Book review: October the First Is Too Late

October the First Is Too Late is a science fiction novel by astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. It was first published in 1966 says wiki, laconically. There is more to be said but you'll enjoy the book more without this review, so read it first. I guess that's a recommendation. But don't let me get too carried away: whilst it is written by yer Notable Physicist and while it is based on a quasi-respectable idea it is tosh.

The plot: our hero, a composer - and making the hero a composer is cute, and lends nice colour to the book - goes on holiday with a scientist, and mysteriously the scientist goes missing for a bit, before reappearing. Life goes on. Then it is discovered that - somehow, inexplicably, obvs - the sun is acting as a giant transmitter, beaming vast streams of information off somewhere. I don't think anyone ever bothers to try to work out exactly where it is being sent, because as it turns out that doesn't matter, which obviously the characters know in advance. Then, while they're in Hawaii, the world mysteriously fractures into multiple zones, each corresponding to a different time: Hawaii in the "present" of the book's narrative, England the same except a few months off, Europe back in WWI, Greece at the time of Sophocles, Russia in the unimaginably far future where the Earth has been through scouring by an enlarged sun and is now a flat glass plain. The characters talk about the "solar transmitter" and realise the bandwith is what you'd need to xferring the full state-of-the-Earth, and deduce that errm this somehow relates to the splitting. Out hero goes off to visit antient Greece, cue various hilarities, gets into a music competition and is whisked off to another bit - Mexico - where the folks from 6 kyr ahead have ended up. Where his scientist friend mysteriously turns up. Cue much discussion - about the moving spotlight theory of time and so on -  but since none of it made any sense I paid little attention. The end.

The book doesn't even pretend to trouble itself about who might be making the Sun do this stuff, or who my have fractured the Earth, or why; so inevitably as the book ends with none of that explored let alone explained, a sense of disappoinment ensues. The people 6 kyr ahead have, as usual, a mixture of super powers and comedy levels of tech already superseded by mobile phones; such is the fate of all such. Hoyle attempts some naive and rather dreadful politics: after about our time the world goes through cyces of expansion, collapse, the same expansion and so on; until eventually folk realise that having lots of population is really awful - think of all those dreadful plebs, watching those ghastly football matches, my dear it just doesn't bear thinking about - and the world would be better with - let's pluck a random number out of the air - 5 million people. The idea that people, thining, might actually be valuable never occurs to him, because naturally he, being a valuable and indeed notable astronomer, is going to be one of the saved. See-also Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion.

Trivia: I mentioned the scientist-going-missing bit, and indeed this occupies a fair slice of the intro. It turns out that he comes back - ta da! - without a birthmark he formerly had. Towards the end, when it gets all science-y, we are told that he came back as a copy, but an imperfect copy. But... why would the vague impersonal copying process choose to make such a mistake? Why not turn him blue, or come back without a spleen, or any of a million other possibilities? If it wanted to send a signal, why not tattoo him with a message? And why did this one guy get a copy / exchange, months before the real action of the rest of the book kicks off? It makes no sense at all, unless our Fred hadn't plotted it all out in advance, had this one bit written, and decided not to remove it at the end even though it had become irrelevant.

New Friends

E and I were in Fort William with the 4Cs, and on a wettish grey Sunday afternoon after Cowhill, we hit the shops. She got new boots, I got panties, oops no sorry I mean I got new Friends. These are #1 and #2 size, much smaller than my existing lot, but I thought I'd give such a try. At the least, they are lighter than the larger grades.

Cost, £80-90 raw, less with discounts and sale, but still enough to make me pause; but I do need to continue with the cycling of my 30-year-old kit, and I do love new shiny stuff, and this will act to push me into using it. Plus, by next month I'll have forgotten the cost and be up for buying more.

See-also: Old Friends.

Book review: Operation Chaos

More forgettable sci-fantasy pap, this time by Poul "Tau Zero" Anderson, who also wrote "The Enemy Stars". But I only got half way through this one. What finally did it for me was the not the cardboardness of the characters, but their inability to be even vaguely intelligent: for example, when left in the darkness at night, our lead decides without thinking to run as quickly as possibly, inevitably falling over rocks and hurting himself and getting lost. And so on. I think that if you're writing an actual novel, you need to do better at thinking of ways in which your characters don't win immeadiately; this was just too unimaginative.

The storyline itself is sort-of OK in a very meh way, featuring "magic" as actual techology, but done in a fashion I could not like; with no verve or panache, nothing to what Jack Vance might have provided.

Book review: Journey to the Center

I have vague but fond memories of The Halcyon Drift, but have not read any Brian Stableford for... many decades. The cover of this is not promising, but never mind, I gave it a whirl. I slightly regret doing so; the book itself is not worth reading, as I should have known, except perhaps as a slight foreshadow of Bank's Matter.

The first para of this review is pretty telling. Both for why you might want to read it, but why you actually don't.

The plot - I expound it, because I shall rely on your accepting my recommendation not to bother read this thing - is the familiar lone-explorer type of guy getting pressed into leading a group of people into a situation, in this case a quasi-artifical planet with multiple levels. Since each level is, say, only 100 m thick there are - unlike in Matter - potentially tens of thousands of levels in the interior, and who knows what vast riches of alien relics; we get the usual sort of stuff where loners go off exploring. Weirdly, it is supposed that there may be aliens in the interior who have lost contact with the surface, for some reason when building the world they neglected to lay any cable feeds upwards, never mind.

Aanyway, apart from a bit of wham-bam stuff Our Hero ends up meeting the aliens, sort of, and then comes out again. This is but the first of a trilogy so somewhing more exciting might happen in the next two volumes, but I'm not holding my breath or planning to find out.

Scotland, 2026

The 4C's - well, AH - have organised a trip to Scotland again this winter, and it almost feels like a tradition now, harkening back to the days of yore. Following last year's Cairngorms, we're going to Fort William this year. Here, as an aide memoire, is a pic of most of the stuff I'm taking. I'm driving alone in the car so can afford to take whatever I feel like.

So we have:

* (green bag on left): Miranda's boots and raincoat

* (grey bag on top with stripey stuff): misc winter clothes likely not to be used (spoiler: they weren't)

* (black bag rightwards): Daniel's yellow sleeping bag, a bivvi sac, and inners for me and E; I expect to use none of that (and didn't)

* (white bag above that): rock shoes, chalk: since E has invited me bouldering on Thursday night

* (small black bag rightwards): my usual "little black bag" of compass, spare batteries, spare glasses, lip salve, headtorch

* (purple bag): my walking boots, and my old plastic boots, to go with the skis

* (black and white holdall): two new tech axes, two old tech axes, two lightweight axes, two aluminium crampons and one steel, and the new Leopards, E's helmet, two Z-fold poles and two telescopic poles

* (blue bag): std gear bag, which I guess I'll sort on Friday night, or maybe Thursday

* (rope bag): old slinky blue; new slinky orange 60m, new non-slinky blue, my helmet, E's harness (my two are in the gear bag)

* (in front): my old skis with Silvretta 404 bindings (and, not shown: poles). I might get a chance to try them, who knows. And hope to hire some modern bindings for a day, too.

In my big blue rucksac: old green warm waterproof trousers; new black waterproof trousers; raincoat; down jacket; thin yellow spare raincoat; walky-talkies; yellow bag with chargers and cables.

Also to take: car food, and enough pasta to get us through Friday night if we need it; and 4 x 100g fruit+nut bars.

In retrospect: I took too much stuff, though it didn't actually matter much so maybe I didn't. Had I paid more attention to the wx, I could have skipped the skis and old boots; and I could have pre-winnowed the ropes perhaps.

What actually happened

A quick run through; I don't think I need to trouble you with details. Full pix for the trip are here; just mountain ones here.

Thurs: drive up, starting off about 9, a few stops along the way, most notably at Barter Books in Alnwick and a walk along the coast just before Bamburgh. Arrive at Edinburgh before 8, join E and Milo at The Climbing Hangar for a fun hour and a bit of climbing, nice to be on totally new stuff; then back to their flat, sleep overnight on their sofa.

Friday: wander to the National Gallery in the morning, discovering war memorials in the gardens along the way, and look again at the collection. More slowly this time, with several stops for coffee and fish-n-chips for lunch; discovering that the collection is smaller than I'd remembered, but still good. Leave with E about half 3; arrive with no stops around 7. The hostel is actually about 2.5 miles out of Fort William in Glen Nevis; this is fine for us, with a car, but might have been annoying if we'd been on foot. Present: us, Laurent, Andy Buckley, Seb. They make a chilli; I preserve the remains for tomorrow; we discuss what-to-do and decide on walking in from the North Face car park.

Saturday: [GPS] up at 6 as decided, b'fast, I'm ready by 7 but Larent is a little late, never mind, we're ready to start walking at 8. Trundle up, mostly in the dry, it is nominally 2 hours into the CIC hut; we manage 1:45, then have a brief break while L+A, who have places tonight, drop stuff. Andy Halley and Jon are presumed climbing up above somewhere. On the basis of <caution> about avalanche risk - Laurent is far more cautious than me - we're doing Ledge Route not a gully. L+A are a party; E and Seb and I will be another, but I'll be relying on L's route finding. At least from below the line of the route is unclear, but then again the cloud level is on the cliffs. There's no snow at the hut but there is by the time we're getting into the gully. As it turns out the route finding is easy; the route itself is natural, there are some footsteps, and there are a couple of other parties. A good route, but long. Wx is cloud, and some rain, and "warm", so we're all a bit damp by the top. I've stuffed up my gloves game - I need to have a spare dry pair accessible but don't; I should have swapped before going over the top but didn't, I should have dried my glasses ditto - so when we finish we come out of comparitive calm into rather strong winds, sufficient that after a bit we abandon hope of actually going to the summit. For the records, the Ben Nevis forecast was 45 mph; that gets you wind strong enough that facing into it is literally painful. Fortunately L navigated us off happily, with the aid of the OS app. Really I should have tried using the Strava heatmap to do the same, but was sufficiently cold-in-the-hands, and fogged-in-the-glasses, that I just let him do it. After a while, perhaps half an hour, we've come down far enough that we can see a bit, and the wind is less, and things go more easily. Around where we take crampons off we've come to above the lochan, where there's a clear path branching off down, so E and Seb and I take that, trusting there's a path from lochan back to the NF path. And... there is, sort of, rather wet underfoot but not actually boggy; you have to continue quite a long way to get to the bridge below the dam to get over the main river. Looking in arrears I think we would have been better just going up the path behind the hostel, which is actually a good path and not boggy at all, and would have made descent easy. Soir: E and I have reheated chilli - and then she has some pasta too - while Seb gets a pizza.

Sunday: [GPS] Seb decides to go back on the train - he has been up since Thurs - and E and I decide on an easy low level walk prior to her taking the 5 pm train home, since the wx today is no better and we don't fancy another long day in the wet. And so we do the Cowhill circuit, with nice views either back to Ben Nevis - still in cloud - or the loch. This bookended by coffee, and then lunch, in The Old Deli. After, to Nevis Sport then Ellis Brigham to get <stuff> in my case to small - #1 and #2 - friends; in E's case some new mountain boots, since her old ones, although nice, are really wearing out all over. Soir: pasta, and a beer. Oh, impressions of Fort William: a bit of a dump. Sorry. Not helped by a grey wet visit, but the way the A82 runs along the loch front rather ruins the ambience.

Monday: [GPS] all alone I get to decide what to do; Strava heat maps show me Stob Ban and Mullan nan Coirean as a circuit so I give that a go; it turns out well. As expected there's quite a lot of up - SB is 999 m - but I can cope with that and have plenty of spare at the top. Navigating purely by heatmap - because of the clouds - works, and although it is somewhat unnerving to commit myself - because there's decent and re-ascent, so after this point I can't simply walk back easily - it is also exciting. There are also occasional footprints. I'm carrying an axe but don't need it, though I consider getting it out on the final slopes up to SB. From SB it is really a walk around the ridge at the head of the corrie of the Allt a Choire Dheirg. And so back. I've managed my gloves rather better this time. Soir: moved from our 4-bed room to a "dormitory" which had 7 beds I think; but I was the only occupant.

Tuesday: time to go home I think. Wx is not improving. Drive along looking over the loch; stop briefly in Glencoe village but it isn't interesting; consider stopping in Glencoe but cloud halfway down the hills puts me off. Stop at Tyndrum; pass the Kelpies; around Edinburgh; stop for an afternoon walk along the sands on the N side of Bamburgh this time, lovely [GPS]; at Barter Books; and so it is about 7 when I get into Durham so just as well I didn't linger in Glencoe. Find "City Hotel and Bar", which is conveniently central. It was lying about having parking, as I suspected, but the main carpark is nearby and I stop for a pint in The Boathouse on the way back; what I didn't realise is that its windows would be thin and the outside have shouty students and traffic till late; but never mind I sleep.

Wednesday: up early no breakfast wander Durham [GPS]. Highlights the river, and the cathedral. Which is kind-of Hereford like: rather heavy and dark outside, thick Norman columns inside. But with redeeming features of interest. After that, it is four hours drive home.

Book review: The Inferno

The Inferno by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle is very much in the style and tone of his other books, but my first impression is that despite the non-stellar¹ prose, it is just more intelligently written than the other stuff I've been surfing through recently.

The plot, in brief: a Scientist, Our Hero, Cameron who is in fact The Cameron, in Australia to arbitrate rival designs for a new radiotelescope, notices a reddish patch in the sky that isn't Mars, and which turns out to be not a supernova but even more excitingly the first signs of the galactic core turning into a quasar. Returning to his home in northern Scotland, conveniently shielded by the season from the core, he and a few others survive and begin to rebuild, encountering and overcoming vicissitudes along the way. At the end, he discovers that a providential darkness that had shielded the Earth from overheating had some unexplained extraterrrestrial origin.

All of this is quite nicely handled. There's a bit of religion thrown in - Cameron's wife gets religion and leaves him for the madness down south, there's a nice singing-in-ruined-cathedral scene at the end, and Cameron ponders the observations made by the Mad Astronomer which reveal that the darkness-that-saved wasn't natural. Cameron speaks gaelic to ghillies and ponders Culloden. I could find out if the Hoyles had roots up there, but perhaps it is just the climbing: there's a lot of names of mountains and the A9 out of Pitlochry stuff. The initial build up is nice: our man is from CERN, but knows enough to arbitrate UK vs Oz radiotelescope designs, flys around the world a bit, and sees kangaroos or are they wallabies in Oz. It all seems a bit like the rather more gentle pace of scientific life in the 60s. The scene when "Mars" is seen is almost comic, undoubtedly by design: Hoyle is either making fun at, or just replaying in-jokes, about astronomers only looking through computer-pointed telescopes and not actually knowing where any of the planets are.

In a way the ending, by which I mean all the stuff after the inferno, is - apart from the cathedral - a bit mechanical, working through "the obvious" sort of problems, but not in a heavy-handed maner.

Notes

1. Arf arf.

Book review: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe by Ralf Dahrendorf is a book; Goodreads starts off The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 effectively ended the division of Europe into East and West, and the features of our world that have resulted bear little resemblance to those of the forty years that preceded the Wall's fall. The rise of a new Europe prompts many questions, most of which remain to be answered. What does it all mean? Where is it going to lead? Are we witnessing the conclusion of an era without seeing anything to replace an old and admittedly dismal way of life? What will a market economy do to the social texture of various countries of Central Europe? Will it not make some rich while many will become poorer than ever? That last question at least turns out to be answerable No: most have become better off, some greatly so; few have become worse off.

However, I read this thing more than a year ago and, as Spike Milligan memorably said, it left an indellible blank on my mind. The title aims far too high; not only does it - as I recall - fail from this distance in time to manage much in the way of foresight, but philosophically it falls far short of Burke.