I am giving a
five-star recommendation to a novel which I found difficult to read
at times. Why? Well, because it gives an insight into a criminal
justice system which has evolved to an unscientific state where it is
normally only capable of detecting and convicting stupid people. Now,
criminologists patiently tell us that most criminals are amazingly
stupid. The trouble with that little factoid is that huge numbers of
completely innocent persons are also a bit stupid at times, which
means that they are all too easily convicted by a system which, by
and large, does not believe in clever criminals, let alone
scientifically-minded ones, and whose own concept of “forensic
science” revolves around a determination to introduce “single
particle evidence” to increase, rather than improve, the conviction
rate, ignoring that it’s an axiom of science that a single particle
proves nothing. A conviction rate bolstered by wrongful convictions
can only be improved by being reduced.
This novel is
difficult to read at times because the primary villain is a clever
and calculating necrophiliac murderer who lies, skilfully and also
sadistically in pretty well every conversation he joins and the minor
villains are senior police officers who apply Lardarse’s Razor to
every conundrum, whereby the conclusion that leads to the path of
least thought and effort is always reached. The tension in the plot,
and there’s a lot of it, derives from the way the clever
necrophiliac interacts with institutionally-irrational senior police
officers to constantly ratchet up the scale of the disaster
afflicting the primary heroine and several other innocents. And this
strikes a chord with me, as it will with many other readers, because
you cannot live in the modern world and not know, or know about,
policemen like this. There is also a well-drawn secondary villain
whose most devastating tactic against those victims he seeks to
destroy is to marry them. He, too, will strike a chord with many
readers. It’s the grains of truth which make this novel both
compelling and uncomfortable.
The author knows her
stuff and she knows the Devon landscape the story is set in. She
knows terrifying truths about teenage girls and isn’t afraid to
tell them. The story is well-told but not gently told. The solution
is as shocking as it is surprising, but it is well crafted around the
limitations of the senior investigating officer.
Breakneck Point by
T. Orr Munro is published in the UK by HQ on the 14th of
April 2022.
A novel take on the
disappearance of Agatha Christie.
This is a
well-crafted novel based on a real-life mystery where the truth is
unknown to anyone in the present day. As such the author can do more
or less as she likes and her chosen course is an interesting one,
showing the way that women tend to form alliances in stressful
situations rather than making enemies. This is true, sometimes; it
may even be true quite often, but it’s definitely not always true.
It will also be
controversial in that the story suggests that Irish independence was,
if not built on hypocrisy, far too tolerant of hypocrisy and
injustice from the outset and for decades afterwards, right up to the
nineteen seventies and in some cases beyond. Single mothers had fewer
rights than criminals and institutions for them genuinely were worse
than jails. The author tries to soften the blow by pointing out that
England and the United States also had institutions of equivalent
function, but these were never quite as bad, never had such a
complete grip and certainly did not endure for anything like as long.
Although, anyone seeking the Roman Catholic Church at its absolute
worst on this particular subject in the 20th century
should look to Franco’s Spain and Galtieri’s Argentina and not
Ireland.
This is a mystery
story where the usual moral certainties have been altered: the men
who have survived the Great War, even those in high authority, are
perfectly willing to fudge the truth and even break the law in order
to minimise actual harm while the “fallen” women are willing to
break the law in order to obtain justice for themselves and their
children, whether the latter are lost or dead. Crimes against
humanity make other crimes seem perfectly reasonable.
This novel deals
kindly with Agatha Christie whilst possibly taking liberties with the
unknown facts, but it deals kindly from a 21st century
viewpoint. Which is why I can’t give it a five-star recommendation.
The Christie Affair
by Nina De Gramont is published by Pan Macmillan (Mantle) on the 20th
of January 2022.
A romantic fantasy
set in a recognisable Yorkshire landscape.
In the early
nineteen-nineties, a famous commissioning editor proclaimed that his
reading of the future fiction market was for “Erotica in a
horror/fantasy landscape.” Thirty years on, this novel turns his
specification upside-down.
The author allows
herself only one fantastical premise (and this is a very traditional
one) in that some individuals can be two different species and change
forms at will, or according to their need. Pretty much everything
else is solid and decently-researched eighteen-nineties Yorkshire.
The landscape of this novel is born of observation and not fantasy.
The local industry is correct (there was an episode of “Landscape
Mysteries” by the Open University about this!) and we even see how
pawnbrokers of the time manipulated prices to avoid the legal
requirement to auction high-value unredeemed goods.
There are a couple
of erotic scenes amidst all the Victorian morals, but while these are
fantastical, they are not perverse.
The characters,
regardless of species-shifting, are believable and the heroine’s
heart versus head dilemma is complicated by the fact that her heart
goes a bit in both directions, as does her head. There’s also a
clear divide between being thoughtless or limited in scope and actual
cruelty: both occur in the story but the author does not confuse the
two.
The stories within
this story question whether happy endings are real, but the real
question is what is the heroine prepared to do for her happy ending
and how does she even define “happy?”
Daughter of the Sea
by Elisabeth J. Hobbes is published by Harper Collins “One More
Chapter” on the 20th of December 2021.
This is a
well-researched novel about a confused and yet pivotal period in
European history.
It involves several
characters from the author’s previous novel “Hitler’s Secret”
but isn’t exactly a sequel because there is no reference to that
story, even though it could have been relevant.
In the immediate
post-war period there are shortages and hardship in a Britain
struggling to return to peaceful progress but still not perceiving
that the defeat of Hitler might have left Stalin poised for further
advance in a westerly direction. In Germany and Austria there is
still chaos and effective anarchy, in that soldiers of the allied
powers trying to impose “rule by laws rather than fear” are able
to act arbitrarily and even murder as they please. One of the “good”
characters is determined to use an investigation into Hitler’s real
fate and current whereabouts as a sort of one-man witness
extermination programme. More than one of his superiors threatens him
with retribution for this, but the threats, for one reason or another
are all empty. Life is very cheap in occupied Germany and Austria.
Life in liberated France is governed by an unhappy mixture of
self-righteous retribution and hypocrisy: the corrosive aftermath of
NAZI conquest.
The OSS and MI6
decide to send professor Tom Wilde, from the previous novel, to
Berlin, Nuremberg and Bavaria to find out what really happened to
Hitler in his bunker and Wilde is encouraged and skilfully
manipulated by a senior Russian SMERSH officer. For most of the novel
the only real evidence that something might have happened other than
the official narrative of Hitler’s suicide in the bunker, consists
of lethal action against anyone asking questions. SMERSH, of course,
“firmly believe” that Western intelligence agencies have Hitler
in secure and comfortable custody and are planning to use him for
their own wicked purposes. There is a twist in the tale about the
outcome of the search for Hitler, but there’s also a twist in the
tale about what, exactly, SMERSH wants to get out of the OSS/MI6
search for Hitler.
The Man in the
Bunker by Rory Clements is published by Bonnier Books on the 20th
of January 2022.
You (should) know
you’re dealing with a psychopath when someone else is to blame
The above headline
does not betray the plot of the second Joel Norris/ Lucy Rose novel
(the author is clever), but in real life this is a good guide to
dealing with psychopaths. The problem the two detectives in the novel
have with their psychopathic killer is the level of sophistication
with which blame is transferred -and that also translates to real
life.
This is an effective
page-turner of a thriller and much of the urgency comes from the poor
relations the two leading characters have with colleagues: it’s a
race against incompetent or uncaring intervention as much as it is a
race against a clock set by the murderer. (One is reminded of the
real life case of Stephen Port, now being examined in the coroner’s
court, where a less dramatic but equivalent race was lost.)
What the public sees
is a police service rendered helpless by its own rules, procedures
and above all, assumptions. What they want are police detectives who
will cut through all these to get to the truth and this is what
Charlie Gallagher supplies in this novel. Doing the same thing in
real life is going to be much more problematic, but if this novel
succeeds to the extent that I think it will, it will be proof that
the public are currently very frustrated with the police. “Dixon of
Dock Green” spoke to a public who could trust the police and not be
let down all that often. The Joel Norris and Lucy Rose series speaks
to a public who expect senior officers to queer the pitch for any
officer who’s actually trying to do the right thing against the
odds. Full marks to the author for tapping into this, but the fact
that the public is receptive to such a narrative is a serious
problem.
Lethal Game by
Charlie Gallagher is published by Avon Books on the 11th
of November 2021
This novel contains
many moments of peace and beauty, but all of them are menaced in some
way. It is in the nature of Victorian society that most people should
go to Church and that “Christian” phraseology be widely used,
even to justify abuse. Persons in authority ignoring the awful
warning of Matthew 18.6 are commonplace throughout the story.
Kindness, where shown, is not always accompanied by sufficient
courage either. Probably, no matter what century you are in, the
number of people going to church and dedicating their lives to “good
works” in the name of Christ is a distinctly unreliable guide to
the number of true Christians around at the time. Consciously or not,
the author illustrates Matthew 18.6 almost perfectly.
Those characters who
show both kindness and courage shine through, despite their flaws and
sometimes ambiguous status in Victorian society. The author also does
a very good job in presenting the importance of the performing arts
in an era where life can be dreary and grim even for the wealthy. In
our our lives of constant music and almost unending entertainment, we
have lost this and I think it’s a loss that matters.
Lily: A Tale of
Revenge by Rose Tremain is published by Vintage of the 11th
of November 2021.
This article is not intended to deter anyone from having a necessary or recommended vaccination, against Covid-19 or anything else. The article's purpose is to provide supporting material for an intended Parliamentary Petition asking the UK government to reconsider its policy of NOT using a quick, simple and almost cost-free procedure known as "aspiration" which ensures that an injection which needs to be intramuscular in order to work properly and safely, does indeed go into muscle tissue and not into a blood vessel, which can cause occasional serious complications and, probably much more commonly, may simply stop the injection working properly and lead to reduced or nil protection for the recipient. If a vaccine is designed to be administered by intramuscular injection in order to work, and if its safety has been assessed by regulators on that basis, then it would seem completely reasonable to require the use of a well-tested and very simple procedure for insuring that this is what happens. The Danish government requires exactly this!
This article is necessary because the rules for a Parliamentary Petition place a severe limit on the number of characters (80) which may be used for the petition itself, whilst the "more information" box is limited to 300 characters and the "additional information" box may contain no more than 500 characters. This isn't a lot when you're trying to argue with public officials enjoying almost unlimited access to media time and column inches.
The following YouTube video, by Dr John Campbell, has been embedded as the best way of summarizing what the argument is about, whilst respecting his copyright. There's a bit more material and some tidier links below the video.
The first (and most recent: August 2021) of the studies to which Dr Campbell refers is this one:
Intravenous Injection of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) mRNA Vaccine Can Induce Acute Myopericarditis in Mouse Model
Can Li, Yanxia Chen, Yan Zhao, David Christopher Lung, Zhanhong Ye, Wenchen Song, Fei-Fei Liu, Jian-Piao Cai, Wan-Man Wong, Cyril Chik-Yan Yip, Jasper Fuk-Woo Chan, Kelvin Kai-Wang To, Siddharth Sridhar, Ivan Fan-Ngai Hung, Hin Chu, Kin-Hang Kok, Dong-Yan Jin, Anna Jinxia Zhang, Kwok-Yung Yuen
And this is a link which goes directly to the relevant URL (Dr Campbell gives a link which includes his own search information, which whilst very scholarly is never going to fit in a 500-character box on a petition!)
This article set out to discover whether inadvertent intravascular injection of an mRNA vaccine could induce Acute Myopericarditis and the researchers found that it indeed it could, in a mouse model. (It being unethical to kill people to find this out.)
The second study referenced in the video was started in 2006 and published in 2007:
Adenovirus-induced thrombocytopenia: the role of von Willebrand factor and P-selectin in mediating acceleratedplatelet clearance
Maha Othman, Andrea Labelle, Ian Mazzetti, Hisham S. Elbatarny, David Lillicrap
This study requires more in the way of explanation: the researchers were trying to answer a fairly complex immunological question about the use of adeno-virus vectors in both vaccines and gene therapy. They administered an adeno-virus antigen to mice (which had been genetically modified in different ways) via a tail-vein intravascular injection. This induced thrombocytopenia (there was a panic about the AZ covid vaccine also doing this in humans in very rare instances) with mice modified in one way and not in those modified in the other. But where the thrombocytopenia was induced, it was when the antigen was given in an intravascular injection and in the case of a vaccine (but maybe not a gene therapy agent) it could have been given therapeutically as an intramuscular injection. The complex immunological process leading to thrombocytopenia involved the innate immune responses to an antigen circulating in the bloodstream, most of which would not be encountered by an antigen entering the lymphatic system via muscle tissue.
There are two implications here:
Firstly the use of adeno-virus vectors in gene therapy may be more problematic than their use in vaccines, but gene-therapy is only given to people who definitely already have a severe illness, whereas a vaccine is given widely to all sorts of people to prevent illness.
Secondly, to avoid thrombocytopenia with adeno-virus vector vaccines, it might be as well to ensure that vaccinations intended to be intramuscular in order to work properly and safely are indeed given that way, avoiding inadvertent intravascular injection.
Conclusion
While the first study explicitly finds in favour of aspirating intramuscular mRNA vaccinations to ensure that they are not inadvertently given intravascularly, the second study indirectly leads to exactly the same conclusion for Adeno-virus vector vaccinations as well.
Other types of covid vaccine exist and some of them are being used. The Chinese have two inactivated virus vaccines, which might be exempt from the above logic. However, "authorised news footage" of Chinese nurses administering these vaccines to the masses shows them quickly and efficiently aspirating the injection every time. So even though they may well be using the least problematic type of vaccine in this respect, the Chinese authorities appear to regard aspiration as good practice, fit to be seen in glossy propaganda footage. The Chinese government has certainly not banned aspiration! The Danish government mandates it.
The UK government's main argument against aspiration is that a small number of vaccines would be wasted. However, any intramuscular vaccine that is wrongly given into the bloodstream will not work and be wasted anyway: the real waste is any vaccine believed to be correctly given that wasn't, and therefore does not work, because that wastes the opportunity to protect that patient from illness.
A link to the petition will be posted here if and when it goes live. There are several hoops to jump through first and this may take a few days.
This is not intended as an obituary of Sir Clive
Sinclair, but it has been written just after news of his passing was
received and is an attempt to go beyond the superficial responses and
remember something which not every commentator and journalist in 2021
will know about. In honour of Sir Clive, the text of this article is
being written using the Psion Quill word processor running on a
Sinclair QL Emulator called QPC2 (itself an item of legacy software
these days) and all of this is hosted on a rescued Windows 2000
machine, which for ten years now has not needed to be connected to
the internet to be useful to me. An embedded video and a link or two
will be added after the text is transferred to the dystopian world of
Gatesware, but all of the words are being written in a Sinclair-friendly
environment. Let me take you back to the world before the IBM PC or
the Sinclair QL, before even the ZX Spectrum, ZX80/ZX81 or the
Jupiter ACE that derived from them. Back to 1977-78.
I was fourteen and like many of my classmates I
was learning to programme. Unlike most of the others, though, I
learned to programme in four different ways at once. The way we all
learned was under the supervision of the maths teachers and we had to
learn, two at a time, on a single terminal at our school in
Letchworth, which was connected at some expense to a DEC-10 mainframe
computer at Hatfield Polytechnic. Time was limited and everything we
did was tightly-controlled according to what somebody else thought we
ought to be doing. It was mildly interesting, but if that had been
all I learned about programming and computers it wouldn't have
resulted in any creative impetus.
At about the same time, my eldest brother gave me
a Texas Instruments TI-57 programmable scientific calculator.
Programming this was like writing very short and simple "FORTRAN"
programmes, but it would do maths to a higher level of precision than
was available to fourteen-year-old scholars using the "BASIC"
entry-level facilities on the DEC-10. It wasn't lost on me that
something I could fit in my blazer pocket could do things I couldn't
do with three tons of computer down a phone line in Hatfield.
Shortly after that, one of my friends bought and
built a "Science of Cambridge" (Clive Sinclair's trading
name at the time) MK14 Microcomputer kit. During the "getting it
working to see what it does phase" he and I became interested in
the simple physics of the LM7805 voltage regulator which powered the
thing: The datasheet had graphs laying out the relationship between
input voltage (which could be anything from 8V to 36V) output voltage
(always 5V), load current and the surface-area of the improvised
heat-sink required to stop it frying itself. There have been many
occasions in the decades since then, when this understanding has
given me an advantage over "software" engineer colleagues
who learned about computers without burning their fingers even once.
My friend got the MK14 working, tried out all the
sample programmes in the instruction manual and then lost interest.
He had acquired a TI59 programmable scientific calculator which could
store programmes on magnetic cards whereas permanent programme
storage was a MK14 weak point. He sold the MK14 to me. I got more
data on its INS 8060 "SC/MP" microprocessor (National
Semiconductor had a physical site in Bedford) and began to think
about the instruction set and what could be done with it.
Concurrent with this, our Physics Master (and he
was a master of his subject) bought a kit to build a Nascom-One
microcomputer, against the fierce opposition of the maths teachers
who thought they should enjoy an absolute monopoly of teaching
computing skills -and the even fiercer opposition of the senior
French teacher who wanted to use all the available money for a
complex audio-teaching system which I never saw or heard working
once. This cost more than twenty times as much as the Nascom; quite
possibly a hundred times as much. Every pupil in the "language
lab" would be headphoned and wired up to a control panel, so
that the French teacher could press a button to take control of any
individual pupil and harrangue them without their classmates being
able to hear what he was saying and give moral support, or bear
witness to any psychological abuse. With the benefit of more than
forty years of hindsight the language lab never worked, probably
because another, wiser, teacher realised the potential for abuse and
sabotaged it.
My friend and I weren't involved in the
construction and commissioning of the Nascom One, but we were allowed
to use and programme it. It was based on a Zilog Z80 microprocessor,
which had a bigger and more powerful instruction set than the INS
8060 in the MK14, and which also had a whole family of (expensive)
supporting chips to build a system with. Knowing the inner workings
of two different microprocessors, each the product of a different
design requirement and philosophy, taught me somewhat more than the
sum of the two microprocessors concerned. I could see that both of
them had strengths and weaknesses, and that "strength" and
"weakness" were both defined by what you were trying to do
and how you sought to do it.
Both the MK14 and the Nascom (at least in the
configuration the physics lab had it in) had to be programmed in
hand-assembled machine code. Both had a minimal set of programme
editing tools in EPROM or PROM; that in the Nascom had been extended
with an EPROM containing a library of useful subroutines which the
user's programmes could call. (These had been written by the Physics
Master and were not a feature of Nascoms in general.)
The MK14 had a twenty-key keypad and an LED
display, somewhat like a calculator. Saving MK14 programmes to
cassette tape was an extra which I never ran to. The Nascom had a
QWERTY (48-key?) keyboard (a quality magnetic-switch affair that I've
never seen bettered for feel) and a video display which worked
through a 12" portable TV donated by the school caretaker. The
Nascom had a cassette tape interface, which worked reasonably well,
albeit slowly, and an I/O unit designed and built by the Physics
Master, which allowed users to control and monitor hardware
experiments. This introduced us to the concepts of digital and
analogue inputs and outputs. (Something the maths teachers would
never have done in a million years.) My friend soon had a programme
to play computer-sounding music through a speaker connected to the
I/O unit. I explored what simple mathematical functions sounded
like, because this didn't need me to type in a digitised musical
score. Some of these sounds were harmonious, but not all of them by
any means.
The project the Physics Master had in mind for the
Nascom, however, was a star-map programme and it was this which
really highlighted the differences between the Nascom and the MK14.
First off, the Nascom had a full-size if not very hi-res screen and
the MK14 had none. Then, while the MK14 had a 256-byte (or was it
512-byte?) PROM (I don't think it could be erased and reprogrammed
with updated software) and 256-bytes of RAM, the Nascom had a couple
of 2KB EPROMS, containing the firmware and the subroutine library, as
well as, I think, 4KB of ram and 1KB of video ram. It could be
expanded to more than that, but it never was due to lack of funds.
The Z80 could address 64KB of memory and another 64KB of I/O, but
extra logic chips and buffers were needed to implement that, while
the 8060 could address 4KB with very simple decoding of its control
signals and 64KB with more complicated "paging" using what
were otherwise dedicated I/O lines. I don't remember any support on
the 8060 for dynamic ram: I think there were two 4-bit-wide static
ram chips on the MK14.
So if you were seeking to do something simple with
the minimum number of chips and other components (and a single-rail
power supply), the 8060 was more attractive than the Z80, but for the
star-map the Z80 and the other resources of the Nascom would be
needed. (The Z80 chip itself only needed +5V, but I think the EPROMS
and separate UART chip used with it needed +/-12v as well. The Nascom
had a three-rail plus ground supply, at any rate.)
Even so, fitting the starmap on the Nascom was
going to be a squeeze. If the movements of all the displayed stars
were to be fully calculated by the Z80 as the programme ran, then a
lot of memory (and programming work!) was going to be taken up by
maths subroutines and the whole thing might be disappointingly
sluggish to run. It was thought better to have some stored tables
rather than lots of maths going on in real time. But doing all the
calculations to compile those tables was going to be tiresome,
unless... The Physics Master wrote down the necessary equations and a
list of values he wanted fed into them, and commissioned me to write
a programme for my TI57 calculator, which churned out all the
necessary numbers (no printer: I had to write them down as they came)
over the course of a single lunch hour. The star map programme went
on to be a successful teaching aid!
By the time I left secondary school in Letchworth
for a college of further education in Bedford, where I never saw a
computer of any kind being used for any purpose whatsoever, I had
learned that mainframes like the DEC-10 had enormous power (for the
time) but it was served out in very small portions and in a
restriction-rich environment where computer professionals had control
of everything you did. I had learned that there were different types
of microprocessor, suitable for different roles, and that if you had
the right mindset you could do a lot with even the simple ones
despite the relative lack of computing resources. (With that mindset
it isn't even difficult.)
I also learned to keep some sort of programmable
scientific calculator handy, because they can get you out of all
sorts of holes when you are testing computer software or even
analogue circuits, by giving you an idea of what at least a few
correct outputs ought to look like! One of my brothers bought and I
helped him build a Powertran SC80 computer, which was capable of
supporting a disk drive and running CP/M. The MK14 was consigned to a
drawer, but it and the processor it used were not forgotten.
Then I realised that I didn't want to be a doctor
or a vet, which were the only reasonable excuses for studying five
A'levels at the college, and I needed to get a job instead. Never
having applied for a job before, I went to the careers service, near
the college, and the lady there coaxed the basics of a CV out of me,
including the fact that I'd programmed more than one kind of computer
and that my brother and I had built and programmed our own Powertran
computer. She wisely expunged all mention of assorted poaching
techniques; I had matured in a rural setting.
She consulted her records and found that a company
in Bedford, called "Comserve Computer Services" wanted a
trainee under the Youth Training Scheme. She arranged an interview,
warned me that other YTS trainees had found the proprietor "tall
and frightening" and I went along to the interview, thinking
that anyone taller and more frightening than my own father or one
particular older brother (the others are less gigantic) would be
worth seeing.
Dave Cox, the proprietor, turned out to be no
larger, really, than my brother, but at the time he had a habit of
frowning in thought, especially if he was listening intently to what
you were saying. This was probably why my teenaged predecessor had
allegedly fled in terror when interviewed. I showed no fear and was
accepted on the spot, having indicated that I'd "built my own
computer" which is Dave's recollection of the interview.
On my first day in the post of YTS trainee, I was
handed a datasheet for the National Semiconductor 8060 and told to
learn the instruction set. I was a bit surprised at this, but a nice
Irish lady gave me a cup of tea and I glanced at the datasheet to see
if anything had changed, which it hadn't. I waited for someone to
actually give me some work to do, Dave waited until lunchtime
for me to start learning the instruction set.
He said that he needed me to help him write some
firmware for a firm in Rushden that was making drilling machines
controlled by 8060 processors and I needed to learn the
instruction set! I replied that I already knew the instruction
set because I had an 8060-based computer at home. Dave expressed mild
surprise, but he took me to Rushden (in Northamptonshire) that
afternoon and I found myself learning about CNC drilling machines by
helping to make one work by drawing flowcharts. I was on speaking
terms with my new boss! Forty years later, we still are. My
secondhand MK14 had got me a job, stopped me from getting sacked at
lunchtime on the first day, and, as it turned out, the benefits of
MK14 ownership didn't stop there. What I didn't realise at the time
was that by that stage (late summer 1981) there were exactly three
firms in the world still using the 8060 in new equipment and that the
careers lady had, largely by chance, matched my highly-specialised
skills set with about the only employer in Great Britain who had a
use for them. On my first ever job application! If this story ended
here, I would have something to thank Clive Sinclair for, but there's
more.
Kempston Joysticks
Although Comserve was primarily intended to be a
software consultancy, like several other similar firms it had been
persuaded by the importers of the "Video Genie"
microcomputer to become a dealer. (This worked out badly, mainly
because the importer's trading practices were very much sharper than
those of the erstwhile dealers.)
Amidst the problems were some opportunities: the
machines were really designed, like the MK14, to allow users to teach
themselves how to programme and use computers. They were (mostly)
software-compatible with TRS80 microcomputers, but had a built-in
tape-deck for programme and data storage and a somewhat bigger case,
with room inside to accommodate a few well-chosen extras. What the
customers wanted, though, was to play all the computer games which
were available on tape in TRS80 format. The Video Genie, as imported
at the time, lacked the essential sound output and joysticks.
Comserve had resolved the sound deficiency with a
little amplifier circuit board that took an unused output from the
computer's Centronics parallel printer interface, which was also how
the sound worked on a TRS80, and drove a little 8-ohmn speaker fitted
inside the case, with an on-off and volume knob installed on the side
of the case. In the early 21st century I used the redundant
Centronics printer interface on a PC104 embedded computer module to
drive a phased-array microwave antennae controller. It is worth
remembering every honest trick you learn in life. Forget the
dishonest ones instead.
Back in the early eighties, I was learning all
about Video Genies and microcomputer hardware in general, by fixing
all the faulty machines that the importer dumped on Comserve and then
refused to repair under warranty, which was most of them. Under the
influence of some very strong Darwinian forces, I went from being a
novice to the local expert in a few months. At which point someone in
Kempston, near Bedford, came into ownership of a large consignment of
(switched) joystick mechanisms with moulded cases and bare-ends
leads, which had been ordered for a stand-alone video game and never
used.
Now, the way people played TRS80 games on a Video
Genie without joysticks, was to press the arrow keys and <enter>
for one joystick, and five other keys (I have forgotten which, but
<spacebar> was the fire button) in the middle of the keyboard
for the other. This was obviously awkward, if intimate, for
two-player games! But if the cache of joystick mechanisms could be
interfaced to the Video Genie a widespread need might be met and
Comserve would recoup some of the money lost in its dealings with the
Video Genie importer. Time was of the essence, because a potential
business partner needed to be shown this working before he did
something else with the joysticks. I was asked to stay late one
evening and work out the interface details. In the gap between the
bus I would normally catch and the last one I could catch home, I
achieved this.
The MK14 20-key keypad was organised, in
electronic terms, as a 4x5 switch matrix. The Video Genie had a 64
key keyboard, organised as a 8x8 switch matrix. As on the MK14, there
was no dedicated processor running the keyboard and feeding ASCII
characters back to the main microprocessor: the main microprocessor
or "CPU" scanned the switch matrix itself, through simple
buffers. (This isn't quite what happened on the Nascom One and it's
not what happens in any sort of IBM PC compatible.) On the special
"Genie Two" business model of the Video Genie, the switches
of the numeric keypad were simply wired in parallel with the
corresponding keys on the main keyboard. On a modern PC they are
scanned separately and can have separate functions. I reasoned that
if that worked, so might wiring the joystick switches in parallel
with the keys customarily used to represent joysticks for those who
didn't have them.
The tricky bit was working out where to solder
flying leads. I most emphatically did not want to solder anything to
the back of the keyboard switches themselves, because that would look
awful if the customer took the lid off and it might also cause
heat-damage to the keyswitches concerned. It might also not work, if
the connections clashed.
But I found that the keys chosen as the default
joystick substitutes, were scanned in a logical-enough pattern that
was compatible with the existing joystick leads if used right, with
each axis of the joystick making the same 2x1 matrix as the keys!
Fortunately, the keyboard was a separate PCB on the Video Genie,
connected to the CPU board by a ribbon cable connector. (I cannot
remember if this was also true of the TRS80: it might not have been.)
Not only was it possible to wire a joystick onto the back of this
connector without damaging anything, it even looked passably neat and
tidy and the correct arrangement of wires was easy to reproduce in
numbers.
We didn't want the joysticks directly and
permanently wired to the keyboard, though: I put two DIN sockets in
the side of the (plastic) computer case, which were wired to the
keyboard connector, and the man who had the joystick mechanisms
only had to put appropriate DIN plugs on! He managed to thoroughly
insult me by repeatedly and scornfully demanding to know if I knew
what I was talking about, but even he couldn't argue with the fact
that the "interface" worked!
A lot of "Kempston Joysticks" were sold,
and I have it on good authority that some of the individuals who
founded the UK's thriving computer games industry were inspired to
create their own games by this availability, but my immediate concern was to get
home that night without having to sleep in Bedford Bus Station.
(Spare a thought, please, for anyone who has to do this in 2021!)
Reflections on the last forty-four years
I knew about Turing's Universal Machine concept at
some early point in the above saga, and it seemed to me that simple
computers with no constraints on how they could be used, like the
MK14, might even be a basis for realising this concept. But then came
the IBM PC, and with it an architecture and software environment for
microcomputers which was essentially the same as the DEC-10:
over-complicated with all sorts of things which the ordinary user was
never allowed to see, let alone delve into, which just happened to be
where malware hides! The unvarying response of manufacturers and
software companies to malware writers exploiting the over-complicated
nature of their products was and still is to make everything more
complex still, and here we all are: stuck in a forever war between
not-very good at all and actual evil.
Computers and software are harnessed to the dreams
and creativity of untold millions of users, but only in the
occasional sales-pitch in a YouTube advert. The reality is that the
money of millions or even billions of computer and software
users is harnessed to the dreams and vaulted ambitions of a small
handful of Big-Tech "Founders", however crazed they might
be. It's a worse version of the nightmare vision that C.S. Lewis had,
of billions of "conditioned" humans being controlled and
exploited by a few hundred "conditioners". There are indeed
billions of the conditioned, but less than two dozen of the
conditioners.
I am not sure that we should go all the way back
to Clive Sinclair's MK14 microcomputer to make a fresh start towards
Dr Turing's Universal Machines, but I am utterly certain that we will
never get there from where Microsoft, Apple and Google are going to
leave us. And yet, if we are to actually survive the environmental
and economic challenges which now face us, a technology based on
universal, rather than inherently-restrictive, proprietary, machines
is clearly needed.
This article, but not the embedded video, is Copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 2021
PS: The Video Genie, TRS80 and Powertran SC80 all had Z80 microprocessors. The Powertran also had a chip from a programmable calculator as an early "maths co-processor" and this worked in something called "Reverse Polish Logic" just like Clive Sinclair's first calculator and most Hewlet Packard calculators. I had a friend called "Czes" who constantly complained about the way that everyone assumed he would know how to use RPL.
This novel, published in August 2018, deals with crime and espionage between the UK and China and the way in which criminals utilise the over-heated property markets in both countries, to the detriment of ordinary citizens. The problem in China is seen as one of only the privileged few having access to any investment which is not the (over-valued) Chinese property market or some company either trading in property or providing finance to those which do. The priviliged few, meanwhile, do have access to alternatives; which might be constructive, such as an investment in a company making something useful, or speculative, such as investing in the property market outside China, with London being a firm favourite (with Russians as well as Chinese!) To maintain an unfair gradient in investment opportunities between rich and poor in China, the poor must be forced by the CCP to put what money they have in property, even if it is a risky investment. (This causes mounting anger amonst those unable to invest safely for their own retirement, let alone their children's future.) The alternative investments are still vulnerable to market crashes, of course, but by being outside China they allow the people making those investments to flee the adverse consequences of the very CCP policies they benefitted from.
The problem with the British property market, especially in London, is that criminal gangs have been investing in the property market there for generations and this has made them over-powerful. It had also made the property market somewhat over-valued even before Russian and then Chinese millionaires started to pour money in, often without caring what the state of a property was or what it might really be worth. Add to that collaboration between those British criminal gangs and some politically well-connected Chinese and danger looms for both countries.
The temptations and the dangers of the property market for British gangsters are seen even in the Prologue and in their efforts to suck those gangsters into their own schemes, their Chinese counterparts get themselves involved in crimes and consequences they never even imagined possible, let alone likely.
Smashwords E-book in multiple formats:
Available from this link,
base price is $8:40 (library price $4). This edition is available in
MOBI, EPUB, PDF and other formats and has in-text navigation features in
order to support readers without the menu-driven navigation features of
a Kindle.
This edition is also available from most Smashwords affiliates. Search for:
The Lord of Billionaires' Row by Matthew K. Spencer
NB: readers planning to read the book on a Linux PC with Libre Office,
for example, will do better to buy the .pdf version rather than the
.epub version, because Libre Office may treat every chapter of the .epub
as a separate document and send you back to the table of contents to
read each one separately. This does not happen with Adobe Digital Editions
on a Windows or Mac platform, but in general the .pdf format is
recommended for reasonably modern PCs. For geriatric PCs and CPM
machines etc. a plaintext .txt version is available.
The online reader version is fine, as long as you can get online when
you want to read! If you want something to read during connection
outages, choose one of the downloadable files.
Amazon MOBI-format E-Book:
This edition does not have the in-text navigation features and is
formatted according to Amazon, rather than Smashwords, guidelines. It
supports menu-driven navigation as is normal for Kindles. Base price is
£5.95, see links or your local Amazon domain for price in your currency
and with/without VAT as appropriate to your location.
Paperback (138,000 words, 375 pages) with a base price of £12.95, plus
delivery (which may depend on what else you order). There is no VAT onbooks in the United Kingdom.
Because the paperback might be purchased by or for readers who cannot
cope with a Kindle or other e-reader, the 12-point typeface was chosen
for reading comfort and one of the proof copies was read by a
96-year-old who didn't complain, much.
The Kindle E-book and Paperback editions are now linked in all Amazon
marketplaces where the Paperback is available, so choose a Kindle E-book
link, above, and you should also be able to choose the paperback from
the same page. The exception, as of July 2020 seems to be the
Netherlands.
New: Australian-printed Amazon paperback now available!
Sadly,
the printing cost is higher in Australia than in some other Amazon
domains, so the Australian price has been set at AUS$ 24, which, on June
the 3rd 2021 worked out as AUS$ 26.40 including GST (this does not
include delivery, which may be free to Amazon Prime customers). The
kindle version, also available in Australia, is available at the global
base price of £5.95.
I read this, the
latest crime novel in the “Simon Serrailler” series immediately
after reading the first. It is good, but didn’t grip me as much as
“The Various Haunts of Men.” There is perhaps one plot thread too
many, concerned with the central character’s nephew’s love life.
Yes, it shows that while one family is being completely destroyed by
the “County Lines” drugs trade, others are grappling with less
dramatic but “real” problems. But it’s a bit too peripheral.
The meat of the
story, though, is well-researched and actually quite realistic,
especially as a provincial police force and its chief constable are
surprised and wrong-footed by something they actually had plenty of
warning of, from the past experience of their own senior officers.
The novel draws parallels between the abuse of children by “County
Lines” pushers grooming them as drugs mules and the abuse of
children being groomed by paedophiles. And this is fair enough. In
both cases, the children are generally powerless to expose or
resist those hurting them and those responsible for their well-being
are frequently unable or unwilling to comprehend what is going on,
let alone take effective action. The effect is to isolate the
children from all help and all non-destructive solutions. The author
does a good job in showing how an alert and streetwise parent can
make the difference between hope and despair, but she also shows that
the druggies strive to avoid targetting children with that sort of
parent still on the scene.
The over-arching
message of this novel is that the advent of “County Lines” has
completely removed any element of choice and free will from the drugs
trade for anyone except those at the very top. (I would suppose,
myself, that even those people must live with the constant threat of
assassination even if they are immune from arrest!) Anyone who
voluntarily interacts with the drugs trade by buying its products is
guilty of abusing the children doing the legwork, but those who do
this are completely incapable of ever recognising that THEY are the
source of such misery. And so it continues.
One of the
peripheral plot threads concerns the central character sorting his
personal life out. He’s spent the entire series not doing this, so
I suspect that author is trying to bring the series to a final
conclusion and it probably is about time.
A Change of
Circumstance by Susan Hill is published in the UK by Vintage on the
7th of October 2021.
When Vintage Books
invited me to read and review Susan Hill’s latest novel in this
series, they recommended that I read this, the opening novel in the
series, first. Having read it, I shall now review it, even though an
awful lot of other people will have done so before me.
Set in a fictional
rural corner of England, as if Ely or St Edmunds Bury Cathedral was
near both Glastonbury and the housing estates of Stevenage or
Houghton Regis, this opening novel in the “Simon Serrailler”
series revolves around that character at a distance and the Detective
Chief Inspector is seen mostly through the eyes of his General
Practitioner sister and his new Detective Sergeant, Freya Graffham.
In this story it is not just the criminals who are elusive, so are
the crimes. The local drug dealers are proving difficult to even
identify, let alone pin down, as is a gang stealing newly-delivered
white goods. So when apparently-unconnected individuals disappear
without trace, it’s hard for Freya Graffham to even be sure herself
that she’s investigating a crime worthy of her precious time:
convincing her immediate superior is beyond her and even DCI
Serrailler only concedes that there “might” be something in the
disappearances.
All of the missing,
however, are missed by someone and the pain of these tragedies is
well depicted.
As is the joy which
Freya Graffham finds in her new life, away from London and her
controlling ex-husband in a new community, where she can sing in the
cathedral choir and make her own choices again. Matters of the spirit
and alternative medicine are addressed at several levels and in
varying shades of light and dark. The ending has a lot of impact, but
is not completely dark.
The Various Haunts
of Men by Susan Hill is published in the UK by Vintage, 1st
of February 2010
(Now also available on smashwords.com in multiple E-book formats!)
The Lord of Billionaires' Row is a novel by the blog author, which grew out of his further research into his blog article "Buy to Rot" published in February 2014. The article was on the effects and implications of very large amounts of money from overseas, not always legally come by, being "invested" in the UK property market in general and the London market in particular. Briefly, masses of houses and flats are bought and even built to lie empty, while ordinary wage-earners cannot afford to buy properties at inflated prices and they often struggle to find a place that is for rent at any price.
It became clear that, perhaps due to foreign influence on British media proprietors, politicians and global "influence on the influencers", it was quite impossible to have a factual public discussion of those important issues, let alone other ones which the blog author discovered were interconnected. So, instead of trying to smuggle intelligent debate past The Guardian's online moderators, he wrote an exciting and enjoyable crime/espionage adventure novel in which money from communist China is laundered through the UK property market (where British organised crime was already active and constantly gaining power over law-enforcement and even politicians) and where British commercial secrets are stolen by various means, including physical burglaries by Chinese agents at key industrial sites from Scotland to East Anglia.
The novel also shows how much the policies of the Chinese Communist Party are determined by the personalities of the party's General Secretary and his rivals within the CCP leadership. When the leadership is not only corrupt but institutionally psychotic, there can be no change of direction (ie: away from disaster) without a profound reform of that institution as well as a change of leader. Just swapping leaders for another operating within the same corrupt framework will not suffice!
The implications for Britain of the power over public life that organised crime has obtained by stashing most of its ill-gotten gains in the housing market for generations are just as chilling as the implications for China's future of unending and increasingly corrupt communist dictatorship.
See list of links to Amazon marketplaces on this blog article.
They all offer the Kindle E-book and with the exception of the Netherlands they offer the Paperback as well.
Amazon.com:
Follow this link for a little bit more stuff on the author, as Amazon.com author's pages have more features!
Smashwords edition
Link to page where the book can be obtained in multiple E-book formats.
Note. This includes a mobi format version. This is formatted a bit differently from the "Kindle" Amazon mobi edition, because the formatting guidelines for the two platforms differ. Mostly, this is a matter of the platform's preferred style, which the author has respected in each case. The Smashwords edition, being available in several formats from the same source document, has in-text navigation features needed for a couple of the non-mobi formats, which are not strictly necessary on devices with Kindle-like navigation facilities and so are not present in the Amazon edition.
In-text navigation in this context amounts to a clickable "Back to Top" link at the end of each chapter or front/back matter section, which takes the reader to the table of contents, from where they can click a link to the chapter or section of their choice. In the Amazon Kindle edition, just press the menu button and go to table of contents for the same result. Hyperlinks are not implemented in the paperback edition, yet, but we may live to see (and probably, regret) this in our lifetimes.
Pricing:
The author has set the base price of the Amazon Paperback to £12.25 plus P&P. Due to the weighty nature of the book the paperback price cannot be much cheaper. There is no VAT on books (not even E-books!) in the United Kingdom. The base price of the Amazon Kindle Edition is £1.70 There may be a tiny "delivery" charge to distort this figure.
The base price of the Smashwords edition is $2.10.
There is now an Australian-printed Amazon paperback available.
A good book to read,
but very tricky to honestly review without annoying anybody. I was
invited to review this book, so here goes:
The only
commissioned officer to get a good press in this memoir of the
author’s service in the USMC in both Iraq and Afghanistan is...
Alexander the Great. And even then the author is not uncritical of
Alexander’s later excursions into social engineering. Even senior
NCOs (“Senior Enlisted” in USMC parlance) come across as a sort
of alien species. Whereas Spike Milligan wrote of British Army
Sergeant-Majors (in a letter to The Guardian): “just one of them
could win you a war” Christopher Martin finds their 21st
Century USMC equivalents to be obsessed with trivia when vital
issues, such as food and ammunition supply, or fire support from an
armoured convoy ideally placed to provide this, which chooses not to
give it, are being willfully neglected.
The author joins the
USMC to discover and perhaps prove, himself. This is fortunate,
because he has to take the initiative throughout his service to make
up for what seems to be a void in the leadership he is offered. As a
lance corporal the author becomes part of an electronic network which
allows him to request, without reference to higher authority, mortar,
artillery and air strikes of great destructive power. Yet
communication across that network between those giving orders and
those who know the realities on the ground and what the most basic
needs are, proves to be indirect and almost completely
unidirectional. High authority can convey its orders to the
lance-corporal, who cannot make any of his needs or observations
known to anybody not in his own line of sight.
On his way to his
Afghan deployment in Marjah (and I write as one Afghan city after
another falls to the Taliban, who are newly blessed by CCP President
Xi) the author sees marines at a staging post in Central Asia, who
seem dirty, ragged, emaciated and mentally and physically exhausted.
He wonders if he will be in the same state in a few months time -and,
spoiler alert, he and his surviving comrades do leave Afghanistan in
just that kind of state. For almost the whole of their tour, they
have nothing to eat except MRE and snacks: not even substantial junk
food. In consequence the author more or less stops eating and lives
off coffee and cigarettes, which cannot have helped his fragile
mental state. (He is unsparing in his portrayal of his own mental
state.
MREs are designed to
keep a soldier in the fight for two or three weeks in the absence of
better food. They are not able to keep a man truly healthy for as
long as a month, let alone a tour, and no amount of positive thinking
or propaganda will alter this. MREs are the only substantial food
available at the author’s duty station during his tour (except for
some steaks that arrive on the USMC’s birthday) and it’s quite
obvious that this was also the case during preceding tours in the
same location by other units. No commissioned officer ever spends
more than a hour or so at the location (even as the seasons turn), so
that commissioned officers as a class have no eyes on the problems
and no knowledge of them, but they alone have the power to change
things. That officers have a monopoly on the power of change is the
reason why the Royal Marines and British Army expect lieutenants to
be omnipresent, but the USMC seems to make no such demand(?!)
It is also the case
that the USMC sets great store by the ability of its enlisted men to
carry out astonishing feats of endurance and physical exertion.
Scientific research conducted on super-athletes engaging in extreme
sports has shown that even the best-tuned human body can do this sort
of thing for only forty-eight hours. It simply isn’t possible for a
man performing at his physical limits to absorb enough nourishment to
keep doing it for any longer without collapse. And yet there will be
those who hold that any marine who’s driven beyond those limits
somehow wasn’t man enough to cope. It’s a superman
mentality which is doomed to foster failure when exposed to reality.
You have to
recognise that the exceptional is just that, and save it up for when
it actually stands a chance of affecting the ultimate outcome of a
conflict or indeed any other issue. To stubbornly demand that your
men be exceptional the whole time actually guarantees that they will
be physically and mentally exhausted at the golden moment when a
supreme effort could have bought results. The Chinese believe in the
golden moment, which is precisely why they are suddenly openly
backing the Taliban, right now!
And yet, I left in
awe of the American men who managed to survive, if not always
surmount, the piles of difficulties they were presented with, at
least half of which might have been avoided by better organisation
and more bi-directional communication between the Elite and the
Grunts. Someone needs to translate “By Strength and Guile” into
Latin, so that America’s Elite might understand. At the moment they
apparently believe that strength is a complete answer by itself.
Chasing Alexander by
Christopher Martin is published by Notional Books on the 28th
of September, 2021. An anniversary of note.
Written by two
journalists from the Wall Street Journal, this book seeks to
research, document and explode the delusions of the We Work founder
Adam Neumann, his wife, gurus, senior employees, their numerous
investors and fund managers in charge of other people’s money and
even his Japanese mentor and backer Masayoshi Son of Softbank. The
effect is rather like an ever-swelling firework display of waste and
destruction taking folly to ever greater heights, culminating in the
man at the centre of a massive multi-billion-dollar sacrifice of
other people’s money on the altar of New-Age virtue-signalling,
being allowed to walk away with over a billion dollars (at least on
paper) as a reward. At one point, Neumann even unwittingly seeks
equivalence with Tony Blair by aspiring to become “president of the
world!”
But there is one
very important delusion which the authors do not explode, nor do they
even appear to recognise it! Adam Neumann and Masayoshi Son engage in
large-scale real-estate dealings in Communist China, where all
property belongs to the CCP no matter how many leases, contracts and
title deeds you think you have, and they go on to plot a scheme by
which they would not only control all the real-estate finance in the
United States and the Free World, but also in the very unfree world
of Communist China. Their vaulted ambition is duly mocked by the
authors, but at no point do the authors conceive that even modest and
ostensibly profitable investments in the Chinese property market or
Chinese industry are inherently delusional. Because to do that, would
expose the nakedness of an awful lot of readers of the Wall Street
Journal. With that important caveat, this book gets a four-star
recommendation to readers.
The Cult of We is
published in the UK by Mudlark on the 22nd of July 2021.
Book Review of The
Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa
Translated by Louise
Heal Kawai
* * * * *
A teenage adventure
and the power of truth.
If this novel was
intended only for teenagers, then they probably don’t know when
they are being spoiled.
A thrice-bereaved
High School boy, Rintaro, comes to terms with the death of his
grandfather who has looked after him since the death of his parents,
by going on alarming adventures with a strange talking cat. The cat
is, by Japanese standards, really quite rude and blunt, but that’s
just what Rintaro needs. Each adventure is a fable giving a different
perspective on the meaning and nature of books. The adventures take
place in “labyrinths”, created either by the personality or the
will of the character whom Rintaro is going to confront, but all are
sustained by the power of truth. The way, the only way, for Rintaro
to resolve issues is to find a way in which the character in that
labyrinth is lying (perhaps to themselves) or under a
misapprehension. If he can get his “adversary” to recognise and
correct the lie, then the process immediately becomes non
adversarial: things resolve themselves and books are freed. The last
labyrinth, though, is created by someone far older and far more
powerful than the others. And there is much more at stake than
Rintaro’s own existence or happiness. He has to show how books give
hope even if their power is waning in the modern world. And he needs
all the insight and understanding he has gained from his adventures
to answer that one.
Truth is the key,
not just for the successful execution of Rintaro’s missions but
also for his love-life, because Sayo, whom he doesn’t even see as
his friend to begin with, sees through everything and is completely
unimpressed by the High School’s star pupil and sportsman, whom
even Rintaro loves a bit.
This novel was
translated by Louise Heal Kawai.
The Cat Who Saved
Books is published in the UK by Picador on the 16th of
September 2021.
Book Review of
Thorneycroft to SA80 (British Bullpup Firearms 1901-2020) by Jonathan
S. Ferguson.
* * * * *
The Author is Keeper
of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries.
The original
photography for this book was by N.R. Jenzen-Jones.
It is published by
Headstamp Publishing (Nashville) 2020 and copies are available for
commercial sale internationally. This review is based on a Backer’s
Kit Edition, which does not differ in editorial content from the
commercial edition.
This book sets out
to be an authoritative history of bullpup firearms in Britain, and
starts by defining what “bullpup” means (effectively a firearm
where the barrel begins behind the trigger) and exploring the
American origins of the term, which seems to have been coined two
decades after the first British rifles meeting the definition.
The production values of the book, normally a superficial matter, are
excellent and this makes a genuine difference in a history of this
kind, because the original photographs are crisp and clear and show
exactly the things the text is seeking to convey, whilst archive
drawings and diagrams are reproduced well-enough to be clearly
readable and understandable. The author and his photographer enjoyed
access to relevant firearms in the Royal Armouries collection and to
various archive material and seem to have been mindful that not
everyone would have such access. They have made the most of it so
their readers can benefit.
The author shows
some museum-curator’s bias in letting the guns speak for themselves
rather than by paying too much attention to the oral tradition about
them, but where opinions of actual people come from material with a
provenance, they are included. The story is told largely in
chronological order, and as far as British bullpup firearms are
concerned that story starts with late Victorian inventors seeking to
create a .303” service rifle to take the place of a cavalry
carbine, which would also be capable of delivering accurate fire at
longer ranges. With the propellant technology of the time, this
demanded a longer barrel in a weapon which was not much longer than a
carbine. This is where the 20th century concept of the
military bullpup rifle came from, even if the weapons concerned never
saw service. The bullpup was the only way to have a rifle-length
barrel in a carbine-length weapon. The definition of rifle-length
barrels lost about eight inches around that time, (the “propellant
technology of the time” having already changed without the bullpup
inventors apparently noticing) and so the Short Magazine Lee Enfield
rifle was sufficient to meet the needs of both infantry and cavalry
for two world wars.
Towards the end of
the second world war the British Army knew it needed at least a
self-loading rifle, but there was no enthusiasm for adopting (as some
wanted) the American M1 Garand rifle, not least because it already
looked old-fashioned compared to some captured German weapons, such
as the FG42, the design of which suggested a bullpup without actually
being one. This cued a succession of Anglo-Polish attempts to develop
the working concepts of the FG42 into something shorter and perhaps
even lighter. As Britain began to emerge from postwar austerity and
it became obvious that the end of the Second World War had not
ushered in an era of global peace and security, the idea of adopting
some kind of bullpup multi-purpose weapon for the British Army took
hold and has never really gone away.
The two most famous
examples of this are the EM2 rifle of the 1950s and the SA80 rifle in
British service today. The stories of these are told in detail, but
also in the context of what went before and what was going on
elsewhere during their development. John Garand, for example,
designed a bullpup rifle to replace his own M1 design as the US
army’s service rifle, but retired before it could be developed for
trials, and this was not the only American bullpup design being put
forward. Other, notably successful bullpup rifles have served in
other countries -and, in Australia, they still do.
The book deals with
the problems encountered by British small arms development programmes
in some detail, but if one reads between the lines many of these come
down to the discipline of materials science being largely ignored by
those taking the decisions. This problem is actually endemic to
British defence projects in general and a cynic might say that it’s
the one way of sabotaging projects that senior officials know they
can get away with (they certainly succeeded in sabotaging the Valiant
bomber). It’s certainly not that Britain as a country lacks
materials scientists or that learning about materials science is
unpopular with the general population: J.E Gordon’s eminently
accessible materials science book “The New Science of Strong
Materials” (Or Why we Don’t Fall Through the Floor), first
published in 1968, went through several new editions throughout the
seventies. Mr Ferguson’s book details how an attempt by Cranfield
University to lighten the design of the SA80 by adopting wonder
materials such as carbon fibre and titanium saved a total of four
ounces: this may have disappointed the University of Cranfield but it
will have surprised no-one who has read Professor Gordon’s book,
which teaches the distinction between strength and stiffness. In any
case, many mechanical firearms components come with a minimum
weight, below which they will not work. This is one of several
concepts which decision-makers seem not to grasp.
This is a
well-researched book, exploiting a rich supply of factual material
and actual weapons to the full. It will, therefore, be disappointing
to those seeking to use it to promote one strongly-held opinion or
another. But as a way of understanding what actually went on, it is
perfectly fit for purpose.
Review Copyright (c)
Matthew K. Spencer 2021, all rights reserved.
This review is based
on a free review .pdf from the publisher via NetGalley.co.uk
A fast-paced spy
thriller with a charismatic (French) heroine.
This novel is set in
places and involves the sort of (Ukrainian) people and politics which
the author knows about and this makes it a palpable improvement on
his earlier works. Those tended to be set mainly in American
settings, perhaps to appeal to an American readership, and also
featured highly-technological super-weapons, which are a trap for an
author who does not fully comprehend the fruits of his own research.
The author, wisely, approached this novel with the premise that a
grenade in a modest apartment is dramatic enough.
Although this is an
action thriller and the pace rarely slackens, there are layers and
twists to the plot and it is a battle of minds as well as muscle. The
international politics are more convincing than before (especially as
this review was written the day after what the press are already
calling “the Black Sea Incident”) and Russian intelligence
officers are portrayed as sufficiently intelligent to hatch plots
which pay off even if the heroine does her best to thwart them. And
that brings us to Sophie Racine, the best thing about this book. The
late, great Leslie Thomas once introduced one of his female
characters with the line “you should have seen her throw a grenade”
and the ability to use a grenade wisely is what sets a truly
charismatic female action heroine apart from the AR-toting also-rans.
The supporting cast
is mainly a British SIS officer and former SAS trooper who supplies
the heroine, not with muscle (which would be superfluous) but
restraint and the occasional less-violent solution, such as asking
nicely. This, too, represents an improvement on the author’s
previous work. At the time of the Yugoslav Civil War, when Western
peacekeepers went in, it was pointed out that the hallmark of the SAS
was actually subtlety and if what you wanted was an enemy base
utterly pulverised, you sent in any line infantry regiment of the
British Army.
Traitors by Alex
Shaw is published by HQ on the 23rd of July 2021
