The Centauri Device

Well, there's always a plus side. I'm in hospital again, and a bit stuck for reading. But among the books in Richard's Room, the little family/chillout room next to the Yeo Ward in Exeter's RD&E - amid Cookson, Cussler, King, Cornell, Helen Fielding ... aaargh! ... I did find just one good book, one I haven't read for around 35 years, M. John Harrison's classic SF novel The Centauri Device.

A Vision of Communism

The works of Bertha Thomas (1845-1918) continue to produce a crop of surprises. A while back I mentioned Maxwell Gray's excursion into post-apocalyptic SF, After the Crash; and now I find Bertha Thomas too moved into borderline SF/fantasy on occasion, as in her 1873 A Vision of Communism, which interested me for its strong similarities to a classic 20th century SF story.

Damnation trolley

A spot of technical geekiness for a change: something struck me as very familiar about the "stair-climbing shopping trolley" on the cover of the Late Spring 2015 catalogue for Solutions World, a catalogue of labour-saving devices. It connects, maybe surprisingly, to a 1977 SF movie, and indirectly to a Roger Zelazny novel.

Ask A Foolish Question

From Project Gutenberg: Robert Sheckley's 1953 short SF story Ask A Foolish Question, which is still worth reading, as well as having quite a bit of modern pertinence. The story concerns various species, including humans, who make pilgrimage to a device called Answerer, "Because Answerer knows everything".

The Secret of the Desert: across Arabia by chariot-boat-tank

I wrote previously about the author Edward Douglas Fawcett, after seeing Kevin Dixon's Torquay’s Other History post The Science Fiction of Edward Douglas Fawcett, and linked to his 1893 novel Hartmann the Anarchist; or The Doom of the Great City. As an update, I just found among the growing collection of digitised works at the British Library another of his SF works, the 1895 The Secret of the Desert, or How We Crossed Arabia in the “Antelope“.

Iapetus

Just a piece of stream-of-consciousness that led to some literature I'd quite forgotten... I saw an old Daily Mail article about the very cute cat Venus, who is a chimera - an organism composed of genetically distinct patches. It's not unusual in animals, but unusual to have such a distinct facial division: blue-eyed ginger tabby on the left, green-eyed black cat on the right. She even has a Facebook page.

Invasion Exmouth, 189—

I just ran into an episode set in Exmouth, in Fred T Jane's 1895 future-war novel Blake of the "Rattlesnake": Or, The Man who Saved England : a Story of Torpedo Warfare in 189—., which imagines Britain in ocean-going conflict with a French-Russian alliance.

Ubik poem

For Tony Boucher

ich sih die liehte heide
in gruner varwe stan
dar suln wir alle gehen,
die sumerzeit enphahen

I see the sunstruck forest
In green it stands complete.
There soon we all are going,
The summertime to meet.

Babylon is Fallen

Just purging some bookmarks, I rediscovered Ted Chiang's SF story Tower of Babylon, brilliantly imagining the practicalities of building of the Tower of Babel. This in turn reminded me of Alasdair Gray's collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly, which has a two-part fable on the same theme: The Start of the Axletree and The End of the Axletree, which uses the building of the Tower of Babel, and the evolving social structures within its workers and management, as an allegory for the development of human civilisation. The bookmarks also included several links for the hymn tune Babylon Is Fallen, which concluded the Topsham production of Tony Harrison's Mysteries earlier this year. It's a very catchy tune, open to considerable variation in style, whether the powerfully raw close harmony of Swan Arcade ...



... Sacred Harp devotional part singing ...



... or this grim anti-capitalist anthem by Plunderphoenix: Babylon muß fallen:



The tune is quite often claimed to be a 17th century Shaker hymn, but attribution doesn't seem to reliably track back further than the 1870s and William Edward Chute ...

His tune BABYLON IS FALLEN was printed in The Musical Million 6 (December 1875) and in Hauser's Olive Leaf (1878), where Hauser states that Prof. William E. Chute, then living in St. Thomas, Ontario, “composed the tune out of an old theme, and is too modest to claim any originality, but I do it for him."
- The Makers of the Sacred Harp, David Warren Steel, Richard H Hulan, University of Illinois Press, 2010

However, in an interesting Google Groups discussion on the tune - music for SH 117 BABYLON IS FALLEN - Gabriel Kastelle plausibly suggests a relation to an Irish tune called Reilly's Reel (see YouTube for basic tune, and this rather academic Celtic Trio arrangement - Babylon is Fallen fits perfectly with it).

Since 1991, it has been included in The Sacred Harp, a continually accreted collection of traditional American devotional choral singing (see Sacred Harp and Shape Note Singing and Wikipedia's article, Sacred Harp). I'm not sure what to make of the Sacred Harp tradition. Its choral music is not intended as a performance, and it's participatory and highly inclusive of all levels of ability: highly positive aspects that it's hard to disagree with. But as a musician used to striving for a polished performance, I find it sounds gratingly ramshackle. I guess you have to be in the mindset to appreciate it or not care about that.

- Ray

After the Crash (1923)

In November 2012 (Muriel ... and After the Crash) I posted a brief critique of Maxwell Gray's short story After the Crash, "written about 1908 or 1910" but not published until her final book, the 1923 story collection A Bit of Blue Stone.

After the Crash, while I think it has weaknesses, is an interesting story, both as an example of the "Where London Stood" genre, and as a personal milestone for Maxwell Gray. She'd spent her whole career writing mainstream fiction - chiefly melodramatic romances with a certain amount of social commentary - but in her 60s broke out of that frame and wrote a single post-apocalyptic SF story that powerfully crystallises her own fears (expressed in earlier works) of disastrous consequences of the social changes brought by the 20th century.


I've posted a scan - see After the Crash - at the official site for my biography of Maxwell Gray, A Wren-like Note.

- Ray

SF on YouTube

Just a few things that caught my attention recently: there is some rather good SF on YouTube. First, Крепость (Fortress) aka Ten years from the beginning of the last war: a Russian animation. It has rather the style of 1950s SF: hardware that's  modernised Cold War style rather than an extrapolation of the present day. But the story still works.


You can get brief English captioning if you click the leftmost of the icons at the lower right of the video, but it's not necessary to the understanding of the animation. I see the Russian commenters to the video know their literature: one has quoted the Russian translation of  Sara Teasdale's There Will Come Soft Rains.

And then there's Tears of Steel, the fourth movie from the Blender Foundation, which develops high-quality animations based on crowdsourcing work with open source software (I previously featured the very moving Sintel).


Spoiler (mouseover whited-out paragraph to read):
If you didn't get this, it starts with a couple who split up on a bridge in Amsterdam because the man is bothered by the woman's robot arm. 40 years later, it appears that bitterness over the split caused the woman - Celia - to turn to the dark side of robotics, leading to a post-apocalyptic world dominated by killer robots. A team of scientists has obtained Celia's brain, the prototype for the robots' programming, and is running a simulation with Celia's now middle-aged ex, to try to find an approach that will placate the robots. The story ends in a ruined Amsterdam, with the outcome uncertain: the plan has been successful with one robot, but it's unclear what the others are going to do.

And thirdly, there's Total Recall 2070.See the trailer:



This is a Canadian SF series first broadcast in 1999 (see Wikipedia) that's more or less a cross between the worlds of Total Recall and Blade Runner. It's an eclectic mix of SF tropes from these and many other sources: impetuous film noir detective with geeky oddball partner (who turns out to be an android); sinister corporations; alien DNA; computer viruses; androids wanting to be more human; androids seeking their maker; murder by genetically-engineered diseases; virtual reality technology; and so on. But despite its being derivative in so many ways, it's very watchable, and the whole series is available on YouTube: see the YouTube channel TotalRecall2070.

- Ray

The Iron Thorn

Science Fiction Book Club edition

I just had the pleasure of re-reading an SF novel 40 years on: The Iron Thorn (Algis Budrys, Science Fiction Book Club, 1967, reprinted in paperback as The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn).

The book opens with a tribal hunter, Honor White Jackson, pursuing a winged reptilian alien across a desert. His prey - an 'Amsir' - is not stupid: it's leading him further and further from the Iron Thorn, a landmark structure that powers the 'honning cap' that enables Jackson to breathe. Eventually the Amsir leads Jackson out of sight of the Thorn, and he collapses, choking. The Amsir attacks, saying, "Yield, wet devil!", but Jackson overpowers and kills it, recovering his breath by sucking on an oxygen-generating organ from its corpse.

Jackson returns to the Thorn, the kill having gained him the title Honor Black Jackson, and we find more about his culture: a hunting-farming community clustered around the Iron Thorn (which we now understand to be some kind of local terraforming machine). Now a full Honor, he gets initiated into the society's secrets: that Honors are an elite presiding over a precariously-maintained ecosystem, a completely static society held together by taboo and a Darwinian belief that everything that happens makes things better. Jackson has been spotted by the elders as unusual (he has, for instance, artistic talents) and has every chance of rising to the top. But he finds the picture bleak, and is more interested in the mystery of what lies beyond the Thorn, evidenced by a particular thing the elders don't understand: that Amsirs speak, and why they ask Honors to surrender.

paperback edition

Pondering this, Jackson goes to the desert again, where he's ambushed by a rival Honor, who badly wounds him in the elbow with a hunting dart. Jackson is about to be killed, but the surprise arrival of an Amsir enables him to kill his attacker (thus becoming Honor Red Jackson) - and he decides to surrender to the Amsir.

The Amsir leads him across the desert to its own enclave, an Amsir village with its own Iron Thorn, where he's taken to see the crippled Eld Amsir. Within the limits of seeing him as a devil, the Eld Amsir treats him kindly and gives him a task: to open a door in a smaller Thorn before he starves to death. It has been preoccupying the Amsirs for centuries, and they've been capturing a long succession of Honors to try to do this on the basis of an observation: that the door kills Amsirs, but not humans (they know this because occasional more humanoid mutants among them are unharmed by the door). Jackson is given a minder in the form of one such mutant, the powerful but stupid Ahmuls, to keep him under control if he gets the door open.

 After a deal of contemplation, Jackson (by now very hungry, his arm badly infected) finally opens the door; it's voice-activated to admit only humans, and finally responds to "open up, you dumb bastard". He finds himself in a spacecraft. The ship's computer accepts him as commander and obeys his first order, to trap Ahmuls in the airlock. Jackson gets fed, his arm repaired by the robot doctor, and then receives an implanted education ...

you are now an Honors graduate in Liberal Arts from Ohio State University. You have a special Masters in Command Psychology from the University of Chicago and three semester hours in military journalism from the Air Force Academy.

 ... which qualifies him to command the ship. It also teaches him the martial arts necessary to defeat Ahmuls. He attempts to communicate with the Amsirs, but the ship won't let him, telling him he's contaminating an experiment (we, along with Jackson, now know that the Amsirs and his own tribe are experimental colonies on Mars). He, along with the hospitalized Ahmuls, returns to Earth.

On Earth, Jackson finds himself to be an anachronism. The ship being centuries old, Earth culture and civilisation have completely changed to a post-technological leisure society, with every physical need catered for bee-like ' exteroaffectors', the mobile agents of Comp, a benign world computer intelligence.

Alluding to the introduction of Tarzan to society, he introduces himself as Jackson Greystoke. He and Ahmuls are received cordially enough, but Jackson soon finds that jealousy and bullying are still fixtures of the human condition. Kringle, the nominal leader, is angry about the woman Durstine's interest in the newcomer, and also starts antagonizing Ahmuls, who has the sense to leave the group. Nevertheless, their chief interest is in novelty, and their mood perks up when Jackson agrees to participate in an 'actuality' - the live performance of his hunting an Amsir, recreated and controlled by Comp.

This he does, to great acclaim, but he's underwhelmed by the experience - the mock Amsir was a deliberately weak opponent - and doesn't understand the media conventions of the edited replay.  Neither does he relate to the ensuing enthusiasm to recycle his experiences into aesthetic forms. Comp creates a 'party Thorn' for a gathering, where the Earth people produce attempts (sincere, but to Jackson, naff) at artistic interpretation of his experience: the women mime the role of women of his tribe; one man writes a poem supposed to represent Jackson's feelings about the Thorn; and another dedicates a crassly-done painting to him:

You could tell it was a Honor because it was wearing something on its head that looked like a cross between the German helmets of World War II and the Franco-Prussian War. It was intended to be a honning cap, Jackson supposed.

Jackson puts a downer on the whole event by not praising the painting as he's expected to, and by drawing in charcoal a riposte to it, showing his world as he saw it. He walks out on the party.

He talks to Comp, asking if he can have a spaceship, but the answer is no. It seems Jackson is stuck with Earth and a future of having no-one to talk to "except them and things like them" (Comp has ensured that Ahmuls is content enough, running with the buffalo in a game park). But one of the women, Pall, follows Jackson, and assures him that he'll eventually fit into society, and that she understands him.

And then he thought, To me I am the only sane man conceivable. And she's just cookoo enough to go along with it if I take her. "Oh, come on," he said, turning away from the tent, holding her wrist.

They walk off into the fields, with no particular destination in mind, as Jackson tells her what it was really like on Mars:

The floor of the world is rippled like the bottom of the ocean, running out to the edges. Those edges are high and they're cruel. At sunset the eastern horizon is the far wall of the crater. It's black. Blue-black..."

His words, meanwhile, are already being recorded by Comp as another 'actuality' for public consumption.

"Great stuff! Marvelous!" Comp whispered admiringly in his ear. "Forgive me. I thought all you were going to produce was some sort of cliché. Any cliché from you would be admirably dramatic, of course, with great and wide appeal. But I do not want you to think for a moment that I can't appreciate the raw, honest ring of visceral truth. The audience for it isn't as big, of course, but that's all right—it's good for them. Don't compromise. Don't soften it up just because you want to please her. Make it ring, boy! Tell it like it was!"

The gap of 40 years makes some interesting changes in how you perceive a novel. When I first read The Iron Thorn, I remember enjoying it as SF - a conceptual breakthrough story - up to the point of Jackson's reaching Earth; the rest seemed rather dull. Now I find it's all of a piece, an extended examination of the treatment of misfits, as the driving characters are (Jackson, the Eld Amsir, and Ahmuls) - although let down a trifle by the lead character, presented as a thinker through most of the story, coming across as a culturally inflexible macho twit at the end. The Earth-based section has now, however, acquired an applicability that didn't exist when the book was written, as a sharp satire on reality TV. The ending made me think of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror episode 15 Million Merits, in which a man outraged with a media-driven culture breaks on to a reality show to make an impassioned protest, but when that protest is acclaimed as authentic experience, sells out and becomes a celebrity with that protest as a trademark act.

(Note: The Iron Thorn is not to be confused with the 2011 novel of the same name by Caitlin Kittredge. The latter does look of possible interest, as young-adult steampunk with HP Lovecraft borrowings).

- Ray

Frank Herbert's Dune

trailer for Frank Herbert's Dune

I mentioned my liking for Dune - both the book and the 1984 David Lynch movie - a while back (see Dune, 10 October 2008). But for some reason, I only just got around to watching the 2000 TV mini-series, Frank Herbert's Dune. It's excellent.

Although the Lynch film is very watchable, it brings in a number of innovations (for instance, the decision to change the novel's "weirding way" from a martial art to a sonic weapon technology); a lot of general exaggerations for cinematic impact (I recall way back seeing ridicule of the portrayal of the villain, Baron Harkonnen, as "a bubonic buggering balloon buffoon"); and, more insidiously, altering Frank Herbert's message - "The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes" - into an ending that treats Paul Muad'Dib's heroic, even Messianic, status as a good outcome.

As described in this article - DUNE: Remaking the Classic Novel ("Executive producer Richard Rubinstein and director John Harrison discuss creating the new mini-series") - the mini-series came about because the executive producer, Richard Rubinstein, found that Dino De Laurentis had not acquired the TV rights. Harrison went back to source. There are some additions that he put in to emphasise aspects of the book that he thought Herbert conveyed too subtly - such as the central role of the unseen narrator, Princess Irulan, in the politics of the Dune universe - but it sticks pretty faithfully to the novel's text and spirit. The whole production, filmed with an international cast, largely on studio sets in Prague, looks very good, with interesting costumes ranging between Expressionist and mediaeval in style. It portrays the Harkonnens as they are in the book: vicious and decadent, but not the ridiculous grotesques of the Lynch film. And, nicely, it doesn't neglect the water rituals and cultural quirks of Arrakis.

If you haven't seen the mini-series, it's worth checking out. It probably shouldn't be on YouTube, but it is: Part 1 (2:47) / Part 2 (1:57).

- Ray

Habitation One: guilty pleasures

This is one for Felix Grant, who commented recently,

One of my favourite guilty pleasures is reading potted reviews of one and two star rated films.

A conversation elsewhere, that touched on dystopian books and movies, brought to mind a definitely one-star SF novel I read years back, Habitation One (Frederick Dunstan, Fontana, 1983), and I found a few juicy reviews online.

"A conservative Christian allegory ... whose gratuitous cruelty is equalled only by its tedium" — Mary Gentle, Interzone
- quoted in The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, David Pringle, 1995

Another new name in 1983 was that of Frederick Dunstan, whose Habitation One is both extraordinary and alarming. It describes the life and death-throes of an inbred community occupying the top of a vast tower three and a half centuries after the nuclear holocaust that drove its ancestors up there. Heavy with gruesome and macabre incidents,  mutilations, impalings, cannibalism and necrophilia, the book obviously intends to alarm, in the grand old Gothic manner. More disturbing than that, this murky brew of tobacco-fug, misogyny and Christian cant was dreamed up not by the usual decrepit don or febrile cleric, but by a nineteen-year-old Birmingham schoolboy. Having now graduated in English from Brasenose College, Oxford, Dunstan doesn't intend to write any more SF: he doesn't regard it as 'a serious genre'. Thank goodness we shall be spared Habitation Two and Three. One is plenty.
- British Book News - Page 138, 1984

And there's the extended White Dwarf review by David Langford, reprinted in The Complete Critical Assembly:The Collected White Dwarf (And GM, and GMI) SF Review Columns:

The book is a wondrous cornucopia of things for young writers to avoid ... lumpish prose and wooden characters ... gratuitous nastiness ...
...
Hurled skyward and pulverized from the waist down by an immense steam-catapult, one public hero nevertheless retains consciousness throughout his flight, successfully shoots an arrow into the madman who (for reasons never all that clearly explained) is dangling from a rope high up, fields the small nuclear device with which said madman planned to destroy the entire plot, and arcs onward, nuke in hand, to glorious immolation somewhere over the edge of the world. I forgot to mention earlier on that he was tortured by having his moustache ripped off with hydraulic jacks.
...
... a cringingly sententious epilogue which ascribes the unlikely happy ending to divine intervention. I don't see why God should carry the can for the ineptitudes of F. Dunstan. A real running sore of a book, this.
- for full review, see pp 48-49, The Complete Critical Assembly, David Langford, Wildside Press LLC, 2002

Don't get the idea that Habitation One is so bad as to be amusing and worth seeking out; it isn't. I read it once, and don't intend to again. The worst part of it, for me, was not the nastiness, but its excruciating pomposity, which was echoed in author interviews with the pipe-puffing 21-going-on-middle-age Dunstan. I remember particularly loathing that he should get validation as an author via this execrable book inexplicably getting into print. But it's consolation that there's no evidence of his having written anything else that was published. Perhaps, like Grunthos the Flatulent, "his own major intestine—in a desperate attempt to save life itself—leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain" to save the world from further works.

There's a certain poignancy in coming across a copy of Frederick Dunstan's Habitation One, a curious post-apocalyptic novel, in Derek's Bookstall in Preston, and reading in the author biography of Dunstan's "lifelong desire to be an author" and that in 1983, when Habitation One was published, he was "at work on his second novel". No second novel ever appeared.
- Nicolas Royle, Lives & Letters, The Guardian Review, January 12, 2013

- Ray

The Diamond Age

1996 Penguin edition cover

Another recommendation. Neal Stephenson's 1995 SF novel The Diamond Age is by no means a new book, but for some reason I'd never read it until I borrowed a copy from the hospital bookshelf a few weeks back (it was the only thing not either 'summer reading' or macho bilge -- I promise I'll take it back).

The setting is near-future, but very different both technologically and culturally. Mastery of nanotechnology has enabled atom-scale rod-logic computers, super-strong materials, and matter creation on demand: on the downside, the air, water, and even people's bodies, swarm with a warring ecology of nanoscale devices. Socially, the nation-state has become obsolete in favour of "phyles" - distributed populations with a common ethos, who occupy "claves" of various sizes, some as small as a building - who interact via shared laws.

The book has been billed as "post-cyberpunk", and it starts with a vigorous demolition of cyberpunk tropes. A character called Bud is getting a nanotech "skull gun" implant installed. In a cyberpunk novel this would probably lead to all kinds of shoot-outs and adventures. However, Bud turns out not to be the protagonist, but a dim racist thug who uses the gun to rob an Ashanti businessman; he is rapidly arrested, put in front of a genially draconian Confucian court (Judge Fang tells Bud "Don't be an asshole" when he asks if he gets to offer a defence), and executed. So much for cyberpunk.

We then get to the real story, which begins among the Neo-Victorians, a powerful phyle who have adopted Victorian dress and rules of conduct. John Hackworth, an "artifex" (software engineer) gets commissioned by a Victorian aristocrat to create a book-format device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The aristocrat has realised that, as with the original Victorians, their culture depends on wildcard personalities, and the Primer would be an educational medium designed to foster such a personality in his daughter. Hackworth does the job, but falls into the Victorian vice of hypocrisy and goes into China to make illegal copies. He is, however, mugged, and the original copy stolen, which ultimately places him in obligation to an illicit Chinese technologist Dr X.

The stolen Primer ends up with an unintended recipient, Nell, a young underclass girl in an abusive household - and by coincidence the late Bud's daughter. She gets to keep it because of further peculiarities of the Confucian justice system. Judge Fang, who also coincidentally deals with the case of the Primer's theft, considers that the thief, Nell's brother Harv, has displayed the correct "filial piety" by giving it to her, and that a greater good is served by her keeping it for her education.

The story then moves into multiple threads, including the life of Nell as she grows up to her teens, educated to higher class and a higher destiny by the Primer; Hackworth's fate, forced by admission of his crime to become a double agent and infiltrate a bizarre and orgiastic hive-community; the life of Miranda, an interactive actor who effectively becomes Nell's mother by providing the characters displayed by the Primer; the growing political unrest in China (much of the action takes place around Shanghai); and, centrally, the interactive story Nell is told by the Primer. Starting with simple stories involving her four animal toys as characters, it's designed to guide her through increasingly sophisticated archetypal adventures, puzzles and challenges that mirror her encounters in the real world.

It's taken me three weeks to read it, as it's quite long at 500 pages, and not always the easiest of novels for stylistic reasons, in places imitating the detailed descriptive digression of Victorian novels. It also has its longeurs; while they're thoroughly pertinent to the theme and I like computing, I found Nell's Primer adventures involving understanding various Turing machines repetitive and uninteresting.

I can see, however, why The Diamond Age won both the Hugo and Locus awards in 1996. It's a detailed and brilliantly-imagined exploration of culture, technology and personality, and worth the effort. And I learned a deal about Confucianism.

SPOILER: The Diamond Age at Wikipedia.

- Ray

Chieftain o' the pudding-race

I completely forgot Friday was Burns Night; I like haggis a lot, and it's the one solid excuse in the year to eat it. As luck would have it, however - presumably down to the recent cold weather - I managed to bag a wild one perching in next door's fig tree.

A couple of haggis snippets. Firstly, it's worth reposting the haggis section from Ronald Wright's excellent A Scientific Romance, in the archaeologist protagonist David Lambert, via the HG Wells time machine, travels to 2500AD, and finds the only remaining occupants of a post-apocalyptic Britain to be a tribe of feudal and devoutly religious black Scots, who have an annual mystery play that conflates Christ's passion with Scottish tradition. Their iconography contains a white blond Jesus, whose role Lambert is conscripted to play.

On stage was a table spread with bread, jugs of palm toddy (a new one on me; antique Scotch wasn't the only tipple), and a central plate containing a dark trussed object like a Christmas pudding in bondage. The crowd swarmed at the edge of the platform: wild, eager, fanatical faces, a dark flood from the streets.

In my nervousness, suppressed but not banished by draughts of usquebaugh, my lines deserted me. My eyes flew around in panic, alighted on the crowning ornament of the board. Not a Christmas pud. Nor, exactly, a paschal lamb. It was a haggis - the first - the first I'd seen in Nessie - and Burns came to my rescue. I got to my feet, beamed on the crowd with what I hoped was an expression of
Christly gemütlichkeit, summoned the best stage Scots I could, and stretched out my hand to the blob of dubious meat:

Fair fa' your honest sonsie face,
Great Chieftain o' the pudding-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak' your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye worthy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

This verse leads me to QI, and a nice translation anecdote.



The first stanza of Address to a Haggis is very well-known, but the poem's not often quoted in its entirety. Here it is:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the pudding-race!
Aboon them a' yet tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o'a grace
As lang's my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin was help to mend a mill
In time o'need,
While thro' your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An' cut you up wi' ready sleight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like ony ditch; And then,
O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin', rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an' strive:
Deil tak the hindmost! on they drive,
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
Bethankit! hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad make her spew
Wi' perfect sconner,
Looks down wi' sneering, scornfu' view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckles as wither'd rash,
His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash;
His nieve a nit;
Thro' blody flood or field to dash,
 how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He'll mak it whissle;
An' legs an' arms, an' hands will sned,
Like taps o' trissle.

Ye Pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o' fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer
Gie her a haggis!

In case anyone's still unclear what goes into haggis, a classic recipe (the first known to appear in print) is in Susanna MacIver's 1787 Cookery and Pastry.

A Good Scotch Haggies.

Make the haggies-bag perfectly clean; parboil the draught; boil the liver very well, so as it will grate; dry the meal before before the fire; mince the draught and a pretty large piece of beef very small; grate about half of the liver; mince plenty of the suet and some onions small; mix all these materials very well together, with a handful or two of the dried meal: spread them on the table, and season them properly with salt and mixed spices; take any of the scrapes of beef that is left from mincing, and some of the water that boiled the draught, and make about a choppen of good stock of it; then put all the haggies-meat into the bag, and that broath in it: then sew up the bag; but be fare to- put out all the wind before you sew it quite close. If you think the bag is thin, you may put it in a cloth. If it is a large haggies, it will take at least two hours boiling.

- pages 72-73, Cookery and Pastry, 1787

The "haggies-bag" is the stomach, the "draught" offal - typically heart and lungs. Some modern haggis doesn't follow Mrs MacIver's use of beef meat, and uses offal alone, but the MacSween one, which I prefer and recommend, does.

Contrary to many claims, the origin of the name "haggis" is unknown. The OED says:

Etymology:  Derivation unknown. The analogy of most terms of cookery suggests a French source; but no corresp. French word or form has been found. The conjecture that it represents French hachis ‘hash’, with assimilation to hag, hack, to chop, has apparently no basis of fact; French hachis is not known so early, and the earlier forms of the English word are more remote from it. Whether the word is connected with hag vb. [to cut, hew, chop], evidence does not show.

It's never even been especially Scottish a concept, except in recent tradition. Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds contains an account of an accident Strepsiades, the elderly Athenian protagonist, has with a haggis-like pudding that burst because he hasn't left a steam vent.

Streps. The devil they do! why now the murder's out:
So was I serv'd with a damn'd paunch, I broil'd
On Jove's day last, just such a scurvy trick;
Because, forsooth, not dreaming of your thunder,
I never thought to give the rascal vent,
Bounce! goes the bag, and covers me all over
With filth and ordure till my eyes struck fire.

- Ray

The serpent that once corrupted man

 

Where's my card? 'Miss Sapphire — Poses with a Python'. Now don't get the wrong idea — it's right artistic. Costume-wise, I never wear less than the full three tassels, and between shows I am at that python with the Dettox and a damp cloth even if he haven't been nowhere.

Never watch Blade Runner — The Director's Cut after seeing Victoria Wood's sketch The Library (see 15:27).

- Ray

The Last Ringbearer

Another recommendation from over-Christmas reading: the 1999 fantasy novel The Last Ringbearer. I mentioned it in February 2011, and liked the concept a lot, but for whatever reason only just got around to reading it, after recent reacquaintance with Tolkien's world led me to a handy ePUB version that worked on the Kobo.

The Last Ringbearer, written by Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov as Последний кольценосец and translated by Yisroel Markov, is a revisionist account of the events depicted in The Lord of The Rings. It works on a number of premises, one being a geologist's take on necessary consequences of Tolkien's geography of Middle Earth (the world has to be bigger than the part he shows) - but the most significant is the idea that The Lord of the Rings is a mythologised 'history written by the victors'.

The trio of chief characters of The Last Ringbearer are two from Mordor - Haladdin, an Umbarian academic turned field medic, and Tzerlag, an Orocuen sergeant (an orc, in fact, in this book a human ethnicity) - and Baron Tangorn, a disaffected Gondorian soldier-aristocrat. The three are thrown together in the deserts of Mordor after its fall: Haladdin and Tzerlag save Tangorn, who has been left for dead after he tried to stop an elf-led civilian massacre by mercenaries on his own side.

After this brief framing, we get a flashback of The War of the Ring told with a very different slant from Tolkien's. Mordor is an enlightened technological civilisation ruled by the unremarkable Sauron VIII against a general backdrop of barbarian feudal rival kingdoms such as Gondor and Rohan. It has, however, damaged its self-sufficiency by disastrous land irrigation mistakes, and this weakness is taken as cue for the warmongering Gandalf to advise a Western attack on it.

This attack succeeds through various factors. The "vast Mordor hordes" are a propaganda exaggeration. The Western forces have magic: they can create undead armies, have palantir communication, and got the Elves on their side by the loan of a powerful clairvoyant and magic-enhancing device, The Mirror. They indulge in various breaches of rules of engagement, such as failing to honour conventions on single combat. In the aftermath of the main battles, Aragorn seizes the throne of Gondor by engineering the murder of the de facto king, Denethor (with the unlikely cover story that the latter just happened to set fire to himself), and assures the compliance of allies by hostage-taking (he keeps Éowyn, sister of the Rohan heir Éomer, along with the genuine Gondor heir Faramir, under guarded exile). However, it's not all roses for Aragorn: Arwen will not consummate their alliance, as from her immortal Elvish viewpoint, he's little more than a primitive baby. The Elves also, naturally, won't give back The Mirror.

Haladdin, Tzerlag and Tangorn form an alliance, initially for mutual protection from Gondorian mop-up operations, and kill Eloar, the elf who was behind the massacre. Then, while on watch, Haladdin gets a visit from a Nazgûl, Sharya-Rana (the benign and rational spirit of a dead mathematician) who tells him what's at stake for the future. The world ("Arda") is at the interface of physical and magical worlds, and the Elves have plans to exploit this and lead Middle Earth into an Elf-dominated stasis. The only way to stop this is to disconnect the worlds by destroying The Mirror in the Eternal Fire of Mount Doom within 100 days: a daunting task since The Mirror weighs 1000 pounds and is installed in the totalitarian Elf stronghold of Lórien. Haladdin has been selected to do it because he has no magical abilities, and so is impervious to magical attacks. Sharya-Rana dies - or rather discorporates, having used all his energies - and Haladdin is left to contemplate how he can achieve this quest (of which more in a moment).

I was reading this book well into the small hours - I finished at nearly 5am - and was gripped. Eskov has thoroughly worked out the whole revisionist scenario, and it fits the Lord of the Rings timeline beautifully. The overall stance is humane and rationalist, fiercely polemical in its stance of outrage at misrepresented history. And, as Eskov has stated, it avoids alignment of good/evil with ethnicity or military side. It's thoroughly realistic in its portrayal of brutal Realpolitik and the double-edged aspect of espionage: for example, Baron Tangorn's personal shame is that he compiled for Gondor the open source intelligence report on food imports showing that Mordor was no threat, not realising that this very report would be used as the rationale for Gondor's unprovoked attack on it.

Eskov takes a real joy in his world, too, showing vividly the multifarious cultures that thrive in a geographical area stretching across the equivalent of, say, NW Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. He delights in food and wine and how they're prepared, in total contrast to Tolkien's descriptions that really seem to stem from the latter's dull and abstemious tastes. However, this joy does have a slight downside: Eskov occasionally digresses into cultural back-story that holds up the plot. There's a huge and not very relevant chunk about the history of Middle Earth's Africa analogue, and an interminable section (which really belongs in a separate novel) about Baron Tangorn's adventures as a spy in the port city-state of Umbar, playing off the various security services against each other.

That aside, The Last Ringbearer made very satisfying reading, rich in allusion to similar scenarios in real-world history (if you don't spot them, there's an appendix) and more than a few neat references - when the characters discuss the "World as Text theory" - to the whole issue of the fictionality of both The Last Ringbearer and The Lord of the Rings. Despite it being let down in places by longueurs, it's a superb book: a commenter to my earlier post called it "This is a true book of ideas in the Russian tradition". And it's freely available, now in a 2nd Edition.

The copyright is undoubtedly still very 'grey': free or not, this is still an unauthorized derivative work. The Tolkien estate is not known for its liking of derivative works, but there doesn't seem to have been any move from it lately on the matter. Here's the official page, and here is where I found the ePUB version.

(Check out also this striking Flickr image of Dubai by Rick's Images. A detail of this, which shows towers including the Burj Khalifa under construction in March 2008, was used as the cover image for the Tenseg Press edition I read).

- Ray

Spoiler warning:  I've completed the plot summary below, in white text. Mouse over if you want to read it.

So ... Haladdin works out a solution to the problem of getting The Mirror to the Eternal Fire of Mount Doom: do the opposite, and use a pair of palantíri to transmit the Eternal Fire to The Mirror. They obtain the palantíri (one of them by aiding a coup to free Faramir) and set up the second half of the plan. Baron Tangorn goes alone to Umbar, where he conducts months of espionage in order to contact the Elven underground with a forged letter and the fiction that Eloar is still alive but imprisoned. The Elves don't initially buy this idea, and Tangorn thinks he has failed; he plans to leave Umbar with his courtesan lover Alviss, but is tragically murdered by his pursuers when he steps out to buy her a gift. Ironically, the Elves take this as evidence of the truth of his carrying dangerous information; unknown to him, he has succeeded.

Haladdin's plan goes ahead: to subvert Eloar's mother, the high-ranking Elf Eornis, into setting up a palantír connection, thinking she can talk with her son. The Mirror, she is told, must be in sight at her end as a bona fide of her location. The palantír is dropped into Lórien from a glider piloted by the troll Kumai - trolls are another human ethnicity - and the Elves fail to find it (Eornis has glued it underneath The Mirror). Even though The Mirror is giving distinct warnings of impending doom, the Elves fail to act decisely because of their one weakness: a paranoid demarcation of decision-making among their politely bickering Politburo-like leaders.

However, as the moment approaches when Haladdin will drop his palantír into the Fire, Gandalf spots the danger and casts a spell on Haladdin's palantír to turn him to stone; it doesn't work, because of the latter's lack of magical nature. Saruman takes over, attempting to reason with Haladdin via the palantír, and tells him what's probably the truth: that Sharya-Rana's scenario is just one theory, and that destroying The Mirror may in fact destroy the world. However, fate intervenes when Tzerlag accidentally touches the palantír and begins to turn to stone. Haladdin takes the chance and destroys it to save his friend, who lives with just the loss of a couple of fingers.

There are massive detonations - and the magic simply goes away. Elves become just beautiful people without power or charisma. Magical items, such as Elven medical kits, cease to work. Arwen loses her power over Aragorn, and he goes on to a career as an enlightened king who brings in a long era of democracy in Gondor, and is ultimately succeeded by Faramir.

The book ends with a future perspective - a future in which history has gone more or less like ours, with another continent called Amengo discovered - discussing the historicity and modern media treatment of the characters in the narrative. A "Western literary adaptation" called The Lord of the Rings is one of them.

- Ray

Scots cyberpunk

The Scottish archipelago as depicted
Map via www.floodmap.net

A while back I briefly mentioned Matthew Fitt's SF novel But n Ben A-Go-Go (Luath Press, 2000), but I finally got a copy and read it yesterday.

As SF, its genre is cyberpunk - "high tech and low life" - but with an unusual setting: an inundated Scotland in 2090 after God's Flood, a melting of the polar ice leaving only the highest mountain-tops above sea-level, most of the population living in Port, a floating megacity tethered to the sea-bed above the submerged Greenock. Disease is rife, from sun-induced skin cancer to the endemic "Mowdie", a virus that turns into a lethal form, "Senga", if carriers have actual sex (though virtual sex is possible in the cyberspace environment .

The protagonist is Paolo Broon, an ex-soldier who works as a "third-class cyberjanny", a kind of enforcer who retrieves data and captures errant employees for "Clart Central". His wife Nadia is incarcerated in a medical unit with Senga - a consequence of an affair with another unknown man. Paolo breaks from his routine life when Nadia's medical insurance runs out, losing the only legal routes to finding the DNA contact that can neutralise her virus. But he suspects that the contact is his estranged father, Diamond Broon, a vastly rich criminal mastermind incarcerated in a luxury prison, "Inverdisney", and resolves to seek him out. As it happens, Diamond - an ailing grotesque who has to be carried around by a giant Inuit bodyguard - is also seeking out Paolo, and via messages received through their respective shady contacts on VINE, their paths converge. Diamond escapes from prison to his luxury island hideout, But n Ben A-Go-Go, as Paolo, now pursued by keen young police lieutenant, swims 200km and braves the dangers of the arid 'Drylands' - sunstroke, renegade American survivalists, and mutant kelpies - to confront his father there.

I've delayed tackling But n Ben A-Go-Go for a long time because I thought it would be hard going: the unusual aspect of the novel I haven't mentioned so far is that it's written entirely in a vigorous broad Scots. A sample from the beginning, where Paolo is visiting Nadia in the Rigo Imbeki Medical Center:

Paolo’s ile-stoor resistant bitts squealed on the ceramic flair as he stepped back an glowered west alang Gallery 1083. It wis a summer Sunday forenoon the clatty end o January an the mile lang visitors’ corridor wis toom. A singil lawyer an her lycra-leggit secretary intromittit the silence, shooglin past on a courtesy electric caur. An indie-pouered germsooker jinked inconspicuously in and oot o Paolo’s personal space, dichtin up microscopic clart as it drapped aff his body.

A quarter mile doon, the wersh blinterin sun forced itsel in throu the UV filter gless at the corridor heid, illuminatin the faces an keek panels o the first fifty Omegas. An as he skellied intae the white bleeze, a troop o droid surveillance puggies advanced in heelstergowdie formation alang the corridor roof, skited by owre his heid an wi a clatter o mettalic cleuks, skittered awa eastwards doon the shadowy vennel. The toomness o the visitors’ corridor offered Paolo nae bield fae the buildin’s oorie atmosphere; Gallery 1083 wis an eerie airt wi or wioot passengers.

As it happened, it turned out to be very readable: about on a level with Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. The author does help us along. As he mentions in the slightly too earnest intro, it is to some extent written in a contrived Scots, where unfamiliar words and any number of neologisms - "stoorsooker", "incendicowp", and so on - are well-framed by context. But on reflection, I'd quite forgotten the degree of familiarity I have from childhood: my grandmother had Scottish roots, subscribing to the Sunday Post and getting me Oor Wullie and The Broons annuals every year (before the days when they anglicized the captions); and my stepfather's family were fairly broad Scots speakers. I think that whatever the context provided, it helps with But n Ben A-Go-Go to have some familiarity with Scots vocabulary: no amount of context will tell you that "coup" (a rubbish dump) is pronounced "cowp", not "coo".

There's a certain level of pastiche to the whole novel. For anyone reasonably familiar with Scottish culture, it's hard not to associate Paolo Broon's name with Pa Broon of The Broons. And the portrayal of the floating city of Port has a lot in common with Megacity One in the SF comic 2000AD (which has considerable Scottish roots - see Scotland's influence on 2000AD's Judge Dredd). It has a similar style in its naming of buildings and institutions after contemporary figures; there's an Evelyn Glennie Music Faculty; a Lorne Gillies Square; and a sports team called Portic Thistle.

However, the novel isn't just an extended Scots joke. Its world is a very dark one, where a tropical storm can sink a city suburb, and characters are forced to unusual motivations: a tight legal system, and a powerful taboo about murder, constrain Paolo from any obvious and lethal solutions to his problems, and point up the sheer unpleasantness of his criminal father. Diamond's sole justification for refusing the DNA sample that will release Nadia from years of torment is "Ah am an awfie, awfie bad man".

If you like SF and languages, I highly recommend it.

Eurasis and Africa as depicted
Map via www.floodmap.net

Geeky aside: the geographical assumptions didn't ring quite true. Fitt's "Gods's Flood" - all polar ice melted - raises the sea level by 700 metres. The actual estimate is 70 metres. As with Marcus Sedgwick's Floodland, the pattern of inundation seems to be a fictional vehicle necessary to create a "waterworld" rather than a realistic one - or maybe the author just got the decimal point wrong.

- Ray

A.P.E.X.

The remarkably selective and inaccurate A.P.E.X. trailer

While Googling the works of Philip Roth, I was pleased to run into a film I remember from years back directed by a different Philip Roth - Philip J Roth: the 1994 A.P.E.X.

It's a time-travel story, the premise being that scientists in 2073 are sending a test probe back to 1973. Following a malfunction, one of the scientists, Nicholas Sinclair, follows the probe through to prevent it killing an innocent family, but he inadvertently contaminates the past with a virus. On his return, he finds himself in the new timeline he has created: a 2073 where humanity has been driven to near-extinction by an endless supply of the deadly robot probes sent automatically from the original timeline to erase the contamination. He finds himself an unpopular soldier-technician, his wife a surly and militarily expendable plague carrier who no longer knows him, and his new colleagues completely unaware of what they're fighting. Sinclair uses what influence he has to get a team to escort him to the ruined time laboratory in this revised timeline, where he hopes to reverse the accident. The team doesn't like it; the robots don't like it; and, increasingly, the fabric of spacetime doesn't like it.

In many ways, A.P.E.X. sucks bigtime, and it has attracted much ridicule. Why would a time probe take the form of a rocket-toting humanoid robot of scary and Baroque design? Where are these millions of robots being manufactured? Why are future soldiers always so ill-disciplined and shouty? There's a pleasantly facetious review at Badmovies.org: A.P.E.X.

And yet there's a lot I like about this film. Roth, who co-wrote the story, seems to have a genuine feel for the tropes of SF. The characterisation is unusual: Sinclair is not the gung-ho protagonist usual in this kind of post-apocalyptic rampage, but a thoughtful character whose brow-furrowing angst as an outsider to this brutal alternate world are as central to the story as the action sequences.

And it has a certain geek interest in being one of the two films to feature the single prototype of the Landmaster amphibious vehicle, with its strange 'tri-star' wheel configuration. See Damnation trolley for the other.

It's on YouTube: if you like SF, check it out.

- Ray