Martin's Booklog

Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion — Dan Simmons

Published on August 25, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Hyperion

Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion
Dan Simmons
482, 517 pages
published in 1989 & 1990

No book, whether fiction or non-fiction is truly neutral or can truly stand on its own. Like it or not we always judge a book in the context of when you read it, what you know about it and its author, what others have told you about either. It’s rare that you get into a book truly knowing nothing about it or its writer; even then what you have read before will partially determine how you will respond to it. Especially in SFF we tend to pretend that context shouldn’t matter and we should evaluate a novel on its merits without taking in account its writer’s politics and opinions, but it doesn’t work that way in reality. Knowing that Roald Dahl was an antisemitic arsehole made me never want to read any of his books again even though I loved James and the Giant Peach as a child even if his antisemitism didn’t impact his novels. Not to say good art cannot be created by bad people, nor even that good art cannot be made in service to evil causes (Ezra Pound’s poetry springs to mind). Just that your enjoyment of such art can be indelibly tainted by this knowledge even when the creator’s awfulness has no impact on their art. Often though a creator’s bad opinions or politics do bleed through into their art and knowing about them can retroactively spoil their work.

All of which is to say that I reread Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion after realising how much of a raging islamophobe Dan Simmons really is and it completely ruined any enjoyment I had of these two novels. They were mind blowing when I first read them from my local library in the early nineties, the first modern space opera I had read. Dependent on said library as I was growing up, most of its science fiction was either Golden Age stuff by the usual subjects like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, or seventies New Wave and literary minded novels. In that context Hyperion was a revelation. Not just space opera, but aspiring to be literature at the same time, being deliberately structured like the The Canterbury Tales and with the resurrected Romantic poet John Keats as one of the main characters. For a teenager with little interest in proper literature this was heady stuff.

But that was before Dan Simmons wrote this:

“I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “Your future. Everyone’s.” He was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he stood, refilled his Scotch glass, and sat again. He said, “It was important to me to come back to this time early on in the struggle. Even if only to remind myself of how unspeakably blind you all were.”

“You mean the War on Terrorism,” I said.

“I mean the Long War with Islam,” he said. “The Century War. And it’s not over yet where I come from. Not close to being over.”

“You can’t have a war with Islam,” I said. “You can’t go to war against a religion. Radical Islam, maybe. Jihadism. Some extremists. But not a . . . the . . . religion itself. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are peaceloving people who wish us no harm. I mean . . . I mean . . . the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘Peace.’”

“So you kept telling yourselves,” said the Time Traveler. His voice was very low but there was a strange and almost frightening edge to it. “But the ‘peace’ in ‘Islam’ means ‘Submission.’ You’ll find that out soon enough”

Almost twentyfive years on it’s hard to understand how deeply 9/11 and the following War On Terror fried the brains of a lot of Americans, Simmons being one of them. The 9/11 attacks angered and upset America like nothing else had done since Pearl Harbour and it’s not hyperbole to say the nation lost its mind for a few years. In retrospect, Simmons already had an xenophobic streak in him, most noticable in his horror novels like Children of the Night (set in Romania) and Song of Kali (India), but 9/11 put it in overdrive. And once it was out in the open it became noticable in his Hyperion novels too.

I had originally wanting to reread Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion because reading Excession had put me the mood for a similar but different book, not necessarily another Banks one. Hyperion came closest to what I was looking for. Part of the the space opera revival of the late eighties I talked about in my review of Eternal Light to which you could see Excession as a capstone, it won the Hugo Award for best novel the year after it came out. Despite now knowing about Simmons politics I wasn’t sure it would impact my reading, but sadly it did. There were certain plot elements that looked a lot more sinister now in context: the background detail that Israel had been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust and the description of a Shite uprising on one of the colony worlds and how Fedmahn Kassad, a Palestinina soldier had put it down.

But even before I got to them Hyperon disappointed me with its opening chapter, in which the Consul, the nominal protagonist, sits in his spaceship on a primitive planet playing Rachmaninov on his Steinway piano while outside a thunderstorm rages and dinosaurs bellow. It’s such an overwrought, b-movie villain cliche it made me laugh rereading it. Completely destroyed any respect I had for Hyperion as a novel. Some of which had already been lost by the late nineties, much dumber sequels to the series, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, neither of which had been necessary nor good. Reading that silly prologue set the tone for me. Any goodwill I had for the series was definitely lost by it.

As said, the plot of Hyperion is structured like that of The Canterbury Tales. Seven pilgrims on their way to the so-called Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion, outside of civilised space, where the monstrous Shrike stands guard. During their journey each of the pilgrims in turn tells how they are connected to the Tombs and the Shrike. Meanwhile Hyperion is under threat of invasion by the Ousters, barbarian hordes from interstellar space who exists outside civilisation as represented by the Hegemony, who control the Farcaster teleportation network binding true civilisation together. While Hyperion tells the stories of each of the individual pilgrims as they journey to the Tombs, The Fall of Hyperion details what happens once they arrive. This is much more of a conventional space opera as all the various back stories and plot lines come together.

Even though I was very hostile going in, I could still see what had first appealed to me in these two novels. He may have nasty politics and a tendency for the purple prose, but once he got going, he still sucked me into the story. The world he created in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion has fascinated and inspired me ever since I first read them; at some level these are still what I judge any new space opera stories I read on.

Fun fact: I started writing this review in 2006, after I had finished rereading both Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. For various reasons I never completed them, even though I tried again in 2014. It’s only thanks to Sean Eric Fagan’s Bluesky post about Simmons and the short discussion of Hyperion there that I got a handle on how to finally complete this post.

Shock and Awe — Simon Reynolds

Published on August 25, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Shock and Awe

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy
Simon Reynolds
687 pages including notes and index
published in 2016

Shock and Awe came out the same year David Bowie died, which seems fitting. Bowie after all being glam rock’s most enduring legacy. He had only been a one hit wonder with a couple of unsuccessful albums before he went glam. Ziggy Stardust was what made him famous. Playing a fictional rock star lead to becoming a real rock star, something of a theme in glam rock if Simon Reynolds is to believed. Fake till you make it, something Bowie’s biggest rival, Marc Bolan, also did. Glam rock as make believe, artificial, fake, camp and proud of it. Music for a new generation of pop fans, tired of their older brother’s “Beatles and the Stones” and looking for something more fashionable and cool than earnest long hairs in jeans doing interminable guitar solos. As its name implies, glam rock bought the glamour and excitement back to pop music, brought back a certain sophistication that was more rooted in European music traditions than American blues. An element of snobbery and intellectual disdain certainly was present too with Bowie and Bolan and especially with Bryan Fery’s Roxy Music.

Yet the defining image of glam rock is probably something like this: ugly old blokes in outlandish costumes doing well choreographed danceable foot stompers. Mud, Sweet, Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter, Slade, Alvin Stardust and Wizzard all fit that profile. Artists that had been around the block already, plugging away with little or no success, markedly older than their audience unlike the previous generation of rock stars, who realised that what Bolan and Bowie were doing they could do as well. The image was as important as the music and the music was often somewhat interchangeable, not helped by the fact that e.g. Mud and Sweet shared the same song writers. Intensely popular in the early seventies, it all looked incredibly naff afterwards as punk hit the UK.

Yet there was more to glam rock than this, as Reynolds attempts to show in Shock and Awe. The starting gun for the whole glam rock movement was T.Rex’s first appearance on Top of the Pops in February 1971 and Reynolds also starts his book there, with Marc Bolan, chronicling how he evolved from a fairly standard hippie rocker into the most glamorous pop star of the seventies. Bolan started it, but it’s his friend and rival Bowie who is the red thread holding Shock and Awe together, his evolution as an artist driving the evolution of glam rock in a certain sense. Every third or fourth chapter he pops up again with the next stage in his development, from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke and finally his Berlin period.

In between there are chapters on the other strands of glam rock. Not just the foot stompers like Mud and Sweet, but also Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, Sparks, Queen, Roxy Music, Steve Harley and even The Sensational Alex Harvey Band are examined. There are also the David Bowie proteges: Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople, already established artists getting a glam makeover courtesy of Bowie and finding some success through it they lacked before. A diverse bunch of artists, who outside of the Mud-Sweet-Glitter axis have little in common musically, yet certain elements can be found in all of them.

The fashion and the image consciousness of all of them is the most obvious of course. Each rejected the long hair and jeans looks of the older bands, going for a more glamorous, more outre look. A certain androgyny was part and parcel of this. Makeup and glitter, feminised clothing, a bit of sexual ambiguity can be found in most of these bands, though actual gay or even bisexual artists were rare. A sense of nostalgia, or looking back at older forms of rock music was also there, getting away from the ‘heaviness’ rock had evolved in by the early seventies. Ironically, this while their main audience was the so-called third generation of rock fans, young teenagers who hadn’t been alive for that first wave of rock they reached back to. There is also a heavy influence of older European music forms in many of these artists, especially with Roxy Music and of course Bowie.

Reynolds follows the story of glam rock until the late seventies, ending with David Bowie’s Berlin triology of albums: Heroes, Low and Lodger, in the process tracing the influences glam had on punk. The last chapter is a collection of moments in pop music showcasing glam’s continuing influence on pop and rock. This is the least convincing or interesting part of the book to be honest. At some point glam just becomes another part of the whole rock tradition and I’m not sure you could call Lady Gaga ‘glam’ just because she also dressed up or whatever.

The real test of any music book is always if it makes you want to listen to what it is about and Shock and Awe certainyl managed that. I’ve been on a Bowie/T.Rex/Roxy Music/New York Dolls kick ever since I started it. A good, very readable look at a perhaps still underestimated part of rock history.

More Simon Reynolds: Rip it Up and Start Again on the post-punk revolution.

Medieval Military Technology — Kelly DeVries & Robert Douglas Smith

Published on July 2, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Medieval Military Technology

Medieval Military Technology
Kelly DeVries & Robert Douglas Smith
356 pages including notes and index
published in 2013

Medieval Military Technology is an attempt to provide an overview of all aspects of Medieval weaponry and other technology in one book, as you might’ve suspected from the title. When this was originally published it was the first of its kind for the Middle Ages; this is the second edition. Trying to cover such a huge period like this is rather a challenge of course and that this books tries to cover all aspects of warfare means it can’t really go into too much detail on each individual aspect. Nevertheless an single volume overview like this was exactly what I was looking for, having gotten interested in the topic through watching too many medievaloid fantasy anime…

To be honest, this was a bit of a disappointment. DeVries and Smith turned out to be not very engaging as writers and the end result was a much more stodgy book than it could’ve been. Medieval Military Technology methodologically goes through first personal weaponry and armour, followed by siege weapons, fortifications and finally warships. Each separate part starts with an introduction that tries to sum of the history of its subject up to the Early Middle Ages before going into more detail in separate chapters on its various sub topics. Especially in the first part of the book this approach, detailing each and every possible Medieval weapon and bit of armour, is a bit dry. This is not helped by a lack of illustrations. A few more technical drawings, especially for all the various armour types would have been appreciated. The same lack of illustrations also hamper the other parts, but on the whole I found those to be easier to follow and less dull.

What I found also lacking was how all this technology was used in practise, how it evolved tactically and strategically, how the various bits worked together. Again, the first part is the worst for this because it has so many diverse types of weapons and armour to handle, few of which get more than a few pages to themselves. The only time when the impact of a specific technology is discussed is in chapter 3, about the invention of the stirrup and how it made mounted shock combat possible. Without a stirrup a knight could not brace himself for the shock of running somebody through with his spear or lance; with it he could. This invention arguably led to the invention of feudalism, as rulers had to depend on subjects rich enough to be able to afford to keep horses, therefore needing to grant them lands to be able to do so. DeVries and Smith go into detail on the merits of this thesis, summarising the arguments of supporters and opponents. It’s a strangely argumentative chapter in what’s otherwise a more encyclopedic work.

On the whole then, this was a decent enough overview but it’s not good enough for me to buy a copy for myself. You’d get much of the same value from reading the relevant pages on Wikipedia.

The 4% Universe — Richard Panek

Published on July 2, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of The 4% Universe

The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
Richard Panek
297 pages including notes and index
published in 2011

As a child reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos it all seemed so simple. Some 13-14 billion years ago the Big Bang started the universe, which has been expanding ever since. In due time as it cooled off the first stars and galaxies appeared, formed from primordial hydrogen & helium gases through the power of gravitational attractions. The novas and supernovas from those first generations of stars would create the heavier elements needed for life to arise and ultimately the Solar System would form with the Earth being just right for us to evolve on. As Sagan explained, what would happen next depended very much on the total mass of the universe. If big enough, gravity would slow down its expansion and cause it to collapse, maybe triggering a new Big Bang. If small enough, the expansion could not be stopped and first galaxies, then stars would drift further and further apart until we were alone. If just right, expansion would stop but the collapse would be prevented. Knowing the mass of the universe therefore is important.

And this is where the problems arise: if you count up the mass of all the galaxies, stars, quasars, pulsars, etc, everything you can see with the electromagnetic spectrum, the amount of observable mass of the universe is just four percent of what it actually is according to all our other measurements. There has to be something else therefore that makes up the difference and it’s this something else is what is driving the fate of the universe. It’s the quest to discover what this might be that is the topic of The 4% Universe.

Panek starts this quest in 1964, just before the discover of the cosmic microwave background, following the story until he reaches the present consensus on what the universe looks like and what its likely fate is. Since this was published in 2011 the state of the art has moved on in the almost decade and a half since this was written, but that isn’t a major problem. Much of the The 4% Universe is about the journey of discovery and the people involved, how the then current consensus was reached, which is still interesting even if it has moved on since. Following a roughly chronological order, Panek divides the story in roughly four parts, looking at the different aspects of the problem of the universe’s missing mass. This turns out to be not just a problem for astronomers looking at stars and galaxies and finding too few, but also for cosmologists whose mathematical theories about the universe are directly impacted by this missing mass and particle scientists, whose models might hold the key to solving the problem.

As Panek puts the building blocks together, the picture that emerges is roughly that which you can read at the Wikipedia page on the Universe. That simple history Sagan showed me turned to be much more complicated. What you see in the night sky is not the entire universe and the largest parts of it cannot be seen at all: dark matter, some 23 percent of the universe and dark energy, the remaining 63 percent. And some of the things that we could see if we were close enough are forever out of our reach as they lay beyond the observable parts of the universe, expanding away from us too quickly to be reached by our light.

If you are more interested in cosmology than the history of our understanding of it The 4% Universe is the wrong book for you, as its understanding of it is outdated and its view of it rather high level; reading Wikipedia might be more useful. For me however it did a good job of showing that history and it was the first book to made me realise that doubts about that simple Big Bang model and questions about the mass of visible Galaxies were much older than I knew. It was also the first book for me that clearly spelled out that the cosmic inflation of the early universe happened at faster than light speeds. Obvious, you would think but I never quite got that the universe itself can expand faster than the speed of light and that its limit as the fastest speed possible only applies to objects within it.

Walcheren to Waterloo — Andrew Limm

Published on July 1, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Walcheren to Waterloo

Walcheren to Waterloo: The British Army in the Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars 1793-1815
Andrew Limm
237 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

Back in the nineties, in order to pay my study fees, I used to work the Summers in a chips shop in Veere which was owned by the same people who owned the Campveerse Toren restaurant and hotel, which was the headquarters of the English expeditionary force to Walcheren in 1809. This has little relevance to the actual book to be discussed here, but if I cannot indulge myself in pointless anecdotes in my own booklog, where else? At the very least, this personal history is part of why this title grabbed my eye.

Alliterative as it is, Walcheren to Waterloo is a bit misleading however as Waterloo is barely discussed here, nor does the story start with that failed expedition to Walcheren. Instead, it’s a more general overview of the four different campaigns British forces fought int he Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars. Those in order being the campaign to occupy Dunkirk in 1793 and the following retreat through the Netherlands in 1795/95, the expedition to Northern Holland in 1799, the aforementioned campaign in Walcheren and finally the failed assault on Bergen Op Zoom in 1813-1814. You’ll note that none of these campaigns were at all successful, all ending in failure and British withdrawal from the Low Countries. This may explain why, as Limm shows in his introduction, these campaigns have received relatively little attention compared to Wellington’s campaigns in Portugal and Spain, let alone Waterloo. For Limm they are a good tool to attack the idea that the British Army had transformed itself between 1798 and 1809, by providing a counterexample to the successful British campaigns of the Peninsular War. As he attempts to show, each campaign, whether it took place before, during or after this supposed transformation, suffered from the same flaws, leading to their ultimate failure. This should not happen if the British Army, smarting from its defeats in the American Revolutionary War and their early interventions in the French Revolutionary Wars, was indeed transformed by the reforms enacting by the Duke of York during this period.

As Limm goes through each campaign in order, it does become clear that the same errors were made over and over again. Each campaign was marred by opportunism, the desire for a quick win overriding any other consideration. Planning for each was abysmal and had to be done in a hurry because each campaign was decided on at the spur of the moment. Intelligence about both the country to be fought in as the enemy forces to fight was always lacking, nor seemed to be a priority for the planners. Because of bad, hurried planning and lack of reliable intelligence, the logistics for each campaign were a shamble as well. The lack of cooperation and coordination between the army and navy, something that is somewhat important for an amphibious operation, did not help here either. The execution of each campaign is not inspiring either, with the nadir being the Walcheren campaign, which saw a large part of the expeditionary force fell ill with the Walcheren flu, which ended up killing thousands. Because clear objectives were lacking due to the rushed planning, each campaign ended up spinning their wheels in search of one. While individual battles were won, strategically each was a failure.

The same pattern repeats time and again. The English manage to land with some difficulty, win their early battles and maybe reach some of the objectives before the lack of planning lets them down. Making the problem worse is the preference each commander seems to have had for over complicating his attack plans, needlessly splitting up his forces instead of concentrating them, as best shown in the campaign in North Holland. There it meant that part of the allied Anglo Russian forces had secured their objectives, but were now too far away to influence of the battles elsewhere, leading to piecemeal defeats there. Though not fatal, these defeats means that the French and Dutch forces opposing them get the space to reorganise and be reinforced, leading to a loss of momentum and ultimately a retreat when the expedition’s nominal goals can no longer be achieved.

That this happened during the early campaigns at Dunkirk and Den Helder is one thing, but that this was repeated at Walcheren and Bergen op Zoom indicates that nothing was learned from these earlier failures even when some of the same people were involved. This is one of Limm’s key points, that the Napoleonic Era British Army did not have any sort of institutional memory nor did its leaders have any desire to examine and learn from those failures. The British also had a nasty habit of blaming their allies for their own failures, as with the Russians in the North Holland campaign. The conclusion he reaches is that it took the exceptional talents and dedication of a Wellington to achieve any semblance of this, but that this was limited to him and his direct staff and commanders. Because it was Wellington driving the campaigns in Spain and at Waterloo they were successful; with any other commander this may not have been the case.

an interesting read if with a slightly misleading title. One thing I did struggle with was that Limm’s command of Dutch geography and place names is not always the greatest. Texel is not a river (it’s an island) and Den Helder is not at the mouth of it. Limm also has a habit of making the armies march in a northern or southern direction when would be more fitting to speak of a easterly or westerly one. It took some getting used to and some squinting at maps to make things clear. It would also have been appreciated if the maps had been located in their respective chapters, rather than clustered in the front of the book. Small quibbles for what was an enlightening look at a military period I knew little about.