Book review: Tales of Pirx the Pilot

Tales of Pirx the Pilot (Polish: Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie) is a science fiction stories collection by Polish author Stanisław Lem, about a spaceship pilot named Pirx, says wiki.

They are... of a type. Kinda soviet-ish; but also of the naive scifi era. When spaceships were sent out "on patrol" - why would you do that? When space had sectors. And when displays were cathode ray.

They also feel a bit tame. As though Lem wasn't really sure what he was allowed to do with the new medium, and felt obliged to not stray to far from classical ideas. The prose is often of decent quality rather than pulp rubbish, but the ideas perhaps less so.

For example the last one is something of a ghost story, transmogrified: assigned to an old refurbed ship, Pirx discovers the reactor being maintained by an old robot who is revealed to have survived the crash years ago that killed all the previous crew, slowly. For no obvious reason it starts tapping out in morse code transcripts of the crash. This unnerves Pirx who ends up rather thoughtlessly recommending scrapping the robot, thereby removing the unsettling from his life and settling for the known.

This Goodreads review is a little harsh - I would be kinder - but is substantially correct.

New Blue Montane Coat and Rab Trousers

Ellis Brigham in the Lion Yard are having a "refit sale" so I got this coat for half of its std £250; and the trousers for half their std £90. The coat weights 390 g, 110 more than my previous Rab Orange at 280 g. It is a Cetus (not the Lite); arch; officially 395 g but I see I have a "small" (accidentally; it was on a L coathanger and I failed to check. Still, it seems to fit, including over a down jacket).

What sold me on the coat was the pockets; the orange Rab only has one, and it is high. This means that when walking I can't put my hands in my pockets; or, I have to lift up the coat and put my hands in the pockets of whatever is underneath. Either is annoying, and I readily get cold hands. The new coat is slightly (but only slightly) stiffer material - which I think I only notice because the Rab is so nice and slinky. The "true mountaineering style" is high pockets so the harness doesn't get in the way, but well: I spend more time walking than with harness; and quite often put the coat over the harness anyway.

The new trousers are the same model as the previous, except they are in a women's make, which seems to mean a smaller waist. I think that's OK; for £45 it was worth an experiment. The old trous have a minor hole in one knee, as tends to happen.

Refractive lens replacement surgery

After Scotland, I finally decided that I cared enough to look at laser eye surgery. The problem is rain-on-glasses; on the summit plateau of Ben Nevis, I could barely see anything, and white snow and white cloud makes it hard to see what you can't see. This has obvious implications for safety. After some research-aka-googling, I went to talk to Optical Express, who told me I would get Refractive lens replacement surgery not lasering. This is because... natural lenses tend to start going around sixty or whenever; I forget the exact details doubtless you can find them if you care. Getting tested takes an hour and a half and involves about eight different machines, and ends with what is doubtless intended to be a reassuring video narrated by what looks like a prosperous farmer in a nice three-piece tweed suit, but is actually their CEO. Mostly, they are trying to reassure you that the chances of them miss-slicing up your eyeballs are small.

Lens replacement is more expensive; I was quoted and accepted £9590 for both. Trying to scout around for comparison is tricky, since people are shy about revealing prices. I decided to wing it and not go for two or three quotes.

The promise is that I won't need glasses afterwards. They are a touch vague about exactly how much I won't need them, but I'm reasonably confident they'll do as well as anyone, so I'm just going to suck it and see.

I thought about it for a week and could see no reason not to proceed so I did, booking my appoinment for early-April and handing over my £1k deposit. Naturally there is financing available, but I avoided that. Now I wait, having paid my £8590 balance (actually £8690, because they mistakenly added in a £100 price increase, but they have promised me the £100 back).

2026/3/31: I had my I had my videophone (Teams) chat with my eye surgeon today. All well, he answered my questions (mostly: what is the delay post-op about? Ans: mostly, letting a non-symmetrical lens settle in, so that any shocks won’t cause it to rotate). He did say they weren’t certain of getting my lenses in on time, but we’ll see (geddit?).

Book review: Blitzkrieg

By Len "Funeral in Berlin" Deighton. Newly deceased, which was the reason for me ordering and reading this tome. This one is purely historical; but anyone reading his spy novels will have noticed his interest in military history. I think the book gains somewhat by him being an amateur: he doesn't stand on academic ceremony, and has no rivals to knife. Against that there's a certain pop-y feel to some of this. Nowadays, it is nice to just be able to look up various elements, like say the battle of Sedan, if you want more details or a second opinion.

Deighton traces, well, as it says: from the rise of Hitler to the fall of Dunkirk, with the intention of studying the Blitzkrieg, by which he means the rapid German advance. He asserts - quite possibly correctly - that this is the only instance of such; for example, the fall of Poland wasn't. And so it is a uniquiely interesting event to study.

His main conclusion is, I think, that the success was a mixture of, on the German side, luck and rewards-for-preparation-and-daring; and on the Allied side a mixture of bad luck, and failure-due-to-incompetence.

The entire thing is pretty readable, especially the second half about the campaign itself, so if you're interested I recommend just reading it; I'll try to pull out some factoids here.

LD goes through Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and so on, and from a German point of view these are great successes, driven by Hitler's daring, contempt for the old order, or recklessness, depending on your viewpoint. The campaign against Belgium, Holland and France follows in the same light, so although the tactics were down to the generals, inevitably Hitler gets credit for being bold enough to go with the flow. Likely, any other leadership would not have taken the risk; perhaps better said, likely other leadership would have more correctly assessed the risk and declined it.

But none of this would have worked without the gross incompetence from the Allies; most notably the French. LD points out that they had more tanks, and more aircraft, than the Germans. On the aircraft, there's a little section: why did the Germans have air superiority? Answer, because in the very first attack, airfields were attacked. In response, the French flew planes to safety in dispersed sites, and their comms and org structure was so schlerotic that they didn't bring them back into use.

From WWI, the winners had deduced that defensive warfare was how it was going to go, having won. The losers had concluded that was a really bad way to fight and something better needed to be found. At least in this instance, they turned out to be right. As to going through the Ardennes: "everyone" knew this was impossible, and yet - says LD - in fact some low-ranking Frogs had war-gamed / tested actually doing so, and it worked; naturally this kind of upsetting fact found no favour. It was all like that.

Goodreads. Wiki.

Book review: Derai

Derai, by E.C. Tubb. #2 in the Dumarest saga, of which Toyman is #3. I love the covers of these editions. See how manly Dumarest is, with his bulging thighs.

The story... well, things happen. They make some kind of sense, perhaps, but not really. Folgone, towards the end, offers some kind of life-extension - if you look at it sideways - but bizarrely rations access to that not by money but by fighting; that's weird, obvs, but also it doesn't make the fighting public, which would be the only point of doing this stuff. Hive makes money by selling its mutated-bee products, which appear also to extend life, but only at the cost of turning you into a bloated incommunicado semi-corpse, so that isn't obviously a win.

The point of all the series is that Earl keeps wandering because he is desperate to find Earth. In this one, he is sort-of offered a kingdom, perhaps even a planet, and he still prefers the search for Earth. This is taken as a given, and is merely the answer whenever he is presented with a choice, but nonetheless it is odd: the book, and the series, never really answers why he cares so much.

Book review: Marune: Alastor 993

A "minor" Vance I think I should say; part of the Alastor "series" whose main element is Trullion: Alastor 2262. This one... is somewhat paler. We have a memory-lost protagonist who in his usual resourceful way discovers himself heir to a principality and acts to secure it; but I find the action and plot thin. Only the traditional Vance language saves it. Goodreads thinks better of it.

Replacement pole tips

Somewhere up on Ben Nevis the tip of one of my new poles resides; I think it got pulled out by the mini-snow-basket thingy.

In this modern world of ours I realised I could order a replacement online from Amazon with next day delivery. It turns out that I could get four generic ones for under £5; or I could shell out something like £20 for a genuine replacement part; guess which I went for. I feel a tiny bit sad about it though.

I'll need to glue the new bit into place though.

This is the first time the tip has ever come off a pole. I did consider cannabalising one of my other older poles but I couldn't persuade any of the others to come off or move at all.

Book review: Cold Steel

Cold Steel by Kate Elliott is the third in a trilogy, begun by Cold Magic and Cold Fire. I quite liked both of those - though one of them I didn't finish, because some rotter bought the Waterstones copy that I was reading; so it goes. But by the time of Cold Steel something has gone wrong; either my tastes have changed or her abilities have slipped; or she got bored and ran out of ideas to finish this story off. She certainly didn't run out of words though; this brick is 750 pages long and I got through 450 before giving up. Also this review is very late; I put it aside well before Christmas, perhaps in the hope I would wish to come back to it; but no.

The original, if I recall correctly, preserved some sense of mystery; this volume is young female brats being cwuel to their young male lovers; really, sublimated schoolgirl stuff I think.

The characters wander around an alt-Europe to no particular purpose; very little sticks in the mind except a nice scene by a reedy misty cloudy riverbank; but that's not enough to make a book of.

Subsequent to this I read the Witch Roads and liked it albeit with qualifications, so there is hope for her yet.

Book review: Final Days

Final Daze by Gazza Gibbo opens with an eerie claustrophobic exploration of an enigmatic alien structure hundreds of trillions of years in the future. This is by far the best part of the book, and why I started reading it. Alas it is all too soon over and we return you to your regular diet of wham-bam unthinking action in a variety of uninteresting locations.

Incidentally, the "hundreds of trillions" is just candy, really; it is of no great importance, and also they don't say how they know: the only clues appear to be the appearance of the sky, and could you really tell one, ten or a hundred trillion apart? Better books, like Icehenge, have their chronology uncertain and debated and actually matter to the plot.

Aanyway, back to the action: various people wander around - it takes a while to work out which ones we are following - and an important shipment of alien material is lost on Earth, hijacked. Predictably enough it turns out to be deadly and a "plague" of giant structures starts eating the Earth (it seems a bizarre coincidence that just the hijacked shipment is deadly; or perhaps they all are; the book hints at some connection between the disaster and the resurrected man); most of the rest of the excitement is then about Our Hero getting off Earth and shutting down the gates (did I mention that there are wormhole gates that humans have made, and also we've found distant mysterious alien gates that connect to the said far future) before the evil alien stuff infects the colonies, too.

At the end, the bloke who has been reconstructed by alien tech says that no, the alien stuff is actually trying to be helpful, by transporting people forward into the far future where they can live with genuine free will. But our hero destroys the gates anyway, because he has a messiah complex, and the book doesn't try to argue with him.

Aside: given the catastrophe that losing a wormhole would be, and in the book is, wouldn't it be prudent to take two or even three with you?

The book gets some points by knowing enough relativity to realise that, were they possible, wormholes are also time machines (but loses some by not realising that two, back to back, are one by themselves and don't require some FTL communicator). It then gets its knickers dreadfully twisted when it realises that this implies terrible things for free will - the plot is driven by videos-from-the-future showing the destruction to come - and "solves" that by having the aliens having decided to disappear off into the future past the end of the last wormhole, thus regaining free will. At this point, recall William's Principle: no-one ever says anything intelligent about free will.

This (enthusiastic) review reminds me that he also wrote The Thousand Emperors.

Book review: Maker of Universes

Ah PJF, familiar from my childhood; see my review of The Green Odyssey. Unlike that, Maker of Universes is one of his classics, and almost one of the classics, but sadly although the central idea is great, the trappings are not. The Goodreads reviews say this in more detail.

I'll assume you've read that or similar, so know the setup.

The lower, antient-greek-garden tier, is at first glance a paradise: everyone lazes around eating and drinking of the abundance. As things go on it becomes a bit darker, but I think he could, and a better book would, have really gone into the horror of it: people, transmogrified into odd shapes, condemned forever as pets of a now-absent lord, with nothing to do except drink themselves into a stupor as their past life fades away.

Above that, the teutonic and amerind tiers are less interesting; the writing is somewhat bland; and somehow despite the vast canvas he has given himself the situation is rather bland too.

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 may 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, in and of themselves, thinking, 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.