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nwhyte's reviews
4413 reviews
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
5.0
http://nhw.livejournal.com/883972.html[return][return]Gosh, I'm glad I finally read this, the story of the lives of Chang's grandmother, her mother and herself, during the final collapse of the Chinese Empire, the second world war and the rule of Mao. Somewhat stunned by my own ignorance about China - I knew almost nothing about the Cultural Revolution, and very little about the rest of the story told here. After reading the first few chapters about Japanese atrocities, I began to wonder if there could ever be reconciliation between Japan and China. And now, having read the rest of the book, it's clear that the need for reconciliation begins a lot closer to home.[return][return]When I read We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a few years back, I wondered how he had managed to do such a convincing portrayal of totalitarianism, given that Stalin and Hitler were still in his future. I guess one thing I take from Wild Swans is that the potential is always there: Mao's personality cult was probably the largest in world history, given the number of people affected, but the basic techniques have always been around, and perhaps if anything it is easier to manipulate a population that is literate but frightened.[return][return]Anyway, a really fascinating if sometimes gruelling book.
Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives by Katie Hickman
http://nhw.livejournal.com/1127018.html[return][return]I'm probably being rather unfair to this book, but I'm giving up on it not quite half-way through. Hickman, herself a diplomat's daughter, has pulled together an engaging collection of correspondence from the wives (and occasionally other female relatives) of British diplomats posted abroad throughout the last four centuries. The material is amusing and sometimes moving. But I felt that the book lacked a substantial intellectual framework, such as any serious interrogation of the concepts of Britishness, diplomacy, or wives. And I think Hickman did intend it to be that kind of book, but it isn't.[return][return]I must say also that having lived abroad in three countries in the last twelve years, and having myself set up from scratch two local offices (and overseen the setting up of a third) for my various employers, I did find myself rather unsympathetic to some of the accounts of hardship reported by people whose government-funded bureaucracies weren't always able to guarantee them a perfect quality of life. In the non-profit sector things are a bit different.[return][return]In fairness, some of the hardships are very real. Hickman's father was deputy head of the British embassy in Dublin in 1976 when the ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was killed by the IRA: perhaps the most moving section in the book (and one of the longest single extracts) is her mother's description of the aftermath for the Ewart-Biggs family.
Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
3.0
http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/beadar.htm[return][return]Darwin's Radio is set in the very near future, perhaps in 2001 under what sounds like a McCain presidency. All over the world a mysterious disease is striking pregnant women, causing miscarriages. But the victims immediately become pregnant again with strangely deformed embryos - and, it seems, they may not have conceived by the normal method. Add to this the discovery of a couple of Neanderthal bodies in the Alps, with their baby which appears to be far more similar to modern humans than it should be, and you have the makings of a crisis which will reshape the world.[return][return]This book appealed to several of my own past experiences. As a teenager I worked on a couple of archaeology sites, so I could relate to the thrill of discovering ancient corpses with which the book starts. The passages set in (ex-Soviet) Georgia, exploring mass graves, reminded me very much of my time in Bosnia for obvious reasons. The development of biological theory in the book brought me back to the days when I taught tutorials for a course on the history of evolution theories taught by Peter Bowler in Belfast.[return][return]The three main characters are Mitch Rafelson, a discredited anthropologist, Kaye Lang, a geneticist, and Christopher Dicken, a government-paid epidemiologist. All three are convincing and forced to make tough choices throughout. At the crucial moment when they meet, half way through the book, they realise that the mysterious disease may be more than an epidemic; it may in fact be the next step in human evolution.[return][return]The social and political reaction to the biological crisis is quite convincingly nightmarish. Bear portrays the religious right seizing the agenda in the US, and then not being able to produce anything more than repression. Rafelson and Lang, who have become lovers, flee for an Indian reservation (why not Canada?); Dicken guiltily sides with the government. A shadowy conspiracy involving an Austrian professor, an American millionaire and a reporter from the Economist seems to be offering hope for the future, but we don't hear much more about it.[return][return]I did wonder what was happening in the rest of the world all this time. This virus, supposedly triggered by overcrowding, is first picked up in Georgia, which is not a notably overcrowded country (indeed several parts of it have become distinctly underpopulated in recent years) and of course this goes even more so for the United States. Why did it not hit genuinely overcrowded parts of the world like sub-Saharan Africa? (I suppose the grim answer may be that AIDS has already done the job.)[return][return]At the end of the day I wasn't completely satisfied by Darwin's Radio. The "next step in human evolution" is an old, old science fiction storyline, with an honorable past including most works by Olaf Stapledon, and Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End. But Darwin's Radio will I think be ranked with Frank Herbert's rather minor The Santaroga Barrier rather than at the level of Bear's own earlier work with the same theme, "Blood Music". I wondered a little why the author chose to tackle this theme again. And I felt that somehow the pacing of events was not so much science fiction as "technothriller", as New Scientist put it.
The Age of Kali: Travels and Encounters in India by William Dalrymple
4.0
http://nhw.livejournal.com/861712.html[return][return]The Age of Kali, to be honest, is a bit disappointing. First off because of the form - it is a collection of pieces written for different journals at different times in the 1990s, and there is occasional repetition from one piece to the next, with no overall guiding structure. Second, because of this, the book lacks any synthesising introduction or conclusion, apart from a page at the very beginning explaining the concept of the Age of Kali, the Kali Yuga.[return][return]Having said that, what you are left with is a series of very readable, vivid, in-depth essays on particular places, personalities or events; we start with sectarian violence in Bihar, and end with the Bhutto family. The book is mainly about India, but there are excursions also to Sri Lanka, R
The Owl Service by Alan Garner
http://nhw.livejournal.com/1010278.html[return][return]I think I read almost all of Alan Garner's works as a teenager, but gave up on this one part way in because it didn't grab me at the time. Well, age brings increased ability to appreciate. It's an incredible book, a masterpiece of showing rather than telling, about patterns from the past (of story, of earthenware, of painting) coming to haunt the present day. There is a lot left beneath the surface - we never find out exactly how old Alison, Roger and Gwyn are, though the implication is that they are all three in their mid-teens, Alison perhaps younger than the other two; we never even see Alison's mother Margaret, though she remains a presence in the background; the mystery behind the owls and flowers and the pierced stone is never completely explained, which normally would annoy me, but just seems to work really well here. A really good book.
Three To See The King by Magnus Mills
4.0
http://nhw.livejournal.com/893218.html[return][return]People are very strange, and by putting them in strange yet almost familiar environments Mills brings out our inherent strangeness beautifully. I could spend ages speculating about the symbolism of tin house vs. brick houses, and the sandy plain vs. the canyon, but I won't.
Singing the Dogstar Blues by Alison Goodman
3.0
http://nhw.livejournal.com/855387.html[return][return]This won the Aurealis Award; not sure what that says about its Australian sf competitors, because I felt that the prose was a bit clunky in places, and I saw the twist ending coming from miles away. Our heroine, studying a university course in time-travel, finds that she has been assigned an alien (one of a newly arrived diplomatic mission) as a partner, and in the end discovers more about her own past than she had intended. Potentially good material, but not really pushed far enough.
Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
3.0
http://nhw.livejournal.com/306116.html[return][return]C'mon folks. This is not the science fiction book of the year. I don't particularly mind when authors (especially when, like Robinson, they are authors with whom I basically agree) try to integrate their personal political messages into sf books as long as they also remember to include the sensawunda - so I was able to take the three long long Mars books, and the much more entertaining Years of Rice and Salt. But here, the front cover proclaims "CATASTROPHE BECKONS"; and guess what happens at the end of the book?[return][return]There are some good bits. The daily life of professionals in San Diego and Washington DC seems well observed. The description of the way the policy process works in Washington, and of how you might manage to bring an issue onto the Administration's agenda despite the President's professed indifference or hostility fits with my own limited experiences in a rather different field. But really, despite the momentous issues and difficult public policy choices ahead, it just isn't very exciting.
Abarat by Clive Barker
http://nhw.livejournal.com/1053965.html[return][return]A YA novel about a teenager from a boring American town who is sucked into a fantasy parallel world which she must save. I enjoyed a couple of Barker's fantasy novels for adults many years ago; wasn't really so grabbed by this one, kindly lent to me by mr_renaissance. The illustrations, which I guess are Barker's own from the lack of any separate credit, are a bit jarring as well.