Being a fantasy author is a good background for writing historical fiction. The past is an alien world, and the temptation is to fill it with people just like you and me. Michael Moorcock avoids this in Byzantium Endures, the first of four novels about the life of Pyat, a Russian engineer, in the first half of the 20th century. Born on January 1, 1900, Pyat is headed for hard times, and Byzantium Endures takes him from his childhood in the Ukraine to the end of the Russian civil war. Pyat is a resentful man, often mean-spirited, and an anti-semite. He is in his own view a brilliant engineer of unrecognized genius, far ahead of his time, but he’s not a reliable narrator, (he claims he built a flying machine at age 13, and later a ray gun that almost worked), so his actual abilities are a mystery for the reader. Pyat is sympathetic to the proto-fascist futurist movement, he believes in science, technology and reason, but also in tsarist Russia and the Orthodox Church. He hates the Jews and Bolsheviks for destroying the world he was promised, and the story is often interrupted by rants about Orthodox Russia’s rightful place in history. Like George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, the greatest scoundrel and coward in the British empire, Pyat is the ugly past in its own angry words, half revolting and half sympathetic, but unlike the Flashman novels, this isn’t comedy. How could it be?

Nick Carr’s essay on the danger web technology poses to the ability to concentrate on long texts has spawned two interesting discussions, one at Britannica’s blog and another at Edge. This is an important discussion, not because Carr or anyone else has found the answer, but because it’s time for us to think about what web culture is doing to us – or rather, how we would like to use these new tools. For we have a choice. If the web causes us to read fewer books like Carr warns, and even to think in twitter-sized chunks, I think that’s a bad thing, but it’s not inevitable. Once you become aware of where the technology is pushing you, you have a choice of going along or pushing back. For my part, I read more books than ever these days, but I haven’t always. The ability to read books doesn’t come for free, it’s not something a lucky few are granted, it can be trained, or neglected. The world is changing, far more than most people realize, and you need to ask yourself what kind of person you want to be in this new world. Do you want to be a book-reader? There are good alternatives, all I ask is that you choose consciously, and not just float along wherever the river takes you.

Jens Bjørneboe skriver godt. Jeg vet ikke helt hvorfor dette overrasker meg, for jeg har lest en del av essayene hans, men jeg hadde kanskje ventet meg mer polemikk og mindre romankunst. Den onde hyrde (1960) er ikke polemikk, det er satire, av den typen du ikke ler av. I våre dager er det politisk korrekt å klage på snillisme i fengselsvesenet, men alle reformer til tross kommer jeg aldri til å føle meg vel med innesperring som straffemetode. I beste fall kan jeg føle at noen fortjener det, men ikke at det gir mening på noe høyere nivå enn å holde forbryterne vekke fra ofrene sine en stund. Jeg vet ikke om noe alternativ, men liker det gjør jeg ikke. Det blir ikke bedre av at vi deler ut de strengeste straffene for handlinger som knapt burde vært forbudt. Jeg tror at den dagen ettertiden skal dømme oss – for det skal de, slik vi dømmer våre forgjengere – så er det narkokrigen de vil ta oss på. De vil kalle det en av de store statlige forbrytelsene i vår tid, og de av oss som fremdeles er i live vil ha lite å si til vårt forsvar, for ikke gjorde vi noe og ikke sa vi noe, vi bare lot det skje. Narkotika er ikke et tema i Den onde hyrde, men det er noe jeg vil du skal ha i tankene når du leser den, i tilfelle du føler deg fristet til å tenke at heldigvis er alt så mye bedre nå.

Alternate history is a branch of science fiction, where the science in question is history, and for all its linchpin corniness I like it. (Btw I wonder if Robert Silverberg’s 2000 short story A Hero of the Empire, where Muhammed is killed to prevent the rise of Islam, could have been published today – in fact, forget I even mentioned it: look over there instead, my hypothetical Islamist readers, please leave mr Silverberg alone!) In The Separation, Christopher Priest weaves two histories together, one where Britain and Germany signed a peace treaty in 1941, and the other, our own, where they didn’t. A pair of identical twins are central to the story and to the mystery of the histories’ relationship to each other. This twin-theme and much more will be familiar to people who enjoyed The Prestige, another Priest novel, which was made into a wonderful movie. There’s the same sense that you’re only gradually being told what kind of story it is you’re reading. This trick is easier to pull off in short stories, but Priest manages it here, and he does it by changing the ground beneath you gradually, while you’re reading, instead of with a burst of twists at the end. It’s all very elegant and I liked it, (Philip K. Dick was good at this as well, although also extremely weird, which Priest isn’t, (Dick’s later plots generally revolve around drug-abusing schizophrenics, which gets tiresome after ten times or so)). I’ll read more of Priest. (He’s also a funny guy.)

The Sandbaggers is one of the most brilliant television series I’ve seen, so it was something of an experience to open up Queen & Country, a comic book bought on random, and find an exact replica of the premise for Ian Mackintosh’s 1978-1980 series. The homage is deliberate, and although I am tempted to reprimand Greg Rucka for stealing The Sandbaggers, merely filling it with different characters and moving it up to our own time, I am so in love with The Sandbaggers that I am really just happy to have it all back. Mackintosh’s brilliance was to create a realistic spy series with emphasis on the bureaucratic infighting back home, (which shouldn’t work but it did), and Greg Rucka has updated this beautifully, replacing the Cold War-plots with similarly styled stories of his own, (interestingly, terrorism is a major factor in both versions). Rucka follows, and never surpasses the old master, (who disappeared and supposedly died in an airplane accident in 1979, but personally I believe he was taken by aliens), but he breathes enough fresh air into it to make it worthwile. And Queen & Country is far better than the third season of The Sandbaggers, which was filmed after Mackintosh’s death and partly written by others, (the fact that the he managed to write four episodes after his own “death” certainly lends credibility to my alien abduction theory, now doesn’t it?)

The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke reads at times like the space travel scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey: calm and majestic. This is hard SF in the purer sense, science fiction with an emphasis on the wonders of almost-possible technology, and not much on anything else. Crises are resolved in a rational manner, and with correspondingly calm language. On one hand it reassures the reader to know that the author isn’t just randomly pulling our hearstrings, that things happen for reasons that go beyond “ooh, time for another race against the clock, now who can I place in jeopardy next?” Doesn’t make for a very interesting novel though. The Fountains of Paradise is a wonderful concept sketch of the space elevator, one of the more awe-inspiring solutions to launching people into space. And it’s not a bad novel, Clarke is a great writer, and some might find this minimalism refreshing, (it did get the Hugo and Nebula awards), but to me it’s all just too .. respectable. The opening, with its parallels between an ancient king of a Sri Lankaesque island who builds a mountain palace to bring Heaven to Earth, and a 22nd century engineer’s dream of a space elevator in the same area, made me expect something bold along the lines of “The 9 billion names of God”, but the religious themes are quickly resolved and set aside, to give way for scientific awe with some drama attached. That said, this could make an awesome movie.