faced monsters on film? Submit answers below.

When King (1824-1830) Charles X in the French restoration turned the clock back to before the Revolution, the resurgent Catholic hierarchy, thrilled to be back bossing others around, ruled that shaving was god’s law. This edict was largely a reaction to all those bearded Protestants in the North. Chas X was hard to take seriously and soon on the Rive Gauche, in the student quarter (where I once lived for six months), it became an act of defiance to let it grow. Royal police arrived to fine the hairy, who then appealed to the courts. One case turned on the definition of a beard, for the defendant claimed he had forgotten to shave, been too busy to shave, had broken his razor and that stubble was not a beard when it came to paying a fine. In the modus vivendi that followed moustaches were accepted. They sprouted all over the Left Bank, and have recurred with each new generation of self-styled protestors. A similar story played out in the 1960s Stateside, during the Vietnam War. Hair everywhere was the norm for many against the army buzz cut and sub-dermal shave.

The last U.S. Presidential candidate to sprout face hair was…?  New York Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948. He had a pencil moustache that was much discussed, especially by women. His wife proved exceptional in that she liked his mo but most others, as questioned by pollsters seeking the big news, did not. His mo was subjected to the intense and trivial attention that journalist still reserve for women, as when it was international news that the leader of the French Socialist Party appeared at reception in D.C. in flat shoes. Quelle horreur!  Both French and American media had a feeding frenzy on that.    

The last president to be furry? Go on, guess! Howard Taft (1908-1912) and his immediate predecessor Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1908). If a moustachioed Clark Gable had run for office, well he might overcome the hair barrier.  

Mrs Dewey is not the only woman to rule on beards. Psychologists, social and not, have conducted endless experiments to see if a beard makes a man more or less attractive to women. As with much such research, the permutations of method are ingenious and meaningless. Our tax dollars at work. As with all social science the results are yes, no, and maybe. 

There are also a few words on the carefully curated, meticulously cultivated Hollywood stubble look. It is a kind of a peach-fuzz version of the aforementioned Clarke Gable. (Gable, by the way, shaved his moustache and joined the Air Force in 1942 where he flew combat missions.  He had no need to prove anything with a mo.)  

The high priests of the gay fashionistas have ruled and misruled on face hair ad nauseam.This is followed by the rabbis and imams ruling on beards which is told in piteous detail.  Like Hotspur they summon, but….who cares?  

The book ends where I began.  The return of the cheek fuzz today is an effort to assert manhood in an age when gender roles have been questioned, changed, made fluid, or otherwise challenged.  The one thing a man has left to mark and make him a man is a beard.  Pathetic I know, but that makes sense to me. 

I had hoped for something about the evolution of shaving from dry blade to the micro-electrics today. 

I wondered if Montesquieu had anything to say about beards and climate, but not enough to look for myself.  Likewise the effect of the mass armies of 20th Century, setting the norm to shave in the name of hygiene.  

In the French Army a grunt is called a ‘poilou,’ a hairy one. Explanations for its origin are vexed. One is that the mass conscription of World War I cleared the countryside of men who sported bushy mo’s as a token of masculinity like the stubble of today.  The printing presses of the era spread the image and word far and wide.  Another takes it back to Napoleon’s hussars who were as hairy as Twentieth Century hippies. Think Abbie Hoffman on horseback with a sabre. Scary, right? 

Occam’s razor suggests that there was little shaving in the trenches. Whatever its figurative origin it became literal there. 

I read this in the hope of finding out something about beards in Renaissance Italy of Machiavelli’s time.  There is a reference that I will follow up but nothing in this book bears on my interest. 

The End of Eternity (1955) by Isaac Asimov

GoodReads meta-data is 192 pages rated 4.24 by 52,005 literatizens 

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Asimov!  

Tag Line: The same old story. 

Inspired by the Czech film based on the book, I read the book.

Harlan is an aspirant Platonic philosopher-king of sorts, working at the AllWhen Council that manages Reality in the imagine of divine being. The Council works through Life-Plotters, Sociologists, Technicians, Regulators, Observers, and a whole host of other specialists who tweak Reality for the best, long-term interests of humanity – the greatest good for the greatest number* is the mantra repeated and repeated – over the 7000 millennia of its existence.  These tweakers are the Eternals with no life but service.  

An example of a Minimum Necessary Change is to move a jar on a shelf, so that when in Reality a scientist reaches for it, it is missed.  That faction of a second delay as the scientist gropes for the jar leads to a different result in the scientist’s experiment…with beneficial results, according to those specialists. Butterfly wings are another story.  

Technicians travel time to move jars like that, but no one has ever been able to travel further than the 7000th millennium. That must be the end of human time, or is it?  

Our hero is Harlan, a vain young man brimming with ambition who rises from Cub, to Maintenance, to Observer, to Technician very quickly.  He is then selected for a special mission that embeds him  (literally) in the 45th millennium.  In the course of preparing for that mission he enters a garden of Eden where he finds Eve, a Timer (i.e., a mortal who lives in Reality, unlike the Eternals, who live pretty much forever). She wants him to make her Eternal; he wants to make her. The twain meet in the usual way.     

None of the Eternals are women because abstracting a woman from Reality creates far more consequences than removing a man. Harlan has never seen a woman before and when he does he wants to eat the apple right there, right now.  (By the way, Plato included women among the Philosopher Monarchs for what it is worth. This assertion about Plato is denied by some. Pity the fools!)   

Asimov puts it this way: Eternals are recruited young from Reality after a lengthy analysis to determine the consequences of taking them out of Time. Many promising prospects are rejected because of the projected consequences. ‘[W]omen almost never qualified for Eternity because – for some reason he [Harlan] did not understand  – their abstraction from Time was from ten to a hundred times more likely to distort Reality than was the abstraction of a man’ (p 55). Harlan goes on to speculate that it is because of reproduction, but that is guesswork.  He often admits he doesn’t know. That does not quite fit with his arrogance, but it papers over gaps. 

Harlan hatches a foolproof plan to have his Eve and live happily ever after, only to discover he is not dealing with fools who can be fool-proofed. In fact, he is the fool himself for Harlan discovers to his surprise all is not what it seems to be. Savour that irony. This Time Lord missed the obvious. Stubbornly he presses on. 

Another thing he did not know was that Eve had a plan of her own. There are twists and turns in the plot and eternity gives way to…infinity. Neat. Very. 

The plot is the thing. Asimov at the peak of his imaginative powers.  

*Pedants note: ‘The greatest good for the greatest number’ is a phrase frequently attributed to John S Mill.  Type it into Dr Google and see.  Ahem, well, read every word he ever published and it cannot be found because he never wrote it.  Another example of fake news.  Nor does it fit his approach. The statement traces to be tiresome know it all Jeremy Bentham, not Mill.

The Index, A History ( 2022) by Dennis Duncan

Good Reads meta-data is 340 pages rated 3.71 by 1,086 literatizens. 

Genre: nonfiction 

Verdict: a nerd’s delight 

Tag line:  You say indices and he says indexes.

No (nonfiction) book is complete without one, and I have been disappointed by its occasional absence.  We’ve used many of them without a thought to origin or evolution. We assume many things about the index, and each has a long and vexed evolution. 

We assume these things. Works of fiction do not have an index. Well, some times they have had. Now they don’t. Why not?

We assume the index is much shorter than the text it navigates.  Concordances from whence the chrysalis of the index emerged were sometimes longer than the texts they recorded.  At least one index grew so large at 100,000 words that it was preceded by an index to the index.

We assume an index is a truthful and accurate reference to the text. Believe it or not that has not always been the case. Novelists have added indexes to their novels to imitate nonfiction in some cases. In other cases critics of nonfiction texts have taken the time, trouble, and expense to create a fake index to discredit the work itself. Finally, there are incompetent indexes. 

We assume the index is at the back of the book. They are now, but they started at the front. Once they were a selling point and put first to catch the buyer-reader to show how easy and useful this book is. They migrated to the back but left a shadow at the front in The Table of Contents. Oops. French and Italian books have both, and both at the back.  German publishers have the table of contents in the front and the index in back like English ones.

We assume the index is arranged in alphabetical order yet an index to a Roman text might have been hierarchical in order of importance. There is an index to the poems of Emily Dickinson which is based on the shape and size of the paper on which the verse was scrawled. Even when the alphabet applies, is it to be word order or letter order?  It makes a difference.

We assume an index is an aid to finding topics in the text but not a substitute for the text. Yet some indexes have appeared without a text. Others have hived off from the parental text and continued shelf life on their own.

We assume a Biblical index is made by human intelligence (HI) that will locate the fable of the prodigal son, though the text of the fable does not use the word ‘prodigal.’ To show just how important that humanity is, this book itself has two indexes, one done by AI software and one done by HI software of one Paula Clarke. The difference is obvious. 

Each of these verities has emerged from a kaleidoscope of false starts, rivals, dead ends, pitfalls, and more. Along the way other navigational tools were spawned like the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature on which I suckled. 

There are many anecdotes and stories. One stands out. A Berkeley professor’s lifework was to make a concordance to John Dryden poetry.  Prof plodded away at this filling 63 shoe boxes with 3 by 5 inch index (!) cards and then he died in 1951. To salvage the work another member of the department took it on to find that among the million or so entries many were garbled, incomplete, water stained to illegibility, disordered, inconsistent in terminology, chewed by some creature(s) great and small, incomplete, while still others were sun-bleached.  Hercules paled at the labour but not Josephine Miles. After some years of effort, she described the problem to an electrical engineer while canoodling, and – cutting to the end – the index cards were converted to machine readable punch cards. Just don’t drop the box! Machine readable came to the rescue by reducing the effort for human reading so that she could concentrate on solving the problems.

Being a reader and writer has given me some experience and interest in the subject of navigating books and using indexes. 

1. Oddly, some Kindle books cannot be navigated on the Kindle management website but can be searched on a Kindle device with the app. It would easier for me to search on the desktop using the Kindle Management site because I might want to check something a dozen or more titles for one point. On the bright side searching is possible.
2. The standard but not universal navigation locator for Plato and Aristotle are Stephanus alphanumerics. They were originated in Geneva by a printer in 1578.  Yet our author discusses Plato’s Phaedras and it is possible, even likely, the text he used had these marginal notes, e.g., 514c. Yet there is nary a word about these numbers with letter tags. 
3. Books by the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau have no index. Subsequent publishers have made them in varying qualities with duplicated effort. The index to the Penguin edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan does not apply to Blackwell printing. By the way, Samuel Richardson brought out two printings of his whopper novel Clarissa with different page numbering.  He then compiled an index, and since it would be unfair to prefer the page numbers of one edition to the other, he solved that problem by omitting page numbers altogether from the index.  The result was then equally useful to purchasers of either printing.  Is that logical Mr Spock? 
4. Many Kindle versions of printed books only show locator numbers and not page numbers, yet many of the same publishers require authors to cite page numbers in references.  Square that circle.
5. Moreover, some Kindle versions that do show page numbers do not match the page numbers in the printed text.  A passage ascribed to page 141 on the Kindle edition is not found on page 141 of the same printed text but on page 167.  Go figure 
6. I have four indexes to my name for four books. The first I did myself in haste and it was nothing but a mirror of table of contents.  Shame on me. The second was done by the publishers  in Philadelphia and I only saw it when it was published.  The third was done by the co-author who volunteered to do it! Best came last when the fourth was done by professional indexer in Scotland. A fifth book will be done by a pro at HI. 

Pedants note. ‘Indices’ are for scientists, he says, while indexes are for readers.  No he does not mention in my consciousness the eponymous index cards but refers often to slips of paper in describing the making of indexes. By the way indexes exclude function words like ‘if,’ ‘but,’ and, ‘and.’ They also exclude adjectives and adverbs and pronouns, and concentrate on nouns.  Then there are subheadings and cross references…but not now. 

Network Effect (A Murderbot Novel 5) (2020) by Martha Wells.

GoodReads meta-data is 350 pages rated 4.46 by 6,122 litizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: High octane.

A sarcastic and sardonic SecUnit cyborg protects clients at all costs, but sometimes it has to destroy the client to save the client.  That’s life (and death) for you! That’s Artificial Intelligence logic at work. It may be a machine, mostly, but it is very definitely a man-machine. SecUnit’s best friend, however, is an unembodied computer program called ART.  

Adventures follow. Being kidnapped by thugs is a minor irritant to SecUnit — nothing he cannot handle — but when they murder his Bestie, ART, program by erasing it he gets serious about killing all of them in excruciating ways, but first he has to free the other hostages. Yes, there are hostages. While multitasking, he gets clues on what to do by watching in background mode on light speed fast forward media entertainment like Space Cowboys, Planet Hoppers, Orion Defenders, Sanctuary Moon (his favourite),and more!  Crazy ideas work sometimes – not always. Well, seldom, but desperate times and all that.

Buckle up and get the abacus ready for the body count as SecUnit goes to work reducing the number of target hostiles.  Bystanders are not innocent when this happens. Fast and furious is an understatement.

This Tin Man has a heart and wishes he didn’t, a twist on that old theme.  

Martha Wells needs no sleep. How else could she have produced 41 novel(lla)s since the first in 1993. There has to be a fireplace in every room of her home to make room on the mantle piece(s) for all the prizes and awards her books have accrued.  For certain she does not have a dog demanding to go to the park in perfectly good writing-time.  This is the first full length novel featuring the murderbot but fifth in the series. No, I haven’t figured that out, but a problem shared is a problem offloaded. Let the humans worry about it, as SecUnit might say.  

By the time I get around to posting this, I will have read all seven in the series!  

And All the Stars (2012) by Andrea Hörst

GoodReads meta-data is 204 pages, rated 3.89 by 1223 litizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Creative.

Waiting for a City Circle metro train at the underground St James Station beneath Sydney’s Hyde Park, the roof falls in on young Madeleine Cost. Luckier than others on the platforms, she survived the collapse and slowly crawled out from the rubble. Thus begins the realisation that the aliens have landed.

In cities around the world gigantic spires have plunged into the earth of the Earth, one of them into Hyde Park above the station, and from them a dust floats far and wide. Those directly exposed to it die. Survivors’ skin turns blue or green (some with star markings per the title).  The population is culled by two-thirds we later learn.

Maddie shelters from the dust in an absent cousin’s flat on Finger Wharf, frantically trying to contact her parents in the high country near Armidale and, more generally, to find out what has happened, what is happening, what will happen but driven by excruciating hunger she has to scavenge for food. Ravenous hunger is a side effect of whatever causes the skin changes. That quest for food brings her into contact with others and she teams up with some teenagers whose survival rate seems marginally higher than that of adults. 

What follows is one of the most creative science fiction stories I have read.  That may seem an odd thing to say, but much of the science fiction is not creative. It is sacrilege to say it, but Philip K. Dick’s stores are commonplace decorated with space ships or androids.   

Social services and norms quickly erode; a state of nature emerges (see Thomas Hobbes), compounded by the aliens’ presence.  When the dust settles, the aliens seize the minds of some and announce their plans – which make little sense to those who hear. The aliens use the continued broadcasts of news services and the internet to proclaim their message.  Ergo the media is largely left in place, though many journalists were killed by the dust along with others. 

Even during the apocalypse the media remains irresponsible and cannibalistic. In the quest for the last Pulitzer Prize surviving journalists breathlessly report on humanity’s reaction, including scientific and medical efforts to defeat the dust plague, the best hiding places to avoid the dust, and later how to avoid alien patrols that begin to sweep up survivors of the dust, and finally the organisation and leadership of the human resistance to this alien occupation. All of this  information is monitored by the aliens who quickly extinguish the laboratories, destroy the hiding places, and slaughter the resistance groups. Like Comrade Putin, they use Pox News for their own ends, and Pox News revels in its murderous prostitution.   

The dust was just the beginning. Things get worse.

Meanwhile, Maddie and her Blues hide from marauding gangs of Greens, elude aliens who hunt for hidden humans to use in their competition, and manage tensions within their number. One or two want to fight the aliens they know not how. Another wants to compile a database. A third wants Maddie. They all want more food. The group also faces decisions: stay in the apartment, stay together, stay in the city, or move, split up, try to leave?  

Meanwhile, the aliens start some sort of competition among themselves using human surrogates, as though they are mortal chess pieces. It is incomprehensible but deadly. Needless to say Pox News is there to broadcast it.  

The Sanctimonious Broadcasting Service (once known as Your ABC) features much lip-pursing at the Government’s failure to prevent the invasion, defeat it, end it, and compensate survivors for the inconvenience. Some things never change, not even at the apocalypse. 

Among the surviving humans, opportunists take advantage of the situation. TED talks abound without a pause for breath. Entrepreneurs offer snake oil cures for the dust infections. Religious charlatans talk to god. Predators enjoy the mayhem. The NRA sells more guns that are useless, but comforting.  Lawyers propose making the aliens illegal immigrants and debate the wording of such legislation.  Academics have conferences to pronounce on the situation. Politicians promise to convene Royal Commissions. Ideologues ask the gender of the aliens. None of these standard operating procedures matters one whit but it is what they know how to do, so they do it. 

A very secret resistance forms and launches an attack. There is a great deal of action in the last quarter of the book, and it ends more or less literally with a pitch to make a CGI movie from it.  That deflated this reader big time. 

While there are many reviews on Goodreads, as usual, they are largely uninformative, I could not find a single one elsewhere in a 10-minute internet research. Behind paywalls I suppose. 

One can read all sorts of parables into the story.  Are the aliens the British come to terra nullius with their invisible diseases? Then the earthlings are the aboriginals who cannot fathom what is happening, let alone why. Or should we read the spires and dust as a climate crisis.  Or is it COVID. Take your pick, or add another.  The racial antagonism that quickly develops between the Blues and Greens, who blame each other for the calamity has also to be considered. Then there is the girl-meets-boy romance tucked into it, which is quite charming in its own terms, but attenuated.  (I never did get what cousin Tyler had to do with any of it. My attention span is like that.) 

The characters are differentiated and sympathetic. The tension and mystery are palpable. There are some nice passages about painting – Maddie’s chief interest in life before the Spires came.  But the alien mystery is so immersive that it envelops everything and slows it down…. I found the book easy to put down and hard to pick up.  Although there are some well-judged action scenes on the beach or a fight in a parking garage, and at the end, but along the way there is a lot of talk, talk, and more talk.  It requires some patience and persistence in readers, and this one seems to have less and less of those qualities.  

I found the opening in the ruin of St James metro station close to home because I have waited on that dreary platform at night after Parliament House sessions.  Ditto the mention of the Archibald Fountain above, which was one of my first references points in Sydney.  

Sheila McLeod, Xanthe and the Robots (1977).

GoodReads meta-data is 240 pages rated 3.31 by 16 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Seminar. 

At an isolated but relaxed research institution Philophrenic robots are in development.  Pragmapractor robots are extensively used for simple and repetitive tasks, like telling people to brush their teeth.  (Joke.)  But the Philophrenics have much more complex programming and, perhaps, even emotions.  Xanthe is one of the programers and the story is told from her perspective.  

Xanthe is an only child, an introvert, solitary, obsessive, creative, and likes things that way.  Xeno the director of the institute saddles her with an assistant, despite her objections, and he becomes a source of tension.  While Xanthe swallows the libido-blocking tablets each day, the better to concentrate entirely on her work 18-hours a day, ….  But the reader knows that Daiman, the unwanted assistant, will overcome that chemical barrier.  There is no other reason for him to be there.

The Philophrenics are programmed in the humanities not science or engineering. Thus they know the works of Ibsen, Melville, Brownings, Byron, and prove it by spouting quotations. Each has a programmer whose personality shapes the bot, though it is not supposed to do so. 

Only half-way through the book does the reader learn that beyond the Institute’s walls the world is disintegrating into chaos, although it seems a polite sort of chaos compared to the kind the Republican Party creates these days.  Meanwhile, the Philophrenic robots develop wills of their own and demand autonomy which is conceded.  However no sooner do the Philophrenics take over than the Pragmapractors go on strike. It seems that they do not wish to take orders from other robots.  (At this point I expected Jim Kirk to appear and talk the robots to death in the great Star Trek tradition of low budget endings.)

The Philophrenics we learn in a sotto voce narrative from Xanthe were supposed to be perfected humanity, creatures of reason and knowledge, untainted by the weakness of the flesh.  Like the Pragmapractors, the Philophrenics are sexless, though there are anticipations that the latter may come to demand sex in order to more closely approximate human beings. Remember Mr Data or the Tin Man?  Try as the members of the Institute might, the robots cannot be any more perfect than the humans who program them, and we see early on the personality of programmer is reflected in the robot.  (It seems one programmer works on/with one robot.)

The Philophrenics seems poorly suited for the autonomy they demand since they are totally imbued with literature, and nothing else.  When granted freedom to create their own names they invariably choose the name of a literary character, and when they are also allowed to dress themselves (having theretofore worn coveralls or kaftans) they choose period clothing for the name they have chosen.  Do we detect a lack of imagination here?  (By the way, how such clothing is produced is off stage.) but then why are they clothed at all? 

Aside: the only other time clothing is mentioned it is used to indicate exasperation when Xanthe notes that Xeno’s necktie is at half mast. We are spared the detailed and pointless description of clothing that pads out so much genre fiction. Nor are meals described and decor detailed. Finally, there is no description of the robots, except that they are made in our image.  

All the programmers have code names and that is never explained within my attention span.

Once autonomous, the bots rapidly set about making all too human errors by dividing into hostile groups, going on ego trips, lolling around….  Meanwhile, Daiman and Xanthe become, as long predicted, a couple while the Institute disintegrates around them.  The conflict between the Pragmapractors and Philophrenics turns violent with the humans in between, not quite trusted by either camp, but trusted more than the other camp.  

In the end Daiman and Xanthe leave the shelter of the Institute to brave the misery of real world. That last phrase was not used but it seems right.

About midway there are explicit references to the laws built into bots but Asimov is not named.  

The verdict above, ‘Seminar,’ indicates how wordy the text is.  Every character is articulate and there are pages and pages of talk, or silent narration from Xanthe, and very little movement.  When Xanthe reluctantly takes a holiday earlier, well, that is one of the weakest parts of the text.  

This reader was left perplexed as to what conclusion to draw.  Moreover, the external chaos is never explained, and neither is any role for the robots in that wider world which undermines the whole purpose of the Institute. In that way, we seem to have only part of the story.  While at the Institute there are schedules and work, it never seems connected to the desperate world out there.  It is indeed an Ivory Tower.  The Philophrenics will do nothing to reduce the chaos, though the Pragmapractors might.  

I came across a reference to it somewhere, now forgotten, and being intrigued I found a used paper copy from Abe Books (despite being owned by Amazon, its stock does not appear in Amazon searches) and got it.  It is not available in an e-book. She has many other titles.

The Tango War (2018) by Mary Jo McConahay.  

Good Reads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 4.08 by 172 members of the Human Comedy. 

Genre: History.

Subtitle: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin American during World War II. 

Verdict: Victimology.

As worldwide conflicts occurred in the middle and later 1930s, the relationship of the United States to the 33 nations in Latin American returned to centre stage.  For a century the United States treated as property those parts of this world it noticed, though it generally neglected the greater part. The Monroe Doctrine had originally protected some of the countries of Latin America from the threat of re-colonisation after they had thrown off their European masters, and at the time it was backed by a silent partnership with Great Britain, but in the intervening century the Doctrine had become a convenient excuse for exploitation, rapine, and arrogance.  

The Monroe Doctrine had been used to justify a hidden hand operation that hived Panama off Columbia and turned it into a de facto US dependency for a century. Earlier Mexico had been reduced by 60% in successive conflicts, hot and cold. Being closest, Mexico has always been favoured with US intentions. The best example is in a display of his ‘moral diplomacy’ when Woodrow Wilson had the US Navy bombard Vera Cruz in 1914. That was his phrase.  

Venezuela had once been protected from European creditors on battleships, true, but in return it endured the rapacious business practices of United Fruit (Rockefeller) and others from El Norte.  Since Latin America was all but closed to Europeans by the Monroe Doctrine wall, US businesses dictated terms at will. In the spirit of free enterprise they formed cartels to reduce competition among themselves, the better to exploit the land and people. Free market ideologues never ponder this sad story very long before returning to the clouds. 

Against this background in the late 1930s the Roosevelt Administration set out to vivify the Organization of American States and win friends with the so-called Good Neighbour Policy in which the US pledged never again to intervene by force in its good neighbours.  (Hence, the Cuban sad sacks had to front the Bay of Pigs invasion; black money funded the overthrow of the elected government south of the border more than once, private contractors flew covert bombing raids in Central America, and on and on.) Whatever the intentions of the policy, the administration was not well equiped to practice it.  US embassies in the Latin America were staffed with men (yes, only men above clerical staff) who saw themselves first and foremost as representative of those exploitative businesses.  The diplomacy they practiced often consisted of lecturing the host government on the best way to show gratitude for the US robbery they suffered.

A comparison could be made between the pre-War US domination of Latin America with the post-War Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.  Albeit the US approach was masked and at times ineffective, as when its efforts to block elected governments like that of Juan Perón in Argentina failed.    

Apart from a vast population, the southern Americas possessed natural resources that anyone could see would be important, rubber, oil, platinum, bauxite, natural gas, copper, silver, and other metals and minerals, as well as vast agricultural production, and what’s more it fronted both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Its single greatest strategic asset was the Panama Canal linking the two bodies of water. 

One of the most interesting parts of the story concerns the Rubber Soldiers in Brazil. To increase production Brazil mobilised for rubber production on a new level, and went at it like a military campaign.  

With thirty-three countries to choose from there is a lot to cover, and the author selects material that fit the overall approach of victimology.  The southern denizens have no wills of their own, but are enslaved by Norteamericanos.  The indictment goes on and on.  I admit I grew weary of reading the list of one-eyed wrongs, and tuned out. 

While there are occasional references to German and Italian interests, there is no sustained reckoning of their efforts to sow dissension and suborn the population. We are left with the Alfred Hitchcock film, Notorious (1946) for that side of the story.    

And speaking of that population, much of it came from recent immigration which included millions of Italians, and also a million plus German-speakers from Central Europe.  The Italians were concentrated in Argentina, while the Germans were to be found there, and in Colombia (a two hundred air miles from the Canal), and Brasil. However these Germans and Italians were counted, they added up to a far greater number than the resident Anglos.  Then there was a significant Japanese presence in Peru to be considered.  Given the author’s silence, none of these Axis peoples were anything but peace loving innocents.  

…

One can spend a lot of time trying to define and express that group of southern nations.  Latin American includes all the countries south of the Rio Grande for 6,000 miles to the Antarctic Ocean.  That embrace includes the islands of the Caribbean, Central American, and South America. It includes the French-speaking Haiti and Guyana.  In but not of it are the Dutch-speaking Suriname and the Aruba isles, as well as English-speaking rocks like the Bahamas. But ‘Latin America’ is most general terms for this vast area, even if its people are not all Latins in any sense, starting with the indigenous in habitants. The dominate languages is Spanish but the largest single country is Brasil where Portuguese is the spoken.  For every rule there is an exception.  

To put it all other ways:

Spanish America includes Mexico but excludes Haiti and Brasil as well the Dutch territories and British islands. 

South American excludes Mexico and six other Central American counties as well as the Caribbean islands.  

The uncommon term Iberico-America combines Spanish America with Brasil but omits the French, Dutch, and English lands and islands. 

By the way, it seems ‘Latin America’ is a term attributed to Napoleon III when he had designs on recolonising Mexico as his White Man’s Burden before Kipling. It includes all the Spanish, Portuguese, and French settled lands but omits the Dutch and English.  

Then there is vexed question of the United States territories, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and the Panama Canal Zone.    

One thing common to all these variations is so obvious that it often overlooked.  All use the term ‘America,’ as in the Organization of American States.  One of the first concessions the Good Neighbour policy made was to re-title US embassies and consulates in this region as ‘United States’ and not ‘American,’ since everywhere was geographically American.  

Travels with Epicurus (2012) by Daniel Klein.

Good Reads meta-data is 176 pages, rated 3.81 by 2,574 litizens.

Genre: [Time] Travel.

Verdict: Easy Does It.

In different printings the book has two subtitles:  ‘A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of Fulfilled Life’ or ‘Meditations from a Greek Island on the Pleasures of Old Age.’  The latter seems to fit  the text better, and is less tiring than ‘journeying’ and ‘searching.’    

In its brief compass, professional funny man Klein ponders the pleasures of growing old and older.  He takes aim at the ‘forever young’ fad and many others with acerbic comments.  He romanticises and fantasises about life on a Greek rock. 

The red line through the book is ‘enjoy the moment’ because it is all there is right now.  Mostly we don’t do that. We go at most of our lives as means to an end that ever recedes.  It is as if to say, ‘Once I have everything I want, I will relax and smell the roses,’ but first I have to get all that. Plato called that sickness pleonexia. The Ferengi on Star Trek embody this syndrome. More is always better. Remember Marilyn at the tax office, insatiable?  

Before all that, Klein starts out rescuing Epicurus from his friends. Far from recommending hedonistic pleasure-seeking that his name has come to imply, Epicurus offered a much more basic message.  ‘Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, be there and do that.’ Extract all the pleasure possible from the here and now, whatever it is.  An Epicurean who has understood Epicurus will savour a lentil soup as much as Iranian black caviar.  (A Google search failed to produce a recipe for lentil soup in the magazine that takes his name.)

When I push the pedals on the stationery  bike at the gym sometimes there is an exercise class on. The music is set to ear-drum bursting, the pace is frantic, the result must be a kind of out-of-body experience, I am guessing without personal experience, for the participants. But the noise alone deadens me in the next room perched on the bike. In front of the speakers I have been surprised it has not caused fatalities. No one in such a class, it seems to this jaded observer, is savouring the moment.  Rather they are numb, and on more than one level.  The more so when these sessions have names like Body Attack, Storm, Ignite, Destroy, Smash, and Pound. 

Like Machiavelli, Epicurus (341 – 270 BCE) has been bastardised into a stereotype miles from the original. For what it is worth, when Eppy opened a school in Athens he allowed women and slaves to join in the meals and the discussions. The scandal mongers of Pox News descended. As a result virtually nothing of his original work survived the vigilantes so that the little we know of his teachings comes second and third hand centuries later. Yet his name is widely mis-taken in vain.

There is an 11-minute film listed on the IMDb but I could not find it online, but there are plenty of other films on You Tube for those who must see the movie. The few I sampled lack Klein’s light touch. A couple even managed to make pleasure painful.    

Klein’s other titles include Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates (2009) and Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington (2008). Although Wikipedia doesn’t know it, this is the same Daniel Klein who wrote Blue Suede Clues (2002) and Viva Las Vengeance (2003). 

Galatea (2013) by Madeline Miller

Good Reads meta-data is 49 pages rated 3.94 by 24,583 litizens.

Genre: Fiction.  Species: Short Story. 

Galatea finds life puzzling and ends it all. 

After reading the Song of Achilles and Circe, I am ready for anything that comes from MM’s keyboard, even this slight story between hard covers.  Well, almost ready because I found this one didactic, and did not get the point until I read the afterword, and then I felt I had been preached at under the false pretence of a story fabricated from myth.  The scatological language early on should have tipped me off.  The MM of the earlier novels had no need for such vulgarity to get a reader’s attention.