Political theory and practice

The Stainless Steel Rat (1957 as a short story and 1962 fleshed out as a novel) by Harry Harrison.

Good Reads meta-data is 208 pages each rated 3.93 by 15,404 litizens. There are twelve titles in the sequence.

Genre: SyFy.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Bring on the maze. This rat will beat it.  

Tagline: Where there’s money, there’s the Stainless Steel Rat

Meet James Bolivar di Griz who goes by so many names he has lost track, but those who know him prefer Slippery Jim, those who don’t, call him Rat.  He is occasionally charming and always a rouge, even on his wedding day. He is a fast-talking code hero who steals from rich, again and again. ‘Code hero?’  Look it up, Mortimer. 

He is a rat because he gets into and out of places up to no good, and stainless steel because his world is made of steel and glass, not wood or cement with cracks and crevasses, but even so he finds interstices in the steel and glass at the joins. The rat is something of a thinker when he has a few minutes off from being an action man.

His ambition has long been to be the biggest criminal of them all and he is well on his way to that achievement when in the course of a one-man heist he cleverly takes refuge in an empty office, only to find the head of the ultra-secret Special Corps sitting there waiting with a complete file on him and a phalanx of heavily armed guards. Gulp!  Until that moment the Rat had not really believed that the Corps existed and he had certainly not believed anyone could outmanoeuvre him. Those two truths were hard to swallow but swallow he must.

In the subsequent negotiations, the Rat is licensed to continue his larceny but only as directed by the Corps. It turns out there are many targets the Corps would like brought low and the Rat is the man to do it.  Doing the Corps’ bidding, he travels through time and space to steal to his heart’s content, while compiling data for blackmail, destroying forged bonds, freeing hostages, sabotaging weapons, all in day’s work. A victim of the Everest Syndrome, he steals because it is there to be stolen. (Pretty much how I deal with eating chocolate.)  While doing so he falls in love, marries, sires children and continues with his galactic crime spree through twelve novels in all. The stories are set in the far future, so far that the origins of humanity on Earth are unknown to humankind who are spread far and wide in the galaxy. One blogger nerd estimates the Rat was born of woman, if he was, in the 346th Century.   

His first assignment with the Special Corps is, single-handedly, to overthrow a militarily aggressive world that is conquering its neighbours.  Such long range invasions had long been impossible due to time and distance and their combined impact on logistics.  No D-Days in the 346th Century, not until now!  His mission is to find out how they do it and then scuttle it.  

He finds that the Aggressors play a long game, and undermine the worlds to conquer by financial support for dissidents within. Sound familiar? It is Putin’s Moscow game plan, with agents of influence like Murdoch and The Other Guy (whose name never passes my lips or  keyword). When the dissidents rise up, then the Aggressors move in as though aiding them, and then wallop everyone and takeover.  See, I said he was a thinker.  

He foils them by….means fantastic.

This rat is not the Chinese democracy campaigner, Liu Di, who used ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ as a nom de guerre. She has been in the slammer since 2002 for her troubles. If only Slippery Jim could get her out with a little time travel.  

I read a few of these in a teenage science fiction phase and stumbled across one the other night trawling for Kindle reading, and once I started, well, I kept going.  But one is enough.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm (2022) by Louise Wilder

Good Reads meta-data is 352 pages rated 4.16 by 185 litizens. 

Genre: Non-fiction (though some of the stories belie that).

DNA: Bibliomania.

Verdict: Snappy!

Tagline: Occam did it. 

The world beyond wherein are produced those tantalising paragraphs on the back of books, those lures cast on book-selling web sites, the too-good-to-be-true hooks in advertisements. These are the blurbs. Who hasn’t bit on one of those baits…and read to regret it?  

They run to a hundred words plus or minus, one.  The discipline is strict and stern in this sweatshop. T. S. Eliot’s day job was to do just that, write blurbs for Faber and Faber.  No wonder he went cryptic with his poetry at end of a day. He wrote 5000 published blurbs, and countless drafts (some of which were probably better than the copy used, but excellence does not always prevail).  

Within those one hundred words a copywriter summarises the book honestly but in such a way as to market it to a buyer. It’s like introducing someone at a party, emphasis on the positive, on the common ground, on the best side…. No comment on the negatives. Don’t mention the short-temper, the habitual tardiness, the slovenly home, the relentless egotism, the jail time, the snobbery, the cheating at cards, the nose picking, the carelessness in driving a car….  

It is best if the blurb reflects the nature and manner of the text within the book.  No high fluting terminology for a down and dirty book, nor vice versa.  Last, but not least, the blurb must satisfy its first reader, the author, or failing that, the even higher authority of the publishing editor.  Few authors insist on writing their own blurbs and still fewer publishers let them, because the marketing department knows best. 

Here’s a bet.  Next time you are fondling a new book, read the blurb and see if you can tell who wrote it, the author or a hack copywriter?  Those by authors use – shutter – adjectives, while hacks stick to the facts of the text.  (Pssst, authors have even been known to use, ahem, adverbs.) If the story is set in Berlin, a hack will say ‘Berlin,’ while an author will embellish that as ‘wintry Berlin.’  See the difference. Authors seldom resist backstories, hacks have taken the oath to do so.  The hack writes ‘Berlin. Joe had to…’  The author wants more, so ‘Tall and elegant Joe found himself in very wintry Berlin to…’  The one hundred word guillotine falls on the author’s blurb before it gets to a punchline.  A hack is tempted to put the punchline first to get attention and then backfill.  

Authors are prone to describing the book, in superlatives: ‘outstanding,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘amazing.’ These terms are used for everything these days and so have been emptied of significance, but they persist like semantic ghosts to offer a substitute for meaning. Indeed some book-covers are so crowded with such empty calories of praise that there is no room for a few words for what the book is about. By Gresham’s Law, cheap words drive out valuable ones.  

The hack blurb writer sometimes has to start with a draft blurb from the author, and applies Occam’s razor. Slash!  

Blurbs have always been with us but they have changed over time.  Once they were more like tables of contents, then for a while they were displaced by quotations from other writers and critics praising the book with adjectives and adverbs as above! These Masonic salutations tended to zero credibility and now appear, if at all, as supplements.  

However, it is a baleful truth that publishers have lately began to mimic the promotional pitches for movies, with such meaningless remarks as ‘in the tradition of [last year’s box office success],’ which means derivative, ‘based on a true story,’ which means it isn’t, and ‘if you liked [ … ],  you will like this.’ I may have liked one but find that to be quite enough, no more thanks.  (Buy a toilet seat from Amazon, and you’ll see. Thereafter you will be followed to your grave by Amazon’s suggestions of other toilet seats you might like!) Commercial algorithms assume consumers are single-track obsessives. 

The prose is spritely, the insights sharp, the chapters short.  What’s not to like.  

Aside on discipline. I recently had to write a synopsis of a book in 300 characters, and a space counted as a character.  It took me two weeks of editing to get something adequate.  

War Women (2021) by Martin Limón 

Good Reads meta-data is 214 pages, rated 3.18 by 96 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: South Korea.

Tagline: Women with guns!  

Verdict: The dynamic duo return. 

Having recently enjoyed a South Korean movie, I remembered this title was in the Kindle reading bank so I turned to it to continue my mental travels in Korea.

Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are at it again. Ernie is tall and looks very aryan, while George is even taller and looks very hispanic dark.  They often play on this contrast as bad cop Ernie and worse cop George.  Since they have served in this fictional South Korea well beyond the decade of the 1980s, George has had time to learn a lot of Korean, and treats the natives with consideration and respect.  Ernie accepts his leadership on this front…when he is  sober. Since they are cops, GIs shun them, leaving them to spend most of their time off- and as well on-duty together.  

In this outing one of their prime snitches has gone missing, a Sergeant First Class aiming at the twenty-year pension who manages the classified files, filing system, and archives — the last man to go AWOL. In the past he has passed over useful intel to them for a price. Ergo his absence is more than just an official problem, it jeopardises their own capacity to stay on the good side of the Head Shed wherein sit the brass (sometimes on tacks).  

The plot concerns the rape of women by American soldiers and is even more unpleasant to read in the book than in this line.  Ah, most readers probably supposed the women in the previous sentence to be Korean. Not so, The victims are members of 877th Field Transportation Company, drivers and loaders who cart around boy toys.  Yes, these are women, because the volunteer Army has to take whom it can get, and that riles pea-brains high and low, including brass in that Head Shed in Seoul whose widely repeated off the record remarks about what women are good for have been interpreted by a few sergeants on field manoeuvres as the license to rape.  Everyone knows that in the Eighth Army to lodge a complaint about being raped, or anything else, is more likely to lead to punishment for the reporter than the perpetrator, as in most corporations. After all, there was no problem until the report created it.

Instead the women have turned vigilante on the same assumption, that for the C.O. to report their mutiny would be a stain on his record, one big enough to lose his pension.  Having no North Koreans to shoot at, the Americans, men and women, trade gunfire.  It may sound far fetched but the writer make it credible, nearly.

All of this is aided and abetted by that recurring intrepid journalist, Katie Bird, who puts plenty of cats among the Army pigeons.  She is always a welcome addition to any party with a razor wit and never take no for an answer attitude. She is always two or three steps ahead of Bascom and Sueno and stays there as they follow in her wake.

The to-ing and fro-ing in Seoul is detailed, and in this instance there seems to this reader to be too much of that to disguise the rickety, if distasteful, plot. North Koreans are in the formula as usual.

The series started in 1992 with Jade Lady Burning and this is #17 recounting law enforcement (sort of) in the Eighth Army during its occupation of South Korea in the 1980s. At the time South Korea was a military dictatorship of an unpleasant type, and still impoverished with the constant threat from the north.