Sep 12 2018

London: A Life in Maps by Peter Whitfield

London: A Life in Maps began as a volume accompanying an exhibition at the British Library in 2006. (The exhibit lives on in virtual form at the Library’s web site.) The book was first published that year, and when it kept selling for more than a decade, revised for a new edition published in 2017. The exhibition was apparently divided into eight thematic areas, but Whitfield divides London’s history, unlike Gaul, into four parts: before the Great Fire of 1666, an “age of elegance” after the Fire (something of a long 18th century), a 19th-century metropolis in the Regency and Victorian periods, and suffering from “the shock of the new” in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Twelve years on, the book is a reasonable substitute for a visit, and likely provides more background than the signage offered at the time. Whitfield’s volume is printed in a large format, full color on every page, and if there is a two-page spread without an illustration, I didn’t notice it. From the four chronological parts, Whitfield further divides his text into individual topics — Renaissance London Revealed, Copperplate: From Picture to Map, Shakespeare’s London, to choose four from the pre-Fire section — that are each just a few pages long. The approach adds up to a book that reads quickly, offers fascinating detail on selected items, and allows various themes to emerge over the course of the work.

One of the most prominent theme is how minimally London has been governed over time. Since at least the late medieval period, when Whitfield’s account starts, there have been competing sources of power, wealth and authority along the Thames. In the beginning, royal power, Church authority and the financial muscle of the the City supported and competed with one another. The English Reformation, and particularly Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and other Church institutions broke ecclesiastical authority and tipped the balance very much in favor of the Crown. Royal ambitions required money, and that gave more leeway to the City. At the same time, the king gave former Church estates over to members of the aristocracy, greatly enhancing their power and laying the groundwork for much of London’t future development. Even as centuries passed, London never developed a central governing authority. The City proper guarded its prerogatives. Surrounding areas fell under one form of government or another, and these seldom worked in concert. Even in the 19th century, the railroads and the Tube were private initiatives, barely coordinated at best, destructively competitive at worst.

On the narrow subject of maps and London, Whitfield traces how art, law, commerce and technology have all shaped how the city is depicted, and how that has changed over time. The first printed views of the city are exactly that: panoramas showing how London appeared from a particular vantage at a distance. These were followed by artifacts such as the Agas Map of 1633 that are half map and half view. Whitfield supplements the maps and panoramas with period illustrations. I was very interested to see, for example, pre-Fire buildings that survived into the early 19th century or the Gothic St. Paul’s.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/12/london-a-life-in-maps-by-peter-whitfield/

Sep 11 2018

There There by Tommy Orange

Tommy Orange is such a superlative writer that he can do things that irritate the hell out of me in other books and somehow make them work. And better than work: he creates magic on the page.

It’s not really a spoiler to say that There There ends with multiple storylines left unresolved. In the most glaring example, the penultimate chapter has a sort-of family gathered in a hospital awaiting the fate of a loved one, and you never find out what happens. In any other book, this would drive me insane, but it absolutely and utterly works in this chronicle that is as much a slice of life as it is a fictional narrative. Collecting the stories of American Indians who live primarily in Oakland, California, it is a searing examination of Urban Indians and the many ways they deal, or attempt to, with heritage, identity and survival. Each individual’s story is interwoven into what feels like a living tapestry, almost as if this book is a prose and fictional version of the oral history one of the characters, Dene Oxdene, is compiling for his documentary. And that’s partly why the lack of resolution works: because this narrative stretches so nimbly and powerfully between the past and the present, it feels natural and complete. The future is unwritten because, if you’ll forgive the tautology, the future is unwritten. There There is one of the most immediate books I have ever read, and while I didn’t necessarily understand each character’s feelings, I could absolutely accept their validity because of the way Mr Orange presents them. That is no small feat. This is a superlative book that needs to be more widely read, especially if you have an interest in the American Indian experience. Mr Orange has written something truly special here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/11/there-there-by-tommy-orange/

Sep 10 2018

Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan

So let me begin with a quotation from near the end of the novel (pg 345 of the paperback Titan edition):

“If I took away the sensory overlay I could directly know the patterns of so many concepts coming to fruition out here on the North Sea: the physics behind pressure gauges and safety seals, the signal processing in the robotic arms, the quantum processes in giant screen monitors with thermal imaging of the ocean floor, the statistical mechanics and psychological theories of bonding and interaction in the design of the recreation rooms. This place is a microcosm of humanity’s machine.”

If this is the kind of prose that floats your boat, then you will freaking love Tricia Sullivan’s Occupy Me. An ambitious novel about angels and waveforms and the fight against entropy, it features a cast that’s refreshingly different from that of the average book in today’s market. It’s also got some great ideas about humanity and love and survival.

Unfortunately, it’s also a book about time travel. Unless done right, time travel is one of the most frustrating subject matters I’ve ever come across, for a plethora of reasons. Here, half of my issue was the fact that, as with the rest of the science in the book, it was over-detailed and under-explained. There are so many interesting concepts in this book, but they all get smushed together as we hop between viewpoints — which, in an impressive feat of storytelling, Ms Sullivan successfully presents in first, second and third person — to, um, save some great ideas, I guess? I think if the book had focused on that, and perhaps how it intersected with Dr Sorle’s life, it would have been a much sharper book: as it was, the corporate intrigue and occasional dinosaur left me both unmoved and bored (which is a shame, because Alison is probably my favorite character in the book.) It’s like the financial “conspiracy” was thrown in just to shepherd our characters along to the location where the big finale takes place, as described in my quotation earlier. It feels just as mechanical and inorganic as it sounds.

In fact, a lot of the writing feels more like Ms Sullivan wanted to present some Really Cool Concepts but didn’t know how to comfortably couch it in a human experience. She excels when she’s describing Pearl engaging with her feelings and helping others (also, Alison) but there are things thrown in for no apparent reason, and certainly with no explanation. What was the point of the isometrics? Or of post-Resistance Marquita’s transformation? What is the deal with that freaking refrigerator?!

Anyway, there were too many loose ends for me to really enjoy this novel, but it does have some interesting theories regarding the application of physics/quantum mechanics. It’s not an unenjoyable book, but it could have been a lot more tightly written and less contrived.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/10/occupy-me-by-tricia-sullivan/

Sep 08 2018

Soviet Bus Stops, Volume II by Christopher Herwig

“‘This is bullshit,’ I mumbled, through tears of exhaustion and frustration. The chances of the 4×4 climbing the snowy Goderdzi Pass were as slim as the likelihood that the bus stop at the summit was the prize I so desperately sought. Why was I still doing this after fifteen years, why couldn’t I stop?” (p. 198)

Christopher Herwig’s afterword to his second volume of Soviet Bus Stops poses the question that many readers would like to ask him, and he provides excellent answers. They’re irresistible, and not just to Herwig. “The attention [Soviet Bus Stops] receives around the world exceeds all my expectations.” (p. 198) He can’t quit them. “For the fifth time, I declare I’m finished with the project. Just days later, I find myself searching online for images of Russian bus stops.” (p. 198)

Writing about the first volume, I noted Russia’s conspicuous absence. Herwig explains, “I felt that a parallel existed between the bus stops as underdogs of architecture, and the former Soviet republics that were often overshadowed by Russia.” (p. 198) Russia calls to him, too. “However, as the book gained recognition, so Russian blogs and groups emerged celebrating their bus stops. These people had always appreciated them, but the book stimulated more open discussion.” (p. 198)

Herwig begins to plan a new volume and an odyssey. On a 30-day visa, he covers 15,000 kilometers, first in a loop near Moscow and then clear across Russia from Krasnodar to Vladivostok. Anyone else would have made a book of the journey — maybe Herwig will yet — but in Soviet Bus Stops, Volume II Herwig gives it three paragraphs. He is clearly a man of great focus. “As I approached Vladivostok, at the end of my journey, the bus stops became fewer and less impressive. Though happy in the knowledge that I’d exceeded my expectations, I couldn’t dispel the nagging feeling that I’d not yet reached my destination.” (p. 199) Maybe there is hope for a third volume.

The present volume has an introduction by Owen Hatherley, author of Landscapes of Communism. Whereas in the first volume Vera Kavalkova-Halvarsson, who grew up in a family of architects in Belarus, advanced the argument that the bus stops were an opening for individualism in a stultifying system, Hatherley, who is British, contends “we would be wrong to assume that the outpouring of creativity embodied in the bus stops was aimed against the system rather than its direct consequence.” (p. 8) It’s an interesting argument, but in the end seems stretched to me. Sure, the planners set up guidelines and in some cases that Hatherly documents did have firm ideas about how the overall landscape accompanying a road should appear — as a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk — but the madcap exuberance or just randomness that Herwig documents is at odds with the Soviet system. He gets closer to the mark near the end of his essay when he writes that a bus stop is “a product of the Soviet system, with its combination of command economics, public provision and a paradoxical bureaucratic chaos, where apparent conformity and regularity were bent and twisted at the edges.” (p. 13) And at more than just the edges.

Present politics makes its way into the volume, too. One of the stops from Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula, has been repainted in the Russian tricolor since that region was seized and annexed by Russia in 2014. Several of the stops in Ukraine are in that country’s gold and blue livery. History graces the pages: Herwig includes four photos from in and around Chernobyl.

The only stops from the book I have seen in person are some of the constructions in Georgia. However, that selection includes the one at the top of the Goderdzi Pass that Herwig struggled so hard to reach. I had the good sense to travel that route in summer. The Pass is the high point on 100 km or more of unpaved road along the way from Batumi on the Black Sea coast to Georgia’s ancient capital of Vardzia. It sounds like he approached the Pass from the east, and I can see why his vehicle protested. He made it, though, and took the shot that graces the book’s cover. “This wasn’t bullshit — it was brilliant.” (p. 190)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/08/soviet-bus-stops-volume-ii-by-christopher-herwig/

Sep 07 2018

Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries #3) by Martha Wells

Definitely my favorite of the series so far. Murderbot is slowly becoming more comfortable and confident as an autonomous unit interacting with humans, with a purpose that is becoming clearer, as well: to take down the GrayCris corporation whose actions essentially precipitated Murderbot’s discovery and subsequent flight across the galaxy. There’s a greater wistfulness, too, as Murderbot thinks of Dr Mensah, Murderbot’s ostensible “guardian” and the person most willing to see Murderbot as being invested with an inalienable personhood.

In this installment, Murderbot is intent on examining illegal proceedings on an asteroid that has since been abandoned by GrayCris. Murderbot is pretty sure there’s still incriminating evidence dumped in the memory banks of the machinery there, but the quest to recover such is seriously complicated by the presence of a reclamation team that has bought the rights to the asteroid from GrayCris. Murderbot’s skills as a security consultant quickly come into play as the reclamation team comes under attack from mysterious sources.

That isn’t the hard part for our grumpy AI, tho: the real challenge is figuring out how to deal with Miki, the reclamation team’s pet robot. Essentially a glorified baggage carrier, most robots of Miki’s design are treated like the help or worse. But Miki is treated like a friend and an essential part of the team, something Murderbot has a hard time processing.

I’ve stated in previous reviews that I’m deeply skeptical of the commercial novella format, especially when in an easily collectible series, an opinion that has only been strengthened by Tor.com’s recent decision to embargo digital library sales for the first four months after a book’s initial pub date. I am unashamed to admit that I’m one of the people without the disposable income to enjoy these books without the help of my tax dollar funded libraries, so I imagine I’ll be reviewing the final(?) Murderbot diary quite a long time from now. At this point, tho, I’m genuinely more interested in finding out what happens to e-book sales than to Murderbot. That said, at least I want Murderbot to do well.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/07/rogue-protocol-the-murderbot-diaries-3-by-martha-wells/

Sep 04 2018

Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth

Since June 1 of this year, and through October 28, the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford have been displaying an extraordinary selection of items from their Tolkien collection. The original map of the Lonely Mountain, complete with pointing hand and runic inscription. Watercolors by Tolkien of Hobbiton, of Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug, of the Eagles, of the escape from the wood elves. The original design for the dust jacket of The Hobbit, including a publisher’s note to disregard the red that Tolkien wanted, as this would have raised production costs. Tolkien’s desk. A pipe. Numerous fan letters, not least from a young Terry Pratchett. A map of Beleriand. Some of the objects show Tolkien’s work process: there is a timeline that helped him keep track of who was where when after the breaking of the Fellowship, there are notebooks that he used for writing. There are more personal works: Christmas letters to his children, visionary watercolors from well before The Hobbit was published.

The curators seem very proud of a projection of the design from the gates of Moria at the exhibit’s entrance, and of a multimedia relief map of Middle Earth that changes from light to dark and shows the course of various journeys in Tolkien’s work. They are both pretty neat, and surely involved a good bit of work to create, but they are secondary to the works from Tolkien’s own hand, and from the objects and documents that help illuminate his life.

The exhibit showed me how very early Tolkien was orphaned, and how tight his finances were for many years. He asked his publisher that he be paid for the illustrations that he prepared for the books; he did extra work during the university holidays; he re-used spare examination books for writing. Middle Earth is a cultural juggernaut now, but it was not for much of Tolkien’s life. Other visitors have commented on the items showing Tolkien’s experiences in the Great War, and drawn conclusions about how that affected his writing. I was reasonably familiar with that part of his history, so I did not spend much time with those objects.

The exhibition as a whole is not large. It is all contained within one room at the Weston Library. Tickets are free and bookable in advance online, though a limited number of entries are available each day, and they have been known to run out. The well-stocked gift shop next to the exhibition is only free to people with much more willpower than I have.

I was thrilled to see the paintings, drawings, and maps from Tolkien’s own hand. It was well worth a trip there and back again from Oxford.

(Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth will travel next year to the Morgan Library in New York, where it will run from January 25 through May 19. After that, it will be in Paris, although I have not been able to find a precise location or dates.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/04/tolkien-maker-of-middle-earth/

Sep 02 2018

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

Okay, jeez, this book means well but honestly, it’s like someone took a distillation of current events from the last ten or fifteen years and fictionalized it to make it easily understandable for and palatable to the average white woman. Here is modern feminism (with a bit of background on the movement in America) and, briefly, the problems its detractors correctly point out, with a love story and personal histories to make it all feel more relatable. It’s a perfectly pleasant, perfectly readable, perfectly vanilla book.

I actually picked it up in a bit of a huff (or rather, placed a hold on it at the public library in a huff) as a friend had sent me a copy of Naomi Alderman’s The Power, claiming it had life-changing properties. When I told her, quite gently or so I thought, that I was hesitant to read it because of its exclusionary idea of feminism, I was mansplained to regarding inclusivity. I wasn’t blind to the irony, but I was still deeply annoyed, enough so to care when one of the women’s magazines I read touted The Female Persuasion as a modern feminist novel. “Well,” I thought to myself, “let’s go see what all the moderns think of feminism.” But really, how much could I expect of a society that elected 45 into office?

Which isn’t to say that Meg Wolitzer doesn’t try, or that she doesn’t try enough. I mean, she clearly knows her audience, and knows as well enough of the criticism of mainstream political feminism to include it, however tangentially, in TFP. But I honestly thought Faith and Greer were both kind of awful, and I liked Cory for the most part except for breaking up with Greer for no discernible reason (and then also Lauren’s proclamation about his actions, like it was revelatory for Greer, which only proves that Greer is a total halfwit.) I liked Zee a lot and would have happily read an entire book about her, and that’s a lot of my problem with this book: I had to read about the mostly dull and marginally awful straight white ladies instead of the truly interesting queer woman because that’s how modern (American) feminism is. I’d like to think that Ms Wolitzer was just as aware of this irony as I am but I’m afraid that most of her target audience/market won’t be. Plus also there was a vague undercurrent of “critics are so tiresome” personified in Emelia’s sitter, who even I thought was obnoxious but well-meaning, thereby fitting right in with the rest of the novel.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/02/the-female-persuasion-by-meg-wolitzer/

Aug 30 2018

Dragon Coast by Greg van Eekhout

With his trilogy about a darkly magical California — California Bones, Pacific Fire, and Dragon Coast — Greg van Eekhout has created an interesting world that puts wizards and fantastic creatures into a roughly contemporary setting and spun exciting stories of adventure among the people who shape that world. Earth is home to many magical creatures, from the kraken of the depths through the mammoths and sabretooth tigers on land to dragons in the air, all the way to the great beast at the heart of the world. Some trained humans gain access to these creatures’ power and other kinds of magic by eating their flesh and bones. They take the beasts into their beings and become magical themselves. That also makes them vulnerable, because any sorcerer who consumes their body will likewise gain the power of every beast they have absorbed. It’s a harsh society that calls California’s mild climate home.

The first followed Daniel Blackland as he upended the magical order in southern California; the second followed Daniel and his ward Sam, a golem of potentially immense power as they try to stop the creation of a Pacific firedrake, a massive dragon stronger than anything else known on the whole of the coast. Discussing the plot of Dragon Coast is impossible without revealing the ending of Pacific Fire.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/30/dragon-coast-by-greg-van-eekhout/

Aug 28 2018

Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

Why was Raising Steam, the penultimate Discworld novel, so much better than I expected? I had reason to worry. It clocks in at 475 pages, and for the last 10 books, I have much preferred the shorter ones to the longer ones. Both of Raising Steam‘s immediate non-YA predecessors, Unseen Academicals and Snuff, had seemed particularly self-indulgent. It’s programmatic: Pratchett has written about the post office, banking, and foot-the-ball; now he is going to write about railroads. It takes Moist van Lipwig as its central character, but Moist is not so much a character as a show and a collection of enthusiasms. He’s heaps better to read about than Rincewind, of course, but he’s nowhere near as interesting a creation as Captain Vimes, Granny Weatherwax (or even Nanny Ogg), or Tiffany Aching. The start is a bit shaky, too. Pratchett writes the dialog of Dick Simnal, the most important new character in Raising Steam, in the thickest dialect of any character that I can think of in all the Discworld books. I’m not sure what Pratchett is getting at with the dialect, unless it is referring to a specific regional English origin for the character, at the price of baffling anyone outside of England. He has managed to convey the humble origins of Captain Vimes and many other characters, or the country life in Lancre without resorting to ostentatious dialect.

With all of these factors arrayed against it, Raising Steam should just limp along as a serviceable late-Discworld book, a late-afternoon local on a line that is soon to be discontinued. But no, it works, splendidly, maybe even gloriously, barreling along its narrative tracks to a climax that’s thrilling and an ending that’s satisfying. Why? How?

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/28/raising-steam-by-terry-pratchett/

Aug 23 2018

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

Snuff, the thirty-ninth Discworld book, turns out to be the last one starring Sam Vimes, who has gone a long way in the world since his first appearance in Guards! Guards! There will be one more Moist van Lipwig book, one more Tiffany Aching book (although I am still drafting my thoughts on I Shall Wear Midnight), and that is the end of the main sequence of Discworld books. By the time Snuff was published, Pratchett’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s had been public for four years; he would live for another four. I don’t know if Pratchett knew that Snuff would be his last outing with Vimes, but I tend to think not. There is nothing elegiac about it, and although there is an epilogue saying what happened later to various characters, it is almost exclusively concerned with minor characters whose futures support a point made by Vimes in the book’s middle and provide a few last laughs.

The book sends Vimes on a busman’s holiday, or more accurately, a policeman’s holiday. He is persuaded, well, practically ordered, to spend a couple of weeks at his wife Sibyl’s considerable estates in the countryside at some distance from Ankh-Morpork. She accompanies him to the manor house that she loved as a child but has not visited in eight or nine years. They bring along their son, Young Sam, not least so that he may have some of the same treasured childhood experiences that Sibyl recalls so fondly.

Vimes is out of his element. He is a city boy, through and through, and he finds the countryside vaguely unnerving. Nor is he much better with the people. He is quite used to being in charge as commander of the Watch, but he is not at all accustomed to being lord of the manor. His egalitarian instincts clash with what the people expect from someone at the top of the hierarchy, and he is equally clueless about the ranks and rivalries among all of the people who serve him and his family on the estate. Sibyl, of course, is to the manor born, and she prevents Vimes from making greater mistakes, even as she guides him to a place in country society.

All is not well, or it would be a very short book. During a dinner party, Vimes is told by one of the local gentry how quiet things are and how little there could be to interest someone who is used to the criminality of the big city. Vimes’ ears immediately prick up. Sometime later, he accepts a challenge to a fistfight from the local blacksmith who has egalitarian views similar to Vimes’ and isn’t afraid at all to share them at great volume and with great resentment. The blacksmith, Jethro, is young and strong and fast, but he has not had the decades of fighting people who are actually trying to kill him that Vimes has had, and it’s a short and one-sided fight.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/23/snuff-by-terry-pratchett/