Intervention in the global warming debate from an unexpected quarter. (Thanks to Charlie Stross)

Took Anne’s parents and F on an excursion into Brussels yesterday to see the Pavilion Too Shocking To See and also the Big Tent, representing the Vision of Europe of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. F basically just loved the concept of running around the Big Tent and hiding under the mock summit table in the middle. But he was particularly fascinated by what to most people is the most boring exhibit – the entre 80,000 pages of the acquis communautaire, the collected body of European Union legislation, displayed on a low table all bound in a single binding. For F it was the “big big big book”. He tried to close it by getting the two end covers lifted up, but it basically isn’t possible.

The Roman exhibit in the Cinquantenaire museum was much less fun. Fortunately here is a playground beside the mosque (itself beside the Pavilion Too Shocking To See).

We’ve had a mummy cat and four (now, sadly, three) kittens visiting our back yard for the last few months. Anne has been leaving food out for them and giving them names. She called the local cat protection people yesterday to get them trapped and spayed. So far only the friendliest of the kittens has taken the bait – so the cats are currently ahead 3-1. We’ll see if any more of them succumb to temptation today…

21) The Golden Age, by John C. Wright

Enjoyable space opera romp. Reminded me a bit of the setting of Wil McCarthy’s The Collapsium but I thought this was better. Took a few chapters to get into and understand what was going on, and I was worried at first that I was going to repeat my C.J. Cherryh experience, but in fact by the end all had become clear despite the superhuman transcendent intelligences who play a major part in the action and it seems well set up for the next volume – also on my “to read” pile but some way down.

I meant to list also books I’ve read in the last year by people I know. Books edited or written by lj’ers on my friends list include (obviously) Wondrous Beginnings edited by and Singularity Sky by . Apart from them, Chris Stephen (Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic) and Anatol Lieven (America Right or Wrong) are friends from the political/journalism world, and Rebecca Levene (Strontium Dog: Bad Timing) was a friend at college though I’ve lost touch with her since. There are maybe a dozen others who I have at least chatted with, exchanged one or two emails with, or persuaded to autograph books, in particular four authors who I enjoyed hanging out with at last year’s P-Con – Ken MacLeod, Juliet McKenna, Jim Hogan and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. It’s all part of the dialogue between reader and writer…

20) Wondrous Beginnings, edited by and Martin H Greenberg

Nice idea, getting the first published story of numerous well-known sf authors – to be specific, Murray Leinster, L Sprague de Camp, Anne McCaffrey, Hal Clement, Arthur C Clarke and so on, and publishing it in an anthology together with an introduction by the author in question (or in one case from his daughter). The stories are a bit variable in quality, but less than one might have thought, and the autobiographical material from each author more than makes up for it, especially for those who have since died (de Camp and Clement).

I did wonder what the rationale for choosing particular authors was. Why Clarke, but not Asimov or Heinlein? Why include authors as recent as Catherine Asaro (first story published 1993), Michael Burstein (1995), Julie Czerneda (1997)? And there’s a definite leaning towards the hard end of the sf spectrum. None of these are necessarily bad things but it would have enlightened me if the editors had explained them. As it is the choice looks a little strange – and why is the Ann McCaffrey story apparently out of the order-of-initial-publication sequence that seems to link the rest?

Hah!

Happy birthday, !

19) Fermat’s Last Theorem, by Simon Singh

My “to-read” pile is so huge that I’m not allowed to buy any more books until Christmas. That is, books for me; buying for other family members is OK. Anyway, I found this in the pile left over from my summer purchases and got through it reasonably quickly. It’s the story of mathematician Andrew Wiles and his predecessors in the solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem, the proposition that

a^n + b^n = c^n

has no solution for n>2 and a,b,c > 0. To be honest I was a little disappointed in this best-seller. Having a doctorate in HPS I expect a little more social grit with my history of mathematical Great Men (and, surprisingly, a couple of women in this case). As a former Cambridge astrophysics student I like a little more maths with my accounts of what they did – contrast here the Sarah Flannery In Code book. And as a Clare graduate myself, I was frankly mystified that the college where Wiles actually did his doctorate and where his father was Dean is not even named – the only college that is actually name-checked is Emmanuel, where his supervisor was a Fellow. So I’m glad I bought it second hand, rather than new, and it didn’t really enlighten me much more about any of my own occasional speculations into number theory.

I guess it’s pretty certain that Fermat was wrong. His “wonderful proof” which was too small to fit in the margin cannot possibly have included the work of any of the dozens of later mathematicians drawn on by Wiles to compile his eventual paper of more than 100 pages. So presumably he had found what he thought was a proof, but because he never shared it with anyone in his lifetime, he never discovered that it was unsound.

My trip to Dublin next week has been cancelled. Sorry not to be seeing any of you guys, but at the same time I’ve been travelling far too much recently and need to spend a nice few days in Brussels catching up. Lesson is: don’t take on commitments when you don’t feel completely whole-hearted about fulfilling them.

18) Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne

After watching the dismal Steve Coogan/Jackie Chan film on the plane a couple of weeks ago, I realised I had the novel on my PDA and decided to re-read it. And, well, it’s good. There’s a little bit of the nerdishness recently satirised here, in that every means of transport is described in total detail. There are one and a half total implausibilities in the plot. But basically, this is a story of its time, full of the new wonders available in 1872 – the Suez Canal had been open for only three years, so had the rail link across the United States,and of course the whole point of the book is that the railway across India opened only that year. And this is an India only fifteen years on from the 1857 Mutiny – as far as we are from the fall of Communism; a Japan that has just experienced the Meiji restoration; a United States recovering from the Civil War, and doing its best to deal with the Mormons. And of course this is written by an author whose own native France has been devastated by a catastrophic military defeat the previous year, and is a determined attempt to look outwards and forwards.

The half implausibility I mentioned above is this. The whole basis of the story is that as a result of the trans-Indian railway being completed, our hero, Phileas Fogg, makes a bet that he can go around the world in eighty days. Well, when he gets to India, it turns out the railway hasn’t been completed; and he has to complete the rest of the journey by elephant, rescuing the beautiful Aouda on the way. Now come on; the whole basis of the bet was that the railway was there, and surely the gap between Kholby and Allahabad is sufficient cause to call the bet off?

The complete and total implausibility is the punchline of the entire book, where we are asked to believe that in the course of 26 days travel between the International Date Line and London, none of our leading characters had actually checked the date and realised that they were a day ahead of themselves. So they saw no newspapers and experienced no weekends in America or between Cork and Dublin or Liverpool and London; and the schedule of steamers in New York and railways in Ireland and England was utterly insensitive to the day of the week? Come off it! Of course the plot simply doesn’t work unless you are prepared to overlook this gaping hole in it, and most people do.

And how come all the bells in London strike at ten to nine anyway? Philip José Farmer had an explanation of this in The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, an otherwise completely forgettable effort. Apart from the points noted above, this is really fun and everyone should read it.

This is very funny

(via Making Light)

One for and his history of the vulgar monosyllable:

http://www.suntimes.com/output/business/cst-fin-trib28.html

(thanks to Bookslut)

Happy birthday, !

If you are one of those people who occasionally skims my livejournal because you know me in real life, sign up for an account and I’ll put you on my friends list so you can read (some) locked entries.

I’m watching myself give evidence yesterday to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (preserved for posterity on video Posted in Uncategorised

Andrei Vassilov, unaeded [sic] and alone in the snowy night, had to get inside those forbidding and forbidden walls. Past the guards, and that death dealing electronic fence, across the mine field and the icy moat with its poison spikes, and into the castle itself. Even if he got inside the awesome fortress, could he hope to get out alive?

Extract found on line for The Secret Circle: Operation Royal Family, published 1974. The castle is in northern England, and holds the secret of Adolf Hitler’s true relationship with the British royals. And no, Andrei doesn’t get out alive. I lost my copy many years ago; I occasionally look out for a new one, but it’s not a priority.

Maybe not complete. But they’ve backed down rather than be thrown out by the European Parliament.

And Robert Kilroy-Silk is making an idiot of himself at the session.

Peanuts/Lovecraft crossover

web chat with Alan Garner

Thanks to my old friend Joanna Harvey:

http://www.petitiononline.com/buttigli/petition.html

17) The Pilgrim’s Progress From this World to that which is to come, by John Bunyan

Huckleberry Finn says of this book that “The statements was interesting, but tough”, which I think is fair. Several things struck me – the unattractiveness of the main character, Christian, who wilfully abandons his family, and having lost his first travelling companion Faithful by gruesome means then becomes a know-all to his new friend Hopeful; the fact that the metaphors and allegory are about as subtle as a brick (actually, a brick is more subtle – perhaps “as subtle as a Vogon Constructor Fleet” is the simile I am looking for); the fact that when you think you’re finished the book it then turns out that his wife Christiana and four sons are going to do the same journey; the repeated use of prisons (as Anne said, write about what you know) and capital punishment; and the fact that the main characters are happy to drink wine without threat of eternal damnation, something that many of the book’s greatest fans today would probably disagree with.

I don’t think many people actually do finish the book. Perhaps its most best known image is the Slough of Despond, which is actually described in less than a page in its first appearance (page 31 in my edition). Vanity Fair, while a great name for a town, seems to change out of all recognition between Christian’s visit and Christiana’s. And their children get married off with rather indecent haste.

Two final thoughts. First, the opening poem says some interesting and almost charming things about writing (as well as of course reflecting the writer’s views on other matters); I think it’s rather nice.

When at the first I took my pen in hand
Thus for to write, I did not understand
That I at all should make a little book
In such a mode; nay, I had undertook
To make another; which, when almost done,
Before I was aware, I this begun.

[…]

Well, so I did; but yet I did not think
To shew to all the world my pen and ink
In such a mode; I only thought to make
I knew not what; nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour: no, not I;
I did it my own self to gratify.

And my second, much naughtier final thought is this: I kept on reading the dialogues between Christian and Hopeful/Faithful, and wondering what a skilled fic-writer like or or could make of that relationship. Ladies, if any of you chooses to try this one, I look forward to finding out…

I know hardly any of you care about this, but I do passionately:

British Columbia is having a referendum on the Single Transferable Vote!!!

Good for BC. Enlightened on gay marriages, and now also on electoral systems.

(Not quite true to say that it’s a “first for Canada” – well, maybe having a referendum is, but a couple of the provinces used variations of STV at some point in the past.)

Happy birthday, !

…but this only briefly; will be in London tomorrow to give evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee re Western Balkans policy at about 3 pm. Anyone around Westminster at lunchtime? If so, get in touch.

(No, thought not.)