Another weekend: Dover

[Originally: https://wmconnolley.livejournal.com/31001.html]

A family weekend in Dover Castle, or nearly: we were in the Sergeant Major's house and M+J were in Peverell's Tower. Both are within the outer ramparts and very close to the castle itself. Of the two, Pev's tower is distinctly cuter - its 13th century, pretty spacious for two and has a great roof terrace. SM's is "merely" Georgian, sleeps 6 (us, D+E, and Si+B). Again, spacious (there was an entire table-tennis and living room in the basement that we barely used) but not as much fun as the tower. Decor all fine, and has the glorious property of all holiday lets: its both empty and clean when you arrive.

Friday

E wants to go to Easter Bingo at school, so we end up leaving just after 8. A fairly painless drive down sees us at the castle around 10:30. The drawbridge is down but the huge wooden gates are shut; fortunately a bod is on hand to open them. So we drive in, and end up at the top, just outside the inner keep entrance. At which point we don't really know where we're going, since we (characteristically) haven't done our homework. Phone Mfd, but he's rather hazy on the site layout (it all becomes much clearer in the morning; when stuck, we were about 1 mins drive drive from where we wanted, but we chose the 5 mins round-about route). Unpack, kids straight up to bed, we chat.

Saturday

Its a bitterly cold day, and everyone sleeps in. I think I get up around 10ish, wander down for breakfast crumpets and coffee. Broadly that's how the day goes: mostly an indoors day. E goes to look at Pev's tower. E and M have a game of ping-pong downstairs (M stuffs E). Mfd, Si+B and I go up to look at the castle: first up and round, to the roman lighthouse (I never knew there was a roman lighthouse on top of Dover, but indeed there is, and very ancient it looks, most of 2 kyr old now) and the Saxon St Mary de Castro(which latter I think is very ugly). Then into the inner keep or "Great Tower". This looks dead impressive from outside, as it was intended to, though inside it is really little more than four rooms (I exaggerate, or rather minimise, for effect). It reminds me strongly of Castle Rising Castle, especially the way the entrance stairs wrap around and put you in at the top level. CRC is more beautiful - they had better stone - but also I saw it on a better day. Like CRC, it has passages in the walls and lovely stairs. English Heritage have sort-of decked it out as "how it might have been when Henry II was welcoming visitors" but it isn't too convincing - lacks detail and depth - the attraction is the building, not what they've done with it. Views from the top are great but the thin snow and the cold wind keep us from gazing for long.

Late pm: E starts game of Risk with M, Si. I go down to town to buy more bread and crumpets, and because it would be a shame not to see Dover at all. I've left it late - nearly 5 - and things are shutting. Dover looks like times are hard. I end up in a Morrisons. There's quite a decent pedestrian way from the Castle down to the town, and a lovely old ruined church at the bottom. Dinner: roast beef and spinach.

Sunday

Wake somewhat earlier - 9 ish - and I'm about the first up. E, and then surprisingly D, soon after (D has been sick recently. He was off school last Friday, and again last Tuesday, and was driven to school in between; he's still not tip-top).

I go for a walk around the ramparts before the others are around; I rather feel that I should have done more yesterday. However 5 minutes outside soon cure my of any ideals, and I'm hunching up against the still-bitter wind. Pic: from the Avranches tower, a wintry scene, empty snail shells piled up. In the arrow-slit next door there was a huge mass of hibernating snails. I did look for the "medaeival tunnels" but they seemed closed - that link suggests that they usually are. And so on round, clockwise. Now I understand the shape of the site better I realise its not quite as big as I thought it was; I get down to the cliff face, find the "secret tunnels" bit, get onto the balcony overlooking the container port (the tunnels cut into the cliff were once barracks for the other-ranks, the officers got a fine building up top; then abandoned; then used and expanded during WWII especially for "operation dynamo" the rescue from Dunkirk. So the area has a WWII feel to it, in stark contrast to the Henry II feel of the rest, and poke around inside a bit. But that way you only get shallowly into the tunnels; to go deeper you need to do the tour.

Back, take D and E up to see the castle. They are moderately but not very interested; would be better in better weather.

Lunch, then again a few of us (not D+E) go to see the tunnels; its a 50-min tour, and they sort-of string it out by using it to tell the story of the outbreak of the war, and projecting the tale of operation dynamo onto the walls. it works fairly well, but again (as in at the castle itself) they're fairly thin on real stuff to look at.

And so tea time, another game of Risk (I win, or Si does, depending on how you score an interrupted game), D does his homework, and we leave just before 7 and get back just after 9.

Niggles

I suppose I should throw in a few. You see my top pic, with the union jack flying bravely in the wind? Well, at about 2 Hz the rope was tapping against the flagpole, making a little noise, barely audible usually, but clearly audible in the otherwise silent middle of the night (so on the plus side, you're well above the traffic and noise of Dover, which you don't hear at all). At 7 am on Sunday the fire alarm decided to go off for no reason. They aren't desperately generous with the cutlery - if you have guests from Pev's tower coming over, you'll run out of knives.

A weekend

Just a normal weekend, but I haven't written one up for ages, so:

Saturday

Wake at 6, and wake D at 6:15, to get him to school in time for 7 so he can go off to a climbing competition in Leicester. He isn't exactly in top form - indeed, he took Friday off school sick, and is only half sure he wants to go. But never mind.

By the time I get back I'm awake so sit around downstairs; a little tidying but mostly online, and reading Speer.

About 9:30 I head off into town; its my habit after rowing outings to go for coffee+book in Waterstones; today there is no outing and I feel oddly bereft with a whole day ahead of me (its also Cambridge Science Festival but E doessn't feel inclined to do owt). Stop at the picture-framing place on Mt Pleasant and see how much getting stuff done properly would cost; its not clear, but perhaps £50. I need to bring in a pic. Take in my plastic boots; Timpsons offer to try to re-glue the soles. Thence to Waterstones where I finish off Heartstone: review to follow.

Pick boots up, buy bread from the market bread stall, get some cream from M+S for M, and home. M is nearly asleep on the sofa, E is happy doing E type things. Prevaricate for a bit (early in the day weather had been very windy, with some rain, and yet I'd intended to go running). But then gird up loins and head out at a little after 3, for a "long" run of slightly indeterminate duration. In my fantasies it might have stretched out to a marathon; as it turned out it was 30k. I went somewhere new, which was definitely good as a change: through Grantchester and up Long Road to the Perse; the same route I'd driven D in earlier. That's 9.5k. Then into town, to the river, and to Baits Bite and a k beyond; then back and up the Coton footpath; 30k to just where it turns into road, so I got a walk wind-down. Overall a good run - my first sub-5-per-k 30k (2:30) - but I got very dry towards the end (I didn't finish my second gel as I couldn't get it down). Which has a good side: presumably I'd be faster with more water and more gels. So this, and the Cambridge half record 1:36, are promising for the Brighton marathon. Although, to put forward the opposite view, I was down to 5:15 towards the end.

When I get back, M is out fetching D. I'm tired and have a shower. D comes back, tired, but he survived. He collapses by the fire and doesn't say much.

Sunday

I'm coxing the men's novice VIII this morning. Contrary to the weather forecast its actually quite tolerable. But due to laziness and running late, I drive in anyway. There's a junior sculling head on later, so we content ourselves with one lock done fairly briskly in order not to get too tangled up in them. Unfortunately what they really needed was a technical outing focussing on timing and technique; such is life.

On the way back stop at the Orchard and buy some broad bean seeds, and some sweet peas, and also some violas for the front flower pot and some snake's head fritillaries because they were there. Lunch (bread and cheese type for us all) and then I'm tired so lie by the fire sleeping for a couple of hours, thereby missing the best of the weather. But, later, I do manage to get the violas planted out. Daniel is still unwell - manifesting itself as tiredness and inability to concentrate on his homework. M is fairly quiet too, starts cooking at 4:30 and we have a "vegetable only" evening meal. Her cooking is really very good nowadays.

I'm missing out me being online,posting the Ladies WeHORR entry for them, arguing online about the FTT, reading Speer's "Inside the Third Reich", and so on.

D heads off to bed at 8, its undecided if he'll go to school tomorrow or not. E at 9 (slightly delayed by me having to fix the shower) and M meditates for 15 mins before the news at 10, then heads up after writing *her* diary, and now its my turn.

Refs

* D's climbing results. Not good, but it was his first, and he was sick.

Coire an t-Sneachda

[Originally: https://wmconnolley.livejournal.com/30520.html]

I went to Howard (Roscoe, you remember)'s 100-papers (though it had turned into 100+ by the night) pub evening, and also his pre-retirement drinkies (shock horror). And we talked (I boasted of my three new routes on Ynys Lochtyn) and he said "and I'm going up the the Cairngorms in a couple of weeks time" and I said "mail me, I'm interested" fully expecting to be busy whenever. But I wasn't. And M said I could go. So, that's all my excuses out of the way.

I found my old plastic boots in the loft, and my dachsteins (a little moth-eaten) and bought a new head torch and remembered all the kit I needed (I laid out the waterproof trousers but forgot to actually take them, never mind, Howard had a spare). I took the std.gear (though of course I should have taken less, it being winter, and AL'ing with Karl, but never mind we were all fit and strong).

Let me introduce everyone: here they are. Howard Roscoe is on the left in the fetching yellow helmet. He joined BAS not long before me, but because he was there when I joined it took me about 10 years to realise he'd only been there a bit earlier. Trip organiser, provider of spare kit and early morning porridge, repository of years of experience, never lost anyone on the hills yet.

In the middle is Chris Collett who Howard met through folk music; he's a gardener in Bedford. He's quite new to climbing, but has been on long climbs with Howard in Wales.

On the right is Karl, also Roscoe, nephew of the aforesaid HKR. Like Chris this is his first winter trip, but he's been leading for a while. Notice how Howard has tricked them both into wearing pink knee-pads :-).

And so: on Friday morning Howard picked me up about 10:30 with an already alarmingly full car, so I didn't bring my ropes or bivvy bag. We then went to Bedford to pick up Chris, and then a longer hike north to Todmorden for Karl, who lives in a delightful old stone house up an inconvenient track. All this added something to the journey time, but there you go. After that it was a matter of driving north and more north (stopping for dinner at Dunkeld Chippy) until we got to Aviemore at some time like 9:30 - well, it could have been worse. Would it have been better to leave at 8 pm and drive overnight, arriving at 7 am? Perhaps / possibly; its certainly something I'd consider in future. Though we'd have been fairly zonked. But we got to the campsite in time for reception to pick up our all-important shower-block cards, and set about putting up tents - tricky: the ground was frozen, and with little stones, the overall effect was like concrete and hammering the tent pegs in with ice axes didn't work well, you had to dig out a hole with the pick first. In the dark, the sparks when you struck stones were bright. And so, via showers and beer, to bed.

Saturday (23rd)

I slept rather well - the outside temp was below zero but I had my lovely lightweight 3-season bag inside my old Caravan one, and the luxury of a carry-mat with a self-inflater on top. In the morning Howard provided porridge and then tea, after which I got up. We then did some gear sorting and related activities and drove up to the ski-lift car park, and after a bit more faff we were off - at about 10, perhaps? Almost immeadiately I managed to fling my camera to the hard frozen ground whilst it was turned on, irrepearably damaging the lens - ah well, the way of all flesh. All the pix here are from my phone camera, which is a bit rubbish.

The weather was... as you see it. Cold, though it didn't feel it after the hour's walk in. The snow was hard frozen. If you don't know the area... the snow col off to the right is the descent route of the "Goat track" which starts off steeper than it looks. The darker mass to the left is Aladdins buttress, bounded to the left by Aladdins couloir (I, possible descent route) and to the right by Aladdins mirror. Fluted buttress is to the right; Crotched gully is nearly in the centre of the pic, leading up to the little dip. 


We did that first; its a grade I/II. I A/L with Karl and Howard with Chris. Being on the same climb gave us all reassurance. As you can see from the pic, the weather was unusually kind, in that we could see the crag. It wasn't windy, either. It was however cold, with the snow deep-frozen, which made for good climbing. We soon got into the spirit of things, though since Chris was a bit tentative Karl and I got to the crux - the cornice - first. This proved to be exciting.

The right pic is Karl just below the cornice. It gives a good idea of how hoar-frosted the rocks were up there. It was beautiful, I wish I'd had a better camera able to capture them. The left pic shows them better, though it has the disadvantage of having Howard in it :-). 


Once over the lip, the wind was biting, and Karl and I contemplated not hanging around but going down ahead. However, that seemed unfriendly, and likely to lead to confusion of not-meeting-up-again, and anyway it was fun to watch Howard topping out.

Here he is going "over the top". It wasn't quite as dramatic in reality as it appears here, but it was plenty exciting. Especially for me, cos I didn't bother place a snow anchor as Howard did (ah yes, because I'd left the deadman with Karl, I think) so had a larger runout. And wished, once again, that I'd put a bit more effort into scratching around for gear in the last bit of rock. But planting the ice axe handles provided enough pull.

And so, down the Goat track, and across to Aladdin's Mirror. My guidebook says that the last time (1992) I did it (with M) we did a steepish "scary" slab just to the R of the ice pitch. This time I played on it a bit, but after not very long I decided that since this was my first winter climbing since 1996, I really ought to back off the hard stuff on the first day. So we went R up the easy snow, and had a good time.

The inset pic is Aladdins Pinnacle, which is indeed very distinctive from below. And as you see the sky had started clearing to a beautiful evening. Once we were all up the top we had a choice of ways down, and chose to go over PT 1141 and then down the ski runs. It was interesting to do a variant, but on reflection it was a longer walk and we were all a bit footsore by the time we got back down - at that point I hadn't remembered how to lace up the inners and leave the outers looser.

And so down to the fleshpots of Aviemore. Howard was very keen on the Winking Owl pub, which was unfortunately at the far end of town from the campsite. So we went there for a pint, and then I had a couple of cokes in the next round so I could drive back. However it was rather crowded and noisy and the beer no better than middling - gone downhill since H's last visit, perhaps. So back to the campsite for showers and beers or tea in the tent. However, I needed to darn my dachsteins (20 years of moths in the attic taking their toll) and recharge my phone, so sneaked off to the pub / resto / pizzeria just by the site. And... it was fine. "Unpretentious" shall we say. Coffee, warmth, a quiet table to sit and darn.


From the ski lift car park: the lights of Aviemore gleam in the distance.

Sunday (24th)

Another fine nights sleep terminated by Porridge. We were a bit more efficient this morning and shaved 1/2 hour off our start time. Another cold morn with reasonable weather, though not the sunshine I'd thought the forecast had promised me. We're all a little tired after yesterday's exertions, though we still do the walk-in in an hour.

Pic: us gearing up, Aladdin's buttress above, A's Mirror in the top right. Weather less clear today - the crag largely cloudy when we first turned up.

But what to do? Here we (I) make a mistake, perhaps. Or so it seems in retrospect: I really didn't think of this at the time at all. We'd pretty well decided to do only one route, part tiredness, part not wanting to head off too late - we had a long way to go. So we chose The Runnel, another grade I/II. But what we could have chosen was to go play on Aladdins mirror, or the slab next to it. Have fun putting in ice screws, climbing ice, falling off perhaps. I have no experience falling off ice, and it would be good to have some. Learning how the placements work, and so on. The run-out is easy, so it would have been a good place to do it. Oh well, next year.

And anyway The Runnel was fun. A party of 3 was leading into it as we started up.


Right pic: the line is a bit hard to see; its the "highest" starting gully, about 1/3 left, starting to the right of the rather darker triangular block of rock; and then trending somewhat leftwards (perhaps a bit clearer as the center, here). It has a crux of a narrow chimney near the top, which we were a bit nervous of, not knowing what state it might be in, or how avoidable. But as it turned out it was fine, with good solid crisp snow. Indeed the chief problem turned out to be my right crampon, which (just below the belay for the crux) I noticed was hanging loose. "How careless of me" I thought - I must have failed to attach it properly. So, I carefully re-attached it. Only to have it fall off again. At which point I realised that the true problem was that my right boot sole, including the step-in lug, had come loose. Oops. Secure self, and when Howard comes up he turns out to have a spare strap, and was able to tie it on - he's good at stuff like that.




Left pic: heading up near the start, Karl above me on my rope, Howard above him, and the two seconders of the other party to the right.

Once again, the true crux was the cornice at the top. This time I again failed to put in the deadman, but I had put in lots of gear in the chimney, so all was well.




And the view from the top, Howard and Karl, waiting for Chris to top out, the weather slowly clearing.



And so down the Goat track and back.



Goodbye hills! I'll be back.

Things I forgot

* water/wind proof trousers - only partly - I remembered these a mile down the road, but Howard had a spare
* bowl - tut tut. Though I did remember a mug. 
* compass - really rather careless. Of course I had my phone GPS if desperate.

Book review: Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays

[Originally: https://wmconnolley.livejournal.com/30290.html]

Um, well, a venture into Great Literature. And one I only did because I was wandering through Waterstones and happened to see it laid out. So, score one for physical shops. See-also: [[Sophocles#The Theban plays]].

Overall: difficult. I should re-read it some time.

Ah, is that the keyword above? "Should"? Yes, I think I've accidentally put the truth down.

This stuff was written 2500 years ago, and so its not surprising that much of it is weird or incomprehensible. I suspect it would be even less comprehensible had not generations of translators and interpreters done their best to render the original. There are minor matters like textual integrity, and doubts over which characters get which lines. But I found myself wondering how true to the original some of the English translations could possibly be.

When reading it, I found myself continually wandering off to do other things. So this can't be considered a page-turner. Its hard to read and its dense. Which is good in itself: modern literature is so bloated (vide Spirit). But the "Should" above returns: this is something I read because it has survived for 2500 years, not for enjoyment. I was looking, perhaps, for clues to how people thought then. But that was hoping for too much.

Book review: Atlas shrugged

[Originally: https://wmconnolley.livejournal.com/30200.html. Also copied to: http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2017/12/book-review-atlas-shrugged.html]

Quick summary: (too) long, interesting, enjoyable (as long as you skip stuff), but ultimately unacceptable. 

I'm not going to bother attack its many faults too strongly, because they are too obvious. If you want to read someone disliking it, try CIP. As a token: the many long dense passages of philosophy - Rand's "Objectivism" - that lard the book get increasingly boring as they repeat. This culminates in John Galt's 70-page 2-3 hour speech on the radio, which is more like something you'd get in Cuba or communist Russia than in the cold West. Some of the characters - the dashing pirate - are laughably implausible. But enough criticism (errm, I won't keep to that. Sorry).

The image the book conjures up - of a fading darkening America crumbling under the weight of an unproductive, uncomprehending and eventually almost unwittingly hostile bureaucracy or parasitic class is well done, and will strike a chord with anyone who actually makes things. Those who work for the govt may be less impressed (token: I find her hatred of all govt funded research ridiculous. But hey, I was a govt-funded scientist for years). But Rand's solution - that all the able folk withdraw their labour and their physical selves and rebuild society in a quiet corner before, presumably, walking into the territory emptied by starvation, cold and strife is hard to see as acceptable. As an aside, at the present day, the central core of the hardened capitalist struggling to keep a railroad - yes, a railroad - going seems very quaint and 50s.

A veil is drawn over most of the deaths, but she helpfully provides one example: the wood burning transcontinental sleeper train taken through the long tunnel. It gets stuck inside, and everyone dies. Rand is at pains to set up the incident as an example of bureaucratic stubbornness and buck-passing (someone at the top decrees the train must get through, but all the way down officials area at pains to ensure that the disastrous orders they give can't be traced back to them) and does her best to make it seem as though all the passengers deserve death; but they don't.

You'll have to forgive me some vagueness here: I started reading the book on the way back from the Amsterdam marathon last October, and finished it a few weeks later, so my memory is fading.

And yet the two key intermingled ideas are worth thinking about: that there is a parasitic class leaching off the productive, and that this class is actively harmful (in Darwinian terms, they are bad parasites). In the book, as things go wrong, the parasites use fear of the problems to gain more power and control, and they use that power to throw patronage at their friends, but they also make genuine (to them; at least the book doesn't try to say otherwise) attempts to fix things, but because they are incompetent things just get worse. The attempt-to-fix-but-fail stuff is very true to life for anyone watching politics ever. The Tobin Tax propsed for the EU is a possible example. The stupid carbon trading schemes are another. These are examples where pols motivated by - well, we cant see into their minds, so we have to guess - a combination of shallow and wishful thinking, carelessness and stupidity, and a desire for patronage, act to make the world worse.

Since I've mentioned Darwin I need to complete the thought: which is, that parasites are universal, unless you make great efforts to remove them. Rand's idea is for a parasite-free society. Like many others she has no patience for fixing the old - its a tired toy, she will throw it away and make a new shiny one; lives don't matter to her; or at least, not the lives of small people. Inevitably, her new world would acquire parasites, but that's for the future. Our world is infested by parasites; what keeps them down is partly Democracy and blah; partly that anywhere that becomes too uncompetitive gets out-competed. That's not a careful analysis, but what I mean is that we accept a balance as we must: as long as society functions, and produces enough wealth for all or most, we tolerate some parasites. And at least at the moment it is working: the share captured by the unproductive isn't too high. In Atlas Shrugged Rand has had to produce a less capable society that succumbs to the weight of parasites - though even there it isn't really clear that it would do, if it wasn't for the "strike". Rand's various protagonists have decided - amongst themselves - that all the invisible deaths are worth it, to them. It is a very individualistic philosophy, and to support its plausibility all the lead characters are implausibly capable.

If you agree that Rand's apparent solution - restrict, retreat and rebuild - isn't very plausible, what lesson does the book teach? Just, resistance to stupid bureaucracy I suppose. Put like that, its not profound. And I do sense that many of the book's admirers are motivated more by some savage uncomprehending hatred of The System rather than by a desire, themselves, to try to build something better. Nonetheless there is something there.

[Edited to add: if I'm not mis-remembering, another important element to Rand was the coercive power of the State: its structure and authority is based ultimately on force. She doesn't like this; it doesn't fit with her individualistic world. Nonetheless in the book the state is rather uncoercive: only at the end is there a carefully contrived torture-John-Galt scene, which is inserted only to fulfil her own prophecy, that the state will ultimately resort to force. In this, I'm firmly with Thomas Hobbes and against Rand: without the Civil Sword, no compacts and hence no civil society is possible. Rand's insistence otherwise places her with the hippies and flower children, who she would despise.] 

Refs

* Ayn Rand, Economic/Political General Equilibrium Theorist.

Book review: Sovereign

[Originally: https://wmconnolley.livejournal.com/29849.html]

Continuing the series. You can read the wiki article because it has its fanz. Though it has a notability tag, so may disappear, so here's the cite.

Quick summary: interesting, fun, absorbing.

Why I read it: I'd read Revelation and Dark Fire, from the same series.

The book is one of a series, set in the time of Henry VIII, following the lawyer Matthew Shardlake as he gets involved in various matters of state. They become crime whodunnits, as a series of people get murdered. Manfred said that "his plots are absurd, but he gets a sense of Tudor England". This one doesn't have major errors (unlike Revelation) but (although I don't know Tudor England) I rather feel that the characters behave anachronistically. The plot backbone is Henry VIII making a grand Progress up to York to receive its submission, and Shardlake sent there to deal with legal matters and look after a prisoner who is to be tortured in London. A trail of deaths ensues, triggered by papers relating to the King's illegitimacy.

What works well is the swirl of politics around Henry's visit (the York folk don't like him, there is a lot of sympathy for the suppressed rebellion (Pilgrimage of Grace) of five years back, discussions of past kings, people's reactions to the King. The way lawyerly business mixes in. Also the way authority works - patronage from the King, the Archbishop, the Council of the North, and so on. The trail of death is mysterious - if its technically a whodunnit, I'm not at all sure you could plausibly have been expected to guess the who, though that there were two separate threads was guessable.

I read this in about four days (its long) and finished past midnight.

Book review: Blue Remembered Earth

[Originally: https://wmconnolley.livejournal.com/29577.html]

Not that anyone cares, but I though it might be interesting for me to write up the books I read. I'll try to do them all, good or bad. Its a sort of a diary.

Quick summary: fun enough, but ultimately disappointing.

Why I read it: I've read others by him. With similar results.

Where: Waterstones, over the course of quite a few Saturdays.

Blue Remembered Earth is a "we've got out into the solar system but travel is still slow" kind of novel. There's a nod towards climate change (its 2160, and the world is being repaired) but this has no plot effect; there's a nod towards geopolitical change (Africa is on top, and the Earth bits of the story are set there) but this has no real effect either. And so on. In the usual way of books like this there's a big corporation run by a few people, which helps move things along, and individuals can do far more than is plausible. After a bit a character is sent off on a chase across the solar system following some clues. This helps fill in quite a few pages, and helps show us the universe of the book, but it all becomes a bit obvious too quickly.

Then at the end we get introduced to the new Tech that has been discovered / found, and which will revolutionise this world. Apparently this is a trilogy, so presumably something interesting will happen in the next books, but in this one its all a bit "meh". In order to make the story hang together you have to believe that the woman who found all this, notoriously gung-ho and exploratory and bold, all of a sudden became cautious and decided to leave it for our book's characters to find. The tech itself is "new physics" apparently found scrawled on the side (and then fallen off of) of a natural monolith / tourist attraction on Phobos, which no-one else happened to have noticed. And was then reconstructed by a Brilliant Lone Physicist, who then decided to retire and become a housekeeper. And was then converted from physics to spaceship engine, without anyone ever leaking the secret. Speaking of which, clear signs of intelligent life have been discovered around a distant star, and that news hasn't leaked either, except to Our Hero. It feels like the ending hadn't been planned before the story started, and then when the ending became necessary, he couldn't be bothered to go back and re-write the beginning to make it all plausible.

But that's me being picky, which is fun in itself. Along the way there is enough amusing colour to make it worth getting to the end.