Thoughts of a Depressive Diplomatist

For March I set myself the task of reading about Mars.  I didn't really think this through beforehand and if I have a theme month again (and I might), I shall prepare beforehand and stock up on books.  Despite that, I had more books than I read, and there were several I meant to read that I didn't quite get to.  I also didn't quite make the balence between fiction and non-fiction I wanted.  

In these respects Mars Month was a bit of a failure, as it didn't work as a deep-dive into my shelves.  One reason for that is (almost by defination) a lot of the books I have is quite dated; to get up-to-date info on Mars exploration I turned to the Internet and also listened to dozens of hours of podcasts.  This lead to a little 'Mars burn-out' and meant that at the end of the day I just didn't want to pick up a book on the subject.  I also significantly undersetimated my ability to absorb technic data - it's a long time since I had to do any 'homework'!

The lesson to me is that a themed month is OK, but it shouldn't be at the exclusion of everything else.

If any of you are tempted to ever have a Mars Month, there are a couple of useful Wikipedia pages on Mars in Fiction and Mars in Culture.

Here they are in the order I read them (do persevere through the lengthy discussion of The Red and Green Planet).

H G Wells, The War of the Worlds

I started with the grand-daddy of all 'alien invasion' books.  

I've always enjoyed the economy of Wells' writing and War of the Worlds gives an account of the invasion without any fat (even down to the fact that very few characters are named).  Despite that, it remains a very powerful story.

Of course, I'm of the age that when I read certain passages of this, I hear the voice of Richard Burton or David Essex.  Given the comments on my previous post, it seems that a number of you are too!

Thunderchild's Last Stand by Scot Andrew Bailey

'Robinson Crusoe on Mars' (1964)

Charles Cockell (ed), Life Beyond: From Prison to MarsRay Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Finished Reading

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

A very good book: a beautiful book.  A book about isolation and being at peace with that: it’s perhaps fitting that I read it on the eve of 2nd Lockdown.  I liked it.  

A lot of fans of Jonthan Strange and Mr Norrell – who've been looking forward to this book for years - will be disappointed that it’s not set in their 'verse.  I think, from the hints about the subject matter that have emerged from time-to-time, that there was some expectation that it would be set on Strange’s Faerie Roads.  That's certainly what I expected.  It's refreshing to get something different.  If anything, it reminds me of books by David Mitchell: and that’s not a bad thing. 

I’d deliberately avoided reading any reviews or anything that might have given a synopsis; and I’m glad.  Not that I like to read reviews anyway (at least for fiction).  I’m not terribly interested in what other people think, preferring to form my own opinion on something as subjective as fiction.  Professional reviews are bad enough, but Goodreads is the worse.  I use it as a useful tool, but the reviews!  When they’re not just gushing fans, they’re people churning out half-remembered and never-fully-understood concepts from High School: talk of ‘poor characterisation’ and ‘crass diction’, etc. 

HP Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

A young scholar becomes obsessed with an ancestor who practiced the Dark Arts.  A newly-discovered portrait shows an uncanny likeness between the two.  What could possibly go wrong?

Despite everything about Lovecraft, it must be admitted that he writes well.  Although the reader has a pretty good idea of what's going on from the very beginning, tension is held as the protagonist gradually uncovers the dreadful truth.

Bayt al Azif: A Magazine for Cthulhu Mythos Roleplaying Games, Issue 2 (Aug 2019)

Another thing (along with the Norfolk Admirals) which has been languishing by my bedside for months.  I decided to finish it off on finding out that Issue 3 is now out (in pdf  at least).  

So what did I read in June?

HRF Keating, Mrs Craggs: Crimes Cleaned Up

As I recall it, I read a book by Keating (probably The Perfect Murder) when I was in Sixth Form and trying out all sorts of things to see where my tastes lay*.  I remember not being very impressed and wondering why people rated him.  This book hasn't done anything to change that opinion.  Back when I was 17 I would have felt honour-bound to finish a book I'd started (this is only about 200 pages); but now I know better, and I gave up on it after the first two stories.

If your tastes run to comedy Cockneys and char-lady-puts-The-Establishment-in-its-place, this might be the book for you.  It's not for me.

You can see the post about the splurge of reading I did in the first part of the month here.  Since then I've settled down a little (basically, I'm sleeping better, so not reading into the early hours, which is obviously a good thing).  As the reception of that post was positve, I am reviving the series where I look at what I've been reading (probably on a monthly business).

Read

J D Davies, The Mountain of Gold

The second of the Matthew Quinton series about a captain in the Restoration Navy.  In this one he get's involved with Robert Holmes and a version of one of his River Gambia expeditions.  About half the book is involved with Quinton's domestic problems, but I don't mind that.

This book held up to the promise of the first, and I shall carry on with the series.  Holmes has just started the Second Anglo-Dutch War, so things will be livening up a little!

Last night I was taking on the phone to my Kindest Critic and the subject of blogging came up.  She reminded me that back in the day (when I used to blog more frequently) I used to have a regular round-up of what I'd been reading.  These used to be quite popular posts.  And looking back at some of them this morning made interesting reading for me.

What with the lockdown, insomnia and what-have-you, I've been a) reading more, and b) thinking about reviving the blog a little.  I'm not going to do the weekly 'Books and Stuff' posts that were a feature of the early years of the blog, but I may start posting a little more often and record my thoughts on my reading.

So Far in May 2020...

Goodreads.com tells me that I've completed 25 books so far this year.  These are the ones I read in May.

Michael Bond, More About Paddington

How can you not like the little chap?  This is the second book in the Paddington series, and he's already very much at home in the Brown household.

There's not really much to be said about this.  The stories are lovely.  1959 attitudes to the sale and  handling of fireworks are something of an eye-opener to some-one who was brought up on 1970's public information films though! 

I can't help hearing Sir Michael Hordern's voice when I read the stories (which always makes it a little odd when I watch The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or Where Eagles Dare - oddly enough it never bothers me when I listen to his Gandalf).

Joan Druett, In The Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon

This is a book by my old friend, New Zealand author Joan Druett.  Here she looks at the events around the 1841-42 Pacific cruise of the whaler Sharon of Fairhaven, MA, which saw Polyneasian crewmen mutiny and murder the captain.  This was of course a great scandal at the time but the causes were covered-up.  Joan examines the financial presures on the captain and his brutality and racism which lead to the mutiny (the turning of a blind eye to such things telling us a lot about the American merchant fleet of the time).

A really excellent read, well-worth looking into even if you're not particularly interested in maritime history.

Again, these are in no particular order...

John Scalzi (ed), Metatropolis.  

I'm not sure how to describe this.  It's an anthology of stories by authors who've set themselves the task of writing in a shared future - a post-urban one.  There is a heavy leaning to a world where Green Is Good. 

Like all anthologies it's a bit hit-and-miss, but I enjoyed it a lot - in no small part because it introduced me to some interesting new writers.

Jason Goodwin, The Snake in the Stone. 

This is the second of Goodwin's novels about Yashim the Eunuch, a resident of 1830s Constantinople who (of course!) gets roped-in as a sort of semi-official investigator when crimes threaten the status quo. 

In this case it's the murder of a dodgy French archaeologist who has been upsetting the city's Greek community just when the authorities don't need it (the Sultan is dying).  Can Yashim find what lies at the heart of a conspiracy that goes back centuries?  (Spoiler: Yes, he can.)

Goodwin, who's also a published historian of the Ottomans, obviously knows his stuff.  The way he describes the city, its people and its food is a real pleasure to read, and Yashim is a very engaging companion.

Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk and Moriarty.

Of course I'm cheating here counting these separate books as one  (thus turning my Top Ten up to eleven).  But I read them both in 2017, so they both fall within the parameters of this list.  Indeed, I was so pleased by The House of Silk, that I went out and got Moriarty straight away.

I've not read any of Horowitz's books before,  He's best known as the author of Young Adult books such as the Alex Rider series and as creator of the TV's Inspector Foyle.

Both books are Sherlock Holmes pastiches.  The House of Silk was apparently the first pastiche authorised by the Conan Doyle Estate.  In a way it's a straightforward  tale in the style of Conan Doyle, but very skillfully done.  As you'd expect, it's narrated by Watson and concerns two intertwined cases.  There is a nice twist at the end which I didn't see coming (perhaps blinded by the twist which I was allowed to see).

Twists are obviously Horowitz's bag, as he takes us on a much more twisty route with Moriarty.  Not so obviously a copy of Conan Doyle's model, it takes us into his world from a different direction.

In the Swiss morgue that holds Moriarty's body after his encounter with Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, a Pinkerton agent meets Insp Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard.  Together they set out to stop the vacuum created by his death being filled by a new threat

Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles.

Talking of Holmes pastiches, here's another one. It follows one of the more traditional of pastiche styles - "Look I'm taking the Holmes characters and mixing them with other writers'.  Aren't I clever and amusing!"  In fact, The Hound of the D'Urbervilles is both clever and amusing, because Newman know's his stuff.  He also has an engaging writing style which doesn't judder to a halt and signpost every time he makes an historical or literary reference.   A knowledge of turn-of-the-century adventure literature would help, but if you've heard of Fu Manchu, Raffles and Ruritania, you'll get by nicely.

The gimmick here is that instead of the found writings of Watson writing about Holmes' cases, we have those of Colonel Sebastian "Basher" Moran writing about those of everyone's favorite consulting criminal, Moriarty.  A fun read, which reminded me of the best of Flashman.  

I hadn't read any Newman before, but I've got his Dracula books on the shelf and will give them a go. 

Peter F Hamilton, Great North Road.  

In putting this list together, I was surprised that there wasn't more science fiction.  

In this stand-alone book, Hamilton picks up some of the themes of his other works - corporate dynasties, cloning technologies and wormholes - and weaves together a story in which a murder one cold, snowy night in 2143's Newcastle turns out to be of planetary importance.  

Hamilton is, of course a master of both world-building and character creation and here we see him at his best.  If I had a quibble, I would say that at 1,087pp, it's about 150 pages too long.  

After reading this I was lured into starting the Void Trilogy.  I enjoy Hamilton's work and I have nothing against either brick-sized books or trilogies.  The problem is that they do need some investment.  The Void books require me to remember who is who in the Commonwealth Saga.  Now I enjoyed the Commonwealth Saga a lot (it's probably some of Hamilton's best work), but I read it over ten years ago and my memory isn't sufficiency good to recall relatively minor characters.  To cut a long story short, I've got stuck about a third of the way through the second book and moved on to other things.  

However, I don't want to put anyone off,  as I say, Great North Road is a stand-alone, so if you want to read 1,000 pages of great science-fiction instead of 5,000 give it a go. 

Andrew Weir, The Martian.  

This wasn't a new read for 2017.  The Martian has become one of my go-to books when I want to read something familiar.  

I suspect it doesn't need much introduction.  It's a story of exploration and survival as a lone astronaut on Mars desperately tries to live long enough to be rescued. 

Good hard sci-fi.

It's the time of year for introspective posts, so I thought I'd put together a list of the top ten books I've read this year.

This list isn't in any particularly order.  It had been my intention to choose five fiction and five non-fiction titles, but I found that I hadn't read as much non-fiction as I'd thought, and that in choosing five I was struggling and excluding some fiction that deserved the cut.  Nevertheless, I;ve still been able to waffle on about them at suffient length to justify splitting the list into two posts in order to give you a break.

So, here we go...

Claire Tomlin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.  

A  biography of Pepys, who shouldn't need any introduction to my readers.  The C17th "isn't my period", but Tomlin did the trick of making Restoration politics interesting and giving a good, rounded picture of the world Pepys was operating it.  

Unlike some other of his biographers, she devotes as much energy to Pepys' life after he stopped writing the diary as before.  In doing so, she reminds us just what an interesting life he led, and us what a loss it was that it ended where it did.  

We're so used to the diary set-pieces being thrown as us - what would it be like if they included his impressions of Paris, the death his long-suffering wife or the short reign of James II?  What would we learn about the machinations that saw him elected to Parliament, Secretary to the Admiralty, imprisoned in the Tower, tried as a cypto-Catholic and serving out his time as a non-Juror?  What personal revelations would we find about 'the second Mrs Pepys', the mistress that he kept for 20 years?  

This is a damn good read, and the best book I read this year.

DA Thomas, Edwin's Letters: A Fragment of a Life, 1940-43.    

As the subtitle suggests, this is a biography on a much smaller scale than the one of Pepys.  Thomas has collected letters (mostly from Edwin to his mother) relating to his brother's time in the RAF, from call-up, through training, to joining a bomber crew, being declared 'Missing' and finally the confirmation of his death in action. 

It's the fact that very little of this book concerns itself with operation matters that appeals to me. The great majority of the letters concern themselves with a young man thrown into a strange world and bothered about things like whether he will have to re-sit his exams on navigation yet again.

Geoffrey Bennett, Naval Battles of the First World War. 

Capt Bennett's study - first published in 1969 - is now a classic, and perhaps somewhat dated.  Despite this it's well worth the read if you want an introduction to the Royal Navy's activities during the war, particularly the Big Ships.  If you want something more comprehensive that covers all theatres, nations and types of naval combat, read Paul G Halpern's A Naval History of World War I, which I also heartily recommend,

Bennett starts with a consideration of how the German merchant cruisers were tracked down and neutralised - concentrating as you'd imagine from the title on von Spee's squadron and the Battles of Coronel and the Falklands - and the pursuit of the Goben and Breslau.  After that, despite a couple of interesting chapters on the U-boat campaigns, he is firmly focused on the North Sea face-off between the Grand Fleet and the Hochseeflotte.  

For those of you who are naval wargamers, this provides a lot of inspiration and food for thought: not least on the problem of how inadequately wargames represent the fog of war, mis-identification, lack of communication and sheer bloody cock-up.

Elizabeth Speller, Following Hadrian: A Second Century Journey Through the Rom an Empire.

I picked this book up thinking that it would be a travelogue, following some of Hadrian's peregrinations.  It isn't.  In a way it's more than that, it's a consideration of Hadrian's philhellenism and how that affected his attitude to ruling an empire.  Mainly it is concerned with the visit to Greece and Egypt in 128-130CE and how the mysterious death of his lover Antinous changed him and quite possibly his plans for the Empire.

I'm not a Roman scholar, or even anyone with more than a general knowledge of Roman history, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of Speller's arguments.  Certainly, I can imagine that for someone with a 'serious; interest in Roman history her insertion of large chunks of a fictitious diary of one of the Empress' confidants would grate.  For me, those bits were well done and reminiscent of Allan Massie's books (his praise is the cover blurb), but perhaps they belonged in another book.

Thom Burnett, Who Really Won the Space Race?  Conspiracy Books (2005)

The first thing to say about this book is that it's not some loony conspiracy theory.

I don't normally have to start reviews saying that, but at first glance the signs aren't favourable: there's the publisher (an imprint of Collins and Brown); the racy title (my edition also has the cover strap-line 'uncovering the conspiracy that kept America second to the Russians') and the fact that Thom Burnett 'Is a pseudonym for one of Britain's leading experts on security and military matters.  Having served with UK Special Forces* in the 1990s, he is now a researcher and writer."  So I stated reading this half in the expectation of giving up in disgust after the first chapter. but because it's a subject that interests me.


The second thing that needs pointing out is that the 'Space Race' of the title is the early space race - the book is only interested in the period up to the launch  of America's first satellite Explorer 1 on 31 Jan 1958 - three months after Sputnik 1 and two after Sputnik 2.

Burnett takes as his starting point Bob Hope's gag that Sputnik was nothing to be worried about because it "simply means that the Russian's Germans are better than our Germans" and, more seriously, President Eisenhower's statement that since the Russians had captured all the Peenemünde rocket scientists in 1945 they had been in a better position to concentrate on rocketry.  As Hope's joke shows, even American popular culture knew this to be untrue.  Burnett's story therefore an account of 'our Germans' and why they didn't make it to space before the Russians.

The first third of the book is taken up with an account of  British, American and Soviet attempts first to find information, and later to capture material, on the V-2 ballistic missile programme, based in Peenemünde on the German Baltic coast.  The accounts of various (and competing) attempts by the allies in the immediate post-war period to reconstruct and test V-2's makes interesting reading, as does the story of how the Americans spirited away train-loads of materiel and hundreds of personnel from under their allies' noses* in contravention of previous agreements.

No Nazis here. von Braun with Walt Disney, 1954

The purpose of all of this wasn't space exploration of course, but to perfect ballistic (and later, inter-continental) missiles.  Burnett runs through the well-known story of Operation Paperclip, which sought to bring German scientific expertise to the United States.  Alongside this he also tells us of the Soviet equivalent, though perhaps unsurprisingly, the Soviets were less willing to overlook the war-crimes committed by their experts.  As a result of this - and because it was always the Soviet intention that 'their' Germans be repatriated at the end of the contracts laid out in the reparation agreements* - German scientists and technicians in the East were not allowed to do original research or even to see how their work was being used.

*An information-gathering exercise - Operation Returning Dragon - existed to pump the returnees for information on Soviet missile programmes.  The Western intellegence agencies were astounded by how little the scientists knew about life outside their enclave.

In contrast, the von Braun group (who had gone to great lengths to ensure that they ended up in the American camp) were purged of their Nazi past, fast-tracked into American citizenship and given key positions in the American missile programmes.  From his position in the US Army's rocket programme, von Braun now sought to press for, and publicise, the peaceful uses of rocketry*.  Which brings us to the next part of the tale...

In 1950, several scientists proposed that in order to encourage scientific endeavour, it would be a good idea to have an International Geophysical Year (IGY) along the lines of previous International Polar Years.  The IGY, which ran for 18 months* from July 1957 to December 1958 was soon a battlefield in the Cold War.  The reason for holding the IGY at that time was that it was a period of increased solar activity: one of the aims of the proposers of the IGY was to encourage the launch of artificial satellites.  The Superpowers saw a chance to further their own interests - the Soviets were interested in developing rockets that could deliver ICBMs and the Americans in the development of spy satellites** - while at the same time gaining a large amount of kudos.  A race had begun.

Eisenhower at Cape Canaveral