Just Finished Reading: The Separation by Christopher Priest (FP: 2002)

After finishing his study of the German invasion of Russia historian Stuart Gratton is looking for another topic to investigate. He could try another epic already approved by his publisher about the US war in China and the subsequent decline of America in world affairs or something more focused, more personal, a mystery of identity. For as long as he can remember Gratton has been fascinated with the end of the war in Europe which coincided with his birth on May 10, 1941. Now he has found something else about that fateful date so long ago – the involvement of twin brothers, one in RAF Bomber Command and the other a worker in the Red Cross mentioned in Winston Churchill’s magisterial account of the conflict. But there the confusion starts – Churchill has confused the conscientious objector with the squadron leader and asked his staff to find out more. Is it just a misunderstanding too trivial to publically resolve or is there more to it. Would Graffton be wasting his time even investigating something so trivial and would a book resolving any mystery sell in numbers to justify the expense? But when the squadron leaders daughter provides him with an unpublished manuscript the mystery deepens even further. Memories of participating in huge bombing raids over Germany at late as 1945 call everything into question as do reports of surviving or dying during a crash into the English Channel in 1941. Which account is true? Whose memory is playing tricks? Did the twins even exist as separate people and what has Rudolf Hess got to do with everything?

Chris Priest is one of those authors with a gift. It’s the way he can start a story on solid ground and then, little by little, in logical steps, bend reality in such a way that you start to question everything. It’s not that fantastic elements overwhelm the story, it’s completely rational and makes complete sense. The war ended in 1941 and/or 1945. Bomber pilot Jack Sawyer, died/survived in 1941 and continued to fly until being shot down over Germany and spent the last 2 years of the war as a prisoner until the camp he was in was liberated by the Americans who never actually entered the war in Europe as Pearl Harbour never happened and anyway the European war was over in the Spring of 1941. To hold that many (and more) alternate histories in the palm of your hand and to keep them all nicely interacting until you no longer know what is or is not the ‘real’ history of the world post May ’41 without sending the reader mad is quite something to behold.

As you can imagine for such a superbly crafted but oh so complex plot you really, and I mean really, need to keep your wits about you. This is definitely not a book you can breeze through. You need to concentrate. Fortunately it’s gripping in a way that I haven’t read for some time. The book literally fascinates and I found myself turning pages late into the night (thankfully on my Christmas break). It got me thinking about a great deal – for days afterwards – about how the war could have ended in 1941. Could Britain, with Churchill in charge, really have signed a separate peace with the Germans? If so how would the world have turned out? I know that Hess flew to Scotland in 1941 but was there any real hope of peace at that point? Could our reality just be a failed version of what really did happen at the peace conference in Portugal where a lasting peace was brokered by the Red Cross and the Neutral Powers? I know that Hitler tried to make peace with Britain a few times but was he really serious? I don’t really know and, to be honest, it’s not a subject that gets talked about much in any WW2 books I’ve ever come across to date. They were bad, we were good, and we won. End of story. But what if…..?

It came as no surprise that this excellent work of SF/Alt History won the 2003 Arthur C Clarke Award. It’s one of the best SF books I’ve read in years and goes well beyond being merely thought provoking. Because of it I will be focusing a lot more on the first two years of ‘our’ WW2 to see if it could have been any different than it was. I wonder what I’ll find in the shadowy background and in-between the cracks of reality. Very highly recommended and a cracking start to 2016.

Cartoon Time.

Just not going to happen.....................

The Best Books of 2015

I reviewed 69 books here in 2015 although I rejected one of them after around 200 pages (which in the grand scheme of things isn’t bad and means that I can at least pick readable books). I think 2015 was a pretty good year book wise with a lot of variety and I’ve been pleased by my introduction of the ‘blitz’ method of reading three books on a particular subject is short succession rather than allowing my butterfly mind to drift around as the whim takes it. There will definitely be more blitzing this year! Ever so slowly I am getting my reading under a bit more control though I have built in a bit of randomness just in case. But to the books themselves:

Fiction:

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston
Divergent by Veronica Roth
The Greenstone Grail by Amanda Hemingway
The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
The Traitors Sword by Amanda Hemingway
The Mechanical by Ian Tegillis
Zero History by William Gibson
The Blood Spilt by Asa Larsson
The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
Under Fire by Henri Barbusse

That, I think, is a nice mix of Crime, SF, Fantasy, Historical and Vampire fiction. There’s also a gratifying number of female and non-Anglo-American authors appearing in the list which is good from a multi-perspective point of view. So I’m pleased with that.

Non-Fiction:

1913 – The World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson
How to Live – A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
Singled Out by Virginia Nicolson
Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum
Conquest – The English Kingdom of France in the 100 Years War by Juliet Baker
Empire and the English Character by Kathryn Tidrick
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
Butcher and Bolt by David Loyn
Return of a King by William Dalrymple
The Republic by Charles Townshend
Drone Theory by Gregoire Chamayou
The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter
Titanic Lives by Richard Davenport-Hines

That’s a lot of History as you might expect from my defining interest in the subject although I think it’s a wide ranging historical focus rather than anything too narrow (I’m too interested in too much to be focused on anything for very long). I do feel that I’m ignoring WW1 a bit – contrary to my original plan – and I seem to be skirting around the edges of WW2 but that’ll be rectified this year. I’ve recently developed a real interest in the first 2 years of the war – basically between September 1939 and December 1941 – when Britain basically stood alone against the Germans. So 2016 should see some reading on The Battle of Britain, North Africa, The Battle of the Atlantic, Dunkirk and various early attacks on Fortress Europe…. At least that’s the plan. Of course I’ll be continuing my ‘blitz’ method and the next few will include Germany, The Human Race, The Working Class, Tanks, The Vikings and War Reporting. If I can fit all of that into a single year I’ll be impressed with myself. I’ll try to increase my output a little (75 should be achievable although 80 would be even better) but some of the upcoming reads are 500+ pages so I’ll have to fit in a few more shorter faster reads as well. But that’s all in the future. I’m looking forward to it.

Cartoon Time.

Still no snow here - or for the next 5 days......

US military shelves Google robot plan over 'noise concerns'

From The BBC

30 December 2015

The US army says it has mothballed plans to deploy a robot developed in conjunction with Google because it is "too loud". The Legged Squad Support System - referred to by some as "the big dog" – is capable of carrying 400lbs (181.4kg) of equipment over rugged terrain. But the US Marines now say its petrol-powered engine is too noisy for them to use in battle. Google has long said it planned to move away from its military contracts. The LS3 was developed by Boston Dynamics - a robotics firm acquired by Google in 2013 - as part of a tie-up with the Pentagon's research arm, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

The robot can follow troops on foot through rugged terrain, carrying their gear. It can also interpret verbal and visual commands. However, after a major field trial in 2014, flaws in the robot also became apparent, according to Kyle Olson, a spokesman for the Marines' Warfighting Lab. "There was the challenge of seeing [its] potential... because of the limitations of the robot itself," he told Military.com. "They took it as it was: a loud robot that's going to give away their position." The machine, which has a gas-powered engine, is said to emit a lawnmower-like noise that would be unviable in combat situations. It is also thought to be difficult to repair. In response, Boston Dynamics did create a quieter, electric-powered alternative, called Spot. But despite successful trials in September 2015, the Marines have decided not to take it forward either. This, they said, was because Spot is smaller, can only carry up to 40lbs, and lacks the automation capacity of the LS3.

Google said as far back as 2013 that it planned to move away from its military contracts, which it inherited as part of its acquisition of the company. The tech firm has said it intends to develop robots for use in manufacturing and industry instead. Noel Sharkey, co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, told the BBC: "Spot ... lacks the autonomous operation of Big Dog, but that really is not so much of a problem and would not require a vast amount of research. The problem is that to take the extra steps need to upgrade the battery-driven Spot to the level of Big Dog could require a couple of years development or more and thus a new Darpa contract. So, what this looks like is a face saving statement by the Marine Corps to make it look like they are dumping Google/Boston Dynamics before they got dumped themselves."

[Interesting. It looks like the advent of military robotics isn’t just around the corner. Also interesting that, yet again, compact low noise power plants are the problem. I’m sure if someone can sort out decently powerful batteries they’d be raking in money faster than you could say – well, anything really. But of course there are plenty of applications where stealth isn’t so important. Maybe in the not too distant future we’ll have our parcels delivered by dog sized robots rather than drones?]

Happy New Year! I hope that last night lived up to expectations and that 2016 will exceed them!

Last (for a while anyway) Name to a Face?

Just Finished Reading: Shadow of the Titanic – The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived by Andrew Wilson (FP: 2011)

The first thing that struck me about this often interesting book was that it was obviously written by a journalist rather than a historian. The difference in style between this and the previous Titanic book was rather stark. Shadow of the Titanic is, in a word, far more sensationalist than Titanic Lives and this author focused upon and, I believe, consciously or not heightened the apparent after-effects of the tragic sinking of the great liner.

The author was quite right in his preamble that most books on this most famous ship close with the sinking itself or at best with the recovery of the lifeboats on the 705 survivors by the Carpathia the following morning. Little is mentioned of the two official inquiries in New York and London or what happened to those rescued after they returned to dry land. Although the blurb on the back of the book implies that all 705 survivors’ stories would be told I did think that such a Herculean task in only 350 pages. Such was the case and actually only 20-30 follow ups where attempted. Typically, as you might expect from a non-historian, much of what followed was the low hanging fruit of the lives (by and large) of the rich and shameless with hardly a mention of those from 2nd and especially 3rd class. From then on we were treated to numerous tales of divorce, madness, suicide of those ‘cursed’ by their survival. We have stories of those who believed that something very bad was going to happen to them when they heard the name Titanic for the first time and even one 1st class passenger who had a warning from a psychic she encountered whilst on holiday in Europe. We even have suicides 20 or more years after the event (precluded by divorce and/or death of beloved children) attributed, without as far as I could see a shred of evidence, to the horror experienced by that fateful night. Certainly I am not questioning the fact that surviving the sinking of the Titanic was a traumatic event in the lives of over 700 men, women and children. Many survivors never spoke of the incident again during their lives and never wrote about it. Others wrote newspaper articles, books and even starred in some of the early films recreating their own experiences on board ship. Others, it seemed, simply left the Carpathia never to be heard of again. How interesting would it be to find out what happened to those people rather than the spoiled teenage wife of an Astor?

My overall impression of this book was, unlike the ‘dizzyingly impressive’ comment from the Mail on Sunday (coincidently a paper that the author also writes for) was disappointing. It certainly had a good idea to follow and apparently filled an obvious gap in the Titanic narrative. Unfortunately it didn’t have the depth, heft or scholarship to follow this idea through to a decent conclusion. Oddly what I found most interesting about this book, which to be honest was by no means a total loss, was when the author moved beyond the survivor stories to what happened to the Titanic story itself as the years and decades went by – the stories that circulated at the time, the imposters who tried to claim compensation for losses or who made ‘scenes’ grieving for people they did not know, the misidentified infant who only found out she was a Titanic survivor decades later, the survivors who related their stories to Walter Lord and who assisted him in the production of the movie ‘A Night to Remember’, and the bizarre legal wrangle over a kimono that may, or may not, have been worn that night. Each of these stories could have made an interesting book in themselves but had been brought up as flotsam at the end of the book almost as an afterthought.

Taken with a few good pinches of salt this is a reasonable telling of ‘what happened next’ in the Titanic saga. If you do still feel like reading it (after my hatchet job above) you’ll pick up a lot of interesting side stories that might be possible to follow up elsewhere just don’t expect to be all that enlightened.