Book Review of Pelagia by Steve Holloway

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A Science Fiction novel full of ideas.

This novel is a Science Fiction adventure thriller used as a platform for a wide spread of the author’s ideas. All of these are worthy and interesting, but there’s a lot of them and the narrative occasionally stalls, mid-novel, when characters are used to explain ideas to the reader via speeches to each other when, perhaps, they could have been better explained through the narrative, or saved up for another novel. It’s almost as if the author thinks this book is his last-ever chance to communicate his vision to others. I will be mortified if this is literally true, but I suspect that it’s a misapprehension and in any case the best way to proceed is as if you’ve always got another book ahead of you.

The pace picks up again and a lot happens before the end.

The author’s primary idea is marine-farming and marine ranching, which leads him to describe a society which could not only make those complementary endeavours work, but also thrive as a culture and as part of the future world economy. That in turns leads to the ways in which that society might protect itself and what the threats to it might be. There are a lot of clever technological ideas inherent in all of this. The author also covers religious extremism in a way which sets neither Christianity nor Islam up as wholly bad, in that there’s no wrong way to believe in God: what’s wrong is for extremists to believe in their own power and ambition instead of believing in God. (The author doesn’t say so, but the logical extension of that is that completely atheist political activists might also believe in their own power and ambition more than they do in their ostensible political dogma. Sometimes, you don’t have to say something to get a message across and this novel could have been better if the author has been willing to let his readers discover a few more ideas for themselves.) Changing one’s beliefs, as some of the characters do, is not a betrayal if it’s a falsehood that’s being discarded -and this novel’s Turing test is that the machine intelligences cannot really comprehend the concept of God. (None of them act maliciously, though.)

I recommend this with four stars because, despite all the shortcomings, there’s an awful lot of ideas here and that’s really what Science Fiction is meant to be about. To get five stars, the treasury of ideas probably needs to be presented in a different format to a single-narrative adventure novel. In the mid evening of her career the Science Fiction writer Ursula le Guin wrote a “future anthropology” entitled “Always Coming Home” which presented stories, both from a common narrative and from outside that narrative but in the same world and culture, together with descriptive articles, songs and even recipes. She was able to write something which immersed the reader in her ideas about a future society and culture (which included something very like a future evolution of the internet and Wikipedia, neither of which had happened at the time of writing) rather than having characters in an adventure give set speeches. (Which Greek or Roman readers might even have wanted.) I don’t expect Steve Holloway to do exactly the same thing, but I hope he can find a better way of putting his considerable number of ideas across.

 

 

Pelagia by Steve Holloway is published by Lion Hudson Ltd on the 18^th of June 2021. 

Update 2/12/21: This is a link to the author's website for this book.

 

Book Review of The Keepers of Metsan Valo by Wendy Webb

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This novel gradually transforms from a crime thriller with a supernatural undercurrent into a tale of the supernatural. As such it makes for a good read and it is an excellent story about stories and their power. The heroine, Annalise Halla, returns to Metsan Valo, the family seat of the title, in order, so she thinks, to lay her late and beloved grandmother to rest. In the process she has some terrifying experiences before she learns that, for centuries, the wealth, prestige and indeed “power” of the Halla family has depended on at least one member of the family always being in communion with the Vaki, which the author uses to mean the elemental spirits from Finnish folklore (the story, though, is set in a small community on Lake Superior). Annalise does not know whether to believe any of this, and she certainly does not know whether she really wants to get involved with the Vaki, should they really exist!

It becomes clear that the help which the Vaki give to the Halla family comes at a price, the dilemma is whether or not to pay this, but a more pertinent question is whether or not Annalise is really being given any choice at all. The author’s view of the Vaki ends up being a little rose-tinted, and it is worth pointing the reader towards other novels which offer another view. Sally Magnusson’s “The Ninth Child” has a very clear message that Scotland’s equivalent to the Vaki are completely ruthless and delight in sacrifice rather than mercy.

The big problem with most modern treatments of folklore about the Vaki and similar beings from other cultures, is that they habitually confute a beneficial balance of nature with keeping on the good side of (paying unfailing homage to) supernatural beings who are wholly unnatural. They, themselves, do not obey or respect the laws of nature, nor do they love anyone but those who love them -and that entirely on their own terms. To commune with such is to abandon both the physical laws of nature and any objective moral law by which one may tell good from bad.

This book may be read and enjoyed as a fairy story, which is precisely what it is. It is telling, though, that the large white dog called “Pascal”, the bravest and most sensible character in the book, is left stranded by the author as soon as she takes the story towards honouring the Halla family’s ancient bargain with the Vaki. 

 

The Keepers of Metsan Valo is published by Lake Union Publishing on the 5^th of October 2021

 

Book Review of The Rule by David Jackson

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Cheerfully mixing the gritty daily realities of life in a dilapidated block of council flats with (hopefully improbable) extreme violence, this is a story of a very gentle man trying to do the right thing by his SEN son and his wife in a grim situation made increasingly impossible by those whose concept of right and wrong is shaped by their own whim first and their own interests second, with the rest of the world nowhere except in the way.

Although the hero sometimes contributes to his own misfortunes by being awesomely naive, there is no situation so bad that the psychopaths who have intruded into his life cannot make it worse. For most of the novel the tension lies in the reader wondering how long the author can go on turning the screw and when relief comes it redefines salvation as something which, before you read the book, would seem like catastrophe. 

 

The Rule by David Jackson is published by Viper (Profile Books) on the 1^st of July 2021

Book Review of Secret Alliances by Tony Insall

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This review is based on a complimentary copy sent to me by the publishers after I had bought my own copy from them.

Secret Alliances is a comprehensive history of political, military and intelligence relations between Britain and Norway during and just after WW2. There were several different organisations on both sides, each with different priorities, largely according to what their mission was. The author illustrates the interplay of these differing priorities with a large number of incidents, some already famous, some not, but in nearly all cases with new material from his research and that of other scholars. Since I had read many different books about various different incidents in Norway and the circumstances in which they occurred over more than forty years (I have been interested in the issue since my teens), the experience of reading this book was one of bubbles of recognition in a stream of information that was mostly new to me.

For example, what some authors have described as “failed” attacks on the German battleship Tirpitz often did significant damage and would have prevented her being capable of taking offensive action for months at a time. A major contribution of Norwegian agents reporting both to their own government and to Britain’s SIS, was detailed information about how much damage had been done, how repairs were going and therefore how urgently further attacks were needed. Great sacrifices were made to keep the Tirpitz out action; the evidence in this book suggests that without Norwegian agents on the ground and an organisation that allowed them to report intelligence swiftly, more attacks and even greater sacrifices would have been necessary. The “X-craft” attack was much more effective than I’d been led to believe by previous publications, TV documentaries and one war-movie, which tend towards the “heroic failure” narrative. The Tirpitz was heavily damaged and unseaworthy for some time -and SIS and NID knew this. Similarly, during the attack by Fleet Air Arm Barracuda bombers (only able to carry one 1,600lb AP bomb each), although none of the bombs penetrated the armour on the battleship’s citadel, hits on parts of ship outside the citadel started fires which damaged sea-pipes and caused flooding and a list to starboard forcing the crew to swing the main guns out to port to balance the ship. A clear and obvious sign that she wasn’t about to take to the high seas in a hurry. Reports on the damage done by this raid started to arrive on the same day as the attack, from the same agent who had risked his life to give regular weather reports in the lead-up to the attack to ensure it took place in ideal conditions. (This is another factor which previous books haven’t made much of, but it must have crucial for operations over Norway.)

There is new material on how the German forces tracked agents down by their radio transmissions, and it appears that insufficient attention was paid by SIS to German direction-finding techniques. Having also read some histories of what the British “Y service” did to track down transmissions by German agents in the British Isles, and indeed by Japanese and German army and naval units over much of the world, it is staggering that SIS could have remained so ignorant, unless there was a complete firewall between them and the Y service! (The Y service had an index systematically describing the “static” noises made by individual enemy radio sets, enabling them to locate certain enemy units on the move even if it was impossible to read the cyphers (or Japanese vocabulary) being used. I don’t know if the Germans had the same idea: it was tracing the set, not the “hand” of the operator, which is a separate issue.)

The political information is interesting, too: it shows that Norwegian ministers faced problems and dilemmas over neutrality and the potential Soviet threat that could only be resolved by creating the NATO alliance which allows countries like Norway to enjoy security without sacrificing sovereignty and principles.

Criticism:

With so much light being shed by this book, it is a pity that where the issue of heavy water production in Norway for the Germans is concerned, the author manages to add to the confusion and lack of popular understanding about what, exactly, the heavy water was for and why this was so important. Every author on this subject seems to find it necessary to confuse things and I, having managed to get a Grade A O’level in Physics with Chemistry back in the day, despair of them all. What follows goes a bit beyond being a review and strays into trying to set things straight, for which no apology is going to be made.

On page 252 it is stated that heavy water was the moderator used to separate (fissile) U-235 from (fissionable) U-238. This muddles together two separate processes applying to completely different routes to making an atom bomb. A moderator, such as heavy water or graphite, is used to slow down neutrons in a reactor, increasing the likelihood of a collision with nuclei in the fuel isotope, promoting a reaction and the release of energy and the creation of some other isotope, which may be what the reactor is designed to produce. The two pertinent examples would be to convert the U-238 in natural or low-enriched uranium to Pu-239, which would be desired for weapons, and Pu-240, which in large concentrations prevents an effective bomb being made -and the conversion of Th-232 (Thorium) into U-233, which can be used to make a bomb in nearly the same way as Pu-239, a similar complication being the creation of U-232 which not only stops the bomb working properly in high concentrations: it makes the material more dangerous to handle than weapons-grade Plutonium. “Separating U-235” refers to the production, from natural uranium of low or highly-enriched uranium with a higher content of fissile U-235 as well as “depleted” uranium which is nearly all U-238, which is not fissile but is fissionable if struck by neutrons with a high enough energy. These may come from fusion reactions or (to a lesser degree) from the fission of Pu-239.

There are several methods by which natural uranium can be enriched: at least two different methods were used by the Allies during WW2: if the Germans did the same then I am unfamiliar with the evidence.

In his conclusions towards the end of the book, the author suggests that there were two possible routes to an atom bomb: the Germans chose the wrong one and the Allies chose the right one. This is untrue in several ways at once, and cannot be allowed to go unchallenged:

There were three routes to an atom bomb known at the time: enrichment of U-235, production of Pu-239 in a reactor and production of U-233 in a reactor or, in the American case, the same reactors used to produce Pu-239. The Allies did not “choose the right one”: they pursued all three, with less effort being applied to the U-233 route as long as the Pu-239 route seemed to be working for them. Both U-235 and Pu-239 bombs were produced and used by the Americans in WW2, the two bombs having different operating principles, although a U-235 bomb could have been made either way. The Americans may have produced enough U-233 for a bomb by 1946, although they did not detonate a bomb containing U-233 until 1955. Once a Pu-239 implosion bomb had been seen to work, over Nagasaki, a U-233 implosion bomb could be assumed to work. The 1955 test was of a composite core, containing both Pu-239 and U-233 about which fewer assumptions could be made, hence the test.

The Germans did not “choose the wrong method”; they tried to pursue Pu-239 and U-233 bombs, both of which have since been made to work. (The USSR detonated an H-bomb with U-233 in its primary device and India detonated a small tactical device in 1998 using just U-233.) Neither German programme got very far, partly due to the lack of heavy water and perhaps a failure to realise that graphite could be used instead (some German scientists knew quite well that it could be). The German efforts to use Thorium and U-233 are habitually derided by those authors who notice them at all, but there is a great deal of practical sense in doing this:

Although it is possible to make either Pu-239 or U-233 in the same reactor -and the Americans did just that- in neither case does weapons-grade material come out of the reactor. What you get is either a large mass of uranium containing and small mass of Pu-239, Pu-240 and other by-products, or a large mass of thorium containing a small mass of U-233, U-232 and other by-products. What you have to do next is some sort of chemical refining to produce pure plutonium (it’s not possible to separate Pu-239 from Pu-240 once they are mixed, by any known method) or chemically extract U-233 and the similarly unavoidable U-232 from the thorium.

U-235 can be separated from U-238 only because there’s a slightly bigger difference in the atomic weight of the two isotopes than is the case with U-233 and U232. And it is a time and energy-consuming task.

Not only did the Germans lack American industrial capacity in absolute terms, the industrial capacity they had, relevant to processing their reactor products, basically consisted of the industry, established since 1891, which separated industrially-useful thorium from silver. So, the thorium/U-233 route would have seemed like safer ground to German officials attempted to plan for the solution of novel problems. What the Germans did, actually made sense given the knowledge, resources and worker skills that they had.

The failure of the German atomic bomb projects was not a foregone conclusion and the risk of their success was not negligible.

PS: If you have a fine German silver teapot dating from before the time when the Germans learned how to separate the thorium in their silver ore from their silver, it’s probably best not to use it for actual tea that you’re planning to drink.

 

Secret Alliances is published by Biteback Publishing on the 28^th of April 2021.

Book Review of The Rising Tide by Sam Lloyd

This second thriller by Sam Lloyd is not a sequel to his “The Memory Wood” but it does share one or two features; mainly that of a detective who is struggling with a personal medical crisis even as they try to solve the case and save lives. There is a twist, though, even in that.

There is tension throughout and something of a roller-coaster ride, because the plot unfolds via a series of misperceptions and misconceptions: it becomes obvious that information is missing but it isn’t obvious what this is. While humans plot evil or struggle towards the truth, the sea is an impartial danger, ever ready to kill the good and the wicked. Even so, this is also a portrait of a community where more or less everyone depends on the sea for their living.

It’s also a study of several flawed characters who could be and are perceived in different ways, not just by different observers but even from the same person’s viewpoint at different times. The takeaway for the real world is that assumptions, although sometimes necessary, can be the enemy of investigation. If “the obvious suspects” were reliably guilty, the serious crime clear-up rate might be a multiple of what it actually is. And it’s a dangerous half-truth that “someone close to the victim” commits most serious crimes against the person, because although the statistics might condense to that once an investigation is completed and a successful prosecution mounted, it’s all but impossible for either victims of crime or the police to recall or identify everyone who might count as “close to” the victim in that sense. And because vendettas spring from psychosis as well as events, their triggers are often incomprehensible to anyone but the offender. This novel does not offer a clear insight into the mindset of stalking, but that is not a criticism because the reality does tend to be bewildering.

The Rising Tide by Sam Lloyd is published by Random House on the 8^th of July 2021

Opening of "Where Lapwings Fly" by Matthew K. Spencer

This is the beginning of an ecological alternative timelines novel, which should be completed and published some time in 2022.

Prologue, Hammer Hill

It was getting close to Christmas somewhere around 1980 and the timelines hadn't divided yet. Timelines didn't figure in people's lives (unless they were watching Dr Who), so the boy was oblivious as he caught a bus from Mander College towards home, just before sunset. The weather wasn't arctic by any means, but it was definitely a Bedfordshire winter and the bus would go past Cardington Airfield, which the Met Office celebrated, with reason, as the coldest place in lowland Britain. He cleared a patch on the glass by his seat with his glove, so he could see out and not get bus-sick, at least while the light outside lasted.

There were several stops going up London Road and Harrowden Road for Bedford townspeople to get off, but once the bus got past Shortstown the bus would hold real country folk and those going all the way to Hitchin, where bus drivers from Biggleswade Depot didn't like to linger in case the Red Indians got them. The bus was a green Bristol RE with an Eastern Coachworks body and a six-cylinder Gardner engine at the rear: the sort of vehicle that was still the backbone of the United Counties Omnibus Company. That configuration, with pneumatic gear-selection, kept most of the noise and vibration at the back where the smokers were and the boy was sitting in the clean air as near to the front as he could get without hogging one of the seats reserved for pensioners.

"Does anyone intend to get out in Cotton End?" The driver shouted the vital question as he stopped in front of the imposing facade of RAF Cardington's administration building at Shortstown. There was no reply, so the driver knew that he could use every yard of road through Cotton End for a good run-up towards Hammer Hill. Unless some elderly passenger was already asleep, that is: he leaned round the screen behind his seat and had a good look at who he had in the pensioners' seats. That lady came from Dead Man's Cross: it was go!

The Gardner roared, fairly smoothly, as the bus rounded the bend by the hydrogen plant's gasholder, giving the boy a good view of the airship sheds, looming like green metal mountains against the darkling sky to the East. He caught his breath: a huge flock of lapwings, more than he'd ever seen in one place in his life, were flying over the airship sheds towards Hammer Hill and the woods and spinneys of the Greensand Ridge to roost after searching the fields and flood-meadows of the Ouse valley all day for food. When he peered back towards Goldington Power Station and Willington, behind the flock, the sky was not actually dark yet. The lapwings alone had made it go dark!

The driver kept the bus accelerating gently through Cotton End: he didn't want to be going too fast for the bend in the middle of the village and there was a speed limit, but it was generally safe to nudge the speed limit just as you came out of the village so you could take full advantage of the straight and gently-rising unrestricted road past Wilhampstead Turn.The boy turned to look West through another patch of cleared glass across the aisle. There, against the setting sun and the several chimneys of the Stewartby Brickworks, three of which were painting the cold but colourful sunset with smoke, was another huge flock of lapwings that had risen from the fields and brickfields of the Marston Vale to roost further along the Greensand Ridge in the woods towards Ampthill. In some years, practically all the lapwings in Western Europe would spend the winter in Eastern England and this year what must have been a couple of million of them had chosen Bedfordshire, the river Ouse and the Greensand Ridge to see out the hard months. The sight was stunning, but the boy was the only person on the bus who really noticed. The driver was pleased to have the momentum to crest Hammer Hill without having to change all the way down to bottom gear or risk a stall. Everyone else was thinking about home and a hot cup of tea.

Darkness fell as the bus trundled towards Shefford at a more sedate pace via Haynes Turn and Dead Man's Cross and the view from outside was lost to the lights above the passenger seats. The boy's thoughts drifted away from the Bedfordshire landscape, to recent worries and an argument, if argument was the right word for something so completely one-sided.

His physics with chemistry class had been shown a film on the role of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, and he had at first found it difficult to believe and then, as the evidence mounted, alarming. Carbon dioxide trapped heat, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was rising, through a variety of causes which all tended in the same direction, and so the planet was getting a little bit hotter, year by year. He hadn't seen this reported in The Guardian, so far, nor did he know anyone else not in his class who knew about this, and even they were more bemused than alarmed. This was the sort of thing where corrective action in good time would save an enormous amount of pain, and he was old enough to know that political will tended to follow the path of least pain. But few people knew about global warming and even fewer took it seriously.

There was a local environmental campaign group and he occasionally went to meetings, but he hadn't heard a word about the warming, even there, and eventually he had concluded that he had better introduce them to the subject, because it was evident that no-one else was going to. A couple of evenings ago he had gone along, and when he had been, slightly patronisingly, invited to contribute to the meeting, he had started to say his piece and outline what he knew, winning a few interested and thoughtful nods and murmurs as he went. One lady in her thirties leaned forward a bit, absorbed by what he was saying. But Mr Shortmead, a middle-aged teacher who liked to dominate meetings, even though he prided himself on "helping his young co-learners to form their own ideas" was displaying, not simply restless impatience, but rising anger. Words, like "nonsense" and "poppycock" were spat out rather than muttered and followed by "utter codswallop" "patent lies" and "capitalist lackey!" At that last jibe, the interested lady, and everybody else, turned to face Mr Shortmead, wondering what all this was in aid of. The boy paused for a moment, to let them come back to him when Mr Shortmead had been made to realise that he was being very rude and unkind. The pause was fatal.

Words came from Mr Shortmead's mouth like bullets from a fixed-line machine-gun. The boy tried to get a word in edgeways, but he could not and neither could anybody else. Well, Mr Shortmead was a keen musician and he obviously had been trained in breath control, but it was almost as if he had been specifically trained to use a stream of condemnatory language as a speech-suppression weapon. There were no gaps into which even a sharp edge could be inserted -and all the words were bitter and damning, too! Who had taught him to do this: the KGB? Perhaps the Gestapo? Or was it King Herod's official spokesman?

"Global warming" was an evil plot by the Western nuclear power industry to frighten everyone into dropping their campaigns against nuclear power and allow nuclear power stations to be built by the hundred across Britain and beyond. Either the boy was a feeble-minded idiot, to repeat the lies, or he had already sold out and was a lackey, a collaborator! The torrent of words did not stop until the boy had made a helpless gesture at everybody else at the meeting, got his coat and left. He felt weak at not standing up for what he knew to be true, but Mr Shortmead made it quite impossible for anyone to even suggest they disagreed with him. Once the boy had left, never to return, there was a shocked silence in the meeting room as people wondered how they were going to cope: if a sincere belief (they had no idea if the boy was right or not) could be greeted with such frightening fury, was it safe to say anything at all in Mr Shortmead's presence? It would be several years before the group's members would dare to conclude that the boy had been basically right. Years in which a start might have been made, but wasn't, because Mr Shortmead was not alone.

Sitting on the bus as it waited for the traffic lights by the bank in Shefford, the boy shuddered at the memory of that furious verbal assault. In the past he had been punched in the face by people who hated him less: denying him -and every bystander- control of their own voice seemed more violent, more brutal, than mere physical violence, too.

If that's what the supposed bunny-huggers in the environmental movement were willing to do to someone on their side who was merely presenting what he believed to be a new and important idea, what might their capitalist oligarch opponents be capable of? If that was how the debate was going to be conducted, did it actually matter who won? The bus took a troubled boy onwards to his destination. That night, the Planet Earth timeline spawned new parallel timelines towards two additional alternative futures: Gaia and Technyar.

 

This extract, and the novel "Where Lapwings Fly" it is from, are copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 2021, all rights reserved.

 

 

Book Review of “Great Circle” by Maggie Shipstead

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Epic flying adventure novel with a twist at the end.

This novel is well-conceived as well as well-researched. It is also only the second novel written by an American and at least partially set in England in WW2 that I have read without being annoyed by all the misconceptions, half-truths and untruths -and the other stayed well away from technical matters. As Alan Myers once put it: “the reader is in safe hands.”

Covering a sweep of years from the Great War, through the Prohibition years and WW2 to nearly the present day, Great Circle has many well-drawn characters and perhaps not by accident, the only really superficial ones are found in the scenes involving Hollywood and its people. The leading characters are complex in a way that is consistent with their being driven to do really extraordinary things and I think this is the real strength of the story. “Normal” people wouldn’t have done these deeds, would not have achieved these things. But we see those extraordinary characters being forged in difficult circumstances in difficult times and they achieve by challenging, rather than accepting, the world as it is. They don’t merely overcome adversity: they are nourished by it. This is not exactly heart-warming, because they don’t make very many comfortable personal choices, but they do great things.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead is published by Random House UK on the 4^th of May 2021.