“He hit her,” Rosie told the police, “and came after me. I had no choice.”
A cheerful tale of a young woman, working in a Detroit factory at the end of the second world war, who discovers that she is the chosen Redeemer capable of ridding the world (or at least America) of the demon enemies of humanity, one exorcism at a time. She must also deal with friends, potential lovers and family, and their expectations, in particular choosing between Boring But Handsome Guy and Smart But Weedy Guy. The book is the first in a series, so that last question is unresolved, but I know which side my money is on. Good fun anyway. You can get it here.
Sandra’s seen a leprechaun, Eddie touched a troll, Laurie danced with witches once, Charlie found some goblins’ gold. Donald heard a mermaid sing, Susy spied an elf, But all the magic I have known I’ve had to make myself.
(unusually, this poem doesn’t have an accompanying illustration.)
I was really surprised to find that this is the top book of 1974 among Goodreads users, by a very long way (almost twice as many users as second-placed Carrie) because I had never heard of either book or author. It’s an immensely popular short collection of a hundred or so poems, aimed perhaps at the 10-ish age range. I suspect that the use of the word “sidewalk” in the title has made it less appealing to the many countries where that is simply not a word that is used, including where I grew up.
I quite like the title poem despite the peculiar terminology for ‘pavement’. I found most of the other poems much less impressive, more often just framing a smart phrase than digging very deeply into life and experience. I did like the illustrations. I’m struck that Goodreads reviewers, even though so many of them like the book, tend to say that Silverstein’s other collection, A Light in the Attic, is better. Anyway, you can get it here.
Second section of Part 3 of Carrie:
From the national AP ticker, Friday, June 5, 1979:
CHAMBERLAIN, MAINE (AP)
STATE OFFICIALS SAY THAT THE DEATH TOLL IN CHAMBERLAIN STANDS AT 409, WITH 49 STILL LISTED AS MISSING. INVESTIGATION CONCERNING CARIETTA WHITE AND THE SO-CALLED ‘TK’ PHENOMENA CONTINUES AMID PERSISTENT RUMOURS THAT AN AUTOPSY ON THE WHITE GIRL HAS UNCOVERED CERTAIN UNUSUAL FORMATIONS IN THE CEREBRUM AND CEREBELLUM OF THE BRAIN. THIS STATE’S GOVERNOR HAS APPOINTED A BLUE-RIBBON COMMITTEE TO STUDY THE ENTIRE TRAGEDY. ENDS. FINAL JUNE 5 030 N AP
As with A Passage to India, I think I had seen the film of Carrie many years ago but I certainly had not previously read the book. It’s every bit as good as I expected, with the horror gradually mounting, and the sense that this is the reflection of ordinary teenage meanness and bullying. The tick-tock switching between official reports and documents, and omniscient third-person narrator, also keeps you on your toes and maintains the momentum. This despite the fact that we are told that hundreds of people will die as early as a third of the way through the book.
The other thing that struck me is that Carrie is set in the future. Though published in 1974 (and presumably written in 1973), the action is firmly dated May 1979, with flashbacks to her parents’ relationship in the 1960s and flashforwards to the various official reports on what Carrie did. There is a sense of “it can happen here…” It’s also mercifully short, compared to some of King’s otherwork.
Of course, in 1974 the idea that a teenager would engage in the mass murder of their fellow students was outlandish fantasy. Columbine was still 25 years in the future. It’s actually within living memory that school shootings were not a thing that happened very often, even in the USA. Wikipedia tells me that 17 people have been killed in American school-related shootings so far this year including four yesterday, compared to 14 in the whole of the 1950s. Carrie unwittingly told us what was coming.
In terms of the three main features of electoral systems introduced in the previous chapter, the main point of distinction between the majoritarian systems and FPTP is over the ‘electoral formula’; there are also some differences over ‘ballot structure’. The electoral formula distinction may appear quite simple, but it is seen as crucial by the proponents of majoritarian systems. Instead of requiring only a plurality of votes (i.e. more votes than any of the other candidates but not necessarily an overall majority) in order to win the seat, a candidate must get an overall majority (i.e. at least 50 per cent plus one), hence the title ‘majoritarian’ systems.
A survey of electoral systems published in 1997; I very vaguely know the author, whose father was a colleague of my father’s, and I know several of his cousins rather better.
This is basically a survey of electoral systems in the sense of formulae for translating votes cast into seats won, and goes through first-past-the-post, second ballots, alternative vote, list systems, additional member systems and finally the Single Transferable Vote, which is of course the best system of them all (surely an uncontroversial conclusion).
It’s thorough and informative, though I regret that there is not more Eastern Europe in it – by 1997, many of the new democracies were in their second or third electoral cycle and could have supplied useful data. Nowadays we have seen stable multi-party systems emerge in many parts of the world, and also electoral innovation even in the UK.
There, a group of five men clustered around a crackling bonfire, next to a poorly built wooden cabin. Behind them stood a high wall built to block people from accidentally falling down the vast drop into the lower levels of the city. The wall had a human-sized hole in it. These were the smugglers I was looking for. Now I only had to find out how fast they would drop me.
Another carefully and richly constructed secondary world, but not interesting enough to carry me past the first fifty pages. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019 and not by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile is What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah.
Current A Crack in Everything, by Ruth Frances Long Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
Last books finished The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, by Kamala Harris The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell, by Monica Blackett All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Titan, by John Varley South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton The Sapling: Roots, by George Mann et al
Next books Grave Matter, by Justin Richards Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
This link between theory and practice is exactly what the great economist John Maynard Keynes meant when he said: ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’1 Below, I debunk five of the most common myths about government and explain why they’re problematic for a mission-oriented approach to changing capitalism. 1John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936), p. 383.
This is a rather uplifting book, about how it’s entirely possible to get governments to lead grand projects, also involving the private sector and civil society – if only they want to do it. It’s not based on messianic vision or pure idealism – the author has advised on major state and EU initiatives on how to implement things like the Green Deal. Her central point here is that creating a more just and greener society is entirely possible, as long as it is made a core mission of government and approached as an Apollo-style project.
It would also be instructive to read her analysis of why this doesn’t often happen in real life – in particular, I’m looking with some concern at the managerial approach of the new Starmer government in the UK, and wondering how transformational this can ever really be – but it’s reassuring that a senior practitioner believes that it actually can be done if the political will is there. As Margaret Mead said… (…well, you know what she said). It’s also mercifully short.
The end of the year is approaching all too quickly, and I’m pulling together a list of science fiction set in 2025 and published or released more than twenty years before that. The list for 2025 isn’t a particularly long one, but it starts with The Duplicate Man, an episode of The Outer Limits broadcast in December 1964.
The title character has illegally smuggled an alien onto Earth, which then escapes; he creates a short-lived clone duplicate of himself to hunt it down and kill it, and then the two versions of Mr James are confronted with each other. I didn’t really understand why he needed to create a duplicate of himself to do the hunting, either in the story or in the TV adaptation. It would surely have been better to hire a hit-man or hit-woman. There’s a tremendous analysis of the episode here.
It’s not stated anywhere in the script (or in the original story) that the setting is 2025, but it seems to be fairly well established lore among Outer Limits fans, so I guess it must have been a detail in the plot summary sent out to published TV listings in 1964. We are told that the early period of space exploration was in the 1980s and 1990s, 30 years before, which fits a setting in the 2020s. The establishing scene is in a museum which was founded in 2011.
So what does this story tell us about 2025? 2025 in The Duplicate Man differs from 1964 in that humans have been exploring alien planets and bringing back aliens since the 1980s; there are video phones with rotary dials; there are futuristic-looking guns, cars and houses; and there is cloning, though that word isn’t used. However, relations between the sexes don’t seem to have moved on much – all the scientist characters are men, and the women are Mrs James, a government agency receptionist, and some tourists in the space museum at the beginning. (Having said that, there are no women at all in the original Simak story.)
One point to come back to – in both the Simak story and the TV version, the urgency of getting rid of the alien is driven by the fact that it is about to reproduce, and unleash dozens (Simak) or hundreds (TV script) of killer offspring on our planet. Reproductive politics will come up again as we look at other authors’ takes on 2025…
And one last thing – the monster mask in the TV series got recycled for the Star Trek pilot episode, The Cage, in which it is briefly seen imprisoned next to Captain Pike, with a few more feathers.
