The rule of six

Taking a break from all this Liminal introspection, here are six re-reads that I’ve enjoyed recently. During the summer I continued to revisit my bookshelves (first batch here), so most of these are re-reads.

The End of the Matter, Alan Dean Foster.

To my surprise, I enjoyed re-reading this. I was a huge ADF fan when I was younger. I didn’t realise it at the time, but his ghost-written novelization of Star Wars got me into SF novels. I read it repeatedly. And then I read The Tar-Aiym Krang and I was introduced to the Humanx Commonwealth and Flinx and Pip (our hero and his pet minidrag).

My copy was published in 1979, and features a lovely Tim White cover. NEL published most of ADF’s fiction in the 70s and 80s, and they gave them a consistent look that made them stand out.

I had some reservations about returning to The End of the Matter, as recently I’ve not enjoyed ADF’s fiction anywhere near as much as I used to. But I was delighted to be proven wrong, and in re-reading I remember what drew me to SF (and particularly ADF’s Commonwealth): awe and wonder.

The End of the Matter is partly about Flinx’s quest to find his father, but mostly about a strange alien that Flinx picks up and an ancient alien weapon. This was what I liked about science fiction: exotic planets (Moth, Alaspin), spaceships, ancient temples, dead races with mysterious superweapons and more. And it turns out that I still like it.

The plot races along, and if I have a criticism of it it’s that the wonder of the ancient Hur’rikku device (capable of stopping a collapsar) is wrapped up in just one story—and so early in the series. It could easily have been a greater peril taking longer to resolve.

Starhammer, Christopher Rowley

Starhammer is a 1980s SF novel with an incredibly powerful weapon (the titular Starhammer) left in working order by a long-dead ancient race (unnamed). I’ve got a soft-spot for those… Anyway, in Starhammer humanity is under the cruel yoke of the alien Laowon. As is often the case in Rowley’s books, the book assumes that the reader is already familiar with the Laowon, and they are more shown than explained—which can be a culture shock. I couldn’t just fly through Starhammer, I had to re-read the occasional section as I realised I hadn’t picked it up the first time.

I noted before that earlier-age SF tended to be filled with decent, honest, trustworthy characters. Not so here. Like Rowley’s Fenrille series (starting with The War for Eternity), Starhammer is populated with cruelty and betrayal, and some thoroughly nasty characters.

I don’t think I have re-read Starhammer since I first read it (in 1987 I think). The story is okay, but it’s the first in Rowley’s Vang trilogy, and I’ve re-read the following books more than once. The Vang appears at the very end of Starhammer—it takes a more central role in the next two.

The Vang: The Military Form, Christopher Rowley

Set a thousand years or two after Starhammer, this time the Vang takes centre stage. Awakened from a deep sleep by a team of squabbling asteroid miners, the Vang quickly takes them over and launches an assault on the world below. Things quickly get out of control and the world (and the Vang) is eventually destroyed by nuclear fire.

The Vang is a wonderful creation. An “omniparasite” it takes over host organisms and changes and adapts them to suit. It shares gross similarities with the creature in Alien and the The Thing, and is as terrifying as it is disgusting.

The Vang: The Battlemaster, Christopher Rowley

The third Vang story, this is set 2000 years after The Vang: The Military Form, and another Vang survivor is awakened. This time it’s a Battlemaster, a much more formidable opponent than the Military Form, but also more subtle and not driven to serve the Higher Forms (which unfortunately hindered the Military Form in the previous book) in the same way. This time the adventure takes us to the Vang homeworld, which is finally destroyed when the Battlemaster sends the sun nova. 

As usual human society is corrupt and decadent, and if I had a complaint it’s that it doesn’t feel like 2000 years have passed as everything is pretty much the same as before. But that’s a minor quibble as I liked it a lot.

Darkest Day, Christopher Fowler

Before my re-read, I thought this was my favourite Christopher Fowler book—what’s not to love about a mad Victorian tontine driven by a mechanical device and zombies? But I found it slow and Arthur Bryant wasn’t quite as eccentric as he became in later stories.

I think I still prefer it to Seventy-Seven Clocks, which is the rewrite with the zombies taken out (I've read elsewhere that Darkest Day is supposed to be Arthur Bryant’s over-zealous reinterpretation of events in his memoirs). Darkest Day is in 1993 so no Internet and mobile phones are in their infancy (Arthur keeps losing his pager).

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

Blink is (I think) the thinking fast bit of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. (To my shame I’ve yet to read Thinking Fast and Slow, so I’m guessing here.) Anyway, Blink is all about the power of the human mind to make instant decisions—sometimes called gut reaction. I read it some years ago and I thought I’d give it a re-read. I’m glad I did—it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

As with most of Gladwell’s books, it’s well written and peppered with interesting anecdotes and studies. This was the first time I read about the supermarket jam test, and that test is one of many that has since proven difficult to replicate and that does make me wonder about some of the other stories in the book.

I had forgotten that Blink covers the implicit association test (IAT) for unconscious bias. That’s been a big thing at work in the last couple of years, and I remember taking a couple of IATs two or three years ago. (As I recall, I had no gender bias, but a little bit of racial bias. Which was sobering.) I must have read Blink over a decade ago, and I had forgotten that it talked about IATs.

There’s one anecdote in Blink that I hope has since had further research: Gladwell talks about a student who took the race IAT every day, and every day the result was the same: a bias towards white. Except one day he didn’t—and on that day he had been watching the Olympics and black athletes succeed. The suggestion was that seeing successful black role models helps create a positivity towards blacks. But an anecdote is not evidence, and maybe something else was going on. (Although either way, it’s hard to argue with positive role models.)

Other books

The above isn’t everything I’ve read recently—just the re-reads I’ve enjoyed most. I’ve also read a lot of other stuff (both good and bad). Here’s some of the books I enjoyed:

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed. Excellent book about the benefits of diverse thinking and the dangers of “average”. Unsurprisingly, Rebel Ideas covers a diverse range of subjects—even dieting (in brief: everyone is different, no one diet works for all).

Artemis by Andy Weir. Set on the moon with our small-time criminal heroine caught up in a conspiracy. It’s okay, but every now and again goes into The Martian-style hard-SF problem solving, which never feels perilous as all the situations are made up anyway. (That was also true of The Martian, but that just did it better.)

The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. Argues that for a nation with their own currency (such as the US and UK and others), thinking of the national budget as you would a household budget is illogical. Unlike a household, a nation can print its own money (but not to excess—it needs to keep an eye on inflation). So if this book is right (and that’s a big if—and I don’t know enough to say either way), then the magic money tree does exist after all.

Head Hand Heart by David Goodhart. Not as good as The Road to Somewhere (which I talk about here) and covering the three different types of work (head = cognitive work, hand = technical/craft work, heart = care work) and how head work has become dominant in recent decades. Thought provoking.

Absalom by Gordon Rennie and Tiernan Trevallion. Excellent London-based police urban fantasy horror nonsense from 2000AD.

Brink Volumes 1-3 by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard. Brilliant, and the only thing I really enjoyed when I re-subscribed to 2000AD a couple of years ago. Slow burn SF with a hint of Lovecraftian horror. Wonderful, with stylish art.

The Last Emperox by John Scalzi. The third and final book in the Interdependency series, and just as crazily treacherous and backstabbing as before. A great read, with wonderful dialogue.