peteg's blog 2009-12-01-PeterCameron-FinishingSchoolForBlokes.autumn

Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children

I can't remember when I last read this, though I have been recommending that anyone and everyone do so for many years now. The first two books flow beautifully, and then I had the same trouble as last time: Parvati feels like a half-sketched pawn, little more than a mechanism for Saleem to acquire a son of the requisite biological connection. The war in Bangladesh is a bit too abstract. It all gets a bit too impersonal, unmagical, sad.

I wonder now if Rushdie was trying to set things up for a sequel, on the children of midnight's children. It seems that a Deepa Mehta film is in the works.

T. E. Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom a triumph

The classic sandals-and-machine guns saga by Lawrence of Arabia. Like the movie (but more so), it is an incredibly long and repetitious account of Lawrence's efforts during World War I to forment and support the Arab Revolt. Amongst these 700 pages one might hope that he would provide more context more regularly; often people are mentioned once or twice only, using just a surname or nickname, and the composition of caravans is left implicit. This makes it difficult to keep track of who is where when, what the military objectives were, and who is feuding with whom over what.

The language is pretentiously florid, as if the author is trying to write a Bible of Arab insurgency. Lawrence introspects regularly, albeit with a knowingness that does not work well with a non-specialist such as I, and the progress of his thinking is obscured. Reglarly my eyes glazed over and vast tracks made little impression. George Orwell continued in this tradition of siding with anti-establishment sentiment and writing about it, but realised early-on that flowery language gets in the way of clear apprehension.

Still, it is a fabulous tale. The land is vast, the camel rides heroic. The best parts analyse Arab culture on the road: feasts, sexuality, what is fair game to raid, what is valued, and so forth. Lawrence's motivations, where I could divine them, seem romantic: he would have been just as happy helping in the liberation of the Indians, it seems, if he had been digging up their antiquities instead.

Also interesting are the power relationships amonst the English and Arab hierarchies. Lawrence venerates General Allenby and Emir Feisal as the great men of the day, respects Auda for his ability in battle, and the technical knowledge of his sappers and troops. The Turks are regularly rubbished though, in contrast to the Germans who are deemed an enemy that one can be proud to have.

The international relations of the day seemed a lot more gentlemanly, centering on personalities and lobbying by venerated (upper-class) parties, and there was a lot more emphasis on direct control of the dominion, rather than the indirect approach of Pax Americana. I put that down to the technological limits of the times.

I guess I am more interested in the post-WWI history of the Middle East; after the efforts of King Hussein of Mecca and sons in the region stretching from Hejaz to Syria, how did Saudi Arabia come to occupy the two holy cities? — Lawrence's maps show just a relatively small kingdom around Riyad, which may also have been called something like Wahibistan. Wikipedia has some answers. From a local perspective the British efforts may well have looked like the last crusade.

Somewhat sadly, Feisal did not last too long in Syria, ruling from Damascus; the French ejected him in 1920. It seems that Jordan is the last remnant of the Hashemite regimes, and from this distance it appears to be one of the more tolerant, stable and successful countries in the region.

I'll have to watch the movie again.

Peter Cameron: Finishing School for Blokes

The recent media racket over the boys of St Paul's reminded me that I meant to read Peter Cameron's tale of debauchery and intrigue at St Andrew's in the 1990s. It turns out that he left at the end of 1995, coincident with the arrival of my mates from our country boarding school.

The book is probably most interesting when it is salacious, though there are a lot more details about the drinking than the shagging. I'd totally forgotten about the phantom arsehole, a symbol that was once ubiquitous around Sydney Uni. The politics between the Principal and the Council is tedious beyond belief, and the text slides into self-justification and repetition, and becomes occasionally unsound: Cameron makes it clear that he kept the students at arm's length as much as possible, but also claims that he knew them well enough to capture their essences in a few brief unflattering stereotypes, and that there was a lot of mutual respect floating about.

Overall it is as well-written as one would expect from a heretical lawyer-minister. Cameron himself comes across as initially clueless about Australia, almost inexcusably so after all of Donald Horne's fine work. I wonder if they ever did get another Principal of any calibre.

Funnily enough the wheels fell off the 'drews Rawson Cup monopoly circa 1998, well before the women totally routed the traditionalists in 2002. mrak tells me that was the death knell of the Andrewsmen.

Simon Winchester: The Man Who Loved China

Here Winchester recounts the life of Joseph Needham, author of the authoritative series of books on the history of science in China. His press minions were sufficiently active last year that I somehow recalled the title of this book while looking for something else.

Overall it is quite well written, if a tad too salacious, and a tendency towards a shallow engagement with the academic side of things. (I object to his overly salacious treatment of Needham's eroticism.) More background on the political organisation of the Middle and Celestial Kingdoms in antiquity would have been most welcome, as would be a discussion on how China related to the region; technologically speaking, what came out of their entanglement with the Mongols, Indians and Vietnamese? The extended section on how Buddhism got introduced is the sort of thing there should have been more of, but even a thorough journalistic biography of Needham himself is probably beyond a book of this length.

The Needham Question, as to why China's progress stalled for so long, receives a cursory treatment and is largely dismissed along "you can't prove a negative" lines. I struggle with this attitude, as it implies that historicism can never really isolate the causes and effects of events, a charge that Popper levelled against Marxism. Also I fail to see why a similar question can't be asked of Egypt, India and Arabia, with their early innovations in mathematics and engineering. Perhaps the question cannot be resolved in some absolute way, but the kinds of discussion it generates are fascinating. For example, one line is that Western thought allowed the natural (phenomenological) to be decoupled from the supernatural (noumelogical), whereas the Chinese approach required holistic explanations. Roughly, that perhaps science proper requires modularity, some means of delimiting the claimed scope of purported laws of nature.

Winchester gives the impression that the ancient Chinese were excellent and creative engineers, but somewhat less interested in building abstract models of scientific phenomena; he (but perhaps not Needham) says nothing about Chinese parallels with the great strides taken by Newtown, Leibniz et al in developing the differential calculus in the 17th century. I really would have liked to understand what sort of logic the Chinese employed.

I was irritated to find that the bibliography is enormous; the non-specialist reader would have been better served by a much shorter list of entry points into this expansive topic.

Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies

I've been meaning to read this book since I read a review in the Smage last year, which they pinched from The Guardian. I picked it up just now because the UNSW Library copy of Salman Rushdie's latest has apparently been subjected to a five-finger discount.

Somewhat like In an Antique Land, this novel exhibits Ghosh's talent for anthropological scholarship, flawed by a lack of discipline: the imperative to house as much of his raw material as possible, even at the expense of fidelity, plausibility or pacing, overpowered his finer judgement. He successfully captures the settings of circa 1838; the slave boat, the opium factory, the streets of Calcutta, the villas of the upper crusts, the economic situation of the Indian everypeople, and so forth are vivid. But it is too much, the period too rich a seam, with England at the height of Empire, trying to bring the Chinese markets into their sphere of influence via the opium trade, to fit entirely within even a multi-ply narrative.

Unlike the portrayal of opiate abuse in Trainspotting, the drug scenes here are brief and finesse the cliched moral quagmire of recreationalism and fatalistic destructiveness without much humour.

The narrative is occasionally discontinuous through what feels like carelessness. Whatever became of the judge with the hots for Paulette? — and was the story she told Zachary about Mr Burnham fiction or truth? Either way, I found it a tiresome piece of tawdry prurience, shocking in its unoriginality. The gomusta is the glue character, possessed by his spiritual aunt, capable of making just the right things happen at just the right time. Deeti's shrine is a cute continuity device, but it has apparently no significance beyond forward referencing.

Ghosh's romances are irritating, as his heart is not really in it. Deeti and Kahlua get unofficially hitched within a page or so of becoming free, whereas Zachary and Paulette, who are bleedingly obviously intended for mutual deflowering, barely manage a snog interruptus before the 471st page. They are young and the author treats them childishly. Some other characterisations are a bit clunky; Kalua's transformation from bullock to Deeti's cool-headed weapon of mass destruction stretches credulity; Neel's transformation from Raja to a Jesus-like figure jangles against his occasional recurrence of snottishness.

A movie is clearly in mind: imagine! Ghosh is daydreaming of having Keira Knightley segue from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean to fill the corset of Paulette, and somehow reuniting the extras from Slumdog Millionaire to inflate the lascars and sundry unsavoury types onboard the Ibis. There'll be a couple of song-and-dance numbers to leaven the roti. Hmm, we still need some strapping young blokes for Zachary and Jodu... and who else but Michael Caine for the dragon-chasing Captain? Maybe Salman Rushdie's ex might just be perfect as Elokeshi...

I found the polyglot of the dialogue mostly easy to follow, though that may be because I didn't delve into it much. How much I missed I'll never know.

This novel terminates just over a cliff, and there does not seem to be any news yet of a followup to this, the first of a purported trilogy. Damnit, the spoon's in the flame.

Graham Greene: The Human Factor

A late-career off-beat spy anti-thriller that I picked up on the strength of his perhaps-unrepeated The Quiet American. A tad too dreary to be really enjoyable.

Ralph Steadman: The Joke's Over: Bruised memories: Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson and Me.

Well, Thompson was right: Steadman shouldn't try to write, or in any case I shouldn't try to read it. Much preferrable would have been more art and less prose, and certainly less indulgent self-contradiction.

Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age

This is an old Stephenson that I stole from mrak's shelf a while ago. It seems to lack the cachet of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, but I get the impression that this author's prose is systemically flawed, so I won't be reading another. In some ways he reminds me of Philip K. Dick in that the ideas are not so hot, or have been absorbed into the ambient culture, or whatever.

At the centre of this book is a purported marriage of Victorian values with a nanotechnological society that is mostly hanging off the ex-colonial coastline of China. The aesthetic is borderline steampunk at times, more fantasy than futuristic, with some dodgy and somewhat tedious analysis of the ethics of the "Victoria I" era and Confucianism. I came away thinking that Stephenson must have recently visited the place, with his lack of Gibson's perceptiveness, the ability to scope the locality to the novel and vice-versa, resulting in this occasionally xenophobic, sometimes sinophilic melange.

This being scifi or cyberpunk or something, he is obliged to slip in some unerotic deviant sexuality. Strangely enough, the three heroines (one somewhat fleshed out, the other two skeletal) are virginal for all we know, even though the fleshy one works as an overblown architect of narrative in a high-class brothel. Possibly virginal until the sexual assaults, anyway, that are presented as a fait accompli to the sort-of revolutionary Chinese Fists. In any case, all the characters seem to be bound in overweening power relationships that lack personality.

The nanostuff is fairly plausible but not too imaginative: it generally behaves like programmable organics, and the story could have been told using biochemists rather than nangineers. Indeed, the nanostuff seems to largely bioactive in effect, apart from producing horrendous architecture and justifying an entirely predictable making-stuff-by-hand-for-rich-people unicorns and blacksmiths district.

Stephenson uses Turing machines as a plot point, firstly by having the "young lady's illustrated primer" be one, for the most part, and secondly by portraying vast numbers of young chinese girls as being entirely programmable. I found it ironic that he pronounces that Turing machines have no soul, and cannot do what a human can (yadda yadda), even while railroading his shallowly characterised actors into overly predictable fates. "Castle Turing" read like a high schooler's account of a book by Raymond Smullyan, missing the logic for the scenery. Neologism ahoy, how cheap.

The narrative stalled something fierce in the middle, and entire plotlines are left hanging variously through the novel. The children's stories from the primer are jarring rubbish. Anyway, why didn't they commercialise the book? Surely they could have been more broadly subversive without too much additional cleverness, and there'd be a huge market for it, just like TVs as "educational" child-pacifiers. Also Stephenson seems to believe in the DRM fantasy, that you can control what a user does with a digital artefact through some clever encryption: I found it impossible to believe that Dr X could not fabricate more books after he has created the first.

I never really got a handle on what the Fists were trying to achieve, or what the Seed was supposed to be. In some ways the Feed reflects the current internet: centralised to some extent, but distributed enough that the paranoid can get enough redundancy, privacy, etc. for the most part. If each Matter Compiler logs too much info, well, compose your artefact out of many things and use many Matter Compilers...

The text itself tends towards patronising flabbiness, with a subtext that the author is uncertain his jokes and allusions are going to be understood, possibly because he lacks faith in his audience, but more likely due to him not really grasping what he's trying to talk about. The section titles telegraph the action to the point where there is no tension or subtlety to be found. Ultimately this is more fantasy that scifi or cyberpunk or whatever, and not a patch on Brunner's world-building.

John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar

The fattest Brunner I've yet read, and I doubt he topped these 515 pages. This, not Jagged Orbit, was his first fat book. It is deservedly tagged as his must-read novel.

Brunner must have been on some very good drugs in the late 1960s, and I guess those of the earlier 60s had had time to settle in and make his brain their own. One must wonder if these sorts of books furthered the cause of liberated recreational drug use that the author favours, for at this point in history, none of his fantasies seem to have come through. Indeed I would expect that the late-in-life Brunner was doing the same stuff as the Brunner who wrote this book.

This book is expansive, being perhaps the most holistic attempt at world building I've read. Apparently this sort of thing is called social science fiction. The author's voice, and sometime deus ex machina, is the sociologist Chad Mulligan, whose "hipcrime dictionary" channels Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, and more broadly runs a line echoing the technoculturalists of the day, Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan in particular. The news flashes, the limited attention spans, the population pressure: as speculation, it is top notch.

Let us not dwell on the plot any longer than the author did.

I find it amusing that all the old-school models of computers were way off, positing some small number of humongous machines with incredible IQs that managed the affairs of the world. I reckon we'll only have general-enough AI for this sort of thing after almost everyone has enough computing power to run private instances, totally changing the dynamics of these speculations.

There's lots of racial commentary here, especially on post-colonialism and within the borders of the U.S. These issues were massive in the late 60s but seem to have been stage-managed into timidity now. The eugenics in this book remains as unappealing now as it probably was then, though I do note that choosing the sex of your offspring is becoming socially acceptable.

Here's another review.

John Brunner: The Jagged Orbit

Brunner is on some good drugs here: it's the end of the 1960s and this is (?) his first fat book: almost 400 pages of splintered narrative and psychedelic scenery. In fact, all the characters are on drugs too.

In essence this is a fairly standard story about a computer that tries to predict the future and goes crazy in doing so. It amounts to something like Arnie in Terminator 2, banging on about a future that is somehow going to be avoided and yet somehow can't be, except in this case it is because the Skynet-equivalent is not so much involved in the killing but is merely trying to maximise sales for its arms cartel owners. Uh-huh.

He has some cute devices but all are entirely dispensible. There are no unattractive women here, and all are geek ideals. Utopia ahoy... barring the urban decay, but that's OK, presumably we're all holed up at home on drugs. The writing is self-indulgently flabby and there's a good chunk of condescending say-don't-show in the latter parts. Can't we have a deus ex machina with a smaller mouth?

John Brunner: Manshape

I didn't get into this one; perhaps I read it too quickly or wasn't paying attention. The central conceit is suicide institutionalised at the cultural level, and the book explores the putative causes thereof. Too much plot-furthering explanatory dialogue, not enough action.

Some other bloke has been ploughing through Brunner this year and posting his thoughts. His grasp of the genre is admirable.

Dennis McIntosh: Beaten by a Blow: A Shearer's Story

A somewhat dreary memoir, reminiscent of the Victorian weather, but a page turner nevertheless. The episodic structure wears a bit thin as variety dries up: escape to a shearing shed, so-and-so shore so many sheep per unit time, hit the booze, wake up and wonder about the (future) wife and kids.

The hook is the entirely Australian and now entirely alien life of the shearer, addicted to increasing productivity, always needing to be faster. The sketch of the industrial relations history is somewhat interesting as it covers the time immediately preceding the disintegration of unionism in Australia; the key issue in the early 1980s was the use of the wide comb.

I reiterate the general complaint that the ending is too sudden; we start with a car crash and end with a whimper. Apparently he got a Masters in English literature in the not-too-distant past, and the story of getting from the shed to there might've been worth wiring in. Drawing a parallel with Henry Lawson is a long bow, for this bloke is not pretending to be a poet.

Coincidentally the author is currently reading the book on Radio National's First Person.

David Halberstam: The Best and the Brightest

I picked up this book on the strength of Fred Kaplan's citation in his Wizards of Armageddon, hoping for more insight into Robert S. McNamara's decision making. Well, wasn't I disappointed; Halberstam's take is that it is indeed turtles all the way down, until we get to the one with the weak knees.

This book is expansive, a reporter's in-depth reconstruction of the decision making processes surrounding the U.S. engagement with Vietnam from the post-war period up to about 1968. Structurally it is a narrative with mini-biographies of the major players embedded at mostly opportune points. Clearly Halberstam immersed himself in Vietnam itself in the 1960s, mined the Pentagon Papers and made the most of his time with Daniel Ellsberg.

Most interesting to me was Halberstam's narrative of how the substantial expertise on Asia in the State Department was sidelined and purged by the the irrational U.S. policy towards post-revolutionary China, from circa 1950 to the early 1960s. Roughly McCarthyism (exemplified by the platitude that only Nixon could go to China and not be red-baited by Nixon) gave rise to the idea that those interested in China were by-and-large fellow travellers, whereas those following the Russians were apparently OK because of the big-boy issues of missile gaps and atomic tensions.

Hence by the time that Kennedy and his best-and-brightest were taking decisions that would severely limit Johnson's options in 1965, Communism had become this atomic red monster that ate all the dominos before it. It was quite late in the day, 1966 or so, that McNamara acknowledged that the Vietnamese just might be fighting on nationalistic grounds, quite at odds with the idea of the Comintern (etc). As Halberstam wryly observes, at the time the dominoes themselves didn't seem to mind too much.

Unlike so many other books on this time in history, much attention is paid to the antecedents to the American involvement. News to me was how the preeminent general of the time, General Matthew Ridgeway, kept the U.S. out of the French disaster at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954. This wise consul went unheeded a decade later. Eisenhower comes out sounding like a man of rare reason to me, winding down the military in a way that slipped away from McNamara. Also Halberstam pointed to events I wasn't aware of, such as the Brinks Hotel bombing. (These days Wikipedia's coverage of just about anything is superior to just about any non-principal source — which publisher could ever devote so many pages to so much arcana? — but this book still provides a top-notch jumping-off point.)

Generally the decision making mechanisms in the various bureaucracies (Defence and State in particular) seemed debased by the all too familiar cover-your-arse selective hearing that we get so much of now. Truth tellers were marginalised, 'yes' men rose rapidly, systems were implemented that kept the noise and discarded the signal. In essence, rational the best-and-brightest may have been, but also quite disconnected from reality: evidence-based activity was M.I.A. The why and how of Johnson (et al) hiding of the escalation from the congress and the citizenry is quite plausibly constructed, and perhaps the saddest part of this debasement of the American deliberative apparatus.

It seems that McNamara understood the limits of force (at least in Vietnam) by about 1966, about two years into the escalation. Eerily familiar is the absence of a plan for winning, let alone what to do after winning: was the U.S. going to occupy South Vietnam for decades?

The text itself is slightly flabby, and could have been more tightly edited in a few places. It sometimes got a bit too repetitive, going beyond the rehashing that makes such a long narrative tractable to the casual reader.

Pointers to recent material:

Another example of the executive being captive to events beyond the control of the perenially new rational operators is Entangled Giant at the New York Review of Books: why does each incoming U.S. administration cover the arse of the previous one?
There's an extensive collection of stuff about Halberstam at the New York Times. Clearly a great journalist, and didn't the times give him a lot to work with.
McNamara gave an interview on UCTV in the mid-90s. He gets real after the 30 minute mark.
My timing is once again impeccably uncanny: he Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers was released concomitantly to my reading of this book.

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

I last read this book about a decade ago and don't remember much from the experience. Conrad's prose is of the old school, more Dickens than Orwell, and the occasional locution sometimes jangles. The story itself is quite edgy, quite gripping, with the occasional lapse in continuity and allusion to current-time events to keep the reader awake.

I feel, as with most classics, it is a bit pointless trying to say much when so much has already been said.

William Gibson: Virtual Light

Another book I stole from mrak's bookshelf a while ago. Definitely by 1993, and probably quite a bit sooner, William Gibson had developed a fairly rigid stucture for his novels: roughly, fibrous chapter-long episodes that climax in entanglement. This is the book that proves the rule.

In essence the plot is cops-and-robbers, without real cops. Well, one of the ex-cops is the Knoxville hero who saves San Francisco from gentrification, and post-book is presumably ravaged by an increasingly cyberspunky pseudo-heroine. The cyberpunk elements are well-used, lending the cities a Bladerunner-ish ambience. There are some clangers though, like having Swiss-style data fortresses and yet requiring some critically-important information to reside on a pair of virtual reality glasses for plot, and probably tax, purposes.

As with most of Gibson's output, I found myself hurrying to finish it, wondering what it is all going to amount to, and afterwards being somewhat saddened that he didn't bother with a take-home message.

Bruce Sterling, ed.: Mirrorshades

I pinched this one from mrak's shelf a while ago. This book promises to checkpoint the cyberpunk genre circa 1988 by collecting short stories from some or all of the major players, such as William Gibson and apparently Sterling himself, whom I've never read.

The best, for mine:

Tom Maddox's Snake Eyes was cute but inspecific. Available from his website with a lot of other stuff.
James Patrick Kelly's Solstice is an adventure in drugs as legitimate experience-enhancers, and as artforms. Definitely the best written story in this collection, but rates meh for cyberpunk. Again, his website has loads of his writing.
Paul Di Filippo's Stone Lives had some promise, enough to justify looking at his other stuff. I would say this exceeds the average for cyberpunk in this collection, albeit with a ghost-in-the-corporation that makes the twist somewhat predictable. Shades of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land?

Overall the collection was paint-by-the-numbers: if there's a woman, she is a sex object, deviant at least in apperance and otherwise indistinguishable from the blokes, Trinity from the Matrix being a modern canonical example. If there is politics, there is the 1980s totalitarian against the free American. If there's a book editor, he is into self-aggrandisement.

This book might have lead me to doubt that my conception of cyberpunk, which I take to be pretty much defined by Neuromancer and Bladerunner, coincides with anyone else's... if it weren't for the reviews on Amazon. Hopefully I can jump off from here.

Fred Kaplan: Wizards of Armageddon

The passing of Robert S. McNamara has reignited my erratic search for substantive information on this icon of rational methods. (The computer science equivalent might be Dijkstra.) In his rehashed pseudo-obituary, Fred Kaplan made reference to interviewing McNamara for his PhD thesis of 1983, titled Wizards of Armageddon, which I figured might be worth a read given that his polemics on Slate are usually interesting and coherent.

In brief, this book is about the strategic thinking of the civilians entangled in the U.S. war machine immediately following the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The 1950s and early 1960s are dealt with in some detail, which makes sense as these were the most interesting periods, and presumably Kaplan had a mountain of newly declassified documents to trawl through, myriad ungagged players to interview. Conversely by the time of Carter and Reagan we're definitely into newspaper clipping territory.

The centerpiece of the narrative is the construction and evolution of the RAND Corporation by the U.S. Airforce, home to many international policy thinkers over the years: Kenneth Arrow and many other illustrious economists have spent some formative time there.

Kaplan alludes to some of the central mathematical concepts, such as game theory, that underpin the strategic analyses that he describes without providing enough detail to be engaging; showing the prisoner's dilemma in extensional form deepens rather than covers this gaping hole. By treating lightly over technical specifics, the book sometimes feels like little more than a laundry list of participants, reports and military obscurities. Perhaps I really should be aspiring to read Machine Dreams.

Interesting were the various views of the Korean war: some took it to be a failure as the U.S. didn't win, whereas others felt it was a success as it achieved limited goals using limited resources. The tension between these views is mirrored in the schizophrenic thinking about the use of nuclear weapons, as portrayed Kaplan. Roughly, how could the U.S. win in a mutually-assured destruction (MAD) scenario? The two options seemed to be be either not to play, implying more Koreas, or to hope that some sophisticated signalling with nuclear devices (e.g. the "no cities" policy) got read correctly, resurrecting the possibility of a doubtlessly-Pyrrhic victory.

Another perspective (circa p200) is given by Clausewitz's ideas on military objectives: if war is politics by other means, and self-destruction is assured once the bomb comes into play, then using the bomb cannot possibly be sanctioned by a government which notionally has the civic wellbeing in mind, or indeed, derives its sovereignty from the populace. Therefore war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. became impossible to countenance (if we are prepared to grant the Soviet rational self-interest) and the proxy war of Vietnam (and so forth) became inevitable. I wonder if this fed into McNamara's thinking at the time.

I observe in passing that Herman Kahn's escalation ladder (circa p223) is reminiscent of Rapoport's tit-for-tat strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Kaplan uses exactly that moniker to label Kahn's Type III Deterrence.

Kaplan struggles to distinguish between the policies that make sense while there is a nuclear imbalance — for instance, the U.S. had no need to be particularly subtle in its use of the first atom bombs as no other power could challenge it — and those for the equilibrium state where any of several actors could bring the planet to a biological conclusion. In the latter case MAD is justifiable due to it being something like a Nash equilibrium, and moreover the policy makes it highly unlikely that conventional wars will get out of control if the actors are rational. Kaplan does not even mention Nixon's behaviour in this context.

Concretely (p315), Kahn's theory of escalation clearly leads to an arms race, at least until MAD levels of weaponry are established. After that it makes sense to a military-industrial complex acculturated to constant expansion to pour money into anti-missile defence systems, which up to that point are prohibitively expensive (p322). Kaplan would have done better to tie these arguments to the dynamics of the situation more often.

McNamara has some key roles in this saga, but my desire to get some handle on his methods, some insight into how he dealt with the complexity of the defence portfolio, and specifically the moral ambiguity of the bomb went unsatiated. We get some comments to the effect that he was well aware that the Vietnam War was not right and not ever going to be right; for example (p366) in 1966 he states in a public speech that communism is not always at the centre of conflict in the developing world. His loss of certainty at this time, the end of his stint as Defence Secretary, unraveled his public unemotionalism, giving the impression that his morality was only underpinned by rationality: from his incredibly abstract view of the war, only possible by being so far from the action, it was justifiable on a rational posturing basis and no other. Coupled with the obligation he felt to his country to take his best bite of a shit sandwich, the disaster appears inescapable.

Clearly Kaplan has found his niche in writing for Slate; he has a keen eye for interpreting policy and theory, and reads well in the short popular form. This book needed stricter editing, as it was quite repetitive in some places, but I grant that was not so easy to achieve in the early 1980s.

John Brunner: The Shockwave Rider

Finally got to one of Mark's recommendations after finding it at the secondhand bookshop on Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn that Bernie took me to. It is definitely the best of the Brunners I've read thus far.

This is one of those big ideas author hobby horse scifi operas, where some things are spelt out in excessive detail and some details are skimmed right over. (Think libertarianism and Heinlein.) I can't really take utopianism seriously, except perhaps real utopias: who's to say the new powerbrokers will be any better than the old ones? — but this is merely aspirationalism on the part of the author, not worth analysing further, and I'm not going to get sucked into strawman work...

The book's big claim to fame is the first appearance of the (tape)worm meme. The idea of programs self-propagating through computer networks surely did not originate here, though just what such a device might achieve is quite well explored. His actual proposal is probably closer to a botnet now, something that could only be removed by dismantling the network.

I'll bite a bit on the idea that there should be no privacy on the network: his focus is on institutions, which mostly produce information that could ideally be made freely available. Moverover Brunner seems to understand that all transactions will be tracked but misses the implication that corporations (and not just government) will abuse that info, and it may be the cross-referencing that ultimately causes the most pain. Really, how is it workable to have zero privacy for government decisions and reasonable privacy for individuals? &mdash but I said I wouldn't get sucked in.

The plot gets a bit implausible at the discontinuity from recorded memories to real-time action, and I found Kate to be little more than a geek fantasy, the wise woman who understands, her intuition perfect and forward to boot. Shame about the scrawniness. Precipice is too perfect a settlement to be stable, and he never mentioned who's collecting the garbage.

The Delphi Pools are cute, albeit coarsely sketched. Here Brunner slips past the obvious moral concerns (that some things are broadly thought too icky to bet on) and instead presents them as a means for the government to adjust the well-being indices of the population, a conundrum for any more immediate democracy. Full points for exploring this feedback loop, but how about the myriad others?

For more, you can read someone's brain dump full of spoilers on Wikipedia. Here's another review that takes it apart a bit more.

First of the cyberpunk novels? Perhaps, perhaps not, I dunno, but worthwhile in any case.

John Brunner: Into the Slave Nebula

I fear this one was written sometime around 1968 to satisfy a soul-destroying contractual obligation. The title gives most of it away, and smeering it with scifi does not improve on an entirely predictable plot. Perhaps the reader is supposed to be amused that the author is aware that this space romance is a turkey.

John Brunner: Total Eclipse

I picked up a pile of Brunners at Gould's. As always, I walked in with hopes of finding some particular books, viz the ones that Mark suggested, and walked out with other things. This one takes on a classic theme, viz alien anthropology, ala Asimov's The Gods Themselves and Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, and does nothing special to it. Oh, of course the boy genius solves the puzzle of why the aliens died out. Sorry to spoil it for you.

What I found most frustrating was the imprecision: apparently these aliens produced "exactly one" of their artefacts, or at least that is what was found by the 100,000 year late Earthlings. Only one knife? One house? Err, of course not, he mostly meant one type of knife, house, etc. except perhaps where he doesn't; maybe there is just one ship in the entire world. What was the point of that telescope anyway? I hoped it was going to go all 2001 and take great vengeance on the various stereotypes in this book.

The ending is a bit depressing (perhaps too like the subsequent Rama X for two many Xs) and a tad predictable given all the self-absorbed personalities involved. Are they not smart enough to think up other ways to pass their time?

This review is a bit fairer.

John Brunner: Telepathist

Mark suggested I read some John Brunner, and though he didn't recommend this one in particular, it was all I could find at Gleebooks second-hand a few months ago. I haven't read this sort of classic pulp-ish scifi for a long time, excepting the occasional moldering Asimov, and having looked through quite a few library catalogues and second-hand bookshops they are getting quite difficult to find.

Here Brunner is workman-like, recounting the rise of a mental superman with a broken body to the peak of the "curative telepathy" profession. At the two-thirds point I worried that it would go all Ubik with mental worlds-inside-worlds, but fortunately he dodged that bullet. It's an amiable read, but surely not his best; there are a few non sequiturs in the plot, such as the ready acceptance he finds when he returns to his home town in the last third.

Apparently it was released as The Whole Man in the U.S., which might give you some idea of the narrative arc.

David Malouf: Ransom

The major problem with David Malouf is that I feel I am committing great sins of cliche, repetition and irreverence by even attempting to appraise his work. Could anyone summarise the ambit of this work any better than by calling it "a reimagining of a great scene of the Iliad"? Simply, I cannot.

Somewhat like the obvious reference point earlier in his career, viz An Imaginary Life, the book starts slowly and is fixated on character; the plot provides some opportunity for interaction but the preference is rumination. Scenery is sketched with incredible economy. Part IV makes it all worthwhile.

William Gibson: Mona Lisa Overdrive

Another loose sequel-ish sort of follow-on from Count Zero, and yes, the cyberpunk style was wearing that thin by the end of the 80s. This is more a romp for Gibson with his favourite characters than any serious attempt to tell a story, or perhaps it is merely floating a collection of ideas for the Matrix sequels to raid. The metaphysics is almost completely auxiliary, the narrative weaker than ever and the new characters vapid.

William Gibson: Count Zero

A sort-of sequel to Neuromancer. The three stories, interwoven, are probably better inferred from the Wikipedia plot summary than the book itself. Given that we're in it for the stylistic flashiness, this one burns less brightly than its predecessor, and is nowhere as original. Thematically it is something of a Terminator-alike, with big strong men duking it out over some weakling who's critical to the plot for somewhat artificial reasons, and so forth.

Once more Gibson treats cyberspace as fashion accessory, making no essential use of it. Moreover the plot could not possibly work if it functioned as the internet does now, i.e. pervasively providing ambient information.

Philip K. Dick: Vulcan's Hammer

Prototype for the plot of Terminator and other technodystopic iconographics. Tries to out-psych 1984, combining the classics (Vulcan's hammer? As in, those flying things were forging something?) with some shamelessly artless workmanship. It's all tediously first order; if two "sentient", mechanised intelligences are waging a proxy war on each other, wouldn't you expect the smarter one to figure out a robust winning strategy?

It seems pointless to read Dick now; his ideas have either been absorbed into the popular culture or are just dross, and I can't always tell. Some may argue that he got there first, but others have polished the product and gone deeper.

Philip K. Dick: Ubik

Confused.

William Gibson: Neuromancer

I read this about thirty months ago and didn't remember squat. Indeed, I don't remember much even an hour after completing it. The Matrix-as-vacuous-extension seems stronger than ever: the Rastas, Zion, the dub, the uneven technology. But where did they pull Larry Fishburn from? I fear mrak is right, that technology does undermine all traditional story forms; this plot probably wouldn't fly if it extrapolated from today's gizmos.

Everywhere I go, people ask me: "what impact is kruddnet going to have? What are the applications?" The ambient opinion is more of the same, or at least more of what I've already got (circa 1Mb/s down, 100kb/s up on Exetel, approx 70Gb a month, reasonable price). Sure, there's truckloads one can do with pervasive wifi (err, work in a cafe for starters), but obese pipes? When are we going to get a Wintermute?

Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure

After seeing Jude a few weeks ago, I thought I'd give the book a go, and am glad I did. Hardy's prose is nowhere as stodgy as that of his fellow Victorian Dickens [1]. While the plot drags at times, and his characterisation of female traits somewhat lamentable, on the whole the novel chugs along quite pleasantly. It's a bit like reading George Orwell: the social politics dominates (and sometimes lays waste to) all else, in a readable way.

Apparently the canoncity of Hardy's text is unclear; the Penguin classic I obtained from UNSW Library, dated 1998, has the accoutrements of an academic treatise. I particularly disliked the endnotes, as one couldn't readily tell if they were usefully explaining some classical or geographical reference, or merely pointing out where the various texts differed.

I can't resist reproducing the following, from Part Sixth, Chapter 1 (p326 in the book I read):

But finding himself the centre of curiosity, quizzing, and comment, Jude was not inclined to shrunk from open declarations of what he had no great reason to be ashamed of; and in a little while was stimulated to say in a loud voice to the listening throng generally:
'It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man — that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times — whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be the wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays — I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: "See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!" But having ended no better than I began they say: "See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!"
'However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses — affections — vices perhaps they should be called — were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies. You may ridicule me — I am quite willing that you should — I am a fit subject, no doubt. But I think if you knew what I have gone through these last few years you would rather pity me. And if they knew' — he nodded towards the college at which the Dons were severally arriving — 'it is just possible they would do the same.'
'He do look ill and worn-out, it is true!' said a woman.
Sue's face grew more emotional; but though she stood close to Jude she was screened.
'I may do some good before I am dead — be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story,' continued Jude, beginning to grow bitter, though he had opened serenely enough. 'I was, perhaps, after all, a paltry victim to the spirit of mental and social restlessness, that makes so many unhappy in these days!'
'Don't tell them that!' whispered Sue with tears, at perceiving Jude's state of mind. 'You weren't that. You struggled Nobly to acquire knowledge, and only the meanest souls in the world would blame you!'
Jude shifted the child into a more easy position on his arm, and concluded: 'And what I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worst of me. I am in a chaos of principles — groping in the dark — acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of opinions, but they droped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine, — if, indeed, they ever discover it — at least in our time. "For who knoweth what is good for man in this life? — and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?"

The movie concludes at what I think was an opportune point in the plot; the denouement merely repeats and reinforces the social commentary of the above form, driven by some under-explained female hysterics and scheming.

[1] DickensURL.com gifted me this fantastic URL: http://DickensURL.com/be3/Oh_gracious,_why_wasn't_I_born_old_and_ugly?.

John Clarke: The Tournament

I bought this book back in 2002, when it was first published, probably in the face of this SMAGE review that I may have read at the time. It has rotted on my shelf for that long, always too daunting with its references to too many people I've heard of but never paid any mind to. Until now, until now.

Well, that review was right. John Clarke well knows that the quality of a metaphor is in how it twangs when overextended, or how much inspiration Dali got from it fracturing. Unfortunately the biggest joy I got from this text beyond the inviting novelty of the first few chapters was finishing it.

Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson: Journey to the Ants

I finished reading this book, a distillation and popularisation of their more technical The Ants, back on Christmas Day of last year, but have only now found time to write it up. Indeed, it is not worth trying to critically evaluate or summarise; suffice it to say that anyone with an interest in natural science should read it lock-stock.

The highlights were the personal stories of how the authors came to study these insects, and the characteristics of the various ant species, specifically the leaf cutters (farmers of fungi), the weavers (assemblers of leaf nests), the bivouac-building army ants, and the aphid-shepherders. I'd be keen to see any of these in action. The art and photographs are amazing; you can get some idea from this National Geographic article on army ants.

The concept of eusociality is fascinating, and was apparently somewhat of a mystery to Charles Darwin, who intuited that that kind of specialisation depended on strong familial relationships. In essence, the question is why it would ever be more effective to put effort into raising sisters rather than one's own offspring. Work from the 1960s on kin selection explains this in terms of generational gene frequencies, and the author of the papers on the mathematical models, W. D. Hamilton, seems to be of the old naturalist school too. I want to understand this better.

Random things about the ants:

Sydney Uni has an insect behaviour mob who have recently studied ant traffic control.
Dad told me about the omnivorous Argentine ants that infested various parts of Sydney, and that they were one of the few exotic pests to be successfully eradicated. (Strangely enough this invasion story recurred in 2004.)
Meat ants will supposedly save Australia from the cane toad. Dad reckons this predation vector was known before the toad was introduced.
The authors have a new (2008) book out called The Superorganism. (Thanks to Tyler for the pointer.)
Apparently some species of ants engage in voting protocols that some people perceive to be similar to how bees appear to do it.

David Markson: This is not a novel

Dave C gave this to me many, many years ago, around the time he departed Australia for good. I can see what attracted him to this experiment in fiction, and also why he so freely parted with it.

Reader feels less appreciation for the non-novel on completion than whilst reading it. Pages were turned, jokes occasionally apprehended.

Artifice wears thin, preoccupations of author too banal, reader opines. Speculation, questions of a rhetorical nature, seem a cheap device. Particularly in the era of reductive analysis. Even more particularly in the face of millenia of art, much providing substantial insight.

To reference is not to create. To refer in French is to posture. To refer in Latin is to solipsistically enjoy the firing of one's own neurons. Reader would have preferred characters and plot to a toilet roll of death notices.

Reader can almost perceive the genesis of Nick Cave's circa-2004 renaissance in this book, with structure and themes closely parallelling There She Goes, My Beautiful World. Reader is relieved that the benefit was not solely the author's.

Dương Thu Hương: Novel Without a Name

Daz gave me this one after he got back from Việt Nam, the idiomatically-Saigonese photocopied edition. I found it much better than Paradise of the Blind, containing a lot less food porn. The plot ambles through the northern theatres of war, skipping lightly over the details of battle, up to the final throws of the struggle with the puppet Southern regime. The author does a much better job of drawing her predominantly male characters than your average male author does on his women.

Griffith Review #22: MoneySexPower (Summer 2008/2009)

Here I am, finishing reading the summer's Griffith Review at the tail end of its shelf-life. I think I started back in November. While it is less patchy than last time's, on the whole it failed to grab me. The highlights:

Edwina Shaw's tale of teaching in a coughJuvenile Justice Centre, The heaviness of keys, is wryly amusing.
I missed the point of Jonathan Raban's Just two clicks, where the activities of a hitherto-unknown-to-me Neil Entwhistle are recounted and somewhat analysed. What the subject did was bizarre and perhaps inexplicable, but for Raban to close out the essay with a string of caveating maybes is weak. It is well written though.
Something for the weekend is Tony Barrell's potted history of Rupert's infamous shock rag News of the World, which I always thought specialised in alien abductions. I guess the sordid sells more.
Peter Ellingsen recounts his coverage of Tiananmen Square in his memoir China on my mind, reminding me of all that the modern newspaper fails to deliver.
In Love Thy Neighbour, Craig Scutt discusses Australia(n men)'s relationship with South East Asia, well, Thailand in one particular, and sexual in another. I think the excerpt in the SMAGE is the better piece as it contains more innuendo.
Mary-Rose MacColl was charged with reviewing maternity services in Queensland in the recent past, and her experiences and summary findings are recounted in The birth wars. I expect her book of the same title will make riveting reading for those with a specific interest in this topic.
Rachel Robertson's Bonus ruminates on how her mothering of her son, who has autism, defines her as a "carer", worthy of a cash bonus from the Federal Government, because she is "eligible". The art of this essay is to enliven what I'd usually find to be a tedious word-semantic game with life experiences and a style of societal analysis that lacks obnoxiousness. Perhaps the stand-out piece.
The "reportage", My Banker, by Wayne McLenan would have been better billed as "bullshit". It's a long and rambling account of a dodgy investment arrangement in Central America, and like a story in a pub, didn't coalesce and didn't end soon enough. The best bits are set in Europe. His weakest piece yet.
Charlie Stansfield's The Last Taboo artfully explores the fraught sexuality of people with severe disabilities, based on her experience as a professional in the disability sector, and with professionals in other sectors. Another stand-out.

I found it funny that so much of MoneySexPower was concerned with disability; I was expecting the majority of the articles to cover the topical Wall St big swinging master of the universe type-A's.

H. W. Lewis: Why Flip A Coin?

I finished reading this back in mid-January but have only now found the time to write it up. I've forgotten why I picked it up, probably on the strength of a blog review or something.

This is a very Americentric take on probability and decision theory, with a smattering of public choice, game theory and random other things. Math is almost absent, so there is almost no support for all the "trust me"s the author throws in. A bibliography would have ameliorated this. There are some good pop-sci treatments of various things, but it ends up being a ramble with too much opinion and not enough evidence. The ultimate advice is formulate-then-compute, and stick to it.

The bit I enjoyed most was about Lanchester's laws, which model how two opposed army-like things inflict damage on each other as a function of time. There is a good writeup of the math here.

His take on Arrow's Theorem is a bit naive and uninteresting; a more insightful approach would have furnished some perspective through the later work of Amartya Sen (and many others) or perhaps May's Theorem, but clearly there's more table-thumping to be had in banging on about how impossible voting is.

Wayne McLennan: Tent Boxing

I picked this one up whilst waiting for Andrew T. It was just sitting in the window of Sappho Books, someone thinking it a hook, and for <$14 /> I figured I may as well be the mug. (The last thing I bought there was Ray Monk's biography of Bertrand Russell.) I'm a fan of McLennan's short pieces, especially those in the Griffith Review, and the Smage gave this memoir a glowing review.

Here he recounts his recent experience, at the age of fifty, of joining an old-school tent boxing troupe on a journey from Tullamore (near the centre of New South Wales) to Far North Queensland. There's a lot of drinking, a bit of fighting, a lot of male bonding, some aggro, some scenery, and a lot more drinking. Of course he has a go himself, and of course that was ill-advised. I always liked how he expresses his regrets and fears, the dangers and his responses to them. There's plenty of quiet reflection here, in a Henry Lawson sort of a way.

Despite what the Smage opined, I preferred his earlier Rowing to Alaska, which I found more naturally episodic and more diverse in its episodes. On the topic of boxing, his earlier piece for the Griffith Review is quite riveting.

Paul Theroux: Dark Star Safari

Gonk recommended this book to me ages ago, and I ended up buying a Penguin classic-cover edition on the strength of that, the price, the account of crossing Lake Victoria I heard on Radio National, and the first page, where the author promises to cut through the televised myth of Africa-the-poor. To an extent he does.

The story is a sprawling, slightly flabby account of Theroux's return-to-Africa around 2001, an overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town via some of the places he spent time as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1960s. There's a solid focus on the individuals he met that time and this, the wildlife and the flora. Politicking gets some time in the sun but lacks sufficient background for non-Africophiles to really get to grips with.

Theroux clearly has an intense dislike of the kind of tourism Africa was once famous for — Hemingway-esque big game hunting — and the "agents of virtue", of which he was once one. I guess he wants to drive a wedge between those who attempted to provide a secular education (or similar, i.e. a worthy long term investment in the people, not infrastructure) and those who try to save souls or build monuments to aid agencies. He argues strongly that Africa has not developed, but is as bereft as anyone and everyone for what to try next. Less short-termism? More projects where Africans provide the labour and materials? A return to subsistence?

Theroux got kicked out of the Peace Corps, and you can read a great account of those days here. I think this book makes it quite clear that he benefited more from his experience than Malawi did, and that it could never have been any other way.

Andrew McGahan: Praise

I bought this novel on impulse, partly because of the movie, partly because David Marr apparently thought it to be one of the few Australian books of the 1990s that told it like it was. As one would expect, 'it' (embodied by Brisvegas) was drenched in sex and drugs, and just a little rock-and-roll.

I guess the inevitable comparisons are with Douglas Coupland's classic Generation X and John Birmingham's iconic He died with a felafel in his hand. I found it inferior to both, and indeed not even as good as the film, which may be due to Sacha Horler being a better Cynthia than McGahan's. Not to say it wasn't worth reading, just not worth reading slowly.