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Monday, January 30, 2023

John Bellamy Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution

Over the last quarter of a century, John Bellamy Foster's work on ecological Marxism has been hugely influential on the international left. His book Marx's Ecology, published in 2000, was incredibly timely. Coming as the world was increasingly aware of the environmental crises that people faced and offering new insights into how Marx and Marxists have understood nature and the way human society changes the world that we are part of.

As editor of the US socialist magazine Monthly Review Foster continues a prodigious output of articles that grapple with many different topics, but his work on the environment and ecology continues to develop. This new book brings together and updates many of Foster's articles from various different sources, with a particular focus on the way that capitalism transforms nature. Even those who regularly read Foster's articles in Monthly Review will find new material here as it includes articles from a wide variety of popular and academic journals and all of them have been brought up to date.

Foster's argument can be summed up with quote from the introduction where he explains the peculiar relationship that capitalism has to nature. Quoting Karl Marx, Foster writes:

Nature in this system is viewed simply as a 'free gift' to capital, while the vast majority of human beings are treated as an exploitable and expendable mass from which to generate surplus for the wealthy owners. The result is a system that knows no bounds, is oblivious to genuinely human needs, and is inherently unsustainable - now confronting its absolute limits in the Anthropocene.

Many of the chapters explore how exactly this process takes place. Foster looks at the growth imperative within capitalism, that drives accumulation and systematically degrades nature. He engages with contemporary debates about how this system can be challenged, including the degrowth movement. He notes, for instance, while discussing Naomi Klein's work that many critics of the left willingly confuse matters by arguing that degrowth is similar to "the austerity policies associated with neoliberalism" rather than a transformative project that fights for an economy based on "rational use of resources under conditions of absolute necessity and the promotion of equality and community".

As most of these chapters first appeared as articles over a number of years the reader will not a development of Foster's arguments through the book. This is frequently in response to evolving social movements. Foster notes, for instance, that "main thrust" of the environmental movement has changed. shifting "from demand-side initiatives aimed at reducing consumer-market demand for carbon fuels to supply-side strategies aimed at corporations and designed to keep fossil fuels in the ground".

Some chapters however explore more theoretical debates. A number of these are more challenging, and require careful reading. There's an interesting chapter on "the theory of unequal ecological exchange" which explores how Howard Odum's ideas of "emergy" might be synthesised with Marx's own dialectical understanding of society and nature to produce a clearer understanding of how the inequalities of global capitalism had led to an "unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery". There are some useful concepts here, but Foster cautions us that "learning from such a systems ecology approach is one thing; falling prey to the reductionism to which it can potentially lead is another. In any Marxian analysis, ecological materialism must take theoretical precedence over energetics".

Other articles deal with Engels and dialectics and several are defences of Foster works from his critics, particular those on the left who critique the "metabolic rift" theory that Foster develops from Marx's work. I have discussed some of this elsewhere and won't revisit that in this review. Instead I want to finish with a look at Foster's discussion of the struggle for a sustainable world.

What sort of society might this be? Foster argues that a sustainable society is one where there is a rational organisation of the interaction, the metabolism between society and nature. This would be a society organised by the "associated producers" whose aim would be to pass on the world to succeeding generations. This, he notes, contrasts with reformist strategies - even radical ones - where there is no fundamental transformation in economic organisation. For instance,

rather than dealing with the unemployment problem directly - through a radical program that would give people jobs aimed at he creation of genuine use values in ways compatible with a more sustainable society - degrowth theorists prefer to emphasize sorter working hours.

But, he continues, "it is hard to see the viability of shorter work hours and basic income guarantees on the scale suggested other than as elements in a transition to a post-capitalist (indeed socialist) society."

In fact one of the themes that runs though Foster work in this collection is a sense of urgency at the need for fundamental social transformation in the face of ecological collapse. As such, Foster argues that radical demands can only be successful as part of a wider struggle for systemic change. How does Foster envision social transformation? He writes:

Here it is important to recognize that an ecological and social revolution under present historical conditions is likely to pass through two stages that we can call ecodemocratic and ecosocialist. The self-mobilisation of the population will initially take an ecodemocratic form, emphasizing the building of energy alternatives combined with just transition, but in a context generally lacking any systematic critique of production or consumption. Eventually, the pressure of climate change and the struggle for social and ecological justice, spurred on by the mobilisation of diverse communities, can be expected to lead to a more comprehensive ecorevolutionary view, penetrating the veil of the received ideology.

It is not immediately clear to me whether Foster's description here is intended to refer to the period after workers' have won state power and overthrown capitalism, or if it is intended to mean the whole period of revolutionary transition. A few paragraphs later he says, "The path toward ecological and social freedom requires abandoning a mode of production rooted in the exploitation of human labour and the expropriation of nature and peoples." In this case, we must understand Foster's earlier vision as being post-revolution, in the sense of taking place after the defeat of capitalism yet while the earlier social and economic relations continue to exist.

Foster explains that "in general we can expect the Global South to be the site of the most rapid growth of an environmental proletariat, arising from the degradation of material conditions of the population in ways hat are equally ecological and economic".

As I have written previously I am wary of the phrase "environmental proletariat" as it might be interpreted as downplaying the historical role of the working class as producers of surplus value under capitalism. But I am not sure that Foster means it quite in this sense, as he explains the term as referring to a "broad mass" of the population who gain awareness of the environmental threat leading them to revolutionary action. Having said that I do think Marxists need to insist on the centrality of the working class to revolutionary struggle. They are a class defined by their lack of ownership of the means of production and their need to sell their labour power. The working class is the class upon whom capitalist society depends, who have the power to stop the capitalist economy and through their revolutionary organisation build a socialist society.

Of course their position in society will not lead workers directly to an ecological consciousness, but this is why campaigns by environmentalists remain so important - as they can bring ecological issues into the working class movement. On a small scale the presence of environmental activists, often encouraged by socialists, on picket lines in the current mini-strike wave in Britain, is a good example of this process. In this sense Foster's term "environmental proletariat" is a helpful concept.

As with all of his work, John Bellamy Foster's Capitalism in the Anthropocene is enormously stimulating. The book covers many different subjects and readers will find much to grapple with. Foster's theoretical work has been crucial to a new generation of activists, socialists and Marxists trying to get to grips with the multifaceted capitalist crisis we all face. The strength of Foster's work is that it gives a clear theoretical base to the revolutionary struggles that we are engaged in. As such this, and Foster's earlier books, are a crucial tool for the fight for socialism.

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Karl Marx - The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Outside of the radical left The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is not one of Karl Marx's best known works. This is a shame, because it is an engaging, humorous and brilliant work of historical analysis that showcases Marx's writing skills, his polemic and, as Engels notes, his "thorough knowledge of French history". More importantly it is where Marx uses his "great law of motion of history" to show how events are the "clear expression of struggles between social classes", and as Engels said in 1885 "after thirty-three years we must still say that [the work] has stood the test of brilliantly."

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte deals with events in France after the revolutionary proletarian movement of 1848 has been defeated. It is not a straightforward history of events and readers looking for that will need to supplement their knowledge from elsewhere, including Marx's own Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850. Rather Marx shows how specific events in France arise out of the clash between differing class interests, in particular those of different sections of the bourgeoise colliding with each other. But Marx demonstrates how the working class is instrumental in driving forward some of those interests, before itself being isolated and defeated. This passage gives a sense of how Marx writes history - with the back and forth of class struggle shaping wider events:

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than three thousand insurgents were butchered after the victory, and fifteen thousand were deported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat passes into the background on the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but with ever decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As soon as one of the social strata above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows become the weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are distributed.

Marx, of course, reserves his praise for the workers who fought, as against the cowardly, reactionary bourgeoisie.

But at least it succumbs with the honors of the great, world-historic struggle; not only France, but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the ensuing defeats of the upper classes are so cheaply bought that they require barefaced exaggeration by the victorious party to be able to pass for events at all, and become the more ignominious the further the defeated party is removed from the proletarian party.

Marx wrote this to explain the success of Louis Bonaparte, a figure whose seizure of power, and his Janus faced policies, became a byword on the left for reactionary governments and figures. But reading the 18th Brumaire I was repeatedly struck by how Marx places historical materialist analysis front and centre of every event. It produces some of his most memorable and also clear statements on different groups in society, for instance the peasantry, who Marx says forms the class basis for Napoleon's power:

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships... the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes... They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.

The reference here to the peasants as being a "sack of potatoes" reminds me that this book is full of some of Marx's most quotable passages. It is where, for instance, Marx quips that history repeats itself as tragedy and farce, where he writes that people make history, but not in circumstances of their choosing and where he reminds us of the way the capitalist class subordinates all to their interests:

The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist’s caldron of capital.

Without some knowledge of French history, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is not an easy read, but it is worthwhile as it is perhaps the finest example of Marx's application of his own historical materialism.

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein - The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime & Dreams Deferred

It is not uncommon, while looking at reviews of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's The Disordered Cosmos, to see people describe it as a book of two halves, the first being the difficult science and the second the politics. But to read The Disordered Cosmos like this is to misunderstand a fundamental point about Prescod-Weinstein's powerful polemic. One of her key arguments is that science, and that includes the cosmology and particle physics that she researches, cannot be separated from politics. This is something that the author herself learnt, as she writes in to the introduction, "my new understanding that society would follow me into the world of physics was also something of a phase transition for me."

Prescod-Weinstein's research is complicated. That said, she has a gift for analogy and clear writing that makes the concepts she deals with as accessible as possible. Much of Prescod-Weinstein's work is related to "Dark Matter". This is the mysterious substance that dominates our universe yet is invisible to our detectors. We can infer its existence from experimental measurements and from the complex equations that Prescod-Weinstein loves (though she is careful to only include one of these in the book!). In her explanation of her own work, and the "disordered cosmos" we live in, she begins with the smallest particles and their components, building up and linking these to the enormous structures of galaxies and clusters of galaxies that dominate the galaxy we can see. It is fascinating and Prescod-Weinstein is a brilliant communicator and tackles some amazing science.

But as she explains the science, Prescod-Weinstein also does two other things. She constructs useful metaphors that allow her to explain wider, political issues and tackles the way that capitalism shapes the very framework that scientists use to understand the world. Let's look at a good example of this. Prescod-Weinstein says:

Newton's conception of objects moving in space relied intensely on Euclidean geometry as an organising framework. I a sense, students are still introduced to calculus through this lens... Almost everything in my education about space eventually came back to Euclidean geometry, because it was supposedly intuitive.

But she continues,

The Palikur people of the Amazon see it rather differently. Their geometric system, which more accurately describes the movement of stars across the night sky than the Euclidean one, is what we would call 'curvilinear.' Understanding stars moving across the sky requires a king of intuition for curves - something that's hard to gain when you're always thinking in Euclidean terms. The Palikur system seems to train the mind to think in terms of curves from the very start.

This, is an important insight. The intellectual framework we have for understanding science arises out of a particular time and space - the European enlightenment. This was, as Prescod-Weinstein says, then imposed on the rest of the world through an ongoing process of imperialism and settler-colonialism. So our science is closely tied up with the interests of the capitalist system.

Prescod-Weinstein points out that even a subject as seemingly scientifically "pure" as astronomy is tainted by its role in this process. She highlights the recent debates over a new telescope on Mauna Kea were administrators and scientists dismissed indigenous communities concerns. European astronomy expeditions needed the labour of slaves and indigenous people and their findings helped spread the capitalist system around the globe. Those astronomers and scientists who would dismiss the close links between astronomy and the interests of capital might like to note that the first thing a visitor sees when arriving at the Greenwich Observatory in London is not the brass meridian line, but a set of "Imperial Standards of Length" crucial to the organisation of global commerce. The meridian line itself carves up the world based on a line drawn through the capital of the British Empire. Time itself was transformed by capitalism, as EP Thompson famously wrote about in his article Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.

Our intellectual frameworks then arise out of the dominant economic and political interests of the system we live in - and this has shaped even the science that Prescod-Weinstein studies. The use of colour names as analogies in particles physics is problematic, and Quantum Chromodynamics was originally (and sometimes still is) called "colored physics". A name that would not have been used, as Precod-Weinstein points out, had Black people not been "excluded" from particle physics in the 1960s. The language of physics is "a hot mess".

Which brings me to one of the key points of this book - racism. Physics, Prescod-Weinstein points out, has a racism problem. Part of that is something that she calls "white empiricisms", this is

a practice of ignoring information about the real world that isn't considered to be valuable or specifically important to the physics community at large, which is oriented toward valuing the ideas and data that are produced by white men... I developed this argument by using the specific example of how Black women are treated in the scientific workplace and juxtaposing it against a debate about whether actual observations and experiments are necessary to support theories of quantum gravity. Black women are constantly asked to provide hard evidence for our evaluations of our most common place experiences with discrimination, et white men are taken seriously when they suggest that more affirming data isn't necessary in order to test their theories of quantum gravity.

Physics is a subject that has been built upon racist structures and individual actions of racism and colonialism. As James Poskett has recently pointed out, Isaac Newton had enormous investments in the South Sea Company, which in turn made massive profits from the slave trade. Prescod-Weinstein shows how indigenous people, slaves and servants had their knowledge and labour stolen and used by white-male scientists who claimed it as their own. The scientific establishment has developed on a structural racism that has deep historic roots - both systemically in terms of the history of capitalism and institutionally in terms of the history of the science itself.

The problems with structural racism, and misogyny that Prescod-Weinstein documents, mean that physics is not a welcoming space for people who don't fit the white-male norm. Prescod-Weinstein gives us the unpleasant statistics. But she also tells us her experiences - the racism, the sexism, transphobia and homophobia and the difficulties that students who come from lower income backgrounds (something that is much more common for Black students) experience arriving in an academic environment that is shaped by the interests of better off white people. I suspect this is true of other sciences too, but Prescod-Weinstein argues it is particularly a problem in physics. She also highlights that trans and nonbinary people in physics are "particularly harmed by gender discrimination, including by advisers and colleagues who refuse to use people's correct pronouns". Too often the institutions say that its "too difficult" to learn how to do this. To which Prescod-Weinstein rages:

First-year college physics students are expected in just one semester to not only memorize Newton's laws of physics but also to learn how to apply them. If we can have the lofty expectations that our students will master the basics of gravity - a deeply mysterious force that pervades the entire universe - then surely they are owed mastery by their professors and classmates of a couple of letters that get their pronouns right.

So Prescod-Weinstein is under no illusions that more training in "microaggressions" or "antiracism" is enough to solve this problem. Nor is simply increasing the number of black or LGBT+ students. As she says, "My personal success will not end the structural racism that keeps so many Black people and refugees, especially single mothers, their children, and trans folks in poverty."

Instead what is needed is the destruction of a system that is based on oppression and exploitation. Prescod-Weinstein is very clear that the systemic and structural problems that she outlines are the consequence of centuries of colonial and imperialist rule, and are integral to capitalism. They distort science, and they distort scientists and they make it harder to practice science. As such the system needs to go.

Prescod-Weinstein's book is a powerful, beautifully written study of science and society. It is, at times, a difficult read, because the subject matter includes racism, sexism, transphobia, sexual abuse and rape. Towards the end of the book she writes that as a teenager she believed "that if we solved the fundamental equations of physics, the rest of the proper order of the universe could be derived". This chimed with my own experiences studying mathematics and physics at university. As a white, heterosexual male I certainly do not claim that I can share her experiences of oppression. But I did have a naïve belief in "pure science" that I thought would fix the world. Finding that this was not the case was one of the reasons I became a socialist activist.

In reading The Disordered Cosmos I was reminded however that science, and education, do matter in and of themselves and that we want more people to enjoy them. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's book is filled with her enthusiasm for the universe, as much as it is filled with a rage against a system that denies this to so many people. As she concludes, "We must demand liberation for all, including the right to know and understand the night sky, not as the context of desperate and generous searches for freedom, but as the beautiful place that holds the answers to how we came to exist at all."

Related Reviews

Richardson - Say it Loud! Marxism & the Fight Against Racism
Saini - Superior: The Return of Race Science
Horne - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
Winterburn - The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel: The Lost Heroine of Astronomy
Angus - A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Miller - Empire of the Stars : Chandra, Eddington and the Quest for Blackholes

Poskett - Horizons: A Global History of Science
Farmelo - It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science
Ananthaswamy - Through Two Doors at Once

Clegg - Gravity: Why What Goes Up, Must Come Down

Greene - The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

Monday, January 23, 2023

Bethany Clift - Last one at the Party

Regular readers of this blog (there are some, right?) might have spotted my predilection for "end of the world" dystopian fiction. The various threats to the world we live in - pandemic, war and environmental - have stimulated a resurgence in the genre and I have been enjoying their tales of doom. Bethany Clift's take on disaster was begun before Covid-19 impacted humanity, though it features in the opening chapters of her book as the disease she describes 6DM (Six Days Max) erupts out of the United States. "No one wanted to repeat the mistakes of Covid-19" quips her unnamed protagonist, just as governments take rapid, decisive and ultimately pointless action to try and protect their populations.

The United Kingdom as a brief respite from the disease, protected by its island status and a quick decision to blow up the Channel Tunnel, before, inevitably the disease makes its way in and everyone dies. Well everyone that is except for the author of the diary that this book purports to be. This then is the story of the only person left alive, of the minutiae of the end of the world - caring for your dying partner, visiting your dead parents, trying to work out how to find a working car, dealing with the lack of fresh food, and wondering what to do with the rubbish that is no longer taken away. It is a brilliantly believable account, told by a woman who is happy to admit she is completely unprepared for how to deal with this. She "can't change a lightbulb" never mind grow crops. So the story is in someway and account of how she does become equipped to cope with the end of the world, and also a moving account of how our past shapes our attitudes to crises.

Most end of the world novels deal with the fantastical - biker gangs and the like. Last One at the Party considers the mundane - how do we greave for a partner who has died when the relationship was on the rocks? How might our mental health, and the history of our mental health, affect our ability to survive? How would our actions post disaster be shaped by who we were before the disaster? Clift describes how her character navigates both the loss of electricity and her panic attacks. Its a refreshing antidote to those end of the world novels where the central character is a jack of all trades who is also a crack shot. The book is not the dystopian "chick-lit" that some deride it as, its actually really thoughtful and compelling. Clift's prose is easy to read and we are drawn into a world where survival means remembering to fill the petrol tank on the Land Rover, but also not making irrational decisions about where to travel.

There are some intriguing bits too - the rats and seagull infestations evoked George Stewart's ecological end of the world novel Earth Abides. There's also the brilliant depiction of what happens when the last survivor finally meets another survivor. Last One at the Party was an enjoyable read for me, though I felt the ending was a little rushed and slightly unbelievable. But if you like dystopian nightmares, particularly those that develop the "cosy catastrophe" that John Wyndham excelled in, then this is likely for you.

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Helen Pilcher - Life Changing: How Humans are Altering Life on Earth

The ongoing way that human society is changing the species and ecosystems around us has roots in historic ecological transformations and the need for humankind to "first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion". It is a fact acknowledged by Helen Pilcher who begins her study of how humans are altering life on Earth, by examining how they have altered life.

In her opening chapter Pilcher begins with her own "genetically modified wolf", a dog called Higgs, and examines how and why early humans must have domesticated wild animals. Dogs could hunt, defend and provide food and furs to hunter-gatherer communities, likely ensuring their survival. Pilcher then develops these points looking at how our ancestors would have domesticated animals and plants, to produce the cows, chickens, horses and agricultural crops that billions of us depend upon today.

Pilcher sees a continuity between these early domestications and the ongoing changes we are making to species today, what she describes as "our complicated relationship with the natural world and our growing sense of mastery over it". She takes up some important political issues such as environmental destruction and genetically modification, in the hope that the reader will find a "source of inspiration and of hope, because they show us that, when humans take time to care about [the] natural world, great things are possible."

Pilcher embarks on a whistle-stop, and accessible, account of how species change and evolve, before delving into the complexities of genetic modification. She looks at various examples of species, from cows to fish, possums to horses. While some of the science is a little superficial (the book is aimed very much at the general public) Pilcher doesn't shy away from the complex issues these subjects provoke, and links each story to wider contexts - such as extinction, ecological changes or the need to produce more food. Some of these accounts, such as the GM goldfish and the changing nature of farmed chickens touch on more fundamental issues - such as the way that animals are transformed in the interest of profit. Unfortunately Pilcher does not fully interrogate these issues. Writing about the genetic changes that result from selective breeding in cattle aimed at making cows that produce more milk Pilcher says,

although Holstein [a breed of cattle] breeders are beginning to adopt the genetic test for Chief's [an important sire] faulty gene, they too can look past this and see the broader economic picture. Although the faulty gene cost the dairy industry millions of dollars in losses, using Chief's sperm to inseminate dairy cows has still led to US $30 billion in increased milk production over the past 35 years.

She then notes that "we are now beholden to an industry that prioritise short-term productivity over the long-term health and sustainability of its herds". Here the word productivity could be more helpfully replaced by the word profits, as that is what the GM companies and breeding industry is actually interested in. In fact, a great limitation of this book, is that it fails to adequately examine the motivation behind such scientific developments tending to celebrate the science rather than query the motives.

Pilcher celebrates scientific and technology advance in the face of wider social and ecological issues. For instance she writes:

I agree that there are problems with our food system. If these engineered animals are used to prop up an already broken system, then I question their value, but I am open-minded to the use of gene-edited farm animals in different settings. If we could somehow ensure that big companies don't have the monopoly on these animals, and tat they could be made available to smallholders, it could make a big difference to their lives... African sleeping sickness, bird flu, mad cow disease... as scientists unravel the molecular mechanisms that confer immunity, animals could be modified to resist these blights.

But this hope masks a much bigger problem. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation has noted the close links between poverty and African Sleeping Sickness which had been seen "as a colonial disease that had been eliminated and could be relegated to history". Cuts in funding for "control units" had helped lead to a major resurgence in the disease. Repeated outbreaks of Bird Flu are closely linked to the way that industrial agriculture concentrates huge numbers of animals together in the interest of maximising profit, something the late Mike Davis wrote eloquently about. Mad Cow disease too is closely linked to the irrational way that cows were fed in the interest of fast growth and maximising profits.

There are, of course, scientific, technological and medical advances that can help prevent and treat those affected by these diseases. But at their root they are a problem caused by a food system driven by big business in the interest of profit. We can hope big business will not have a monopoly on GM animals, but the reality is that big business has a monopoly on the global food system which drives unsustainable, unhealthy practices and encourages zoonosis. Looking for purely technological solutions to these problems ignores the origin of the problems themselves.

This problem is also there in Pilcher's approach to ecological destruction, where she again looks to scientific and tech solutions. She says, "some find de-extinction unnatural. The scientists responsible have been accused of 'playing God', but don't we also play God when we destroy forests, over-hunt, pollute the planet and warm our word?"

While the science Pilcher describes is very modern, sadly her framework is dated. "As our numbers have grown, our impact on the planet has intensified. Now humans have become an evolutionary force of extraordinary influence".

But here again Pilcher ignores the nature of an economic system that drives such ecological destruction in the name of profit. "We" aren't guilty of anything. Capitalism, and the big mining, logging, agricultural and fossil fuel corporations are guilty of destruction in their own interests. Looking to corporations to develop technological solutions to biodiversity loss and extinction allows these companies to continue their unsustainable behaviour while placing a green fig-leaf over the consequences.

In the final section of the book we are introduced to some amazing work by conservationists and scientists trying to protect endangered species such as coral and the New Zealand flightless bird the Kākāpō. The people doing this work are clearly motivated by a desire to save their chosen species, and work incredibly hard to do so. Some of the science (not all of it GM) is incredible, and Pilcher's amazement at this work is infectious. She writes, "It's still evolution, but it's evolution that is guided by a well-meaning, informed human hand. This is conservation at its finest."

But again the focus on saving specific species seems a throwback to an earlier period of environmental activism. Today the struggle against biodiversity loss needs a much more systemic approach that looks at the way that ecological systems are placed at the mercy of capital. Conservation at its finest would be the integration of such science and technological insights into a wider challenge to the economic interests that are destroying the coral reefs, cutting rainforest or draining wetlands - an approach that would recognise the subordination of natural systems to the interests of profit.

Pilcher's book left me intensely frustrated. It is a book that attempts to understand how human society impacts upon the natural world, but divorces its discussion of the science of Genetic Modification and related technologies from human society itself. In particular Pilcher fails to really discuss the question of these technologies in the context of a world dominated by the pursuit of profit. She touches on some concerns about GM, but doesn't raise any real issues about accountability or democratic control of these technologies - or even the question of science under capitalism. Instead she seems spellbound by the science, isolated from social context, and that makes for a deeply unsatisfactory study of some of the most important questions of our era.

Friday, January 20, 2023

Christopher St John Sprigg - Death of an Airman

There are several remarkable things about Christopher St John Sprigg's Death of an Airman. The first one is that despite its popularity when first published in the early 1930s, it has been out of print for many decades and has only republished by the British Library's imprint.

The story is an unusual whodunnit, set around a small airbase in the south of England in the early 1930s. Flying has taken off as a hobby for wealthy young people who delight in the thrills and dangers, and the reader is introduced to an excellent selection of unusual characters who form the basis for the mystery. The reader arrives on the scene with the Bishop of Cootamundra, an Australian bishop, "on leave" in England who wants to learn to fly so he can better visit his scattered outback flock.

On the first day of his instruction the Bishop witnesses a crash and determines that there is something odd about the death, concluding that murder has occurred. Here's were the book gets a more unusual and interesting. One thing is the aerodrome's characters - most of these are women, including the young woman, Sally Sackbut, who manages the business - Sprigg clearly did not baulk at giving women characters key roles. Another thing is the motive behind the murder which is related to drugs trafficking. Drugs are an unusual plot device for a mainstream murder mystery in the 1930s and it leads our detectives into an international hunt for the killer. There are some fascinating period aspects to this, at one point a policeman expresses surprise at a murder being linked to drug trafficking, "We don’t often get that mixed up with drugs. Have you brought the stuff you found?" he says! Aircraft from the continent stop for customs checks in Kent!

Another interesting part to the book is the detailed descriptions of aircraft and flying. The author was a expert pilot himself, and in fact the most interesting thing about Death of an Airman is the author. Christopher St John Sprigg is better known to history by his pseudonym, Christopher Caudwell. In 1934, the year Death of an Airman was published, Caudwell was starting on a very intense engagement with Marxism and a few years later would publish his first Marxist book of literary criticism about poetry. Caudwell was also an accomplished poet and critic, whose life and work was cut short when he died fighting for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He died firing a machine gun to cover the escape of his comrades in February 1937, having joined the British Communist Party in 1935.

Reading Death of an Airman to find hints of Caudwell's emerging Marxism is a pointless task, though his inclusion of numerous female characters points to an individual who didn't accept at least some of the most common fictional stereotypes. In fact while Death of an Airman is an unusual novel, its not a brilliant detective one. The cast of characters, the unusual setting and the period details make it a worthwhile read, but the overall dramatic story was a little disappointing.

Related Reviews

Carr - The Hollow Man
Leonard - Maximum Bob
Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice

Sunday, January 15, 2023

Arthur C. Clarke - The Fountains of Paradise

Despite a lifetime spent reading classic science fiction, for some reason I had never read Arthur C Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise. This 1979 novels is considered one of his best and while I devoured many of his books, this one escaped me. In some ways I am glad I did not read this as a youngster. Then I tended to look for the hard science fiction in works by authors like Clarke. I was particularly fond, for instance, of the spaceship Rama and its secrets in Rendezvous with Rama, and its less successful sequels. True, The Fountains of Paradise, has its giant technological marvel, though in this case the story is much more focused on the people who create it.

The book takes the form of historical fiction, telling the deep story behind the creation of Earth's first space elevator. The book is set on a thinly veiled Sri Kanda which Clarke moves closer to the Earth's equator to make the science, and plot, work better. The elevator is conceived of by the engineer Vannevar Morgan whose earlier work includes the first bridge between Europe and Africa. Morgan's proposal to build an elevator is denied by the religious monks who live on the island's tallest peak. But in a framing story going back into the ancient past Clarke cleverly sets up a reason for the monk's to move, leaving Morgan free to build his tower.

There's no doubt that this is Clarke's greatest work. The three linked stories each need the others in order to work, but in many ways they all deal with the creation of marvels - the first is the building of a giant pleasure garden, the other with the bringing of Earth into a galactic empire. But it is the main story, which frames the building of the space elevator through the story of Morgan's life that is the most poignant. Here Clarke returns to the classic idea that technological development is inseparable from humanity's progress. Morgan exemplifies the urge for humans to push outward to the planets and stars. The reader hears little about the other challenges on Earth - poverty and hunger perhaps - these are neglected for a wider story of progress. But nonetheless Clarke makes Morgan's story a good metaphor for human technological development.

That said readers in the 21st century will be amused by the technology itself. Clarke was a renowned futurologist, who made many predictions and came up with some breakthrough scientific ideas. Here he imagines a space elevator and his character uses technology that mirrors the internet, even to the extent of google news alerts. But there's still only one terminal per house!

I enjoyed The Fountains of Paradise a great deal. It is a classic of 1970s science fiction, and probably deserves a suitable film version. It is one of the few classic science fiction novels from this era were the characters are not blurred out by the big science object, and retain a real humanity.

Sunday, January 08, 2023

James Holland - Fortress Malta: An island under siege 1940-1943

Between 1940 and 1943 Malta became one of the most heavily bombed parts of Western Europe. Under siege by the Axis forces because of its crucial strategic position in the Mediterranean, the fact that the island was not captured is testament to the remarkable resilience of its population and tactical mistakes made by Adolf Hitler.

James Holland's Fortress Malta is a detailed account of this story that spares none of the grim details. His accounts of the impact of the siege and the heroic defence of the islands are based on archival material and interviews with men and women who experienced these events. Their stories, frequently laced with personal tragedy, are remarkable. It is particular impressive that Holland was able to capture them given that many of those interviewed were speaking nearly sixty years after the events.

Several things stood out to me from the book. The first was that Malta's story is remarkable because of the unique experience of the island. Far from Britain, low on supplies but of high strategic importance, the defenders experienced events that few civilian populations in Western Europe had to deal with. During the heaviest siege this meant that mass starvation was real, as rations were cut to minuscule levels.

British people are used to imagining that only they experienced the bombing in the Blitz, ignoring what happened to people in Europe - especially Germany. But Malta had it far worse than anywhere on the British mainland. On one day more bombs were dropped by the Germans on a single airfield than hit Coventry during the whole war. Almost no buildings in Malta's towns remained standing, and had it not been for the excavations that could be made into Malta's soft sandstone civilian deaths would have been much higher.

In this context the military made decisions they would not have done anywhere else. Mavericks who couldn't follow orders were not disciplined, but rather tolerated - and Holland focuses on the stories of several of these.

I was struck by how the British saw Malta. Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, who was Commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, and was closely associated with the defence of Malta, commented in his April 1942 farewell message to the islanders, that "The very extent of the success of the forced based on Malta has led to a ceaseless battering of the fortress, but one has only to think of the air effort the enemy is diverting to this purpose to realize that this is but another of the services that Malta is rendering to the Empire". The horrific reality of siege for the Maltese was to be understood solely in terms of "service to the Empire".

Reading Fortress Malta I got the distinct impression that the British leadership cared little for the inhabitants of the island, so long as they continued to help the greater objective of strategically aiding the defence of the Empire. This is particularly noticeable when thinking about how the high command repeatedly failed to understand the real situation and the need to significant numbers of the latest Spitfires. Long after the Battle of Britain had been won, Malta's pilots were outnumbered 30 or 40 to one in air battles. Despite understanding the strategic importance of the island the British military were unable to offer the material support that would have drastically reduced the suffering on the ground. This failure was not solely because of the difficulties of convoy supply.

These mistakes were only surpassed by the idiocy of the German commanders, particularly Hitler. Malta was bombed into the ground and an invasion would have been easy for the Germans who could have severely undermined the Allied efforts in North Africa, and protected their own supply routes. Yet Hitler intervened to stop this - great for Malta, but an appallingly bad military decision.

Holland tells this story well, and I was certainly drawn into his remarkable account. He also does justice to those men and women, not all servicemen, whose lives were utterly destroyed by the war. The strain of months of siege caused enormous trauma, which today we would know as PTSD or "shell shock", but was dismissed then. Holland quotes a statement from the military, which demonstrates a horrible callousness towards those who had seen real horror, day after day:

Anxiety neurosis is the term used by the medical profession to commercialise fear. Anxiety neurosis is a misnomer which makes 'cold feet' appear respectable. To give way to fear is to surrender to the enemy attack on your morale. To admit to anxiety neurosis is to admit a state of fear which is either unreasonable or has no origin in your conception of duty as a soldier. If you are a man, you will not permit your self-respect to admit to anxiety neurosis or to show fear.

I was a little frustrated that he didn't develop some of these larger themes, and perhaps explore Malta's later history in the context of the siege and British rule. The military focus meant that Holland tended to concentrate on the experiences of the British (civilians and military personnel) with very little on what ordinary Maltese people thought and said. I would have liked to know what they thought of the British, and was interested in passing reference to a number of people who were clearly supportive of the Italian regime - how general was this? Altogether though, this is a good military history that visitors to the islands and those interested in World War Two will get much out of.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Andy Wood - The Memory of the People: Custom & Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England

Early modern England was a society in transformation. On the one hand capitalist social relations were beginning to shape almost every aspect of life. On the other, older forms of social organisation were still important in terms of how people related to each other, as well as their expectations of what they should be able to get from society. In particular old communal relations - the use of common land, the right to get resources from woods, land and water - were crucial to life in the countryside. These relations were a fetter on the development of capitalism, and wealthier classes wanted to see them ended. But the poorer sorts wanted to defend them.

Andy Wood's book The Memory of the People is a study of how these relations, and in particular the struggles to end or defend them, shaped how people understood their place in society and their own history. In particular he looks at how what was understood as "custom" was shaped by that history and those struggles. The wider "culture" that is created out of these interacting ideas, relations and customs, should be, Wood argues following Clifford Geertz, "socially and politically".

Karl Marx said once, in a quote that I don't think appears in Wood's book, that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." This sense of humans trying to shape their own futures, but in contexts not determined by, or even favourable to, them runs through his book. For instance, Wood notes that "Peasant rights in forests and woodland... grew out of persistent, everyday friction with their lords".

The book then can be read on two interlinked levels. Firstly, and perhaps most enjoyably, it is filled with anecdotes and accounts that Wood has dug out of historical archives and primary sources, of how ordinary people understood and defended their customs in order to protect or improve their way of life. This review could be filled with some of these quotes and stories and they are by turns inspirational, amusing and fascinating. Some of these customs are clearly about protecting scarce resources:

The 'ancient customs' of Stillington (Yorkshire) specified that the inhabitants of each ancient messuage or cottage could take three wagonloads of turves from the common every year and as much bracken as they could gather between the rising and setting of the sun on 14 September.

As Wood points out, "such rules generated a sense of place that was grounded in common practice, regulated by collective interest". Usually customs like these were considered to have existed in "time out of memory", i.e. before any living person could remember. Frequently they were not written down, and in many fascinating passages Wood shows how the elderly were often called on to give witness and say how things had been in the past. This sometimes meant that older people from communities would tell what they had been told by parents, grandparents and older people in their youth - a social memory that could stretch back hundreds of years. Such historic and custom practice was important - it was also malleable - one a few occasions Wood cites examples were contemporary memory was clearly invented to benefit people today at the expense of the rich and the authorities.

Critically, custom was mixed up with social relations. Lords had to be careful to ensure that their interest were not overwhelmed by this dynamic. They had to remain watchful over the daily processes by which land was exchanged, common rights exercised, fuel collected and so on, because subtle shifts in those daily transactions might gradually see customary regulations shift away from the lord's control.

As Marx and Engels pointed out, class struggle is sometimes hidden and sometimes in the open. The constant push and pull that resulted in custom becoming entrenched was always there. But Wood also highlights that this struggle was not just between rich and poor, but also within communities, one which "pitted the settled poor against the rootless and utterly destitute". One group was out to protect its existing interests and the other to win rights and custom for the future. Wood engages with a number of other historians, sometimes critically, about what the significance was for this.

We have seen how material interests underpinned a wide variety of social conflicts. But we have also observed the ways in which those conflicts over material resources were enmeshed with opposing conceptions of the world: struggles over custom entailed more than conflict over pasture, or minerals, or fuel. They involved contests over memory, identity, entitlement and notions of belonging, legitimacy and community.

It is this sense of communities struggling for their place in the world which makes Wood's book so fascinating. Economics is not enough to understand early modern social relations, what is required is an understanding of how people understood themselves. But economics did matter, and as Wood concludes, the "gentry and nobility" were concerned about custom and developed "growing contempt" for customary claims precisely because they helped the lower classes to defend their rights against the rich.

Ultimately early modern England saw the defeat of the old order, though the process took many hundreds of years. The enclosure of land, the destruction of the commons and the creation of new capital friendly social relations were resisted by the masses. In doing so, ordinary people deployed their historic knowledge, their memories and even written archives to protect their interests. They also fought the authorities, burnt hedges and knocked over walls. This story is the backdrop to the development of capitalism and Andy Wood's brilliant book gives us further insights into a complex process. In doing so he reminds us that ordinary people's resistance drew on a rich culture that was usually ignored by the powerful.

Friday, December 30, 2022

John Dickson Carr - Hag's Nook

Hag's Nook is a novel by the prolific John Dickson Carr and the first of twenty-three such books featuring his famous detective Dr. Fell. The novel opens with the young American Tad Rampole who is visiting England and has an introduction to Dr. Fell. At a station on route to Fell's he meets the attractive young woman Dorothy Starberth who lives in the same village as Fell, and immediately falls for her. The Starberth's are an extremely wealthy family whose ancestors have been governors of the horrific Chatterham Prison, whose inmates were regularly hung from the gallows.

A strange condition of the Starberth's inherited wealth is that at 25 the male heirs must spend the night in a locked room. Their they have to follow some secret instructions in order to qualify for their inheritance. But the night after Tad's arrival, the elder brother of Dorothy dies while trying to follow these instructions. Fell, together with the local chief constable, Tad and others must work out what has happened. In doing so, they find a dangerous well, a disgusting swamp, a lot of rats and some dark secrets.

As with other Fell novels this is a locked room story told in great detail. Fell refuses to give any hints until he has worked out the whole solution to the puzzle, and we follow events through the supporting characters, in this case Tad. The book begins, and Tad experiences his arrival in the village, as a sort of gothic horror. Nameless evil seems to lurk inside Chatterham, defying the sleepy romance of the village. Tad's romancing of Dorothy can be contrasted with the frightening reality of her families bizarre traditions, and sudden death.

Carr was an American and his descriptions of rural England betray a lack of familiarity with the countryside. The nights are full of croaking frogs, a difference that cannot be down simply to the collapse in biodiversity in Britain's rural areas. Descriptions can, at times, be a little over the top. Though there is a satisfyingly pompous butler, who loves melodrama at the movies, and so nice misdirection.

But as with all locked room mysteries, the delight is in the reveal (something Carr made a big point of in Fell's most famous mystery, The Hollow Man). This one is done brilliantly and even though it seems impossible Carr's genius is in making it feel believable.

Related Reviews

Carr - The Hollow Man

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Florian Huber - Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans in 1945

The first half of Florian Huber's book documents horrors that took place towards the end of the Second World War. As the Red Army advanced from the East, in countless towns and villages, ordinary Germans killed themselves. Huber initially focuses on perhaps the largest of these mass suicides, in the town of Demmin, where of 15,000 or so inhabitants, 1,000 killed themselves. The scale is almost unimaginable:

All through the summer and far on into the autumn, Sorge the registrar [in Demmin] listened to the grim stories of death... On 25 May, Elfriede Schultz, whose son-in-law had already been missing for some time, came to report the suicide of her daughter and grandchild. The death of three-year-old Gerd Wedhorn in a canal was registered by his mother, whose own suicide attempt had evidently failed. A musician reported that his wife and drowned herself and their child in Swan Pond. On 12 June, Marie Buchner told Herr Sorge of the deaths of her son, daughter-in-law, grandchild and three other members of her family, who had all been found together, hanged.

Germans shot, hung, took poison and hung themselves. Perhaps the hardest thing to read are the stories of parents who killed their children, often, in Demmin, by drowning. An eyewitness is quoted:

Dr. P told us that about 600 people, many of them children, had walked in to the [River] Peene. He'd had to help fish them from the water and lay them out in long rows. All day long, bodies had kept washing ashore.

Huber says that this aspect to the Second World War has rarely been acknowledged. East German and Soviet authorities wanted to avoid any accounts that would have undermined the image of the Red Army as a liberating force, so the stories of mass suicides in the face of the Russian advance, like the history of mass rape by the Soviet Army, were hidden or ignored. Huber's book is an attempt to both tell these stories and understand events.

But the book is very much one of two halves. The first half recounts horrific stories of suicide, based on diaries and eyewitness accounts. This material is shocking and likely to be new even to those who are well versed in the history of the Second World War.

In the second half of the book Huber tries to explain why the suicides happened. Here the book is much weaker. He begins by telling the story of Hitler's rise to power and the early "happy" years for the German people and economy under Hitler. He argues that Hitler's rise was accepted as it gave meaning and confidence to the German people following the disaster of the First World War and helped fix a national malaise. He shows how many, including opponents of the regime, found the new fascist government successful - often despite misgivings. In particular he shows that millions of ordinary Germans hero worshipped Hitler. Huber builds up an argument that millions of Germans bought into the Hitler myth, and the collapse of the regime took this away - leaving a void that for tens of thousands could not be filled. Huber writes:

The future they [Germans] had been promised was evaporating before their eyes, The Fuhrer had left them, and the Reich was collapsing, leaving behind it a gaping void. After twelve years imbibing Nazi ideology, those who had believed in it, identifying as part of the national community and subscribing to its moral and social norms, faced not just a collective loss of meaning but the threat of personal disintegration. The emptiness they felt was palpable. Many genuinely believed that the victorious Allied forces would wipe out the German nation and the best they could hope for was a life of oppression. Unwilling to face this reality, they chose suicide as a final act of resistance, of renunciation.

But if this is true, it doesn't explain the events described in Huber's book. Almost all the mass suicides took place in the East, in the face of the advance of the Red Army. There were suicides in the West, but they were tiny in comparison to the East. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people fled West towards the Americans and British. Were they fearful of all forces they would not have done this, expecting the same wherever they were and suicide numbers would have been similar on both fronts.

The war waged by the Germans in the East was a total war that saw the mass extermination of civilian populations, terror on an unbelievable scale and the systematic destruction of whole populations of Jews, Polish and Ukrainian people. It was a war that enabled the Holocaust. As Huber himself shows, Germans were increasingly aware of this, even if there was no official acknowledgement or reports. Several anecdotes from the book illustrate how the knowledge of events "in the East" shocked people. On one occasion a young Hitler Youth member tells of his horror at seeing some Nazis beating Polish forced labourers. Another telling story is of a German couple who kill themselves after learning of the atrocities.

Ordinary Germans in the East did not commit suicide just because their world was falling apart - they were terrified because they knew that the Russian army would bring violent revenge to their own homes - something played up by the Nazi regime. Huber's explanation is inadequate.

But there are other problems with the book. This is very much an account of "ordinary Germans". But which Germans matters. There are two aspects to this. Firstly the question of German Jews. As Richard Evans points out in his own insightful review in the Guardian, Huber doesn't refer to the German Jews who killed themselves after Hitler's rise to power. As Evans says "After all, they were Germans too." While Huber doesn't ignore the Holocaust - quite the contrary - there are some other strange omissions. As far as I could see Jewish people are not mentioned until page 159 - a strange thing in a book devoted to understanding the mindset of German people under Hitler. Huber's account of Hitler's rise initially focuses on his polemic around the Versailles Treaty, not his antisemitism. The account of the period of 1933 to 1939 barely touches on his shutting down of opposition and the first, systematic, state repression of Jewish people. This alleged "era of happiness" was marked by real improvements for Germans. But it was also the period when disabled people were killed, concentration camps set up and a mass state network of repression created. It is extraordinary that this is barely touched on.

The "ordinary Germans" narrative also hides another piece of analysis that Huber could have explored. This concerns who committed suicide. The accounts that Huber uses (and his use of archival material seems extensive) mostly seem to be middle class - shopkeepers, small business people, professionals. There are an absence of accounts from factory workers, labourers etc. This might just be selection bias that results from who kept diaries. Where working class people more or less prone to suicide? Did they buy in to the regime in the same way? The social base of fascism tends to be the petty bourgeois that are regularly quoted by Huber. But the author makes no attempt to explore this in a way that could illuminate our understanding of German society under Hitler, and who/why committed suicide.

As I read further into the book I became increasingly uncomfortable. It felt very much like Huber was arguing that Germans, collectively suffered as much as anyone, and that most Germans, despite being enamoured of Hitler and pulled into the myth, were ignorant of wider events. Huber appears to be saying that Germans were essentially innocent of the crimes of the Nazi regime. This is inadequate as even some of the anecdotes he uses makes clear.

There is something else missing from Huber's book - the discontent and opposition to the Nazi regime. Reading his account of Hitler's rise you get a sense of inevitability. But the Nazi victory was not inevitable, it was challenged and it almost didn't happen. Had the left organised differently, in particularly creating a United Front against fascism involving mass unity between Social Democrats and Communists then the Nazi movement might have been stopped. So there were literally millions of Germans who did not buy into the Hitler myth, and as the war went on, a growing number of Germans who understood that the war was lost and did not "subscribe to its moral and social norms". To say otherwise is to see the German population as an undifferentiated mass that all supported Hitler.

Huber's book is of some interest. The material on suicides will be new to most people, though its worth noting Richard Evans' caveat that it is "very much wide of the mark" to say this is an "untold story". But does the book explain what took place, and why? I don't think so and in fact I think the narrative it lays out is dangerous - both in terms of understanding Nazi society and offering us insights into fighting fascism today.

Kershaw - The End

Mazower - Hitler's Empire

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

S.A.Chakraborty - The City of Brass

I was looking forward to reading The City of Brass. The cover grabbed me and the outline describing a young woman in eighteenth century Cairo living by swindling and stealing seemed fun. The added bonus, that our hero Nahri, can also magically heal people added to my interest. I do love a good bit of escapism.

Sadly while enjoyable, the book did not live up to my expectations. I enjoyed the idea that Egypt, fought over between European colonialists was also the site for a hidden struggle between spirits and fantastical djinn, whose own cities were torn between struggles between pure blood and others. But the story itself is too complex. The novel follows two threads, that of Nahri who accidentally summons a dead Djinn back to life, and who takes her to the hidden city and Ali, a younger prince of the ruling family in that city, torn between loyalty to his family and concern for the oppressed in the city.

But the overlapping stories, while fun to read, have too much overlapping back story. Understanding the complex rivalries requires getting to grips with some detailed lore that wasn't described well enough for me to remember the nuances. That said there are some great aspects to this book. Nahri is a brilliant hero - we rarely get female, Muslim, main characters in fantasy novels - and I suspect that Chakraborty's depiction of Nahri is one reason for the book's success. I also thought the depiction of oppressed minorities (and the racism directed against them by the elite) and poverty among the masses was well done. And it was good to see the resistance to this also portrayed, even if the rebels came close to caricature.

I'm unlikely to read the rest of the trilogy. But I appreciate that others will devour them.

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Mark Stoyle - A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549

Mark Stoyle's book is the first new study of the Western Rising for many years, and he has found much new archival material to freshen a story that has been told many times. Stoyle argues that the Rising was essentially just a religious rebellion, designed to challenge the furthering of the evangelical cause. In this sense he says there was little or no "social" aspect to the rebellion.

Personally I think this only holds up if you crudely separate religious belief in the 16th century from wider social context, but despite my disagreements with Stoyle's central argument - this is an excellent history, detailed, interesting and very readable. Sadly lack of archival material means we don't know enough about what motivated the common people to rebel, but Stoyle does his best to tell us.

I've been asked to write a longer review of this book for another publication. I'll post a link to that here when it is published. In the meantime I wrote about the Western Rising in the book reviews below, and in my book Kill all the Gentlemen.

Samuel R. Delany - Babel-17

Following several highly disruptive alien attacks on human military infrastructure, poet, spaceship captain, code-breaker and linguist Rydra Wong is asked by the government to crack a code that has been identified simultaneously with the attacks. Wong quickly realises that this is no code, but a language. She identifies the next site of an attack and hurries there after recruiting a crew at least one of whom proves themselves through a wrestling match and others are, well, dead.

As Rydra learns how to speak Babel-17 she begins to understand that the language has power. Failing to prevent an attack, she and her crew are captured by privateers who prey on alien (and sometimes Earth) vessels one of whom is known as the Butcher. The Butcher already speaks Babel-17 and Rydra notices he never uses the word "I". Teaching the Butcher this is part of Wong's strategy to identify a spy in their midst, but doing so allows the language to full break through. It turns out that Babel-17 is a language that shapes the speakers own mind, transforming their perception of events, time and themselves. Wong herself has been the spy, and was ever since she began to learn the language.

Babel-17 is an intriguing book. Delany uses the novel to explore various concepts of language, in particular the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - the idea that a language shapes the users perception and thought. The problem is that the book is quite complex, the story sparse and large chunks given over the exploring the linguistic aspects of the story. Those more knowledgeable than me about language might find some of this interesting, and the concept shaped several other writers' work. But I found it a drag at times and found myself pausing to wonder "what was going on"!

At times the book veers toward the surreal, as with the dead crew. In other places it felt almost like Star Trek, with an episodic feel. I was left feeling that the book was very much of its time, when the author and readers were more willing to experiment with form over content. In the final section, Rydra leaves a note "the war will end in six months", hoping it will encourage pacifist tendencies among the military authorities. I wondered if this was a reaction to the Vietnam War, and perhaps Delany himself was hoping that this use of language might influence readers. Whatever the truth of that, Babel-17 is part of classic SF literature, but it may not appeal to the modern readers' taste.

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Andrew Pettegree - Brand Luther

We are used to thinking of Martin Luther's impact in terms of religion - the beginning of the Reformation in Germany that led to the fundamental fissure of the Christian church into two wings. But in this interesting biography Andrew Pettegree argues that Luther also had a secondary legacy, which was the creation of the modern printing and publishing industry. Luther, Pettegree argues, shrewdly set about creating "Brand Luther" with a mass produced, standardised, instantly recognisable set of publications that were devoured almost everywhere in Germany - stimulating the printing industry and driving the ideological arguments that popularised Luther's positions. The Luther "brand" was a key part of the Reformation, and without it Luther may not have broken free of his initial isolation.

It is hard to argue against Pettegree's basic position here. As he shows, Luther was a consummate propagandist. In many ways an early example of a radical politician he was able to create a network of likeminded thinkers who used their positions to articulate a set of common arguments. The publishing industry that grew up around Luther was based not on a need for him to individually profit (he received no money from the sales of books and pamphlets) but on the need to get the word out. Luther rapidly became a bestselling author, outstripping any other writer. Five years after he produced the Ninety-Five Thesis that began the Reformation, Luther was Europe's "most published author ever".

Part of the reason for this was that Luther himself was prolific, and his arguments clearly met a ready audience. But Luther's notoriety was also part of the appeal. Readers wanted to know more about this monk that was challenging the Pope. But a really big reason for his popularity was that Luther wrote in German, appealing directly to the masses over the heads of the Latin read establishment. His work could be read, and understood much more easily than the opaque defensive arguments of the Catholic church.

But Luther also carefully constructed the basis for the new industry. He brought to Wittenberg a printer and set him up as a business. He helped create and construct the town's university shaping it into a centre of evangelical thought, and he created a readily recognisable brand that pushed his ideas.

All this Pettegree explains in detail, and ties it into the story of Luther's life and times. He shows how Luther's engagement with argument and events (such as the Peasant War) meant a constant stream of new material and, how other events, such as high profile debates and even Luther's death, were managed by Luther and his admirers to fit the brand image.

While Pettegree's general argument is unchallengeable, I did feel that there was one aspect to the story that was missed. This is the way that Luther's ideas arose out of a time of transformation in the German economy, and the beginnings of the rise of a new economic class who had an interest in production for the sake of profit. Pettegree hints at this. He notes, for instance, that the "achievement" in creating "brand Luther" was a "very personal one" for Luther whose youth working for his father in the "copper-mining industry" was an experience he put to "very good use". It is hard not to see Luther as having a unique understanding of the print industry not simply because of his understanding of language and design, but also because of his knowledge of bourgeois industry. Thus there was a dialectical interaction between developments in German society that were encouraging capitalist interests and the rise of the new religious ideas. Luther's genius was to bring the two together and to create the first mass propaganda machine. But Luther's ideas feel on fertile ground - and that in itself, as Pettegree shows, was in part down to Germany's changing political dynamics. Without these factors coming together Luther may well have been little more than another radical chanting his discontent at the church before being condemned to death.

Andrew Pettegree's biography of Luther puts an interesting, if not entirely new, framework on the Reformation. It is an interesting, engaging and refreshing look at a personal story that has been told many times before. Perhaps most importantly though it shows that while Luther began the Reformation he had to also create the networks that would sustain it. Most of that was the men (and a few women) that argued his position, but there was also a whole new industry behind it as well, that Luther personally shaped.