A Bunch of Five Four

1. Today I'm trying to finish my working synopsis for the prospective novel I was calling The Arrow and the Circle, and have now renamed (under what may be the too obvious influence of Christopher Priest) The Devices. Once I know what the shape the plot takes, writing a 120,000-or-so-word novel in which it all happens should be, er, simplicity itself.

This clearly calls for diligent application and undivided concentration on my part. Hence this blog post.

2. I've managed to keep @trapphic, my Twitter account for microfiction, going at a steady rate since reviving it for the New Year. For those who can't be bothered to join Twitter (and you're not missing a huge amount, unless you're the kind of person who's desperate to be informed whenever Stephen Fry scratches his right ear), I've appended more stories to the already lengthy back-catalogue on my website. I'm quite pleased with some of them -- the Quaestor's tale[1] in particular is one I'd like to revisit at greater length.

Being an enormous narcissist, I'm always interested to see (either from comments on Twitter itself or, more commonly, after reproducing the stories on Facebook) which of the stories receive most approval from readers. Some of the ones I've been most pleased with turn out to be overly complicated, the way they hang together neatly in my head failing to reproduce itself in anybody else's. (This failure is, naturally, mine entirely as the person trying to communicate the ideas in question.) I was, for instance, much more impressed with my own account of an alternative history of Vikings and Egyptians on Mars, recounted in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, than anybody else seems to have been[2], while what I thought was a throwaway metafictional joke turned out to be the most popular story I've posted yet[3].

3. A couple of weekends ago B., R. and I made the trip to London, to attend both a friend's birthday party and the British Museum's Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler exhibition, which closed last Sunday. We'd been intending to visit the latter back in December, but the difficulties of reliably transporting a baby 100 miles in a car intervened. This time, through careful booking of advance train tickets and two nights in a rather good hotel, the whole enterprise became substantially more feasible.

The exhibition was impressive, although limited by the failure of many Mexica artifacts to survive the Spanish Conquista. The sophistication and variety of what was on display was a strong reminder of the complexity of the Aztec civilisation and its occupied territories, as well as of the relativity of human cultural values. Despite their ability to make a simple carving of a bunny rabbit look terrifying, there was evidently nothing special about the Mexica that was "savage", "primitive" or "inhuman". And yet they built a culture around ripping the hearts out of living victims in numbers that ran into at least the hundreds of thousands. It's a conundrum which is difficult to get one's head around (and has produced two extremely good, though very different, Doctor Who stories). The exhibition naturally offered no glib answers, but seeing items which were routinely used by the people in question helped to make the abstract question considerably more concrete.

I was amused by the exhibition's use of the term "deity impersonator", which made what I assume was a fairly straightforward sacramental role sound like an exotic drag act.

(The party was also lovely, and R. extremely popular at it -- although we had of course to leave for our hotel bed, and his cot, relatively early. We also managed to meet up with one of his godfathers on the morning of the Sunday, which was nice.)

4. In "Prose I Didn't Write" news, I've recently managed to finish two more books: The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns, and Transition by Iain "Look, no M!" Banks. I want to say more about both of them soon, but... well, I really ought to be getting on with writing that thing of my own. I'm now reading The Panda Book of Horror, Obverse Books' follow-up to last year's Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus which I bored you all about at the time.

5. [Edit: See separate post above.]

STORY NOTES:
[1] Within the reservation my badge meant nothing. The tribal authorities ran the show. ‘You’re on Catuvellauni land now, Quaestor,’ I muttered.

[2] Our sky-craft’s snake-prow glints proudly / As we stand sturdy on Tiw’s red world. / Bronze bowmen hail us, bragging of Horus. / We fight...

[3] ‘Once I’d had the idea, the book wrote itself. After our creative differences and arguments about royalties, it erased itself out of spite.’

Holland Takes On Norway

I've had a frustratingly unproductive week -- I've only produced only about 700 words of a sample chapter. The rest of the time I've been waiting in for building contractors, journeying fruitlessly into town and arsing around on the internet. Not a good set of outcomes, although the 700-odd words do seem to me to be rather good ones.

Meanwhile, I've finished two books written (presumably rather faster) by other people, both of which I've been meaning to blog upon. I've probably only got time for one now, so I'll pick Millennium: the End of the World and the Forging of Christendom by Tom Holland.

Like its predecessors, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic and Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (both of which I wrote a little about here), it's a chatty, pacy, well-written narrative of a turning-point in western history. If you want a clear sense of the turmoil in European thought of the 9th to 11th centuries which led to the eventual revolutionary idea of the separation of Church and State, this would be the book to read.

Unfortunately, that wasn't really what I was after. What I most admire in Holland's work is the way he makes cultures which are radically foreign to any modern worldview seem familiar and sympathetic, and in this book the distance wasn't really there to start off with. Our western Anglophone culture is of course post-Hellenic and post-Roman in the same way as it's post-Christian... but it was christian an awful lot more recently than it was either of those other things. The machinations of kings, popes, knights and even emperors (of the "Holy Roman" variety, at least) seem rather banal and mundane, in a way which even republican Rome, despite its familiarity, never does.

Inevitably perhaps, my favourite parts of the book are those which deal with the borders of christendom -- the Islamic Caliphates (whose appearances are sadly brief) and heathen-turning-christian Viking nations. Somehow the Vikings -- who are almost certainly prominent among my actual ancestors -- seem "alien" in that ancient-history way, whereas their contemporaries of the Romance and Saxon cultures simply don't. This despite the fact that the contemporary history of Britain at the time (which Holland fortunately covers extensively) is largely a power-struggle between different Viking factions for control of these islands.

As Holland points out, the Normans (who were of course of Viking descent, "Norman" being a rather unconvincing romanisation of "Norseman") didn't conquer an England that was still ruled over by Saxons: both Harold Godwinson and Edward the Confessor had Viking mothers, and had in any case inherited the throne from a bunch of Norwegians. The last King of England of pure Anglo-Saxon heritage (which is to say, of course, that he was descended from an ethnically slightly different bunch of Odin-worshippers) was the ill-remembered Edmund Ironside, who died a full 50 years before the Conquest.

The Viking stuff was fascinating, and brought home to me the extent of their cultural influence -- which extended from Vinland to Kiev, and as far south as Byzantium itself -- in a way I'd never realised before (despite reading Henry Treece's splendid Viking Saga trilogy as a lad). If only someone had been able to unite them so that they stopped spending most of their history chopping one another up with axes, the Vikings could have built an empire spanning the Northern hemisphere from America to Russia -- something which has never been achieved in our history.

(I suspect this may in fact be what Harry Harrison and John Holm were writing about in their own trilogy, beginning with The Hammer and the Cross, none of which I've never read. Certainly it's an occupational hazard of being an S.F. writer that reading actual history always diverts one into alternatives.)

Unfortunately, the Viking material accounts for barely a third of the book, the rest being taken up by the aforementioned pope-jockeying. There's a certain amount of entertainment to be had from the shocking corruption, quick succession and occasional startling simultaneity of the contemporary popes, but it palls quickly.

Holland has also developed an irritating verbal tic which I didn't notice in either of his previous books: the construction "[X amount of time] later, and [Y event happened]" is repeated on average once a page, and the repetition of all those needless "and"s quickly becomes tiresome. A canny editor could have cut nearly half a thousand words just by excising them. If I'd been more involved in the narrative I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed it -- indeed, it's entirely possible that this is what happened with Rubicon and Persian Fire. Ah well.

I did at least learn that the Olympic year of 2012 will be the 1100th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's great-to-the-32nd-grandfather converting to christianity from the worship of Odin One-Eye, All-Father, Victory-Bringer, Master of Ravens and Wolf of Battle, the Hanged God. Which is nice.

Vikings are cool. Fact.

The Post with No Name

All names have meanings, at least originally. (Admittedly some of them mostly mean "Look how stupid my parents are.")

"Philip Alexander Purser-Hallard", for instance, means "Lover of Horses, Saviour of Men, Steward, Steward" in Greek, Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon[1]. Even in English, a good many names are more transparent than that, as both Heath Ledger and River Phoenix could attest if they didn't have that other thing in common.

In some cultures, personal names routinely have entirely transparent meanings, so that the most common Chinese surnames mean things like "Fruit", "King" and "Willow Tree". Generally, however, when people have transparent names, we refer to them by the same sounds they use when speaking their own language, rather than attempting to translate them.

The major exception to this, bizarrely enough, would appear to be members of the Lakota tribes of Native North Americans, such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud et al, all of whose names sound -- unless you have a problem with "foreign" words per se -- perfectly reasonable in Lakota.

The other borderline instances -- that I can think of, at least -- are fictional Chinese women, such as Rupert Bear's friend Tiger Lily (who may in any case be named after Peter Pan's friend Tiger Lily, who is -- very broadly speaking -- a Native American). There's a walk-on Hong Kong masseuse in Die Another Day who's named Peaceful Fountains of Desire, but that seems to be a throwaway racist / sexist joke for the old-guard Bond fans. In any case, the intention is to make the exotic seem less threatening (and therefore fit for childhood companionship and / or shagging) by familiarising it.

Sitting Bull and co I'm less sure about. Is the idea that people who name themselves after everyday objects must be inherently more primitive than people with perfectly sensible names like, say, Earp or Custer? The practice doesn't seem to extend even to other Native American tribes, so I'm guessing it's something very specific about the Lakota's interaction with Anglophone settlers.

I wonder whether a history of North American colonisation written in, say, Spanish would talk about "Tatanka Iyotanka" or "Toro Sentado"[2]?

[1] Actually, I'm not altogether sure what "Hallard" means. This site gives two entirely different etymologies, but family tradition tends to go with the first one, "hall-ward" -- supposedly meaning something along the lines of a butler or estates manager. Although it could equally mean the bloke who guarded the door, I'm amused by the idea that it means essentially the same as B.'s original surname of "Purser".
[2] Any linguistic solecisms are my own. [Edit: And actually, a quick google would have given me my answer there.]

Heart on Sleeve Time...

This made me smile. But only after this had reduced me to floods of tears:

"And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. [...] And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope."

I don't think I've ever been so moved by a political speech. It's a weird feeling to be having, but just at the moment I kind of love the United States.

Progress

I've just been listening to Fat and Frantic on my Walkman, exactly as if this was 1988.

In 2008, however, my Walkman is considerably smaller than a cassette used to be, and currently contains 62 albums with ample room to spare. That's the equivalent of carrying around not only a machine half the weight of a brick on a strap, but a suitcase full of tapes to stick in it. And I keep it in my pocket with a phone I can carry round and use to ring people up from anywhere I like[1], and an object the size of my little finger that's functionally equivalent to a floppy disk, only with 4,000 times the entire storage capacity of my Dad's Amiga.

I'm not dismissing the deeply ambivalent effect that Western consumer technology has had on the world, improving quality of life immeasurably for a small portion of the world's population while fuelling a runaway consumerism which threatens to bankrupt the whole of humanity. Sometimes, though, it seems appropriate just to marvel.

[1]OK, so we had a few of those in 1988. But they were also the size and weight of half a brick, cost as much as a small car, and were exclusively used by yuppies for phoning up other yuppies and yapping about their stock options.

Transformation and Terraforming Update

I'm going to be reading The Great Transformation and Red Mars for a little while yet, I suspect.

As I said before, Karen Armstrong's thesis (not originally hers, but developed in great detail in The Great Transformation) is that the revolutionary spiritual philosophies she exemplifies with the figures of Confucius, Buddha, Socrates and Jeremiah, represent a paradigm shift in global (or at least Eurasian) thinking about religion, and thus in the consensus definition of what it means to be human. The main difficulty I have with this so far is the lack of connection she draws between the histories of China, India, Greece and Israel.

China's clearly the odd culture out here, as there are visible links between the remaining three: the first-millennium-B.C.E. Greeks and North Indian Aryans shared common (and relatively recent) Indo-European roots, while Israelite and Greek spiritual culture were strongly influenced by the common myth-systems of the pre-classical Mediterranean and Middle East. All three peoples later had common dealings with colonial Middle Eastern superpowers, most notably the Persian Empire and Alexander the Great.

However, as I understand it, contemporary China was a great deal more isolated, and isolationist. Although only rarely and sporadically unified, the people of the North China plain in the first millennium B.C.E. mostly dealt with one another, or at most with neighbouring peoples whom we'd also identify today as Chinese -- rarely travelling, under no threat from foreigners and warring only against one another. Aside from some trade with neighbours including India (the route by which Buddhism eventually arrived in the first century B.C.E.), ancient Chinese culture was monolithic and self-sufficient. Nor was the era of Chinese history which Armstrong takes as her starting-point -- the culture of the Shang Dynasty -- similar in any notable way to that pertaining in Mycenaean Greece, pre-Biblican Canaan or tribal Punjab.

Thus one might see Jeremiah, the Buddha and Socrates responding in the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. respectively to broadly similar (and distantly connected) social upheavals which led them to question contemporary belief-systems (Yahwism, the Vedic religion, Olympian polytheism) which in turn had originally been revisionist responses to yet more ancient polytheisms with a common ancestral background. The contemporary Chinese sages, however -- Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuang Zi et al -- weren't responding to anything that hadn't been Chinese for millennia.

I haven't read ahead, so it's possible that Armstrong's saving up her explanations for the last chapter. As far as I can see, though, if she really wants to justify these supposed simultaneous revolutions in thought (and let's not forget that Jeremiah and the Buddha, say, were roughly as contemporary with one another as Newton and Einstein) as anything more meaningful than coincidence, then her options are limited.

Unless she posits: a) a level of global travel and communication during this era that there's really no evidence for, or b) some kind of large-scale global influence (climatic or epidemic, perhaps, although she's shown little interest in those so far), she'll have to fall back on c) a load of mystical bollocks ("It was a quantum leap in human evolution", "God moves in mysterious ways", "It was Gaia achieving self-consciousness", etc). I can't really see her doing any of those... but if the conclusion's going to be "It was all a really big coincidence", then I can't altogether see the point of the book either. Oh, well.

Meanwhile, Red Mars is also exploring the gradual, large-scale tectonic changes which turn ordinary people adapting to a changing environment into an entirely new culture, and doing so at a very, very leisurely speed. At this rate I'm hoping I'll be finished with the trilogy by Christmas. Thank heavens for the lovely, brief short stories in Short Trips: Transmissions.

Incidentally, apropos of my tag for Robinson-related posts... when my fellow Bernice Summerfield authors Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham were writing their take on Martian history, the only mildly parodic Beige Planet Mars, their original suggestion for a back-page tagline -- veoted by Virgin -- was "Danger, Kim Stanley Robinson!". Which, in the absence of any humour in Red Mars, at least makes me smile wryly.

As the Romans Do

Recently, when I've not been scribbling frantically about vampires, suns or the interaction between the two, I've been reading either SF novels marketed as thrillers or books about ancient history. I'm currently on The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod and The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong, but it's Cowboy Angels by Paul McAuley and Rubicon by Tom Holland that I want to talk about.

Cowboy Angels has as its background a United States which, having gained access through the development of quantum computing in the 1960s to various alternative versions of its own history, proceeds to infiltrate, ally, fund and destabilise in time-honoured fashion until by the 1980s it has its own empire of client U.S.A.s, all dominating their respective globes but subservient to their political masters in "the Real".

This could be a fascinating story, but unfortunately we only get glimpses of it. Published by Gollancz S.F., is nonetheless packaged and marketed as a thriller, and written in the hardboiled, action-intense style of a Tom Clancy or a Dan Brown. This has been a recent trend in McAuley's fiction. His early space operas and quirkier S.F. high-concept stories (some of which are very good indeed -- I love Red Dust and Pasquale's Angel, as well as his Doctor Who novella The Eye of the Tyger) have given way recently to a string of would-be-bestsellers where an S.F. device in a near-contemporary setting is subservient to a war, espionage or crime plot. (It's a trend I'm pleased to see being reversed in his next novel, out later this year.)

To be honest, though, if you want to read an account of a global superpower extending its hegemony into multiple alternative realities as an allegory for contemporary US imperialism, I'd recommend (McAuley's fellow Doctor Who and Telos author) Lance Parkin's take on the same theme in his Faction Paradox novel Warlords of Utopia. Aside from the chutzpah of encoding a liberal message in a generally right-wing mass-media form, Cowboy Angels really doesn't accomplish anything that Parkin's book didn't do better.

In a direct comparison with Warlords, Angels comes off worse in several ways.

It's less subtle: where Warlords critiques the U.S. in terms of the Roman Empire (giving it a tranche of ascendant Nazi histories as its anti-democratic enemy), McAuley's evil empire is run by an alternative version of the 1980s CIA.

It's less imaginative: where Parkin has enormous fun with his variant Romes, McAuley deliberately confines his alternative histories (presumably on the basis of his target audience's imaginative limitations) to variants in 20th-century history (fascist and communist revolutions in the 1920s and '30s, nuclear war in the '60s) or unpopulated Americas where settlers can re-enact the frontier dream. A rival metauniversal superpower based around, say, a Confederate, Spanish or Aztec North America could have livened the whole thing up no end.

(The climax takes the mundanity even further, with a nuclear showdown taking place in our universe -- known here as "the Nixon sheaf", after the President at the time of first contact. Parkin's book credits the reader with understanding that danger is danger, and suffering suffering, no matter which history the characters are living in.)

Finally, it's far, far less interestingly written. In both books, the author encourages the questioning of neoconservative positions by using a viewpoint character who initially espouses them... but whereas Parkin's conceit of using as a Roman historian as his narrator allows him to write like Robert Graves, McAuley is obliged to write like, at best, Michael Crichton.

His change of direction may well be enabling McAuley to sell more books, but it's hampering him as a writer.

Tom Holland's, on the other hand, seems only to be benefiting him. I've not read any of his novels (I have both The Vampyre and The Bonehunter awaiting my attention), but his histories are getting him far more broadsheet attention than they ever seem to have.

The attention's deserved, too: Holland has a knack of retelling ancient history in a way which foregrounds individuals and their clashes of political, religious and philosophical ideas in a way I've rarely encountered outside historical fiction. Persian Fire brought an era about which I previously knew virtually nothing alive to me in unexpected and exciting ways, and Rubicon is similarly impressive.

The fact that so much Western culture has consisted of retellings of the various stages in the long, painful fall of the Roman Republic means that much of the story is inevitably familiar. I found myself constantly checking which other works the narrative had caught up with: "Ah, this is where Rome starts"; "So we're up to Carry on Cleo now"; "Ooh, the kid from Asterix and Son's just been born"; "This'll be the start of Julius Caesar, then". It ends pretty much as I, Claudius is starting.

Nonetheless, Rubicon reignited my long-standing interest in Roman history by showing me new perspectives and facets.

(I see that Holland's own forthcoming project is a history of Western Europe around the end of the first millennium, which is an interesting choice. I'd hoped he'd go for another period / setting in ancient history, possibly something Egyptian. I'd love to read his take on the Atenist Revolution, for instance. Still, this promises to be fascinating, if rather less for its evocation of an unfamiliar society and setting. They've even put the bloody Bayeux Tapestry on the cover...)

I also reminded myself -- while trying to remember how Coriolanus, of Shakespeare fame, fits into the late Republican history Holland’s describing (answer: he’s much earlier, from the time of the kings in fact, and probably fictional anyway) -- of the fantastic fact that Shakespeare refers to Coriolanus’s family, the gens Martia, as "Martians".

This makes me want to write a novel (or at least a short story) where the early expansion of the republican Roman Empire is disrupted by the earlier-than-scheduled arrival of H.G. Wells’s colonising aliens, and the legions slaughter the lot of them.

Romans are cool. Fact.

If It Wasn't for December, I Wouldn't Have Any Embers

Inevitably, this month has been spent largely in preparing for the forthcoming santaic rituals, and I've had very little time for blogging, or indeed for writing anything other than our Christmas cards. (I have managed another Surefish column, but that won't be up till January.)

I trust that "Sol Invictus" will partially remedy this lack, although a few of you will have seen it already last year. Those of you I send cards to should be receiving this year's story, "Polarity", shortly -- the rest of you will have to wait till December 2008.

Much of today has been spent rushing around manically, distributing presents and buying supplies for the forthcoming jollities. (I've never actually visited the Bristol Beer Factory before, but it turns out to be the only place one can actually buy kegs of their beer. Not that there's a brewery shop or anything -- I wandered in and found a chap in overalls, who was kind enough to stop putting mash into vats with a great big scoop and sell me some.)

In other, unrelated Christmas news... look, Kylie with a Dalek! Her dress may be minimal in scope, but at least she kept it on, unlike certain 1970s Doctor Who companions I could mention (and who'll appear fairly swiftly if you type "katy manning dalek" into Google Images).

Forgetting Christmas for the moment (as if such a thing were possible)... Elizabeth II may now be Britain's oldest monarch, but she won't be our longest-lived head of state for a few years yet. That honour goes to, of all people, Richard Cromwell, who succeeded his father as Lord Protector when he was 31, ruled for a disastrous eight months in 1658-59, then lived on in obscurity until the age of 85. If longevity in our rulers is a thing to be celebrated, than All Hail Tumbledown Dick.

Finally, the new word for worldbuilding an alternative history is whatification. Pass it on, and use it at all available opportunities.

And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home.

Yaroo! Cave! Etc

You won't see me getting nostalgic here about my old alma mater, the minor-with-pretensions-to-major public school Lancing College.

This is because, while my all-fees-paid scholarship placement there certainly benefitted me in the long run, it's only on balance over my five years of attendance there that I could say I enjoyed it more than I hated it. I made some good friends (all of whom I then lost touch with completely), and I owe a great deal to certain teachers, but the school as a whole... pfft.

Boarding-schools (not that I ever boarded, thank God, or I would have gone mental) are hermetic subcultures, geographically isolated, with limited channels to the outside world. Considered as speech-communities, their language can evolve in some peculiar and baroque ways.

For a while I've been thinking that it might be a service to philology (albeit a minor service, probably performed in a tiny rural church at 11 o'clock at night according to a scandalously misprinted prayer-book all copies of which were supposedly burned in 1762) if I documented some of the weirder slang that was in currency at the school between 1985 and 1990. Preferably before it all falls out of my head, as much of it has done already.

What follows, then, is a brief dictionary of (what I remember of) Lancing College slang of the late 1980s, with notes.

Some of this language was doubtless transitory, some perennial enough that I'm sure it must survive today. A lot of it's also self-evidently ridiculous, which is why it's hilarious to remember my contemporaries (and, to be scrupulously fair, me) using it in all seriousness as part of our adolescent dominance-rituals. What knobs we were.

• amphi, n. The school amphitheatre, used for open-air drama and illicit smoking.
• dodds, n. A clumsy person. (An eponym, obviously. During my time at Lancing it was gradually giving way to barclay, n., after a particularly unfortunate classmate of mine.)
• dossage, n. Relaxation, laziness. (Etymology obvious, and I'm surprised it isn't in wider use.)
• foetus, n. A stupid or useless person. (Used as a general all-purpose insult with truly astonishing ubiquity. Quite how this state of affairs first arose, I couldn't even begin to speculate.)
• glip, v. Masturbate (of a male). n. (Male) masturbation, semen. (Onomatopoeic, presumably, although to be honest I'd rather not think about it. I don't think the possibility of female masturbation really figured as a concept for any of us, except presumably the sixth-form girls.)
• glip-rag, n. Handkerchief etc used to clean up after masturbation.
• grove, n. Toilet. (This one was historic -- none of my contemporaries actually used it. The only people who did were a few nostalgically-minded masters who found the equally pastoral-sounding "bog" aesthetically troubling.)
• Head Man, n. Headmaster (or school principal, for those of you who were born after 1980 / in the United States and have never read The Beano. This is another one the masters used more than the pupils.)
• herman, n. Person with ginger hair. (As clear an illustration of metonymy as I've ever seen. The word originally applied to a boy nicknamed "Herman" because of his close physical resemblance to Herman Munster -- a resemblance which his ginger hair marred only slightly. Before long, however, it was assumed that gingerness was the defining characteristic of a "herman", and the Munster connection was forgotten entirely. I heard this applied to petite, pretty redheaded girls.)
• irrelevant, adj. Keeping a low profile, and therefore unlikely to be widely recognised. (Not knowing someone in your year was usually a major social faux pas, so I suspect the cool kids made this one up to mean it wasn't bad when they did it.)
• juvie, n., adj. (Person showing signs of being) marginally more immature than oneself at a particular moment.
• pitt, n. Study-bedroom. (This one was in official use, and had probably been so since the first such rooms were adopted at the school. It was always spelt with the double "t", suggesting that the etymology wasn't the obvious one.)
• prole (also proll), n. Member of the working classes, particularly the support staff. (This wasn't, of course, unique to Lancing, but it was shockingly universal among the pupils there. More interesting than the simple fact of its use were the limits of the same: the school librarian, for example, an educated, clearly patrician man, was never a "prole" -- although nor was the School Marshal, a distinctly working-class ex-army N.C.O. dragooned into instilling some semblance of discipline into the pupils[1]. That may just be because we were too scared of him, though. Groundskeepers, cleaners, kitchen staff, people who served you in shops, students at state schools -- all of these were "proles".)
• rip, v. Mock, tease, ridicule. (For some reason outsiders were always surprised to discover that our use of "ripping" differed from that current at Malory Towers in the 1940s.)
• ronnie, n. Short person. (A somewhat less extreme parallel to herman (q. v.), since being short was at least one of the characteristics which the history master nicknamed "Ronnie" shared with Ronnie Corbett, rather than one of the few which distinguished them.)
• smeggy, adj. Smelly, disinclined to wash. (Derivation obvious, and deeply unpleasant.)
• square, n., adj. (One who is) hard-working and clever, and thus not cool. (I can only assume that "square" had been applied to overly conformist pupils in the late 60s, and had shifted its focus since then.)
• twos, n. See below.
• vegetable, n. One who fails to enjoy, or does very little, exercise. (This, like "square", was usually applied to me.)
• wicked, adj. Ugly. (Used of boys who were considered hideously, fantastically grotesque, and any girl who wasn't a potential supermodel.)

This is an incomplete list -- in particular, I can no longer remember (except as euphemistic and faintly ridiculous) the name of the rota whereby the younger boys were allocated mundane menial tasks like picking up litter, presumably in an effort to teach us not to be so fucking rude about the people who were doing all the hard work in our vicinity. [Edit 6/12/2007: As John has now reminded me, it was "twos".]

I may well add to this as more words come to me. If you were at Lancing during the relevant period and have (somehow) found your way here, do feel free to comment with further examples.

[Edit 6/12/2007 to add "rip" and "twos".]


[1] The School Marshal during my early years at Lancing was a huge, terrifying man who died tragically and heroically on holiday, saving his fellow-passengers from the capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise. I couldn't stand him, but that's scarcely the point.

Confound their Knavish Tricks

One of the things I've spent the past couple of weeks doing has been "researching" (in that very specialist 2000s sense of "reading stuff on Wikipedia about"[1]) the British royal family, in service of an as-yet-unrevealed project.

Vaguely interesting things I've stumbled across (none of which are in any sense revelatory, and many of which you may know already, but which were either news to me or things I'd never fully realised before) include the following...

• While the present royal family may possibly be distant descendants of the Anglo-Saxon kings (in the sense that by now, pretty much anyone living in the British Isles could be descended from them), their best claim to the throne of England relies on the fact that the illegitimate grandson of Ethelred the Unready's brother-in-law happened to have a bigger army than Edward the Confessor's brother-in-law. Hmm.
  
  
• When a monarch who's previously been deposed but not killed comes back for a rematch and wins, the subsequent retaking of power is called a "readeption". Or at least it was once.
  
  
• While Henry VII may have been a Good Thing in that he ended all that tedious bitching between the Yorks and the Lancasters, his best claim to the throne was his descent by a dubiously legitimate route from Edward III's younger son John of Gaunt. Gaunt's children by his mistress, Katherine Swynford, were retroactively legitimised by the Pope (though specifically barred from the succession) when the two married late in life, in a move which was widely regarded as dodgy. (Henry then sensibly married Elizabeth of York, the older sister of the Princes in the Tower, ensuring that his own heirs were direct descendants of both York and Lancaster lines.)
  
  
• The Stuart kings after Charles I, and later the Jacobite "pretenders" to the throne (the disinheriting of several perfectly rightful monarchs on the grounds of their religion being yet another area where the current incumbents' claims to the monarchy can be seen as a little ropy) were directly descended from the Medicis of Florence, Charles' queen Henrietta Maria being the daughter of Maria de Medici and Henry IV of France.
  
  
• And speaking of France...
  • Louis XV, who came to the throne at the age of four, was succeeded 72 years later by his own five-year-old great-grandson. How often does that sort of thing happen, eh?
  • For the last six generations of the Bourbon monarchy in France, the male heirs were all called "Louis" and their wives some variant of "Marie". Someone really didn't have much imagination.
  • The two current claimants to the French throne (both perfectly legitimate, except for that small matter of France being a republic these days) are Louis XX and Henry VII.
  
  
• Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov (of "nearly as many impersonators as Elvis" fame) was Elizabeth II's second cousin once removed. Somehow I'd never realised that before. It means the Queen's first cousin twice removed is a Russian Orthodox saint, and also probably shagged Rasputin. Funny how these things work out.

If you think any of that sounds complicated, you should see the family tree. The current heir to the throne is:

• the great-nephew of Edward "Nazi sympathiser" VIII;
• the great-to-the-fifth-grandson of Mad King George;
• the great-to-the-11th-nephew of Charles "Off with his head!" I;
• the first cousin 15 times removed of Bloody Mary;
• the great-to-the-15th-nephew of Henry "I'm 'Enery the Eighth I am" VIII;
• the great-to-the-17th-nephew of Richard "A horse! Aaaaaaayyy horse!" III;
• the great-to-the-21st-grandson (by two different routes) of Edward "Poker time!" II;
• the great-to-the-24th-grandson of Bad King John;
• the great-to-the-26th-grandson of the Empress Matilda;
• and the great-to-the-28th-grandson of the aforementioned William the Bastard.

I want the House of Wessex back.


[1] And while I'm rambling on pretty much at random -- we all know that "1960s", "1970s" etc denote particular decades, but is there any simple term that refers specifically to the first decade of the 21st century, rather than potentially to the entire century or indeed millennium? The nearest I can get is "twenty-noughties", but that manages to be simultaneously ugly and twee. ("1900s" has a similar problem, but at least you can only go 90 years wrong with that one.)

Books Update: Iron and Clay

Due to various external sources of hassle, it's been over two months since I last updated you on my reading habits.

It feels longer, for some reason -- so long I can barely remember what I thought of some of the following at the time of reading. Nonetheless, I did resolve to write at least two sentences about everything I read this year, even (well, implicitly) if those were trade-paperback comic compilations read in a blatant attempt to bring my reading rate back up to a book a week for 2007.

Roughly in reading order, then...

Collapse was fascinating, an involuted and in-depth attempt at anatomising the process of major societal collapse, as seen in numerous historical and present-day cultures. Like Jared Diamond's earlier Guns, Germs and Steel, it's theoretically a work of history, but one with polemically strong scientific interests and a scope so broad as to be more typical of... well, science fiction.

The most interesting part of the book for me -- and happily also the longest -- was the examination of the fates of the various Norse colonies in the North Atlantic, and in particular that of the Greenlandic Norse, whose demise is in stark contrast to the contemporary (and continued) thriving of the Inuit in the same location.

While learning about other cultures and their history is always fascinating, Diamond's style is abstract and and his descriptions of, say, Polynesian or Maya or Anasazi culture can end up a little alienating. The close connection between Norse history and my own (like most English people I almost certainly have Vikings among my ancestors, the Old English I studied at university was very close to Old Norse, and I've actually visited Iceland) made these chapters feel a lot more vivid.

Diamond assumes throughout that all his readers will be more interested in North America and its neighbours than anywhere else. This and his tendency to focus on the minutiae of agriculture, lead him to start he book with an extensive, rampantly dull exploration of current farming practices in rural Montana, to ease the reader in gently with something reassuringly familiar before heading off and examining scarily exotic cultures like Northern Europe.

Nonetheless, Diamond's central thesis -- which I've summarised briefly here -- is compelling and disturbing, and needs to be heard. I'd recommend the book to anyone who really cares about the future of human civilisation. Although you might want to skip some of the lengthier descriptions of soil degradation that get you there, and just take Diamond's word for it that this is the sort of thing that happens.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is the second book I've read by the excellent Michael Chabon, the first being the very fine The Final Solution. His prose has a roomy, open feel to it, his characters have depth and unexpected corners, and their experiences can be deeply affecting. Like The Final Solution, Kavalier and Clay concerns Jewish refugees during the Second World War, but these ones, instead of going to the Home Counties and meeting the octogenarian Sherlock Holmes, end up writing comic books in New York.

There's a great deal about the early history of superhero characters, and about the general theory of comic-writing, which shows that Chabon really knows his stuff. Other metaphors pressed into service include the art of stage magic and the staged escape (Joe Kavalier, who draws the adventures of the superhero, "The Escapist", whom his escapological escapades have inspired, is an escape artist in every sense)... and the Golem of Prague, whose artificial existence is somehow tied up with that of Joe and his oddly-named New York cousin Sammy Clayman.

It's a deceptively complex novel, and one I need to reread to get the nuances. Fortunately it's also an unmitigated joy to read, and I'm keen to follow it up with The Yiddish Policemen's Union when I get hold of a copy.

(My father-in-law liked it, too.)

I've already mentioned the release of the latest, and assumed final, Time Hunter novella, Child of Time by George Mann and David J Howe. I've now read it, and it's a pleasant if inconsequential conclusion to Honoré and Emily's adventures. It is in many ways a homage to the series' inspiration, Daniel O'Mahony's exceptionally fine Doctor Who novella The Cabinet of Light, and on a purely narrative level it nearly succeeds. Unfortunately, it's a far cry from being as well-written as several of the other Time Hunter books, a fact which becomes especially clear when it reprints Cabinet's prologue as an epilogue.

Given the efforts Time Hunter has made to carve a niche out separately from its parent series, it's a little sad that the best thing about Child of Time is a guest appearance by the Doctor himself. Disguised though he is under the cunning and copyright-defying pseudonym "Dr Smith", Mann and Howe do well in recreating O'Mahony's version of the character as seen in Cabinet (and indeed the book's conclusion makes his identity very clear indeed). It's good that the series has come to a definite conclusion rather than petering out, but a shame it couldn't have gone out on a more triumphant high. Ah well.

Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream is a novel that requires some explanation, and a certain amount of apology. It's the epitome of high concept,being the novel Adolf Hitler would have written if he'd given up on radical politics, emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1919 and become a hack author turning out pulp S.F. by the yard.

To be strictly accurate, though, that novel -- Lord of the Swastika -- comprises about 95% of The Iron Dream, the rest being a minimalist framing narrative consisting of a blurb, an author biog and a deliberately fatuous critical essay dissecting "Hitler"'s work. It's the latter which delivers the allohistorical punchline: in the absence of German expansionism, the Greater Soviet Union has risen to unquestioned dominance over Eurasia, and Hitler's novel -- not to mention the colourful eye-catching swastika iconography which he created for it -- has become an inspiration for a generation of Americans desperate to resist the Red menace.

"Hitler"'s narrative is a full-on psychotic foaming-at-the-mouth power-fantasy, where blond, muscular Trueman Feric Jaggar returns from the mongrelised mutant state of Borgravia to his ancestral fatherland of Heldon, siezes power through petty political thuggery (nobly described, of course), and then proceeds to cleanse his post-apocalyptic Earth of every nuclear-spawned mutant (especially the loathsome, insidious psychic parasites known as Dominators) to deviate from the true (and, it implicitly appears, exclusively Aryan) human genome.

Spinrad's aim is to highlight the inherent fascism -- the racism, the sexism, the militaristic fetishism, the sublimated homoeroticism -- of a good deal of ancestral pulp S.F. I certainly found myself overwhelmingly reminded at times of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman heptalogy, whose hero, eugenically bred by the noble godlike Arisians to rid the universe of the loathsome demonic Eddorians, rises to dominance over... well, you can probably fill in the rest.

I admit I found Spinrad's point a little... well, obvious... but that may be down to my having been born at around the time he was writing the thing, and having lived through a generation's worth of deconstruction surrounding these early texts and archetypes.

My real problem with The Iron Dream is that Lord of the Swastika is, of necessity, a very bad book indeed. There's a certain amount of fun to be had with stylistic pastiche, with phallic symbolism and Hitler's leather obsession, but this -- I promise -- palls very, very quickly. The reader gets the joke -- that this is alt-Hitler's fantasy of how his long-abandoned plans for political domination might have played out -- within the first few pages, and is left facing chapter after chapter dealing with a protagonist with no sense of irony or self-doubt, written by a "writer" equally devoid of both qualities, in which violent boorishness and unthinking kneejerk bigotry are elevated to the status of moral absolutes.

Someone with a monomania about racial and genetic purity may be capable of causing far more harm to the world than someone obsessed with train timetables, but they're not noticeably more interesting to read about.

Since Spinrad's "Hitler" controls the narrative, there aren't even any of the setbacks or "unexpected" twists which make a genuinely unironic adventure story palatable. A genuine pulp S.F. novel with this premise would at least have built up to a revelation that -- shock! -- Feric Jaggar, who controls an entire nation of Truemen with the force of his will is in reality (and unbeknownst to himself) not a Trueman at all, but a vile Dominator! ...Or that -- horror! -- despite their beliefs the Helder are not in fact unmutated humans, but are themselves mutants of some eventually-revealed kind, the true True Human Genome having vanished generations earlier.

Any decent pulp S.F. author would have seen the need for these or something similar, but "Hitler"'s utter confidence in Jaggar's divinely-ordained rightness rules out any such possibility. And so we slog through 235 pages of dreary, soul-pounding thuggery and self-aggrandisement to reach the (admittedly clever) punchline. Spinrad's novel could have worked so much better as a short story -- a lengthier critical essay, say, giving more historical and biographical background for the alternative Hitler and his world, and quoting frequent extracts from Lord of the Swastika to back up its points.

The actual existence of those 235 pages achieves nothing whatsoever that couldn't have been achieved by simply telling us about them. By writing them out in full, Spinrad has wasted hours of my time and I dread to think how much of his own.

The central conceit of The Iron Dream is, ultimately, quite a neat one, but it's nowhere near enough to power a novel. The book's also somewhat embarrassing to read on the train, emblazoned as it is with a swastika and the legend "A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL BY ADOLF HITLER!"

(...I should write about comics now, but this is long enough already, and I have a festival to flap about. I'll have to come back to those in a week or so's time.)

Further Reading

It's been a while since I last posted one of these.

Since then, I've managed to read The Battle for God, Pattern Recognition, Perdido Street Station, Cloud Atlas, Another War and A Dream of Wessex, all of which were rather excellent in diverse ways. I've also covered rather a large number of others which I hadn't been anticipating at the time of making that list. Most recently I've been working my way through Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and China Miéville's The Scar.

GG&S is a strange mixture of visionary and plodding, setting out to explain the disparities in technological and political development which allowed the Europeans of the late second millennium to conquer and subjugate most of the population of the rest of the world, rather than (for instance) the Incas getting there first... but ending up talking mostly about the early history of agriculture. Which is fair enough since this would appear to have been the main mechanism whereby the said cultural differences arose, but I'm not sure we entirely need the six chapters devoted to food production when more interesting developments such as the invention of writing just get the one.

Never mind -- most of the chapters about other aspects of world history are quite fascinating.

(It turns out, incidentally, that the ultimate cause -- or the nearest Diamond thinks we can get to one -- is the shape and position of Eurasia: it's bigger than any other continuous continent, quite bumpy but not too bumpy, and runs left-to-right on a map rather than up and down. All of these turn out to be highly significant... although humanity's tendency to go round killing, rather than domesticating, any animals that haven't already evolved to avoid getting killed by people hasn't helped.)

The Scar, which I've still not quite finished, is pretty good but nowhere near as good as Miéville's marvellous Perdido Street Station. This has come as something of a disappointment, given how much I was looking forward to reading more from the same author.

Part of the problem is Miéville's habit of fusing his fantasy-horror with other genres: PSS is Dickensian urban gothic, a type of story which I find relentlessly fascinating, whereas The Scar is a seagoing adventure story, which I find a lot duller. (Iron Council is a western, apparently. I may have to give that one a miss.) More disappointingly, though, what should be an incredibly imaginative setting -- a mobile oceangoing pirate city built across a seascape of tethered-together ships -- is rendered with far less of the lavish sociopolitical, cultural and geographical detail which made PSS such a joy to read.

Be that as it may, the current list of books I've got and want to read soon runs as follows. Books added since last time (which are most of them) appear in bold.

Ben Aaronovitch, Genius Loci.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: a Journey Inside the Mind of Philip K Dick.
Paul Cornell, British Summertime.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: the First Arabesk.
Frank Herbert, Dune.
Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor.
Kim Newman, The Night Mayor.
Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars.
Justina Robson, Mappa Mundi.
Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream.

The following have dropped off the list since last time, or at least been relegated to "less urgent":

Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.
Mark Chadbourn, World's End.
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.
Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.
Jacqueline Rayner, Winner Takes All.
Gary Russell, Spiral Scratch.

That's quite a list, and it doesn't even take into account the crate of S.F. and fantasy I picked up from my Dad at Christmas. Feel free to make suggestions as to which titles I should tackle first.

Imbalance of Power

Yesterday I composed a post about my recent reading, viewing and partygoing, with a few words about the weaknesses in season six of Buffy, and an explanation of my theory concerning alternative world history in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Then my beloved wife started looking for what turned out to be a nonexistent electrical fault, and accidentally cut power to the whole house, including my PC. So, er, that's gone now.

I'll stick with the observation that makes me look the most intellectual, which is that I'm 40 pages into Jared Diamond's astonishingly ambitious macrohistory, Guns, Germs and Steel: a Short History of Everybody for the last 13,000 Years, which attempts to explain in terms of environmental, geographical, zoological and botanical factors why Europeans ended up throwing their weight around enslaving people and similar all over the rest of the world, rather than, say, Papuans.

It's a fascinating topic, and one I really want to know more about. Unfortunately the book is... well, pretty damn thick, and thus rather intimidating. I very much want to have read it, but going through the the actual reading process is a daunting prospect. It'd be a good candidate for making available via direct cerebral download or RNA memory-extension. I think I may be reading it for quite some time.

Now B. and I are off to Manchester, to stay in a hotel and go to pubs and eat nice food and do such touristy things as we can find to do. I'm overdue a decent city-break, and I'm looking forward to it.

More bloggery next week, with any luck.