Book review: The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night, and Earthlight

Two rather low-grade Arthur C. Clarks. Both have an unfortunate combination of not-terribly-interesting storylines, combined with his rather clunky writing.

The Lion of Comarre is a sort-of very early prequel to The City and the Stars, and Against the Fall of Night is I think effectively an early draft of TCATS (both, at wiki). I didn't read much of ATFON, to tell you the truth. As to TLOC: we're around the year 2600 or perhaps later, but not far-future; the world is somewhat bland and has ceased to advance scientifically (although weirdly at one point a science-y guy says "oh of course in 50 years we'll have an interstellar drive", as though that kind of thing could possibly be predicted, never mind) and Our Hero goes off to find the Mysterious Lost City of Comarre where his near-genetic-equal genius-engineer forebear was last seen. Finding the MLCOC turns out to be trivially easy; he goes in and discovers that everyone is asleep in machine-produced consensual dreams. Being a total clown he attempts to awaken the sleepers, and discovers to his astonishment that the withered old men prefer the world of dreams where they are young and virile again; who could possibly have guessed? Certainly not Our Hero. After that he leaves, having been saved from the Robot Boss's grasp by the aforementioned Lion, who otherwise takes minimal part in the story. And so Our Hero goes back to the world, clutching his forebear's notebook of last projects, fired by enthusiasm to excel, or something.

Earthlight features a lunar observatory, and Our Hero is now a security agent masquerading as an accountant, sent to discover who is leaking info to the Federation (of outer planets) who are not very happy with Earth hogging all the heavy metals. As you would expect, girls put punch cards into the computers while men do all the story. In the end, Earth is mining nearby (why?) and puts its "fortress" in the same place (why?) and when the Federation decide to attack the Earth outposts on the Moon, they inexplicably choose to attack the strongest point, FFS why? There's a dead exciting space battle which wiki tells me is modelled on ("in homage to") E. E. Doc Smith, who did these things better. Clarke arranges that both sides, effectively, lose; they reflect deeply upon this and decide that being nice in the future is a much better idea and disappear off to the stars hand in hand. There's a desperately-exciting space-rescue towards the end which is carefully arranged to need people to breathe vacuum for a bit; I skipped that as I've read it a zillion times elsewhere, but perhaps it was new then.

Book review: the War with Hannibal

A classic - look it even says so - a portion of Livy's History of Rome. Not being a scholar I forget the exact details but much of this is sourced to the lost works of Polybius; and the introduction and various footnotes are somewhat sniffy about Livy's qualities; but I'll take it all as read. Much like Thucydides he has at suitable moments inserted speeches from the generals, or the senate, and it seems like that these are "what he felt should have been said at that point" rather than actual verbatim reports.

As well as the actual battle reports he tells us every year about the election of the new consuls, and aediles, and so on; which the Romans faithfully did all throughout the war; and how they got their commands - via decision in the Senate, or by lot, or by agreement - and this all gives the impression of a well-ordered republic that even at times of stress, when the rules needed to be adapted, it was all done according to rules. We don't see this from the Carthaginian side. Oh, and they took their signs-and-portents very seriously.

The history is very much one of battles, with a few notes about one side or another ravaging the countryside, and sometimes being short of grain. But what one sees is both sides constantly raising fresh troops, although I get a slight impression that the Romans are more raising their own, whereas the Carthaginians are raising Spanish and Gauls and Numidians and so on. So my suspicion is that the Roman state was just bigger, and more productive, and that an economic history would make this much clearer. Somewhat in the way that economics, and the vast USAnian productivity, would tell you that the USA was going to win the Pacific war in WWII without actually having to look at the details. Livy always counts armies by total number of troops, foot and horse separately. Sometimes he notes that some were raw troops, or peasants pressed into service. But usually he just goes by numbers. I'm curious if the commanders thought that way, too. But they must have been aware that veteran well-armed-and-armoured legionnaires would destroy many times their number of peasants.

So the story goes: Hannibal, starting in Spain, with a lust for glory (Livy lavishes praise upon Hannibal's qualities as a general - possibly in part to excuse Roman failures - but calls him cruel, treacherous and faithless as a person), attacks a random Roman city in Spain then crosses the Alps with great hardship into Italy. Note that he doesn't do this as a surprise attack - the Romans are fully aware he has crossed, though not his exact track - but, oddly, as the easiest way to get there. I completely don't understand why he didn't go by ship. Anyway: once there, he decisively defeats several Roman armies and may have been only a short hesitation away from taking Rome itself. But he does hesitate, and after that, even though he wanders around Italy for years - indeed, more than a decade - variously taking and losing cities and battles and ending up for no obvious reason all the way down in Bruttium, he seems to become largely irrelevant. He isn't the only Carth general - there's Mago, and more than one Hasdrubal - but as the title hints, he is the main one, in a way that isn't matched on the Roman side.

I thought that "Hannibal crosses the Alps" was most of the story but no: that is only chapter one. In subsequent chapters - the book is arranged by years, this is convenient as the Roman commanders change with the years - we go back to the war in Spain, which ebbs and flows, with Roman consul-lead armies getting destroyed and re-created, and in the end Scipio Africanus-to-be comes in and kicks the Carthaginians out. As a sub plot there's action in the East too, with Philip being encoured to cause trouble by the Carths, but all that generally seems to fizzle out. And then in the end, Scipio crosses to Africa - which finally pulls Hannibal out of Italy, since they now need him to save Carthage - and wins. This BTW is the second not the third Punic war, so Carthage is merely captured, not destroyed, and peace is made.

Speaking of peace: a strong lesson from all this - and it's the same from the Peloponesian war - is that the side that is winning never wants to make peace. At various points the Romans are on the ropes, and so at that point the Carths are all gungo-ho; and then later the Carths sue for peace - and actually the Romans give them an armistice, but it breaks down, and the Romans crush them. Although individuals on either side have enough foresight to say "we're doing well now, let's not risk everything, we should agree to peace", the weight of opinion always overrides these sane voices.

In terms of war, the lesson - also hammered home in Ceasar's stuff - is that poor generals can get a lot of people killed. "poor" usually means rash, or careless; but it sometimes means over-cautious.

Life was pretty grim back then, and I suspect most of the soldiering took place under circumstances that we would nowadays consider intolerable, much like Sherman's marches in the US civil war. Livy reports with little comment that, when cities were captured, any Roman deserters captured were crucified. So lots of other stuff we'd consider terrible probably isn't even mentioned.

Book review: the Clocks

Another Christie. Quite good I think, but nonetheless I shall pick at flaws. We're back in the usual Christie-like England: secretarial bureau, rows of houses, detective inspectors and so on. Foreign intrudes (spoilers) in the source of the money to drive the plot - in a burst of invention the money is now Canadian instead of that old staple, the Americans - and in the source of Spying to drive the, ermm, sub-plot as it turns out to be. That's one of the disappoinments: the sub-plot turns out to be entirely disconnected to the real plot.

Anyway, someone is murdered, it isn't clear who he is. By bizarre coincidence "Colin Lamb" (who may be the same as “Adam Goodman” of Cat Among the Pigeons), is in the neighbourhood at the time, looking for spies. He has the usual scrap of paper from a predecessor telling him it's number 61; and the murder occurs at number 19; and somehow he fails to realise what I did instantly, that if you turn the paper over then... however, that's just a red herring, because while Miss Pebmarsh gets done for spying right at the end, that has nothing to do with the plot and is merely an excuse for CL being on scene. So that's deffo a defect.

The real plot I think works, almost entirely. And the manner of it being dreamt up I like. And the second-wife bit is nice.

The thing wrong, though, is the money. This is a significant inheritance from a rich man and yet our builder doesn't choose to move; or stop his business work. Even more mysteriously Miss Martindale continues to run her agency. I don't think that's believable. I think it works in Christie's mind because the inheritance is to her just a plot element; it isn't something you're supposed to try and use.

Minor: when Edna almost talked to the detective, and then once again, saying "well I don't think that could be true" I knew instantly that she would be killed. And lo, she was. Chsitie has used that too often. And there's also the rather improbable actually-being-prepared-to-strangle-someone-in-public, which is dubious. Ditto the third death. Indeed the "first death carefully planned, second and third deaths less so" is a bit of a recurring trope; and something of a poor reflection on Poirot: obviously he could not prevent the first death, but he could if he was quicker stop #2 and #3.

Book review: Elephants Can Remember

Christie / Poirot again. Not her finest I fear; indeed, as a detective story rather poor; but as a book to read, not bad. Wiki is not kind: According to The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, this novel is one of the "execrable last novels" in which Christie "loses her grip altogether". I don't think it is quite that bad.

I shall not trouble you with the plot, only the flaws in it. The chief one is that there are identical twin sisters in it; in a mystery novel, this inevitably means that they get swapped, and alas "the mad rejected one pushed the nice one over the cliff" is all to obvious a solution. So much so that it is inconcievable that the police at the time didn't consider it. Did they, for example, take fingerprints or consider dental records to establish identity? This isn't even mentioned, because it can't be, because if it was ever mentioned even the dullest reader would find it obvious.

The bit with the dog was better and more subtle. I pat myself on the back that I got that too. I didn't get the "general decides to kill sister in law out of duty and self out of honour" bit, party because that bit is arbitrary. An alternative, darker, and perhaps non-AC motive would have been after the wife's death he decided to have a fling with his sister in law - frightfully attractive filly and all that - and then felt guilt. The finding the wife, having been pushed off and hit with rocks, and her being not quite dead, but instead of rushing for the doctor they stop to listen to her extended dying words, isn't plausible.

The bits - heavily, painfully, frequently repeated - about the four wigs are odd. They were identical twins; the housekeeper was of poor eyesight; did it also really need a wig or two for the diguise? I feel this bit was poorly thought out; possibly even an element not properly worked in; maybe it seemed good at the start and she couldn't be bothered to re-write it.

I think it implausible that our good general would not have left a suicide note - he would have known full well that suicides normally do, and he is trying to make it appear as such; well, in fact it is. I also think it unlikely he wouldn't have left an envelope with his solicitors, to be delivered to the children when they reach maturity.

Book review: the Grand Titration

This is a collection of essays by Joseph Needham about science in China and the West. The nominal question to be answered is "why, given that in ye olde dayes, China was like ZOMG much more tech than the West, how come it didn't invent modern science?". But in practice much more space is given to convincing us that ZOMG those antient chinks were well up there maaan.

Oh dear, am I revealing my prejudices?

There's a pretty scathing review in Science from 1970 which says quite a bit of what I wanted to say, but perhaps more authoritatively.

Before I get into lengthy quotations, let me say a bit about how badly he establishes his core concern, which is (I am paraphrasing, I hope you understand) that "everything" in the West was really invented in China. His method of doing this is to notice that the Chinese had, say, clocks, quite early on; that the West had better clocks later, and then to say or imply or infer that Western clock tech comes from China. But what he never does is prove any transmission; or really make any effort to demonstrate.

There's another issue, which is that in most cases he is talking more about tech than science. Bureaucracy isn't greatly threatened by tech; people making better ink or an improved lock-gate aren't a threat; it's the people wondering about the stars who need to be controlled.

Let's quote some of JN:

So we come to the fundamental question, why did modern science not arise in China? The key probably lies in the four factors: geographical, hydrological, social and economic. All explanations in terms of the dominance of Confucian philosophy, for instance, may be ruled out at the start, for they only invite the further question, why was Chinese civilization such that Confucian philosophy did dominate. Economic historians such as Wu Ta-Khun, Chi Chhao-Ting and Wittfogel, tell us that though Chinese and European feudalism were not unlike, when feudalism decayed in China, it gave place to an economic and social system totally different from anything in Europe: not mercantile, still less industrial, capitalism, but a special form which may be called Asiatic bureaucratism, or bureaucratic feudalism. As we have already seen above, the rise of the merchant class to power, with their slogan of democracy, was the indispensable accompaniment and sine qua non of the rise of modern science in the west. But in China the scholar-gentry and their bureaucratic feudal system always effectively prevented the rise to power or seizure of the State by the merchant class, as happened elsewhere.

So his answer is the China got bureaucracy, Europe got merchantile democracy. Or said another way:

This is the background, then, which alone enables us to say that there was no modern science in China because there was no democracy. Democracy of a sort there was, in so far as (in many dynasties at any rate) it was possible for a boy of whatever origin to become a great scholar (the village neighbours might club together to provide a tutor for him) and so take a high place in the official bureaucracy. Democratic, too, was the absence of hereditary positions of lordship, and democratic was, and still is, the psychological attitude of the commons within whom the four 'classes' (scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants) interchanged with considerable fluidity among one another. It explains the utter lack of the servility so noticeable in other peoples of the eastern hemisphere. But that particular sort of democracy associated with the rise of the merchants to power, that revolutionary democracy associated with the consciousness of technological change, that Christian, individualistic and representative democracy with all its agitating activity, which characterized the New Model Army, the Army of the Marseillaise, the Minute Men, the Floating Republic, the Dorset Martyrs, the Communards, the Sailors of Invergordon and Kronstadt, and the Motor-Cycle Battalions which took the Winter Palace that China never knew until our own day.

(note we can tell from this that democracy is a good thing, because JN feels obliged to pretend that China had it). But note that he is uneasy in his explanation: is it democracy, is it merchants? And why are all of his "applications" military? More on the Chinese system:

There is probably no other culture in the world where the conception of the civil service has become so deeply rooted. I myself had no idea of it when I first went to China, but you can find it everywhere there, even in the folk-lore. Instead of stories about heroes and heroines becoming kings or princesses, as in Europe, in China it is always a matter of taking a high place in the examina-tions and rising in the bureaucracy, or marrying an important official. This was, of course, the only way in which to acquire wealth. There is a famous saying (current till recently) that in order to accumulate wealth you must enter the civil service and rise to high rank (Ta kuan fa tshai). The accumulation of wealth by the bureaucracy was the basis of the phenomenon often described by Western people in China as 'graft', 'squeeze', and so on, and of which so many complained. The attitude of Westerners, however, has been prejudiced by the fact that in Europe religion and moral uprightness had a historical connection with that quantitative book-keeping and capitalism which had no counter-part in China. At no time in Chinese history were the members of the mandarinate paid a proper salary, as we should think natural in the West. There were constant efforts to do so, decrees were always being issued, but in point of fact it was never done, and the reason is probably because the Chinese never had a full money economy.

It really doesn't take much to realise that a society where the highest ambition is to be an arts-side bureaucrat isn't going to get scientific flourishing. And

There cannot be much doubt (as we can now see) that the failure of the rise of the merchant class to power in the State lies at the basis of the inhibition of the rise of modern science in Chinese society. What the exact connection was between early modern science and the merchants is of course a point not yet fully elucidated. Not all the sciences seem to have the same direct con-nection with mercantile activity. For instance, astronomy had been brought to quite a high level in China. It was an orthodox' science there because the regulation of the calendar was a matter of intense interest to the ruling authority. From ancient times the acceptance of the calendar promulgated by the Emperor had been a symbol of submission to him. On account of a great sensitivity to the 'prognosticatory' aspect of natural phenomena, the Chinese had amassed long series of observations on things which had not been studied at all in the West, for example auroras. Records of sun-spots had been kept by the Chinese, who must have observed them through thin slices of jade or some similar translucent material, long before their very existence was suspected in the West. It was the same with eclipses, which were supposed to have a fortunate or antagonistic effect on dynastic events. Then there were the 'unorthodox' sciences, for example alchemy and chemistry, which were always associated with Tao-ism. Neither astronomy nor chemistry could enter the modern phase, however, in the Chinese environment.

You can't trust him on the details, of course. He asserts that "astronomy had been brought to quite a high level in China" but what he means is observations. Their theory was utterly deficient; they weren't even interested enough to ask.

And that's a good place to segue into a congruent but distinct view, which I get from Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: that the Key Insight, which the antient Greeks provided, was criticism. The idea that you created theories of how the world was, but others were allowed to criticise and scutinise, and propose better. You see immeadiately that kind of attitude fits well with merchantile democracy, and very poorly with bureaucracy of any stripe.

In a way, we're back to the similar "why poverty?" question. The answer is "you don't need to explain poverty; it is the natural state". Similarly "why ignorance?". And so "why no science?" gets the same answer: that's the default. You have to be special to get science.

Book review: Murder in Mesopotamia

See wiki. The usual group of suspects is gathered in isolation at a dig in Iraq. I rather liked this, and enjoyed reading it. The denoument is pleasing in that it preserves symmetry: usually inevitably we have to break symmetry as one of a set of carefully balanced candidates is selected.

But it is terribly flawed, I think in ways that we might think of "yes I accept that because it is in a detective book". So Posner is a convicted German spy, but escapes, unlike every other such. He then has the bizarre misfortunte to coincidentally die in a train crash. And then mysteriously becomes sufficiently expert in archaeology, despite a total lack of training, as to become eminent; he (I think this was the idea) acquires the identity of someone else in the crash, and somehow none of the people that ever knew him recognise the change. Meanwhile, his own wife doesn't recognise him.

Turning now to the murder, it turns out that a heavy stone had been dropped onto her head. This is a desperately unreliable way of killing someone, so much so that it would be a mad plan. But more, if you've stuck your head out of a window, and someone drops a heavy stone on your head, then there will be a wound underneath, where your neck has hit the windowsill; not to mention blood on the windowsill; but in the book there isn't. As to the second murder, I think it implausible that poor J really necked an entire glass of acid in the middle of the night; sipping it is far more plausible; and once again it is a desperately unreliable way of killing anyone¹.

Meanwhile, the obvious possibility that "someone dropped a rope from the roof and let someone up" is completely ignored.

On the trivia scale: we are given a careful plan of the house, and which room everyone is in. Naturally, it must all be neat and tidy, and it is: there are workrooms, living room and such, and everyone has their own bedroom. Including nurse L. Even though she only arrived a week ago, the house mysteriously grew another room for her.

One more thing: we are told that no-one could possibly have got through the barred windows; and so of course we accept this, as part of the fixed stars of the plot. Then she is killed by a pot dropped on her head as it sticks out of the window through the bars, and technically this isn't cheating, as it is possible to do this even if you couldn't climb through. But nonetheless I think it is not reasonable that people would have been certain that no-one could climb through - what about a small man, or boy - if the gap is large enough to permit a head? And remember these were bars, not a grille.

Refs

1. We're also back, somewhat unfairly because obviously it would spoil the book, at the "why not fail gracefully?" problem. Suppose you've killed your wife, who you both love and hate; and on-site is yer Famous Belgian Detective. When faced with the choice of fess up, or go on a killing spree (with the inevitable prblem that you're spewing out yet more clues, and increasingly unlikely to escape), slaughtering your best friend... wouldn't you more likely just confess?

You! I wanna take you to a towbar!

I wanted to get a towbar, trailering for the purposes of. I ended up going to Towbar Express, or rather they ended up coming to me, since they do it on your driveway. It took about 2-3 hours, and cost about £700, for the 13-pin connector, and a detachable "swan neck" type.

Pic: the detatched towbar itself. Quite heavy. It comes with keys for locking it once in place. The "green" indicator is "locked in place" I think; it twists, to insert or remove.

Not easily seen from that pic: the plastic cover under the bumper needs a hole cut for the towbar to peek out of. Here is the bloke cutting said hole, having taken off the plastic to work on it. Distant view. Here's a pic with the bar removed, note plastic dirt-protector in the socket.

All this went without problem, and towing to Norwich was fine. Trivia: the car complained a couple of times that "ACC" was unavailable... I think this was it struggling a bit on cruise control up some of the hills.

Note that I ended up with a six foot length of metal that used to be where the towbar is. I'm keeping it for a year or two, then will probably throw it away, since I don't ever expect to remove the towbar fitting. If you knew you didn't want it, you'd probably have to pre-warn them to take it away, I don't suppose they want it either.