Book Review of Reykjavík by Ragnar Jónason and Katrín Jakobsdóttir

(Translated into English by Victoria Cribb.)

 

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Icelandic chiller thriller with a resolution!

(This review is based on a free review EPUB from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

The narrative of this well-written and competently-translated novel stretches from August 1956 to November 1986 (there is a reference to prior events in 1955), with most of the story happening in the run-up to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavík when a decades-old missing persons case is revealed to be a murder case which comes to a head and is resolved on the day of the summit meeting itself.

This structure sets the scene for the thriller whilst giving the readers a series of snapshots of Icelandic society changing (and the economy and population growing) as changes in communications, travel and entertainment technology bring the outside world closer to Iceland than it has ever been before, before the world’s most powerful leaders arrive in Reykjavík to thrash out their differences and focusing the whole world’s attention there.

Almost all the action takes place in Reykjavík or its suburbs, or on the “remote” island of Videy, which bears about the same geographical to Iceland’s capital as Hayling Island does to Havant. (This may or may not help British readers from North of the Trent.) The one, interesting, exception is when the heroine has to travel to her home community in the North of Iceland for her brother’s funeral. Buildings there being painted in bold colours (as they are in Port Stanley and some Hebridean communities) in a brave attempt to stop the settlement blending any further into the landscape than it already has.

The heroine herself is brave and brilliant, though she only discovers this in herself when tragedy forces her to take on her older brother’s mantle and complete his journalistic investigation into what might happened on Videy before either of them was born. She has to cope with generational differences as well as those of politics and social class. Though when push really comes to shove, she gets prompt support from those she thought most conservative and disapproving of her -even as someone she trusted acts with monumental treachery. Though the story shows us some divisions within Icelandic society, these fade away as soon as the shocking truth, which no-one can excuse or accept, is exposed.

If there is a moral here (and in Nordic thrillers there often isn’t) it is that it’s not the presumption of innocence that allows the rich and powerful to get away, literally, with murder, but their own blithe assumption of immunity. Guilt and innocence are irrelevant to those who are never required to account for their own actions. And in the summer of 2023, we have all seen a lot of evidence of that!

Reykjavík by Ragnar Jónason and Katrín Jakobsdóttir is published in the UK by Michael Joseph on the 17^th of August 2023

Book review of Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine

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A gestation thriller!

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

 

 This is a well-written and generally well-thought-out novel with an interesting surprise ending. It describes a nightmare pregnancy during a winter which seems to go on for so long that the setting might be Narnia rather than the Hamptons. That cost it a star, I’m afraid: I know it’s about the way that perceptions change during pregnancy, but a pregnancy supplies a certain timeline and the season doesn’t seem, to the reader, to turn with that timeline. It may be alright in the author’s original plan, but so much of the book happens in winter that it seems eternal.

The other troubling thing is that, until the surprise ending and explanation is reached, it’s hard for the reader to tell whether the pregnant heroine is being stalked by strangers or at least gaslighted by her husband, or if she’s delusional and hallucinating. This isn’t a crime for which any writer can or should be “cancelled” but it carries rather more risks in the real world than most of the things writers are being cancelled for these days. The whole point of stalking and more especially gaslighting is very often to get the victim declared mentally-ill and, most especially delusional. Either to discredit them in court (especially a divorce court) or for someone connected with the stalker to seize control of the victim’s financial affairs. There’s not a stalker in the known universe who wouldn’t be pleased to confuse women’s (or men’s in some cases) experience of being stalked or gaslighted with delusion, hallucination or some allied psychosis. And even when the novel’s fairly startling conclusion is reached, the necessary delineation between abuse and hallucination is not quite there.

This book has some interesting things to say, but the two deficiencies significantly dilute what is good about it.

Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine is published by Viper (an imprint of Serpent’s Tail) in the UK on the 17^th of August 2023.

What REALLY made those behind the AI revolution panic?

 I published this article on this blog in 2021 and almost nobody read it:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2021/06/ai-and-economics-of-tyranny.html

Until, that is, about two months before the sudden about-face by leading AI researchers, politicians and business leaders, culminating in today's meetings between President Biden and not only the British Prime Minister, Mr Sunak, but King Charles as well. 

And between world leaders meeting in Singapore, supposedly about pandemic regulations, and last week, that article was being seen by hundreds of people located in Singapore every single day.

Now, the most obvious theme of the article is that it suggests that an AI-based economy is the only known way that tyranny can become sustainable (and thus persist for generations or the proverbial thousand years) in the modern world, because it's the only known alternative to letting people have enough freedom and the certainty of ownership of their own ideas to innovate and pursue more efficient solutions, because it's in everybody's interests to do things better.

Somewhat paradoxically, an AI-based economy allows for innovation to be suppressed and efficiencies found which do not actually benefit those who have to implement those efficiencies. So an AI-based world economy would have the benefits of economic sustainability without any of this freedom, democracy and accountability stuff: and the past few years have seen the global elite very much at war with all three of these graces. But that's precisely why the about-face is so strange: it's been very clear for many years that this is what all the decision-makers in the Capitalist and Communist worlds have wanted ever since the "fall of communism" or at least, the failure of the Soviet Bloc. They didn't change their minds because this blog (or any other source of the same basic concept) showed them that continuing on their chosen path would probably have the very results they most wanted!

Thing is, there's the theme of the article, which is obvious, and its implication, which took a bit more thinking time on the part of our lords and masters:

If the Chinese economy benefits proportionately more from the introduction of AI than the American economy precisely because the bulk of its workforce is less-skilled than its American counterpart and expects much less reward, so it can be replaced by AI with little or no economic disruption and very little in the way of compensation and with no imperative to maintain anyone's standard of living, then not only is it possible that those economies where the skill levels are much HIGHER than in the United States (Finland, Japan, Switzerland, South Korea, possibly even Croatia these days) could see a negative economic and social impact from the introduction of AI, those economies with a significantly LOWER technological skills base than that of Communist China (such as Sudan, Uganda or Tanzania?) might derive an even greater proportional economic boost from AI than Communist China.

The panic is really all about the rather belated realisation that the AI revolution will have all the effects the global elite have hoped and planned for, but the resultant power and all other benefits will flow to all the wrong people!